Blow (4 page)

Dora took a breath. But she couldn’t contain her delight and made this suppressed squealing sound. “You know what I’ve heard,” she said with a conspiratorial look in either direction. “I’ve heard — I know it’s weird but — polenta, that’s what I heard. It’s all the nutrients. Midwives sell it to aristocrats now. Smoothes wrinkles, everything. Seal blubber, too. But I could never do that. That’s cruel.” Chloe looked around the room, probably wondering if all of eternity was going to be like this.

I was happy just to sit down for a couple of minutes. I don’t know how long I was out, but by the time I jolted up at the sound of the ticker printing out my next pickup, Dora was back at her desk and Chloe was asleep in a chair with her hair braided.

I grabbed the ticket (shipwreck, shark feast), and Dora said, “We’ve got a problem.”

“You ran out of scrunchies?”

She usually gives a courtesy laugh but not this time. She looked at me, scared almost, and said, “She’s a sleeper.”

That’s shoptalk. Being a sleeper (as in: alive) means you’re a mulligan, a refund. It meant I had no business picking her up instead of Vlad. It meant she was all dressed up and no place to croak. She had to go back, wake up, and talk about having one of
those
experiences while everybody pawed at her to make sure she was real. It meant she had just become a bureaucratic nightmare.

Dora was still trying to find the E-73 Return Forms, which we only use once every thousand years. Meanwhile the tickets were printing nonstop. Dora finally found the form and started the paperwork right away. I had to get back to work. But to Chloe’s credit, she was real nice about the mix-up. It was sort of weird, actually. She didn’t even complain. For the next several hours, I rushed in and out with different fares. Chloe flipped through the magazines, listened to the drowned sailors talk about mermaids, never had the kind of conniption some women have over a messed-up salad. I think she had the opposite flaw. She just took it in stride. I kept apologizing, but she didn’t seem all that bothered by it. And she had this freckle right below her elbow . . . but that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.

Still, you don’t get a three-day turnaround on that kind of thing unless you’re seriously connected. When you factor in all the forms, routing them through the proper channels, and the whole time difference, then you see why Chloe’s processing took so long. To her it seemed like a week. In France it was two long, fallow years.

O
NCE THEY LAID
Chloe’s body to rest in the mausoleum, Pierre crumbled under the weight of a colossal aching. I didn’t tell anyone, ’cause I didn’t want it getting back to Chloe, but I had to go there to pick up the hundred pieces of Pierre’s permanently broken heart. As she slept on the stone, Pierre slunk to his cottage, past the tree stump where she made him tea, past the headstone of her favorite goose, past the meadow where they picked flowers. Since he had nothing left, Pierre continued to sew. His solitary genius grew more and more legendary.

When Giovanni saw the first vase of the new year, he was actually making fun of the Frenchman at the time, at a dinner party on his veranda. “The flowers he makes, they are like garnish to my marbles, like a sprig of parsley. Little accents on the main course, yes? And who eats the garnish? Nobody. But who eats the veal parm —?”

A delivery boy brought in the new vase.

Babbo stopped.

He walked up to the vase, gauze gardenias planted in his own marbles. He lifted a finger toward the flowers, then retracted it before making contact. Everyone at the party saw a specter wash over him. Babbo’s mustachioed lip quivered. Then, with a roar of grief, he wept.

Only Babbo could have seen it, the funeral in the fabric; only the eye of the great marble painter could have spotted the pain in the petals. The rest of the company, Giacomo included, stood at the dinner table dumbfounded. “What is it, Babbo Giovanni?” asked one of his patrons. “What news is this?” But Babbo could not talk. The great artist blubbered random miseries about his rival. Giacomo had to see the guests out, and Babbo sat on the ground, holding the vase like an injured child.

And so for Giovanni, too, the time of Chloe’s absence became restless. Maybe under all the bluster, Babbo actually liked having Pierre’s constant epistolary abuse in the margins of his invoices, the backbiting he’d pass along through their mutual vendors, the snarky asides they would volley in their separate interviews with kings. Maybe Babbo had grown old into one of those mischievous geezers who picked fights to keep the blood flowing.

But Babbo never let on that he cared for Pierre. And then Pierre simply disappeared behind the doors of his house, slouching through the halls like a tired skeleton. Both the great craftsmen of the age were adrift, one a sorrow-drowned tailor with a mermaid he swore he saw everyplace he looked, and another who missed his friend — well, maybe not his friend, but something close to it. Slowly, slowly, each man began to neglect his craft.

In those two years, the homes of Old Timey Europe became drastically less well decorated. People started buying kitsch items like bones of the saints and fuzzy-colored reproductions of a sparkly cottage in the woods. Hideous, just awful stuff.

Most people blamed the subsequent downturn in society on broken families. Ugly homes breed ugly lives. Incidentally, this was when killing became popular. So that was kind of a big deal. Another thing that happened was that Giacomo had to become a man during that time.

With Babbo Giovanni doing nothing but moping over the worktable, Giacomo was left to run the house. He only knew how to make
pasta e fagioli,
but each day he would replace a new bowl by his father’s desk. Babbo never ate. He just sucked up tears from his thick beard. He had given up all his jovial songs and silently painted lonely stars into the heavenly spheres. Until one day, that spark in him, the sprezzatura, the fat frolicky horseplay, withered in my hands. The potbelly remained, but the spirit of the potbelly was gone.

