Читать книгу Collectors - Paul Griner - Страница 8

HE DID NOT PHONE ON MONDAY or Tuesday. Wednesday, determined not to think about him, Jean left her office at lunch for a new Thai restaurant across town, then hurried back without eating—despising herself for doing so—convinced she’d miss his call; Claudia must have told him where she worked. Thursday she decided that the champagne had given him false courage and that he’d come to regret his boldness, and by Friday she was certain that his change of heart no longer bothered her. In celebration, she wore a new perfume to work, Savoir, which to her seemed both subtle and distinctive—one noticed it only if one stood close to her, but then its crisp citrus scent was unmistakable. She found herself sniffing the insides of her wrists to take it in.

In the early afternoon, a slack time, she doodled over the cover of a folder on her desk, and, studying the markings, saw that she’d written Steven’s name dozens of times, the initial double loops of the S, the jagged t, the near circles of the vowels. She called the receptionist to ask if anyone had left her a message, and after being told for the second time that no one had, she began to hate her office.

It was spare and elegant, nearly bare of decoration, and she’d fought to keep it that way, throwing out the occasional plant or poster coworkers gave her around holidays, and refusing her boss’s standing offer to replace the simple wooden and metal trestle table she worked on with something “more refined.” From Bonnie, she knew, that would mean a desk both massive and ornate. But now the room’s cell-like qualities oppressed her: it was small, it smelled of chemicals, and it had no window, nothing to catch her eye and distract her restless mind from turning in on itself. Some of her old work hung on the walls—her first successful ads, framed in unfinished wood—and she understood now that all of it was stupid, obvious and shallow and dull, a poor imitation of work others had done earlier and better. What was there in it that distinguished it, that distinguished her? Nothing. That she’d thought it fit to mount galled her, she could imagine it being laughed at.

She tried to recall the scent of crushed grass, the feel of champagne bubbles bursting against the roof of her mouth, the color of Steven’s eyes, but all of the sensations were faded and indistinct, like images in sun-bleached pictures. Rubbing the spot on her knee where he had touched her, she smudged her blouse with a drafting pencil, and when she flicked at the leaden smear to clean it, managed only to work it deeper into the fabric. Cursing, she turned back to her desk, where the comps for the Pettigrew account—due on Monday and almost finished—were stacked in leaning piles. They depressed her. Fat, clumsy bodies, a nearly invisible product logo, sloppily done letters; she was meant to create the ads, not execute them, and here was the all-too-obvious proof.

She folded one of the drawings in half, in quarters, in eighths, and she was tearing it neatly along the folds when she smelled patchouli and looked up to find Bonnie standing in the doorway, holding a stack of files. Patchouli had a dusty, androgynous smell that Jean hated; it reminded her of the attics she’d played in as a child, and of her Aunt Sally.

“Plans this weekend, Jean?” Bonnie said, miming a knock and entering.

Jean had disliked Bonnie upon first meeting her, a feeling whose origins she traced to the scent and whose strength had never abated, and now she watched Bonnie stop in front of the desk and put on a smile. Being pleasant was something Bonnie was working at, remembering to ask after her coworkers’ lives before launching into whatever it was she really wanted. Jean had seen the tattered management book stuffed into Bonnie’s purse: Connections to Success, The Human Verbal Touch Is Business Magic.

“Yes. I’m afraid so,” Jean said. “I do have plans.”

“Oh really?” Bonnie lowered the files to her side and fiddled with her necklace, a gaudy silver thing whose pendants rattled at her touch. Jean guessed from the awkward pause it was not the answer Bonnie had expected. “What might those be?”

Haven’t got to the “Workers Who Give Surprising Answers” chapter yet, have we? Jean thought. She swiveled in her chair.

“Sailing.” She’d been preparing to let people know all week, and it pleased her to hear the word come out sounding so smoothly indifferent.

“Sailing?”

“Yes.”

“Down to the river? At the place with lessons?” Bonnie sat, face brightening, and Jean remembered that Bonnie had given her a flyer the year before from an outfit along the esplanade that offered lessons. “RANK (BUT NOT RANK!) BEGINNERS TO ABLE-BODIED SEA PEOPLE!” Who wrote these things? she wondered. Bonnie had wanted the whole office to go, as a way to bond with her, the new boss; Jean alone had demurred.

