“You’re some librarian,” Lilly ventured.
“I’m not the librarian. The librarian is imprisoned in the back. Furious, frightened. Gagged, bound.”
“I’m smiling uncertainly now, I suppose,” Lilly said.
“You’re a nice lady,” Rockford said. “Everyone will tell you I’m a foolish man. People can actually find me annoying.” He raised his hands and pressed his fingers together. “Forgive me.”
He took the books she had selected to a desk, put his glasses back on and wrote the titles down in a ledger. He consulted a calendar on the wall and recorded the date as well. Indeed it was St. Matthias’s day, he for whom little had been imagined.
Walking home, she saw a thin donkey pulling a flat cart stacked with bags of cement. The reins were red.
“You know that prednisone is making your face puffy.”
She didn’t raise her hand to feel her bones. She would have once.
“Your lovely face,” Danny continued. “A blurring.”
“It’s your glasses.”
“What! I don’t wear glasses.”
“A joke,” Lilly said.
“I wish I hadn’t mentioned it.”
“It’s just a side effect. A known side effect. Nothing unusual.”
“Of course. If it’s helping you. That’s the important thing.”
“I don’t know that it is. I’ve got to give it a chance to work, the doctor said.”
“I’d read that the benefits were supposed to be more or less immediate.”
She turned her head to the left, then to the right.
“See, you couldn’t do that two weeks ago.”
“I feel like a puppet,” Lilly said.
“You’ll be climbing the pyramids soon, singing at the top of your lungs. Then you’ll run down, you’ll bound down.”
“I’m happy you feel so well, Danny.”
“There’s no obligation for you not to. It’s not a trade-off.” Though he sometimes entertained the disagreeable notion that it was.
Eduardo looked at her with hostility, then his face broke into a warm smile.
“Why do you do that?” she asked. “Do you do it just for me?”
“Qué?”
She said nothing but watched as he raised his broad brown hand and slowly drew it across his face. There was the look of hostility and contempt once more.
“You are easy to tease,” he said in a friendly manner.
They had gone, as part of a small group, to visit the artist Iseabail. He lived in a slum, in a house he hadn’t left for twenty years. The roof was falling in. The hurricane had destroyed the pond where he kept his pet carp. In the past, when it suited him, he had removed a carp for printmaking and feasts. The chandelier above the dusty table, still set formally for ten, was ribboned with strings of dirt. No more the notorious dinner parties, renowned for their delightfully surreal touches. Still, he painted every day. He favored working from photographs or postcards and was not averse to commissions. He was gracious, though the zipper on his pants was broken. All the Americans had a number of Iseabails. They were colorful and looked good on the high walls of their houses.
“Now you’ve met them both, Lilly,” her friend Barbara said, “our pet zanies. But Rockford is just awfully fey, you know, whereas Iseabail is an artist and one not trying to formulate and impose some inner belief on anybody, thank god. I know you’re going to say the eyes are off and it’s true, he doesn’t do the eyes as well as he should, but that’s part of the charm. As for Rockford, the trick to dealing with him is just to say ‘Really! Really, is that so!’”
Stephanie wore the same blue dress every time she visited. Lilly bought another dress which she kept folded in tissue in her closet. She planned to give it to the child when the moment seemed appropriate. This moment occurred when Stephanie, gripping a sandwich Lilly had prepared, squeezed a fat slice of tomato onto her lap. Lilly produced the new dress and convinced her that she should put it on while they washed the other one. Together they washed the blue dress in a pan of water — it seemed scarcely more than a rag — and hung it on the clothesline. Though the day was warm, there was no breeze and the fabric dried slowly. Stephanie examined it frequently to confirm that the awful stain was not reappearing. They did little more that day than watch the small dress dangling on the line. It was still damp when it was time for her to leave with her father and catch the bus that would take them home, thirty minutes away. Lilly wrapped it in a plastic bag. Eduardo did not remark on Stephanie’s new dress or the parcel she held. He looked weary. His hair was white with plaster dust, as he had rewired an entire wall that day.
The next time Stephanie came to the house, she was wearing the same thin blue dress. Lilly never saw the other one again. The two of them did not discuss it.
Rockford had been murdered, shot in his room in the library where he slept and took his meals. It was all anyone could talk about. There hadn’t been a murder in decades. Nothing had been stolen, not even the rings on his fingers, and there were no suspects. Perhaps it was someone who resented the fact that the elderly woman whose modest palacio it had been willed the place for a library. There were certainly other things she could have done with the money. The rumor was that someone from Chiapas had done it. Everything unpleasant was blamed on someone from Chiapas.
Lately she had been sleeping alone, in a room of her own just off the salon. It was the discomfort of her body, the constant tossing and turning. She was no one to share the night with, she’d be the first to admit. And since Rockford’s death she’d been having nightmares. There would be a sense of tension in the air, then a figure separating from the shadows cast by the ungainly wardrobe. Something threatening was wielded — a gun? — a charge of extinguishing light was imminent, but there was still time, a skein of coiled time in which Lilly could act, could acknowledge and confront this thing which had come to take back something she didn’t understand. Something had been given to her to understand and she simply wasn’t strong enough to understand it. Still, she was strong enough to resist it being taken.
She would scream, whirl herself upright, fumble for the light, alarm the old dog, Amiga, the stray who sometimes slept beside her.
Danny had returned to Miami for a checkup with his doctor. He would be gone for five days. He would see the accountant and lawyer as well, for his father, it was suspected, was becoming senile.
Eduardo labored around the house, forever occupied. He didn’t bring Stephanie with him, saying that she had an earache. Lilly was lonely. She had lunch with Barbara and Wilbur, after which they drove to Kabah and looked at the rain-god masks.
“Do you ever have difficulty with Arturo?” Lilly asked.
“No,” Barbara said. “You don’t like him? We’re delighted with him, we’d be lost without him. Wilbur just paid to have his teeth fixed. Four root canals! But he’s a doll, just like your Eduardo.”
Wilbur was trying to convince a carver in the souvenir palapa to come to their house and give him a price for carving one of the doors to the bathroom. It was a wonderful bathroom. “Can you reproduce one of Frederick Catherwood’s scenes on a door?” Wilbur asked.
The man shrugged and said, “Sure,” at the same time. He was carving a jaguar and smoothing the fresh cuts with a leaf. Two finished jaguars were available.
“Not that I expect it to be perfect,” Wilbur said. “Just so people will recognize it as an illustration from Stevens’s book.” He said to Barbara, “I think this would be fun.”