Blow (2 page)

Of course, the reason Babbo and Pierre became such bitter rivals should be obvious by now. Everybody knows, marbles and fake flowers are the principal components of those decorative vases that are filled with marbles and fake flowers. They have entire aisles of them these days at the mega-marts, with all different shaped vases. The marbles hold the flowers in place and resemble water if you’re real forgiving. The flowers never wilt, which makes them perfect for offices and lazy people.

The marbles are sometimes river stones and the flowers are sometimes candles, but more often than not, it’s the balls and bulbs in a glass vase for $27.99.

They’re not exactly my cup of tea. But hey, to each his own, as they say. That is, until they bite the big one, then, to each
my
own.

In Old Timey Europe, around the time chubby German kids were getting eaten by witches in gingerbread houses and all the hot chicks had to be chained to a tower, the vases were
huge.
Every season you’d see unscrupulous peddlers toting around a pile of them to sell at ridiculous prices, because everyone had to have them. And I can tell you it wasn’t just a fad, because it hasn’t vanished since. Old couples, kitsch collectors, single dads trying to spice up a living room — they all go straight for the faux foliage in marble arrangements.

Pierre and Giovanni were the only two grand masters in the art of vase filling. And so naturally, friendship and professional courtesy were out of the question. They hadn’t ever met, mind you. There were no trade shows back then. Giovanni and Pierre disliked each other by reputation alone. When Pierre presented his finest creation at the court of King Louis, the king actually removed a perfect fountain branch of linen lilies in order to paw at the toy balls underneath. And when Giovanni was commissioned to decorate the summer villa of the Duchess of Como, the tasteless cow walked through the halls and ordered more fabric flowers. “Flowers?” said Giovanni, pacing his workshop afterward. His son, Giacomo, sat on a nearby counter, dangling his legs. “Flowers!” Giovanni never returned to Lake Como. When Pierre heard of the episode, he sent a nice thank-you card.

And so, by the time Pierre and Giovanni assumed the mantles of the world’s undisputed best, their animosity by proxy had ballooned to a full-scale hate by mail. It seemed that no one could reconcile the two geniuses of the craft. The rivalry of their houses would last until Chinese manufacturing.

B
UT NOTHING
— and I mean nothing people come up with, whether civilizations or cities or feuds — lasts very long on the eternal scale. If anyone can attest to this, it’s me. From high enough in the exosphere, a nuclear blast looks like a bursting pimple. A tsunami kinda resembles a landmass tucking itself into bed. A massive earthquake just looks like the earth is getting goose bumps. Those things that send shock waves through the populace, the ones so catastrophic that the rich start giving to the poor, they don’t even blow stardust across the wind chimes on my porch. So, to be honest, you’re not even dust in the wind.

What can I say; my graveside manner has withered.

The point is if we’re talking big picture, everything made gets unmade eventually. It all just sputters out after the time is up. Trust me, I’ve seen more contraptions that have passed for ladies’ undergarments over the years than is probably appropriate. A bright idea for a new pyramid scheme, the memory of killing a hundred insects, even the reason you hate that one Indian restaurant, they’ll all fade on you.

And for the most part, it’s best to let ’em RIP. Just pray I don’t take them in bulk.

Like all those other things, the rancor of Giovanni and Pierre had to expire eventually. But let’s not jump to postmortem theoreticals just yet. There’s a lot of story in between angels and autopsy.

As I said before, Giovanni had a fifteen-year-old son, Giacomo, whom I knew very well. He was barely knee-high when we met, during a plague they called “The Great Mortality.” When the pandemic hit their village for three long weeks, I brushed past him over and over again to ferry his friends and neighbors. The shopkeeper who snuck him a caramel every time he came in with his father. The dog from the alley behind the inn. The distant cousin for whom he was intended. All of them I visited. The town was emptied. I even took the rats.

Until one morning, I came for Giacomo’s mother. By then, the boy knew who I was, even though he was just a pup. He’d seen the leather dry up as I walked past the tannery. He’d heard the bells toll, as they say. So when he saw me that sunny Thursday in June, as she lay on the straw bed with a wet towel on her forehead, he knew I wasn’t the milkman. (The real milkman had curdled a few days previous, actually. I mean the
proverbial
milkman.)

Young Giacomo eyed me with a shy disquiet. He had been playing marbles at the foot of his mother’s bed. He rose to his feet. I stood in the doorway, not wanting to seem callous. The fact is, however, that I’m rarely welcomed in, so at some point duty has to win out. He stared at me. I wasn’t even sure if the kid was old enough to form sentences.

When I crossed the threshold, the boy ran at me. I don’t usually fear anything that can decompose, but I was startled. I paused.

I had expected him to smash into me, hit me with his baby fists. Instead, he hugged me. He could barely wrap his arms around one of my legs, and I’m not all that big. I’m about the size of your average rock star, shorter than you’d expect, but with a large presence. His two little hands grabbed at the back of my knee and clutch my jeans as hard as they could. I thought maybe he’d mistaken me for his dad at first, but then I spied some of the young boy’s drawings nailed above the hearth. They were charcoal on onionskin, but even so, the father looked like a king-size gingerbread man with fur.

The boy didn’t say anything. At that age you can never tell if that blank look is a profound sadness for being stuck here on earth or if they’ve just junked in their underpants. But with baby Giacomo, I knew immediately. I had broken that brand-new heart. And the look on his face wasn’t profound meditation or spaced-out mesmer. It was more hurt than the kid knew what to do with.

