—
A FEW WEEKS after her return to Grenoble there was a spring storm that splashed the streets with moss from the mountaintops. The stormy night turned the window of Lucy’s room into a door; through sleep Lucy became aware that it was more than just rain that rattled the glass… someone was knocking. Half-awake, she staggered across the room to turn the latch. When Safiye finally crawled in, shivering and drenched to the bone, they kissed for a long time, kissed until Lucy was fully woken by the chattering of Safiye’s teeth against hers. She fetched a towel, Safiye performed a heart-wrenchingly weak little striptease for her, and Lucy wrapped her love up warm and held her and didn’t ask what she needed to ask.
After a little while Safiye spoke, her voice so perfectly unchanged it was closer to memory than it was to real time.
“Today I asked people about you, and I even walked behind you in the street for a little while. You bought some hat ribbon and a sack of onions, and you got a good deal on the hat ribbon. Sometimes I almost thought you’d caught me watching, but now I’m sure you didn’t know. You’re doing well. I’m proud of you. And all I’ve managed to do is take a key and make a mess of things. I wanted to give you… I wanted to give you…”
“Sleep,” Lucy said. “Just sleep.” Those were the only words she had the breath to say. But Safiye had come to make her understand about the key, the key, the key, it was like a mania, and she wouldn’t sleep until Lucy heard her explanations.
From the first Safiye had felt a mild distaste for the way her employer Señora Del Olmo talked: “There was such an interesting exchange rate in this woman’s mind… whenever she remembered anyone giving her anything, they only gave a very little and kept the lion’s share to themselves. But whenever she remembered giving anyone anything she gave a lot, so much it almost ruined her.” Apart from that Safiye had neither liked nor disliked Señora Del Olmo, preferring to concentrate on building her mental inventory of the household treasures, of which there were many. In addition to these there was a key the woman wore around her neck. She toyed with it as she interviewed gardener after gardener; Safiye sat through the interviews too, taking notes and reading the character references. None of the gardeners seemed able to fulfill Señora Del Olmo’s requirement of absolute discretion: the garden must be brought to order, but it must also be kept secret. Eventually Safiye had offered the services of her own green thumb. By that time she’d earned enough trust for Señora Del Olmo to take her across town to the door of the garden, open it, and allow Safiye to look in. Safiye saw at once that this wasn’t a place where any gardener could have influence, and she saw in the roses a perpetual gift, a tangled shock of a studio where Lucy could work and play and study color. Señora Del Olmo instructed Safiye to wait outside, entered the garden, and closed the door behind her. After half an hour the Señora emerged, short of breath, with flushed cheeks—
“As if she’d just been kissed?” Lucy asked.
“Not at all like that. It was more as if she’d been seized and shaken like a faulty thermometer. I asked her if there was anybody else in the garden, and she almost screamed at me. No! No. Why do you ask that? The Señora had picked a magnificent bunch of yellow roses, with lavender tiger stripes, such vivid flowers that they made her hand look like a wretched cardboard prop for them. Señora Del Olmo kept the roses in her lap throughout the carriage ride and by the time we’d reached home she was calm. But I thought there must be someone else in that garden — the question wouldn’t have upset her as much otherwise, you know?”
“No one else was there when I was,” Lucy said.
Safiye blinked. “So you’ve been there.”
“Yes, and there were only roses.”
“Only roses…”
“So how did you get the key?” They were watching each other closely now; Safiye watching for disbelief, Lucy watching for a lie.
“In the evening I went up to the Señora’s sitting room, to see if there was anything she wanted before I went to bed myself. The only other people the Señora employed were a cook and a maid of all work, and they didn’t live with us, so they’d gone home for the night. I knocked at the door and the Señora didn’t answer, but I heard — a sound.”
“A sound? Like a voice?”
“Yes — no. Creaking. A rusty handle turning, or a wooden door forced open until its hinges buckle, or to me, to me it was the sound of something growing. I sometimes imagine that if we could hear trees growing we’d hear them… creak… like that. I knocked again, and the creaking stopped, but a silence began. A silence I didn’t feel good about at all. But I felt obliged to do whatever I could do… if I left a door closed and it transpired that somebody might have lived if I had only opened it in time… I couldn’t bear that… so I had to try the door no matter what. I prayed that it was locked, but it opened and I saw the Señora standing by the window in the moonlight, with her back to me. She was holding a rose cupped in her hands, as if about to drink from it. She was standing very straight, nobody stands as straight as she was standing, not even the dancers at the opera house…”
“Dead?”
“No, she was just having a nap. Of course she was fucking dead, Lucy. I lit the lantern on the table and went up close. Her eyes were open and there was some form of comprehension in them — I almost thought she was about to hush me; she looked as if she understood what had happened to her, and was about to say: Shhh, I know. I know. And there’s no need for you to know. It was the most terrible look. The most terrible. I looked at the rest of her to try to forget it, and I saw three things in quick succession: one, that the color of the rose she was holding was different from the color of the roses in the vase on the windowsill. The ones in the vase were yellow streaked with lavender, as I told you, and the one in the Señora’s hand was orange streaked with brown.”
Lucy mixed paints at the back of her mind. What turned yellow to orange and blue, purple to brown? Red.
“I also saw that there was a hole in the Señora’s chest.”
“A hole?”
“A small precise puncture”—Safiye tapped the center of Lucy’s chest and pushed, gently—“It went through to the other side. And yet, no blood.”
(It was all in the rose.)
“What else?”
“The stem of the orange rose.” Safiye was shivering again. “How could I tell these things to a policeman? How could I tell him that this was how I found her? The rose had grown a kind of tail. Long, curved, thorny. I ran away.”
“You took the key first,” Lucy reminded her.
“I took the key and then I ran.”
The lovers closed their eyes on their thoughts and passed from thought into sleep. When Lucy woke, Safiye had gone. She’d left a note: Wait for me, and that was the only proof that the nighttime visit hadn’t been a dream.
—
A DECADE LATER, Lucy was still waiting. The waiting had changed her life. For one thing she’d left France for Spain. And the only name she now used was her real one, the name that Safiye knew, so that Safiye would be able to find her. And using her real name meant keeping the reputation associated with that name clean. She showed the book of roses she’d made for Safiye to the owner of a gallery; the man asked her to name her price, so she asked for a sum that she herself thought outrageous. He found it reasonable and paid on the spot, then asked her for more. And so Safiye drew Lucy into respectability after all.
Señora Lucy’s separation from Safiye meant that she often painted landscapes in which she looked for her. Señora Lucy was rarely visible in these paintings but Safiye always was, and looking at the paintings engaged you in her search for a lost woman, an uneasy search because somehow in these pictures seeing her never meant the same thing as having found her. Señora Lucy had other subjects; she was working on her own vision of the Judgment of Paris, and Montse had been spending her lunch breaks posing for Señora Lucy’s study of Aphrodite. Montse was a fidgeter; again and again she was told, “No no no no as you were!” Then Señora Lucy would come and tilt Montse’s chin upward, or trail her fingers through Montse’s hair so that it fell over her shoulder just so. And the proximity of that delightful frown clouded Montse’s senses to a degree that made her very happy to stay exactly where she was as long as Señora Lucy stayed too.