“God no,” Jean said. She wanted to look out a window, but she stared instead at the blank wall opposite her open door and picked out strands of color glinting in the textured paper that covered it. Forest green, sky blue, perhaps a bit of indigo. “Nothing like that. On a friend’s boat.”

Bonnie leaned toward Jean’s desk, smiling, red lipstick slanting across one canine. The files were in her lap now, forgotten. “An old friend?” Her voice was lowered, her head cocked, as if Jean might whisper her response.

“New.”

Bonnie raised her eyebrows, expectant, but Jean smiled back resolutely, unwilling to say more. A phone began to ring in one of the outer offices, four rings, five rings, six, and after it stopped Bonnie sat back and tapped the files on her thighs with the fingernails of both hands. “Well,” she said. “Sounds exciting. I won’t weigh you down with these.” She winked and gathered up the files and stood. “You’ll have plenty to do, I guess.”

“Thank you,” Jean said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to leave a little early today.”

Bonnie paused before answering, and Jean leaned forward and whispered, “Supplies.”

Bonnie’s face flushed, probably with pleasure, all the way up to the fine lines around her eyes, the added color causing her foundation makeup to look caked.

“Fine, Jean, go right ahead. I’ve often said you should make more time for yourself. Take the whole afternoon if you need it.”

At the door she turned, and Jean’s stomach sank. She knew what was coming next: Bonnie would wish her luck, or giggle conspiratorially, or ask her to provide her with all the juicy details on Monday—something unsophisticated and girlish.

“You’ll have time to polish up the Pettigrew drawings?” she said.

Surprised, Jean could only nod.

“Monday’s meeting is at one,” Bonnie said. “But don’t you worry too much about it. I can see from your desk you’ve made a good start on them.”

Jean understood: Bonnie meant to remind her that her visit had been supervisory, not social; she’d been foolish to think otherwise.

“And besides,” Bonnie said, “other things sometimes come first, in time if not in importance. Enjoy being with Steven.” She rapped on the door frame and left.

Jean covered up Steven’s name to keep others from noticing it, and listened to Bonnie’s footsteps grow fainter as she moved down the carpeted hall. They stopped shortly, and then Jean heard Bonnie whispering to one of the other art directors. About her, no doubt. She leaned forward and turned her ear to listen, but it was no use: she couldn’t distinguish Bonnie’s words, only the sound of her voice, rustling like a squirrel in leaves as she spoke.

Saturday, Jean went into the office and devoted herself to the Pettigrew drawings. They were not perfect when she was done, which annoyed her, but she had nearly succeeded in stripping the lettering to something elemental—the suggestion of letters rather than the letters themselves—which would be enough for Bonnie to play up and make a selling point. A hint, nothing obvious, that was Pettigrew’s signature look; Jean knew because she had created it.

Home, she cooked herself dinner, cleaned the apartment, and leafed through her copy of Plummerman’s Collecting Guide, and then at midnight called Claudia, but the phone rang unanswered for a full three minutes and after that she gave up and unplugged it. She slept with her windows open, as she always had, though she knew Mrs. Olsen, her elderly neighbor, disapproved. Two or three times a month she slipped notes and news clippings into Jean’s mailbox, the folded notes illegible and the news clippings detailing burglaries and robberies in the area—once a murder—and across the accompanying photographs she had crayoned COULD BE YOU! in big green block letters. But no one was going to climb five stories to get Jean; they’d have to go up the brick, since the apartment, alone of the ones in the building, didn’t have a fire escape.

An oversight, the landlord had told Jean when she first looked at the place, mistaking her surprise for fear. He had knocked his cigarette ash into his cupped palm as they walked from room to room and assured her that it would soon be fixed, but the code violation didn’t scare Jean, it was the reason she chose the apartment. She was not afraid of fire, and as the main entrance to the building was off an alley, not the street, she believed that here, at least, her privacy would be guaranteed. She would not awake to find that Pavel Hammond had climbed all that way to watch her sleep.

Sunday, Jean awoke in the dark to humid air and clinging sheets. She kicked them off and lay sweating on the bed, staring at the plaster ceiling until its cracks became visible and a Creamsicle orange rim of dawn began to show in the eastern sky. The phone was beside her and she was glad she’d unplugged it; if Steven hadn’t called by now, he wasn’t going to. A shower, some coffee and a roll, and then she was off, to Marblehead, her usual Sunday-morning routine.

