“Isn’t it great?” she said.
“Great.”
“Room enough for two, isn’t there?”
“Oh sure. In fact…” He was about to offer the whole of it to her; that was only right, and he would instantly have done so in the first place if he’d known it to be hidden there. But he saw that she assumed he was ungentlemanly enough to assume that she would be grateful for half, and assumed that he assumed that she… A sudden cunning shut his mouth.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” she asked.
“Oh no. If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“Nah. I’ve always slept with people. My granny and I slept together for years, usually with my sister too.” She sat on the bed—it was so plumply high she had to hoist herself up with her hands, and her feet didn’t reach the floor from it—and smiled at him, and he smiled back. “So,” she said.
The room transformed was the rest of his life transformed, everything not already metamorphosed by the departure and the bus and the City and the lawyers and the rain. Nothing now would ever be the same again. He realized he had been staring wildly at her, and that she had lowered her eyes. “Well,” he said, holding up the cup, “how about a little more of this?”
“Okay.” While he was pouring it, she said, “So how come you came to the City, by the way?”
“To seek my fortune.”
“Huh?”
“Well, I want to be a writer.” Rum and intimacy made it easy to say. “I’m going to look for a job writing. Something. Maybe television.”
“Hey, great. Big bucks.”
“Mm.”
“You could write, like, ‘A World Elsewhere’?”
“What’s that?”
“You know. The show.”
He didn’t. An absurdity in his ambitions became clear to him when they bounced back, as it were, from Sylvie, instead of (as they always had before) paying out endlessly into futurity. “Actually, we never had a television set,” he said.
“Really? Well, I’ll be.” She sipped the rum he gave her. “Couldn’t afford one? George told me you guys were real rich. Oops.”
“Well, ‘rich’. I don’t know about ‘rich’…” Well! There was an inflection like Smoky’s, which Auberon heard for the first time in his own voice—that putting of imaginary doubt-quotes around a word. Was he growing old? “We could have bought a TV, certainly… What’s this show like?”
“ ‘A World Elsewhere’? It’s a daytime drama.”
“Oh.”
“The endless kind. You just get over one problem and another starts. Mostly dumb. But you get hooked.” She had begun to tremble again, and drew her feet up on the bed; she pulled down the quilt and wrapped it around her legs. Auberon busied himself with the fire. “There’s a girl on it who reminds me of me.” She said it with a self-deprecating laugh. “Boy has she got problems. She’s supposed to be Italian, but she’s played by a P.R. And she’s beautiful.” She said this as though she said She has one leg, and is like me in that. “And she has a Destiny. She knows it. All these terrible problems, but she has a Destiny, and sometimes they show her just looking out mistyeyed while these voices sing in the background—aa-aa-aaah—and you know she’s thinking of her Destiny.”
“Hm.” All the wood in the woodbox was scrap, most of it parts of furniture, though there were pieces that bore lettering too. The varnish on fluted and turned wood sizzled and blistered. Auberon felt an exhilaration: he was part of a community of strangers, burning unbeknown to them their furniture and belongings, just as they not knowing him took his money at change-booths and made room for him on buses. “A Destiny, huh.”
“Yah.” She looked at the locomotive on the lampshade, turning through its little landscape. “I have a Destiny,” she said.
“You do?”
“Yah.” She said this syllable in a way and with an attitude of face and arms that meant Yes, it’s true, and a long story, and while possibly to my credit is something I have nothing to do with, and is even a little embarrassing, like a halo. She studied a silver ring on her finger.
“How does somebody know,” he asked, “that they have a Destiny?” The bed was so large that to sit in the little velvet chair at its foot would place him absurdly low; so—gingerly—he got up on the bed beside her. She made room. They took up opposite corners, resting in the wings which protruded from the headboard.
“An espiritista read mine,” Sylvie said. “A long time ago.”
“A who?”
“An espiritista. A lady with powers. You know. Reads cards, and does stuff with stuff from the botanica; a bruja sort of, you know?”
“Oh.”
“This one was sort of an aunt of mine, well not really mine, I forget whose aunt she was; we called her Tití, but everybody called her La Negra. She scared the shit out of me. Her apartment, way uptown, always had candles lit on these little altars, and the curtains drawn, and these crazy smells; and out on the fire escape she kept a couple of chickens, man, I don’t know what she did with those chickens and I don’t want to know. She was big—not fat, but with these long strong gorilla arms and a little head, and black, Sort of blue-black, you know? She couldn’t have really been in my family. So when I was a little kid I got malnutritioned real bad—wouldn’t eat—Mami couldn’t make me—I got so skinny, like this—” she held up a red-nailed pinkie. “The doctor said I was supposed to eat liver. Liver! Can you imagine? Anyway, Granny decided that somebody was maybe doing a number on me, you know? Brujeria. From a distance.” She waggled her fingers like a stage hypnotist. “Like revenge or something. Mami was living with somebody else’s husband then. So maybe his wife had got an espiritista to do revenge on her by making me sick. Anyway, anyway…” She touched his arm lightly, because he had looked away. In fact she touched his arm every time he looked away, which had begun somewhat to annoy him, his attention couldn’t have been more riveted; he thought this must be a bad habit of hers, until much later he saw that the men who played dominoes on the street and the women who watched children and gossiped on stoops did it too: a racial, not a personal habit, maintain the contact. “Anyway. She took me to La Negra to get it wiped out or whatever. Man I was never so scared in my life. She started pressing me and feeling me up with these big black hands, and sort of groaning or singing, and talking this stuff, and her eyeballs rolled back in her head and her eyelids fluttered—creepy. Then she dashes over to this little burner and throws some stuff on it, powder or something, and this real strong perfume comes out, and she rushes back—sort of dances—and feels me some more. She did some other stuff too that I forget. Then she drops all that, and gets real regular, like, you know, a day’s work, all done, like at the dentist; and she told Granny, no, nobody had a spell on me, I was just skinny and ought to eat more. Granny was so relieved. So—” again the brief wrist-touch, he had stared into the mug for a moment “—so they’re sitting around drinking coffee and Granny’s paying, and La Negra just kept looking at me. Just looking. Man I was freaking out. What’s she looking at? She could see right through you, she could see your heart. Your heart of hearts. Then she goes like this—” Sylvie motioned with a slow large black bruja hand for the child to come close “—and starts talking to me, real slow, about what dreams I had, and other stuff I forget; and it’s like she was thinking real hard. Then she gets out this deck of cards, real old and worn out; and she puts my hand on them and her hand over mine; and her eyes roll up again, and she’s like in a trance.” Sylvie took the cup from Auberon, who’d been gripping it, in a trance himself. “Oh,” she said. “No more?”