She hired a girl to help her. She stocked paperback books, and made lively displays of them in the window. She worked up a line of fortune-telling maps for each sign of the zodiac. She took good-luck charms and cheap jewellery of an occult character on consignment from local craftsmen. She installed a palmist in the parlour above the shop — an elderly lady with jet-black hair and piercing eyes who was clothed entirely in black and turned over to Jachin-Boaz’s wife a percentage of whatever she took in. To create an atmosphere around her a coffee machine, tables and chairs were added, and regular coffee-drinkers appeared. A small ensemble of young musicians, playing folk songs and paid by the passing of a basket among the coffee-drinkers, attracted a larger clientele. Soon Jachin-Boaz’s wife took in more money in a week than her husband had done in a month.
During business hours she was comfortable, even gay. Sundays were bad. Sundays with Jachin-Boaz had often been depressing. Without him they were frightening. Alone at night she found her thoughts difficult to control. She washed her hair often and took many baths, luxurious with scented soaps and essences, but she avoided looking at her body. She looked at her face often in the mirror and felt unsure of how to compose it, what to do with her mouth. After not having worn her wedding ring for months she put it on, then took it off again. She began to read more than she had for years, and every night took sleeping tablets. Often she dreamed of Jachin-Boaz, and in her waking hours, however she occupied herself, there were thoughts of him most of the time.
Boaz-Jachin was in her mind less often. Sometimes he had seemed a stranger to her. They had not thought alike, had never been as close as she had expected a mother and son to be. Now he seemed less an absent son than an emptiness, an end of something. Sometimes she would be surprised not to hear his footsteps, his guitar, would catch herself thinking of what to cook for him. Sometimes she wondered what he might be doing at a particular moment. His father is in him, she thought. He is lost and wandering, seeking chaos. Sometimes the two of them blurred together in her mind.
She looked at books of poems that Jachin-Boaz had given her when they were young. The inscriptions were full of love and passion. He had found her beautiful and desirable once. She had thought him beautiful, exciting, the young man with whom she would make a green place, a place of strength and achievement. She had sensed greatness in him as a desert-dweller senses water, and she had thirsted for it. She had fallen in love with him, and she had locked herself in the bathroom and cried because she knew that he would give her pain.
Jachin-Boaz and she had met at university. She was in the arts course, he was reading natural sciences, a brilliant scholar. Then unaccountably he had failed his examinations, had left university to work in his father’s shop. Soon after that the father had died. Then she too had left university, and they had married, living with Jachin-Boaz’s mother above the shop for what seemed long years while the mother throve in chronic ill health until struck down by a bus. If not for that bus she would still be here, thought Jachin-Boaz’s wife, surrounded by her medicines, telling me how to take care of her son, telling me what a wonderful life they had when the father was alive, telling me what a wonderful husband the father had been, not telling me about the mistress that everybody knew about but her. Did she know? The wonderful husband. Another one like my father with his green place in the desert. The good place is never here, the man’s heart is never here.
When Jachin-Boaz’s mother had died his wife had expected him to emerge into a new life. She had never abandoned the conviction she had when she had fallen in love with him that he would be a famous scientist. She had always felt the seeking-and-finding drive in him, his talent for associating seemingly unrelated data. She knew that she could nurture his gifts and help him to develop them.
With his education incomplete, his start in life delayed, she did not expect him to rise fast and smoothly to eminence, but she was confident that he could find a gentlemanly scientific speciality — beetles it might be, or ancient artifacts — and on it build a reputation. She imagined letters from fellow scientists all over the world, papers by her husband read at symposia, printed in journals, international visitors drinking coffee, listening to music, talking late into the night, the lamplight warm on a life of culture, of achievement and significance. Jachin-Boaz went on with his work at the shop and found no scientific speciality.
She tried to encourage him to expand and develop the business. He was content with it as it was.
She tried to interest him in a house in the country. He had no interest.
Gone. Nothing. Dry wind in the desert. The pattern of the carpet of her childhood came into her mind, and she shuddered. Here she was. A different carpet. In the square the palm trees rustled in the light of the street lamps. The globes of the lamps were like great blind eyes, the street was empty below the window, a dog trotted past with a black trotting shadow. Here she was and he was gone, the middle-aged man who had turned away from her in bed or made love feebly, made her feel less than a woman, incapable of giving or taking pleasure. And she had seen how he looked at girls. In the shop, in the street, wherever he was. All that he had not been with her when naked he would try to be with someone new. New and young. But false. False to his abandoned talents. False to the best in him that would be for ever lost now, for ever lost. How strange that he should have left it all so soon, so young, so long ago. How strange that all these years he had been busy with maps, with paper ghosts of finding, with finding-masturbation, and all the finding in him dead! There was nothing left for him to do but die now, really. Poor fool, poor mad failed son and husband. She took her wedding ring out of the drawer, threw it on the floor, stamped it out of shape, put it back in the drawer.
Jachin-Boaz’s wife no longer cared where Jachin-Boaz was, but she felt a strong need to write a letter to him. She reasoned that he would certainly be working at a map shop or a book and map shop wherever he might be. From the information-gatherers who worked on the special-order maps she obtained the names and addresses of the principal journals of the book trade in five foreign capitals. In each of the journals she placed an advertisement notifying Jachin-Boaz that there was a letter for him to be had at the box number given. To each journal she sent a copy of her letter to him:
Jachin-Boaz,
What are you looking for with your master map that you stole from your son, with your savings that you stole from your wife and child? What will your map show you? Where is your lion? You can find nothing now. For you there never were, never could be lions, failed man. Once you had talent, power of mind and clarity of thought, but they are gone. You have taken yourself away from all order, you have hurled yourself into chaos. What was fresh and sweet in you has gone stale and sour. You are the garbage of yourself
You will wake up one morning and realize, whoever is beside you, what you have thrown away, what you have done. You have destroyed me as a woman and you have destroyed yourself, your life. You have been committing slow suicide ever since you failed your examinations, and soon you will come to the end of it.
Your father with his cigars, his theatrics, his mistress that you never knew about until I told you — your father, the great man, died at fifty-two. His heart was bad, and he died of it. You are now forty-seven, and you too have a bad heart.
You will wake in the night — whoever lies with you cannot hold back death — and you will hear the beating of your heart that moves always towards the last beat, the last moment. Wherever you are, whomever you are with; you have only a few years left to you, and suddenly they will all be gone. The last moment will be now, and you will know what you have lost, and that despairing thought will be your last.