I tried to lift the leg he was hugging. He let out a whimper and held tighter. His mother had long ago passed the throes and groans. The struggle was over. Now she lay still on the straw bed, the cold sweat drying in lonely beads on her collarbone. She was down to a last fading ember — the only person that could have noticed a difference between her and a corpse was me. Me and Giacomo.

Those are the moments you really hate the job, think about retiring by a river and carving ducks out of soap. I pried him off my leg and kneeled down to look him in the eye. I shouldn’t have done that, but I had been working doubles in those days — I think I already said that — and I needed an explanation, I think, as much as he did.

When we looked at each other, I’m a little ashamed to say, I was the one who wept. I thought, it’s a stupid thing, being so fragile, expiring. It’s a stupid idea, a rampant disease every person contracts at some point, a cosmically gross afterbirth of after birth. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t taking his mom on purpose, but I was. I wanted to assure him that she wasn’t leaving him, but she was. I suppose I just wanted him to know I hated this as much as he did.

Maybe that’s how repo men feel. Maybe I’m the galactic hand of repossession — just another kind of Wish Police. Maybe I’ll retire after all — you never know.

Anyway, that was when I broke the number-one rule of my job. I told Giacomo I owed him a favor, and that I wouldn’t forget him. Then I took his mother. Her body stayed on the bed, of course, but the important parts. You get the idea. I noticed she had that same look to her eyes, far-off and dreamlike. I promised her the same thing, that I’d protect her son.

After losing everything they ever loved, Giacomo and his father, Giovanni, moved away from their decimated village, burdened with grief as heavy as the Mediterranean. They settled in Cortona.

At that same time, Pierre Vouvray had already lost his wife and was raising a little girl all by himself. But his loss didn’t involve my services directly.

When Chloe was born, the housemaid washed her in a basin and wrapped her in a towel, because her mother, Lady Delice de Bourgogne, was too tired to do it. But even after a long nap, the maid brought the sleeping girl to the lady to hold, and the new mother was uninterested. She was the rare woman who could actually be insulted by a baby’s need for attention. The housemaid took the baby to the kitchen, where the iron hearth was warm like a belly.

Chloe’s eyes were closed when she met the stove, but when she felt its warmth, she gave out a long sigh. The maid could tell it would be a lasting friendship. She leaned down and kissed the tiny nub of Chloe’s nose. The baby nuzzled the maid’s lips, and then Chloe sneezed. This sent the maid reeling with adoration. The way Chloe had scrunched her eyes. The imperceptible sputter from her lips. The deep breath after such a taxing ordeal.

The cuteness of the newborn baby — wrapped in a towel, sleeping on an iron stove — was, in a word, lethal.

The housemaid put her hand to her heart. Her apathy toward her job, her resignation to a low embittered life, even the bacterial infection on her lower back — all gave up the ghost, right then and there. The baby was simply
too
cute. And so I was on hand for the little girl’s birth, to collect all the deceased unhappiness she caused. Monsieur Vouvray was so proud of his baby girl that the week before her birth, he had sewn pansies, hundreds and thousands of them. Then, on the big day, he took them to the bell tower and poured them over the town square.

But only a few days after she was born, her mother, the Lady Delice, gathered her silks in a handbag and declared the rest of her belongings as “moldy rinds unfit for bovine society.” As she left, she announced that she would move to Paris, to pursue a career in the picture business. She would be featured in crowd scenes of biblical stories on stained-glass windows, paintings of coronation ceremonies, and, if she made the right connections, a starring role on a clamshell. As she tromped to her carriage, she said she planned to never return.

When Monsieur Vouvray asked her to think of the well-being of their newborn daughter, the lady flushed, walked from the carriage back to Monsieur Vouvray, at the door, and slapped him across the chin. Then she whirled on her heel, whipping him with her tresses, and melodramatically mounted the carriage once again. As the coachman gathered his harnesses, she allowed one delicate tear to roll down her profile. And with a soliloquacious flounce, she said, “Of course,
you
wouldn’t understand, Pierre. I’m doing this for Chloe
most
of all.” True to her word, she never returned.

From then on, young Chloe was the lady of the house. That is, until the next time I saw her at the age of seventeen. I’ll get to that in a minute.

U
NABLE TO REMEMBER
her mother at all, Vouvray’s daughter, Chloe, had never tasted the bitter draught of mourning. Everyone she knew was healthy. Even her goldfish had miraculously survived for some five years now. She was at that age when they wear sundresses and run around hillsides making things out of wildflowers. She was as blithe as a bee, as bonny as a bunny.

She made Pierre sit cross-legged on the lawn for all to see, at the tree stump, which served as the mademoiselle’s parlor table. And on Saturday evenings, the resident genius of France could be found in the glen just behind his house, employing his vast talent with a sewing needle to making dandelion tiaras for his daughter and her favorite goose.

Meanwhile, at the age of three, Giacomo did nothing but climb the tallest trees he could find, sit in the highest branches, and weep.

Chloe and Giacomo, of course, barely knew the other existed. Sure, Pierre would refer to “Giovanni and that illiterate whelp,” and Giovanni would mention, “That poor, poor little girl, whose only crime is in her blood,” but that’s not much to go on.

To be honest, even I didn’t know they would become, you know, “star-crossed,” as they say — struck by love’s killing shot. By the time they were teenagers, anyone would have assumed they were just plain incompatible.