And got up the next day and defrosted the refrigerator again and swept the carpet in the living room because I was out of vacuum bags. Then I did all the mending that I had been putting off for weeks, scrubbed the landing outside my apartment door and sprayed it with Cat-B-Gon, and thought about talking on the telephone to men about sex, and how I could do it while I was ironing a shirt or arranging flowers in a vase or wiping cat-turds off my shoe. Then I took a shower and changed and went in to work at Sears for the five to nine evening shift. I told myself that the work wasn’t dirty or difficult, that my co-workers were pleasant people and that there was no reason why this job should make me so depressed.
It didn’t help.
The mall was having Craft Week, and to get to Sears I had to pass all the tables and people. I wondered why I didn’t get busy and make things in the evenings and sell them on the weekends and make ends meet that way. I passed Barbie dolls whose pink crocheted skirts concealed spare rolls of toilet paper, and I saw wooden key-chains that spelled out names, and ceramic butterfly windchimes, and a booth of rubber-stamps, and a booth with clusters of little pewter and crystal sculptures displayed on tables made of old doors set across saw-horses. I slowed a little as I passed that one, for I’ve always had a weakness for pewter. There were the standard dragons and wizards, and some thunder-eggs cut in half with wizard figures standing inside them. There were birds, too, eagles and falcons and owls of pewter, and one really nice stag almost as big as my hand. For fifty-two dollars. I was looking at it when I heard a woman standing behind me say, “I’d like the crystal holding the wizard, please.”
And the owner of the stall smiled at her and said, “You mean the wizard holding the crystal, right?” and the woman said, in this really snotty voice, “Quite.”
So the owner wrapped up the little figurine of a wizard holding a crystal ball in several layers of tissue paper, and held it out to the woman and said, “Seventeen-seventy-eight, please,” and the woman was digging in her purse and I swear, all I did was try to step out of their way.
I guess my coat caught on a corner of the door or something, for in the next instant everything was tilting and sliding. I tried to catch the edge of the door-table, but it landed on the woman’s foot, really hard, as all the crystal and pewter crashed to the floor and scattered across the linoleum like a shattered whitecap. The woman screamed and threw up her hands and the little wrapped wizard went flying.
I’m not sure if I really saw this.
The crystal ball flew out of the package and landed separately on the floor. It didn’t shatter or tinkle or crash. It went Poof! with a minute puff of smoke. And the crumple of tissue paper floated down emptily.
“You stupid bitch!” the woman yelled at me, and the owner of the booth glared at me and said, “I hope to hell you have insurance, klutz!”
Which is a dumb thing to say, really, and I couldn’t think of any answer. People were turning to stare, and moving toward us to see what the excitement was, and the woman had sort of collapsed and was holding onto her foot, saying, “My god, it’s broken, it’s broken.”
I knew, quite abruptly and coldly, that she wasn’t talking about her foot.
Then the fortyish man grabbed me by the elbow and said, “We’ve got to get out of here!” I let him pull me away, and the funny thing is, no one tried to stop us or chase us or anything. The crowd closed up around the woman on the floor like an amoeba engulfing a tidbit.
Then we were in a pickup truck that smelled like a wet dog, and the floor was cluttered with muddy newspapers and styrofoam coffee cups and wrappers from Hostess Fruit Pies and paper boats from the textured vegetable protein burritos they sell in the Seven-Eleven stores.
Part of me was saying that I was crazy to be driving off with this guy I hardly knew who had stuck me with the bill for dinner, and part of me was saying that I had better get back to Sears, maybe I could explain being this late for work. And part of me just didn’t give a shit anymore, it just wanted to flee. And that part felt better than it had in ages.
We pulled up outside a little white house and he turned to me gravely and said, “Thank you for rescuing me.”
“This is really dumb,” I said, and he said, “Maybe so, but it’s all we’ve got. I told you, magic isn’t what it used to be.”
So we went inside the little house and he put the tea kettle on. It was a beautiful kettle, shining copper with a white and blue ceramic handle, and the cups and saucers he took down matched it. I said, “You stuck me with the bill at the restaurant.”
He said, “My enemies fell upon me in the restroom and magicked me away. I told you. I never would have chosen to leave you that way, Silver Lady. But for your intervention today, I would still be in their powers.” Then he turned, holding a little tin cannister in each hand and asked, “Which will you have: Misplaced Dreams or Forgotten Sweetness?”
“Forgotten Sweetness,” I said, and he put down both cannisters of tea and took me in his arms and kissed me. And yes, I could feel his stomach sticking out a little against mine, and when I put my hand to the back of his head to hold his mouth against mine, I could tell his hair was thinning. But I also thought I could hear windchimes and scent an elusive perfume on a warm breeze. I don’t believe in magic. The idea of willing enchantment into my life is dumb. Dumb. But as the fortyish man had said, it was all we had. A dumb hope for a small slice of magic, no matter how thin. The fortyish man didn’t waste his energy carrying me to the bedroom.
I never met a man under twenty-five who was worth the powder to blow him to hell. They’re all stuck in third gear.
It takes a man until he’s thirty to understand what gentleness is about, and a few years past that to realize that a woman touches a man as she would like him to touch her.
By thirty-five, they start to grasp how a woman’s body is wired. They quit trying to kick-start us, and learn to make sure the battery is charged before turning the key. A few, I’ve heard, learn how to let a woman make love to them.
Fortyish men understand pacing. They know it doesn’t have to all happen at once, that separating each stimulus can intensify each touch. They know when pausing is more poignant than continuing, and they know when continuing is more important than a ceramic kettle whistling itself dry on an electric burner.
And afterwards I said to him, “Have you ever heard of ‘Lindholm’s Rule of Ten’?”
He frowned an instant. “Isn’t that the theory that the first ten times two people make love, one will do something that isn’t in sync with the other?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“It’s been disproved,” he said solemnly. And he got up and went to the bathroom while I rescued the smoking kettle from the burner.
I stood in the kitchen, and after a while I started shivering, because the place wasn’t all that well heated. Putting my clothes back on didn’t seem polite somehow, so I called through the bathroom door, “Shall I put on more water for tea?”
He didn’t answer, and I didn’t want to yell through the door again, so I picked up my blouse and slung it around my shoulders and shivered for a while. I sort of paced through his kitchen and living room. I found myself reading the titles of his books, one of the best ways to politely spy on someone. Theories of Thermodynamics was right next to The Silmarillion. All the books by Carlos Castenada were set apart on a shelf by themselves. His set of Kipling was bound in red leather. My ass was freezing, and I suspected I had a rug burn on my back. To hell with being polite. I went and got my underwear and skirt and stood in the kitchen, putting them on.