In Marblehead, the air was salty, the wind onshore, and she slipped her sweater on, surprised by the chill. The water was different, she reminded herself, it changed things; that was a lesson she had to learn again and again. She had a few hundred dollars cash, her wallet, a checkbook in case anything at the flea market caught her fancy; she never lost hope that it might.

The steep harborside streets were still blue with morning shade, and as she traversed them she surveyed the flea market, its tables of junk and treasure, its vendors, its crowd. She’d arrived early, but others had come even earlier, and many were already leaving, some holding pictureless frames and others looking like refugees from a waterfront disaster as they passed her, clutching chairs or lamps or carrying the drawers from desks and bureaus under their arms or across their shoulders, and she had to reassure herself that she’d missed nothing. They were decorators, mostly, with their measuring tapes and their bottled water, and big items always went quickly, she knew; getting there after they’d gone made her task easier—less jostling, fewer fights over who saw something first. She was interested chiefly in pens.

Her first time through was just an inspection, as it was best not to show even a flicker of attraction. She was young or at least youngish, her hair was thick and glossy, she was nearly six feet tall, and she knew most of the vendors would remember her having passed—especially this early, when the crowds had not yet arrived. She noted a stall displaying some kind of handmade dogs and marked its location and half an hour later, walking uphill this time, came back. It was a little warmer; she could feel herself beginning to sweat, the sun was on her neck. A flowering crab in a corner yard had spread its bloom, the white blossoms giving off an overripe scent and scattering across the lawn like snow in a sudden breeze.

The dogs had been made from partially melted sugar cubes, awkwardly glued together and painted in fluorescent colors—green, yellow, orange—and, jumbled about, they resembled piles of gravel lining the bottom of fish tanks. Only a few dogs were able to stand, the rest lay on their sides, their misshapen feet mis-serving them, and she picked one up, blue and longish, with a black Magic Marker tip for a nose and long, hanging ears. The tail had a small Styrofoam ball stuck on its end; its stomach crumbled in her palm.

“That is a poodle,” the vendor said, enunciating each word. She was a middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair and an enormous, swollen-looking chest. Her blouse was too tight, pinching the skin on her arms, and for some reason she was holding a hammer.

“Standard poodle,” she said. “Built exactly to scale.”

“It’s unusual,” Jean said.

“Yes it is. It certainly is that.” The woman’s voice crackled as she spoke, as if she was breathing through cellophane. “I had to make it a she-dog. Trying to melt little wiener shapes is too hard.”

Putting it down, Jean was careful not to let it touch the others, afraid one of its legs might scrape off. “Did you make it?”

“Took three days. That smile is the real thing. You find yourself a standard poodle and tell me it isn’t. They’re smart dogs. On all the tests, they’re number two.”

At the next table, another vendor had placed an old cigar box; it was lying open, filled with pens. She had been right, then. Cloisonné, crystal, a few silver, and one gold, which gleamed beneath the others; she was mindful not to look. That was the cardinal rule of the market, not to display your interest, otherwise you spooked your prey—prices doubled or tripled, sometimes items suddenly weren’t for sale, artificial scarcities were created and bidding could start; she would not allow herself to be the one to set it off.

“They certainly are stunning,” she said of the dogs. “But I’m afraid I have nowhere to display them in my apartment.”

The woman’s face changed, as if Jean had insulted her, and she reached over the table with the hammer and pulled the poodle back toward the others with the claw.

“You shouldn’t handle them, then. I wouldn’t have let you if I’d known that was all you were about.”

She crossed her arms below her chest, as if to give her breasts something to rest on, and turned away. The vendor next to her, leaning against the tailgate of his truck, tall, wearing blue jeans and a blue-and-white striped shirt, was smiling. Jean saw his straight, even teeth from the corner of her eye and realized that touching the dog had been a miscalculation; now she would have to wait until after lunch to look at his pens.

