She mentioned a figure, she raised it by a third, she smiled sadly. She said, “I’ll pay you back with my first paycheck.”
She took the money and made it disappear in her pale hand. She was beautiful, perhaps the more so for looking submissive, with her slightly tangled hair, wearing her best dress. She had a dancer’s legs, slender and yet strong, like her fingers, and her head was small and well shaped on her long neck.
As he was reflecting on her doll-like beauty — thinking, Chinese? Cambodian? — she said, “The first time I saw you with Faris in the gallery I knew you were powerful, the way you carried yourself. I knew you by reputation. I hadn’t realized how young and handsome you were.”
“Very kind of you,” Minor Watt said. “Made my day.”
And as he got up to leave, Mara said, “You don’t have to rush off.”
He said, “I’m tempted to stay.”
But he kissed her lightly and left, wondering at this turn of events.
Then it was he who called her, and met her again at the café in the park. He offered her more money, and she took it without mentioning that she’d pay him back. This happened two more times. It seemed that his giving her money kept her from finding a job, though at the third meeting she said she was still sending out résumés.
“Anyone interested?”
“Sporadically,” she said, and held his hand, tugging. She told him about her family, from Mizoram, next to Assam, all Baptists, yet with an ancient pedigree. Her full name was Mara Lal Pawl. That was how she’d known the Naga necklace and the khanjar and the silver dah. But she was alone here; she had not found another Mizo in New York. Minor Watt thought, Imagine!
“Meet me tomorrow,” he said, and specified a store on Madison Avenue.
He took her to buy jewelry. He helped her pick out shoes. She selected some clothes. He sat while she tried them on, and he thought how she was like a small daughter saying, “How do you like my new dress, Daddy?” He paid for the clothes.
They left the last store — Barneys — and walked around the corner to the Pierre for a drink. He said, “You should have a boyfriend, pretty girl like you.”
“Fired him,” she said. “Besides, I have you.”
He did not reply, just kept walking, and he could see that she was thrown. He said, “Would you do something for me?”
Mara didn’t hesitate. She said, “Anything.”
He let her move into an empty apartment in one of the buildings he owned that was visible from where he lived. Using binoculars he could sometimes see her at her window. He began to live for these glimpses, Mara flashing past, or lingering to look out, not knowing that she was being caressed by his gaze.
Minor Watt went on visiting in the oblique way of a wealthy and secretive friend. He sat and held her in a scrutinizing way, thinking: What is it about her that makes her lovely? The only way to possess her was not to love her, but to support her, to satisfy her with money, and yet to keep her a little hungry and apart. He knew that feeling — the poor might be content with the little they have, but the rich always want more. Sonia had always resisted, her defiance subdued him, and he loved her, but he had never truly possessed her.
By the second month Mara, in her acceptance, became entirely dependent on him.
“I saw Faris the other day,” he said. “He told me I was ruthless.”
“He doesn’t know anything. You’re really very compassionate.”
“You think so?”
She had a beautiful smile. “Oh, yes.”
She didn’t know him. He was a stranger, as featureless as a bank, which was all he was to her, a source of light and money, her sole support.
But with the connoisseurship he’d acquired over many years, he knew her well. She was as familiar to him as any object he’d studied, and like those objects she was an empty vessel, self-regarding, inward-looking, even smug and needing to be held, like all the art he’d ever owned. But that didn’t matter. She was also one of a kind, exotic for being a Mizo, lovely in her own way, perhaps lovelier, more delicate and fragile, more breakable than any piece that had ever passed through his hands. And she belonged to him.
What Minor Watt imagined happening, and what he rehearsed in his mind, was that on the anniversary of Sonia’s leaving him, the beginning of the stock market slide, he would take out the dah that she had once recognized and named. He would carry it to the apartment that Mara occupied, and he would confront her, gripping the foot-long dagger by its silver hilt. And then, as before, when facing Sonia with the rare vase, he would hope for inspiration. Perhaps nothing would happen. Perhaps in dramatic finality he would lift his hand and slash Mara’s throat and watch her bleed to death on the carpet from Khotan. And he would say to all the people who condemned him, “Now do you see?”
What actually happened was that he visited the apartment, the dah tucked inside his jacket. Mara smiled when she let him in, but she also seemed to notice that his posture was odd. He was slightly canted to one side, favoring a crease in his jacket.
Minor Watt touched her, smoothing her pale slender neck with his fingers, a characteristic gesture.
Then he said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Mara stepped back with widened eyes, moving her lips, as though translating what he had just said into her own language, and terrified by it. Surprised by her reaction — why wasn’t she reassured? — Minor Watt slipped his hand beneath his jacket and located the knife. But Mara was quicker. She moved on him with an old-fashioned slap, an efficient Asiatic chop, and the knife clattered to the hardwood floor. She dived at it and with a sweeping gesture grasped the handle, shook off its scabbard, and poked the blade at him. Flapping his hands in distress, Minor Watt shrieked. His own voice scared him: she had cut him, she had drawn blood. No one had ever injured him. Fearing for his life, he grew small as Mara loomed. In that moment she ceased to be ornamental. She was a horror to him, as though one of his pieces of art had come alive. Turning into a tribeswoman, suddenly feline, with blazing eyes, she pointed the dagger at him.
Minor Watt was murmuring as if in prayer, pleading for his life, as Mara said, “This is a Burmese dah, but we have similar knives in Mizoram. Some are well made. Most of them are tools,” she went on, examining the blade, “instruments for cutting — for killing.” Now she held it to his anguished face. “They are not trophies. Not art, but useful objects. Now I think you know that.”
Minor Watt backed away, looking at the ugly thing in her hand, reminding her that he had been kind to her.
“Here’s what I want you to do for me,” Mara said.
“Anything,” he said.
“Remove all your clothes,” she said.
Without raising her voice, Mara repeated her request. And he obeyed, undressing slowly, and finally stepping out of his boxer shorts, one hand cupped at his groin for the sake of modesty, the other raised to protect his face, at the level of the blade.
Begging her now, he was gabbling, and Mara’s look of disgust convinced him that she meant to kill him. She made as if to slash him, but only nicked his chin. Even so, he howled at the sight of the blood that dripped on his pale belly.
She prodded again, moving him with the blade into the elevator and down to the ground floor, then let him run. And — grateful, eager — he fled from the apartment, out of the building, naked, his hands and body smeared, absurd, from his touching his wounds, a laughingstock on the busy street, a hilarious news item in these anxious times.
Mr. Bones
WHENEVER I GET sentimental and take on a reminiscing tone and talk about how my father used to read to me and encourage me, I realize that I’m lying. Is it a way of being kind to his memory, like “You look marvelous,” something he used to say? “Pretty as a picture”—seldom true. “Looks good enough to eat,” over my mother’s gristly meatloaf. But then generosity can often seem to verge on the satirical.