Meanwhile, Giacomo traded heavy lifting with the butcher and baker for wild boar and semolina bread. He drove Santa Maria, their mule, to deliver the marbles to the wholesalers. On his day off, he helped the old widow of Venice stanch her basement when the water levels rose too high or her home sunk too low — no one could tell which. He knew the time for play and the time for work. His shoulders were broad enough to carry burdens when others couldn’t, or thought they couldn’t. In short, he’d become a man.

And finally, finally, the processing forms cleared Accounts Payable. And just in time, before Chloe started fermenting into a gorgeous French zombie (the way she would have purred, “Le brains!” while shambling in that white dress — don’t get me started).

Two years after she had taken her exquisite flight from the balcony of the theater, in the early morning of a Wednesday, the wrought-iron gate of the Vouvray mausoleum squealed on its ancient hinges. The morning birds had just begun to warm up their love songs and alibis. Chloe, in her ball gown, rubbed her eyes, yawned and shivered and stretched and sighed all at once. Then she simply walked home as though it had been nothing more than a weeklong nap.

That morning, when old Pierre walked downstairs, he found his daughter standing in front of the kitchen sink trimming the stems of freshly picked flowers. She looked just as she had two years ago. He said, “Oh, thank God I didn’t jump from the bell tower,” and fainted to the ground.

W
HEN OLD TIMEY
Europe heard of the sleeping beauty rising up from her stone bed in the woods, it caused such a stir that writers immediately began plagiarizing the story for themselves. The idea was too enticing. A babe in a slinky outfit, breathing softly from lips imperceptibly open — who
wouldn’t
write himself into the story as a dutiful prince, there to kiss her awake? Over time the details got butchered, but they kept the sewing theme, and the evil witch became real instead of a staged ballet, and the prince must have come from some collective wishful thinking. But hey, historians, what are you gonna do? Mostly lonesome types.

The story was an overnight bestseller. Once it got around, along with an engraving of Chloe, I had something close to twelve cases of village bachelors getting fatally sick from making out with corpses. But you should have seen that engraving.

Even the people in Chloe’s village bought it. And like all the big stories, it felt instantly classic, new but with the sense of ancient truths. The anecdote became a good yarn. The yarn a legend. Till finally the legend became myth, mixed up in the cultural ether, a branch of the eternal redemption story.

In just a few weeks, no one would believe that their own village beauty was the source of the story. Their memories started blurring. That Vouvray girl must have just gotten up after her fall from the balcony. It couldn’t possibly kill someone to fall from that height. She dusted herself off and ran away, mortified with embarrassment.

She had probably been keeping a low profile for the two years. Maybe she’d given birth to an imp in secret. Some people could have sworn they had seen her around town. None of them could recall what they wore to the funeral.

Suddenly, Chloe had always been there, and the Sleeping Beauty was a fairy tale everyone had loved as a kid. You people really are sheep sometimes.

Pierre was in and out of consciousness during the days immediately after Chloe’s return. He would see her, faint, wake up, faint. It was kind of cute. Slowly, between fits of passing out, Pierre began to accept the impossibly merciful reality that his daughter was alive. And very slowly, after more paperwork for Dora, Pierre’s heart rekindled, too. His flowers, so to speak, began again to bloom.

And of course it was only proper that the first bouquet be sent to his arch-rival, his once-again enemy: Giovanni di Cortona. Babbo received the bouquet with a note: “These tulips have never seen dirt. Kindly prevent your recently amateurish gewgaws from making it seem as though they have.”

Babbo read the note in front of Giacomo. Giacomo, who had already read it, expected an outburst. There was definitely an outburst. Babbo Giovanni laughed aloud and grabbed Giacomo in a bear hug, saying, “That snobby garden wench, he’s back!”

Babbo set himself to painting all day, sniggering under his beard. Giacomo went out to look for their mule, Santa Maria. He found her by the barn, grazing on wild rosemary, and took her to the hill in front of their house. Santa Maria liked a good stretch before bearing the bridle for a long journey. Giacomo had the return of his father to celebrate. So together they rolled on their backs and kicked their legs at the clouds.

That evening Giovanni, Giacomo, and Santa Maria set off for the Alps with a cart full of their finest work — aggies and opals, a cat’s-eye marble that winked when spun, tinted crystals you call “princess,” ones with a drop of crimson called oxblood, and round galaxies that twinkled and breathed like real galaxies. Along the way, each village turned up at the side of the road to see them through. Babbo tossed marbles painted in patterns of corkscrews and bumblebees and turtle shells to the kids who ran alongside the cart.

Every village had heard that Babbo was coming. They lined up in the byways, threw their goats to the bridge trolls to clear the paths, and young heralds-in-training blasted cacophonous toots from their brass horns. It was as if the little cart was an army going to war.

Actually, the war was more of a crafts fair, the first crafts fair put on by the royal family of Bavaria, by invitation only, for the grandmasters of crochet, mosaics of macaroni or sea glass, outdoor playhouses, and pretty much all things découpage. Two weeks earlier and Babbo would never have made it. Now he was ready to take his rightful place beside his rival, billed together as co–guests of honor in the brochures (try to guess whether that ticked them off).

The rivals would finally meet. Promoters were billing it as “The Rumble by the Jungle Gyms.” Never mind that comparing the two was like comparing gorillas and chinchillas, vanilla with manila, but whatever; it sold news parchments.