The café had a few tables with umbrellas outside on a cobbled stretch of sidewalk bordered by a white picket fence, but Jean was the only one brave enough to sit out in the wind. She cupped her cold fingers around her mug of hot chocolate, and when they warmed enough for her to feel them, she reached into her purse for her cheese sandwich. She ate quickly, worried that someone from the office might see her, though she’d rehearsed her story in case it should be Bonnie. She’d mixed up her weekends, that was all—it was during the one to come that she was supposed to sail.

Far out in the harbor, sailboats were passing beyond the breakwater. They looked insubstantial, pieces of Styrofoam flung on the surface of a lake. She picked one boat to follow and watched it glide out to sea until it dropped below the horizon, and just as it disappeared a fat white cloud drifted in front of the sun and the light changed, the green water turned black, and the smell of the sea grew suddenly stronger. She was glad Steven hadn’t called. What on earth had made her think she’d like to go out on the water? Above her, the loose fabric of the umbrella snapped in the rising wind.

The sun came out again and she checked her watch—it was nearly noon and shadows were disappearing. Houses had west windows open, the fair should have been filling up, but the crowd was actually thinning. A desultory pace lent the day the feel of a holiday weekend in the city, when the only people left in the emptied streets reminded her of the old pieces of furniture abandoned by people when they move. Jean, wondering if perhaps the east wind had driven everyone inland, was glad not to have to fight crowds, but the lack of people also presented a danger: she would not be able to wait as long as she wanted since the vendors might close up early. She returned to the stall that displayed the pens.

Lifting things, she said, “How much is this? And this? And this?” but did not listen to the vendor’s replies. Canary-yellow Fiesta ware, a German beer stein, a glass cutter that felt heavy and surprisingly imbalanced in her palm. The pens were the fourth thing she handled. Some days she made the item she wanted the third thing, some days the fifth, and some days she wouldn’t even ask, leaving whatever she wanted for another trip. On those occasions, when she returned, she’d offer half the asking price. As she spoke, the woman with the melted-sugar dogs glared at her.

“And this pen?” She held up a cloisonné pen, a good one, even the pocket clip had been enameled. It was smooth and clean-lined, balanced and thin and well made, and it had a G stamped on the flat end of the cap.

“Ten dollar,” he said. His English was not very strong, Italian, she guessed. His skin was tanned, lined, his fingers were broad and stained, the thick nails opaque. He might have been a farmer.

She put the pen back and held up an inferior one, a Parker, some of the cloisonné was missing, and raised her eyebrows.

“Fifteen.”

“Why the difference?”

“Works,” he said. Taking the pen from her, he uncapped it, then spit in his palm and dragged the nib through the spittle to show her. A spidery trail of blue ink began to cross his callused skin.

So he did not know the relative value of his pens, a good thing.

He wiped his palm and the nib on his jeans and held out both ends of the pen to her. “You want? You try?”

She shook her head and fingered through the other pens, then picked up the stein again and read the name stamped on the bottom: Schnitzengruber. “Where’s this from?”

He shrugged. “Wife’s. We no use.” He put the pen back and flipped the box lid closed, which meant he was smarter than she’d allowed for; she would have to declare her interest now by reopening it. She thought of simply walking away, but the pens appeared in her mind’s eye, the gold Cross, the black enamel Mont Blanc, the two sapphire Watermans. Most of the others were worthless, cheaper Kronos or Parkers, which had never worked well when they’d been new and which now would bleed and gum. The first cloisonné she’d held was probably a Grieshaber. Though she’d read about them she’d never seen one, and she’d reached for it instinctively, which she thought might work in her favor—one never touched first what one really desired, so her undisciplined impulsiveness might serve to mislead him.

Her sense that here at last was that rare something worthy of her interest, which therefore she had to have, was, she realized, what she’d been feeling about Steven at her cousin’s wedding, the feeling she’d been unable to recall. But he hadn’t felt the same way, obviously; he hadn’t phoned, he hadn’t written, he hadn’t appeared magically on her doorstep.

She forced herself to put him from her mind and reopened the box and picked up the gold Cross. Its nib was wide, a full stub, and she’d have to replace it if she was going to use the pen; she tended to make her letters sharper than that nib would allow. For a matching gold nib, that meant another seventy-five dollars at the start.

“And this?”

He waited for her to look up and she was sure she knew why. Years before, she’d read that Arab traders, bargaining, watched your eyes, and once your pupils narrowed they were certain you had reached the price you were willing to pay and they would refuse to go any lower. Vendors throughout the various fairs seemed aware of that folklore; they were always watching her eyes.

