Melville’s new place was on the second floor of one of the converted Federal mansions in the McIntyre District. The doorways had the traditional carved-wood friezes. The stairway wound three floors skyward in a hanging spiral. Though Zee thought it was a shame to chop up any of these old houses, this conversion had been done well.
Melville opened the door and hugged her. “Thanks for coming,” he said.
She handed the bag to him. “You’re lucky,” she said. “He hadn’t gotten around to selling this stuff yet.”
Melville looked terrible. His sandy hair hadn’t been washed, and he hadn’t shaved for days. He wore a dirty lime green Salem tee with a logo that read LIFE’S A WITCH AND THEN YOU FLY. He was a big man, muscular from working the boats and from years spent in the merchant marine before he became a writer and an archivist. “I know,” he said when he noticed the way she was looking at him. “I avoid mirrors.”
The second-floor condo was windowed, sunny, and historically perfect, with the same green-over-gray shade of verdigris that had been used in the sitting room of the House of the Seven Gables. She recognized antiques from the 1850s China Trade. The one suitcase Melville had brought with him sat opened by the door, the unfolded pile of grab-and-go that he’d hastily stuffed into it spilling out onto the floor in contrast to the perfect room. The chairs had the light, spindly legs of expensive antiques, and Zee couldn’t imagine Melville daring to actually sit on them.
“Nice place,” she said. She looked around for a place to sit, but this was more museum than living room, with feminine touches but altogether too perfect in its execution. It was definitely a gay man’s house, Zee concluded, probably someone who dealt in antiques. Her mind jumped to the reasons for the split with Finch.
“I’m just taking care of the place,” Melville said, reading her. He’d always been able to read her.
“You want coffee?” he asked, pointing toward the kitchen.
“Please,” she said.
The kitchen was obviously where Melville was spending most of his time. He gathered up the copies of the Boston Globe and the Salem papers and old National Geographics that covered the farm table. Several coffee cups in various stages of abandonment sat on the table and on countertops, one with a fuzzy white-and-green skin growing across the top.
“I’ve got to wash some of these,” he said, taking them to the sink.
“Nice light,” she said. The kitchen windows looked out on the North River. It was perfect New England painter’s light. Zee caught a glimpse of the dog park that ran alongside the river below. At least ten dogs were off leash, barking and chasing a tennis ball some kid had thrown.
Melville rinsed the cups and the old enameled cowboy coffeepot, a twin to the one she had in Boston, which Melville had given her the year she went away to college because he knew she wouldn’t make it a day without his coffee.
The Starbucks bag was empty. He rifled through the cabinets and found some Bustelo. “Pretty strong stuff,” he said.
“I can take it if you can,” she said.
He opened the fridge and reached inside, pulling out an egg, holding it up to her as a magician might, then making it disappear. It was a trick he’d developed to amuse her after her mother died. He presented the egg to her once more, from behind her head this time, and she took it, smiling.
He smiled back, then the misery overtook him again.
“Are you okay?” she couldn’t help asking.
“Do I look okay?”
It was the saddest she’d ever seen him.
“How is Finch today?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Pretty much the same, I guess.”
Like Zee, Melville was hoping it was the medication that had made Finch behave so irrationally after so many years. “This is awful,” he said.
He brought the old enameled pot to the table, along with a wooden spoon. He watched while Zee threw the egg into the pot, shell and all, heaving it as hard as she could, smashing it against the bottom of the pot. It was part of their ritual. When she was finished, he handed her the wooden spoon, and she stirred the egg, shell, and grounds into a paste.
She smiled, remembering the many times she’d made Melville’s cowboy coffee for people, first at school and later for Michael’s friends. Part of the shock value of making the coffee was the looks of disgust it brought to her friends’ faces to see her make it, then their looks of delight if she could get them to actually taste the stuff, which they all admitted was some of the best coffee they’d ever had.
The first time he made it for her, Zee accused him of teasing her. She was eleven and already had a caffeine habit from years of drinking it with Finch’s pirate friends.
“You shouldn’t be drinking coffee at your age,” Melville had said to her. “But if you insist on continuing such an unhealthy habit, you should at least have some protein along with it.” She watched as he threw a whole egg, shell and all, into the grounds, then added water and told her to mix it into a paste. She still thought he was kidding when he put the coffee on the stove and waited for it to boil, then dumped a cup of very cold water into the mix. He strained it into a cup and presented it to her.
“Gross,” she said, looking at the mixture in the strainer.
“Try it,” he said, and waited.
“No way.”
He shrugged. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, pouring himself a cup and sitting down across from her at the table. He sipped his coffee as he read the paper.
Zee watched him drink almost a full cup before she took a sip.
“Not bad, huh?” He grinned.
“Not too bad.” It was the best coffee she’d ever had.
“The egg takes away the bitterness, and the shells make it clear.” He took her cup and dumped three-quarters of it into the sink. Then he took what was left and added milk, filling the cup.
“I drink it black,” she said.
“Not anymore, you don’t. When you’re sixteen, you can switch back if you want to. For now it’s café au lait,” he said. “Mostly lait.”
TODAY MELVILLE WATCHED AS ZEE stirred the grounds the way she had as a child, biting her lower lip, trying to make sure it was right. Finally she glanced up and handed him the pot. She couldn’t read his look. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he answered, taking the pot back to the sink, filling it with cold water to the spout line. Then he put the pot on the stove and turned the gas burner to high.
Some part of Melville had always foreseen this ending, the impossibility of the relationship with Finch. Bad beginnings don’t lead to perfect endings. How could they?
WHEN HE CAME BACK FROM sea that last time, he’d gotten himself a job at the Peabody Essex Museum. Just cataloging and doing a bit of writing, descriptions of their collections, the same thing he did for the Athenaeum now. The Peabody Essex had a huge maritime collection, much of it undocumented. It would be a long time before the museum opened, and they had little room for everything they’d acquired, so it sat in boxes and crates, with the directors of the museum not even realizing in many cases what treasures they had. Melville had been among those whose job it had been to figure it out.
He was grateful for the position, and even more so for the relative obscurity of it, and for the fact that he was back on dry land. For the last several years, he’d been running from something that he knew was absolutely wrong for him, something that had both intrigued and scared the hell out of him at the same time. He didn’t come back to Salem until he was certain that its hold on him had loosened.