“One hundred dollar,” he said.

She didn’t blink. “That’s absurd.”

She tried the two Watermans without listening to his prices. He picked up the Cross again.

“Real gold. Is worth monies.” “Fifty,” she said, letting him see her eyes. It was probably one of the 1920s series, with a vacuum filling system and twin ink reservoirs, for which she’d been prepared to go up to two hundred dollars, but he wouldn’t be able to detect that. For a few days after she’d heard about the Arabs’ methods, every time she passed a mirror she had stopped to stare at her reflection and begun to lie, telling a whole string of them, rapidly. I like my job, Winter is my favorite season, I want to die old and decrepit. Then she would slip in one statement that was true—My aunt’s house burned down, or, Red is a color, or, My uncle was badly burned—and then she would lie again, as many lies as she could think of, quickly, and it was true: the truth narrowed her eyes. With practice, however, over many months, she found that she could hide the truth, give nothing away. The trick was a second voice in her head, midway in register between her own voice and Claudia’s, background to her other thoughts, repeating the same three words, over and over. It’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie. The chant soothed her, put her in a kind of trance, and she heard it now running in the back of her mind.

At sixty dollars his eyes narrowed and he crossed his arms.

“Throw in this one,” she said, holding up the Grieshaber, “and you have a deal.”

He stuck at sixty-five. For another ten she bought a Waterman, and for twenty more she got the Mont Blanc.

After she paid, he swept his cupped hand over the entire display, palm up.

“Other than pen, five dollar for anything on table.”

He wanted to make it an even hundred, but she would not oblige him. “No. Just the pens today. And I’ve already bought too much.” She held up the pens as proof before tucking them into her bag. It would be months before she could check his stock again, which she felt sure he would replenish; if she bought even one more now, he’d probably do some research and never again get taken.

She snapped her purse shut and turned away, and heard the lady with the sugar dogs muttering, “What, you can display pens but not my dogs?”

Jean ignored her. Did the woman not know that this was how the market worked? Every vendor had a perfect buyer, someone out there waiting to find her. Today had been someone else’s day. Her day would come, someone would seek her out and surprise her with the strength of his interest, but if she did not wait for it, she would not do well.

When she got home there was a single message on her answering machine, a woman’s voice, older and halting.

“This is Celia Barnes,” she said. “I was at Miss May’s funeral today.”

Then came a long pause and Jean reached to erase it, but just before she pressed the button the woman’s voice returned.

“That was the prettiest casket I have ever seen, and I was interested in finding out how I might get one for myself. Could you call me at home?” After giving her number, she hung up.

Jean played it back once, pretending the cryptic message was for her, though she knew it wasn’t. Her number was one digit off from that of a nearby funeral parlor, and every couple of weeks she got calls meant for it, usually a family member elected or left to handle funeral arrangements, thinking that he or she had reached the home. Sometimes in the background, during the pauses, would come the incoherent echoes of other conversations, warped and mysterious and strangely troubling. They attracted Jean. After listening to dozens of them, she had decided they sounded like the querulous voices of the dead, anxious to communicate preferences about their own funerals, angered by their inability to do so. Today there weren’t any echoes.

She cleaned the pens with ammonia and silver nitrate, and then filled their bladders with black ink. She’d been right about the Cross, its unwieldy nib. The Grieshaber worked on the third try. She wrote her name out with each, first with her right hand, then with her left, though it was difficult to tell which was which because in all of them her script was hardly legible; she’d always hated her hand. When she was done she made places for the pens in the silver chest she’d bought for just that purpose, sliding them smoothly into their new velvet homes.

Monday was gray and cold. Clouds hung low and ragged just above the flat rooftops, and then a fog rolled in, smelling of the sea, and the bricks outside her windows seemed to sweat in the opaque mist. Conversations on the street reached Jean with odd distortions, their volume swelling as people moved away, shrinking as they came closer, and she heard someone talking about the daily number. 5511, she repeated, 5511. Jean called in sick, not up to work, to having to bubble about her weekend. Yes, the Pettigrew drawings were done, they were in a file on her desk. No, she didn’t think she needed to be at the meeting. She turned off the phone and went back to bed.