Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (12 page)

How many of these things could be declared a business expense? Riff realized he didn’t know how you depreciated antiques. Because they were being used, not simply shelved, cased, admired. How about insurance, too? How much risk? He tried to study the scene economically, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Doors go both ways. They always have. So if there was a key … well … other guests could enter his room although he couldn’t even peek in theirs. Which wasn’t fair. A bit unnerved, Riff felt the wood of the desk, then turned slowly around in a state of perplexed wonder like a kid in the toy store where he’d worked this morning. The shop was full of wooden antique trains and trucks and blocks and birds. Wooden dolls, he remembered, with faded faces. When he left he said … If you want my advice, well, you’ve got that shed out back, right? well, I’d pretend it was full of new stock, that’s right, that shed, I’d pack it with woodsy amusements, then I’d burn it down and claim a loss. Create a bundle of old receipts. Make those receipts claim you bought a cigar-store Indian in March of nineteen ninety-two for a hundred ninety-two and change. No round numbers. On stale paper. Violet aged ink. Then—pouf! Gone with the wind. Up in smoke. And your business—from rotten to rosy. All those expensive toys gone to god in a cloud. Overseas buys are hard to trace. The marionettes from Prague—now not
even a cinder. Who would know? Mute, the man, the manager, nodded. When Riff left Riff said don’t take any wooden nickels.

He’d better wash up and get below. They’ll begin to wonder what was keeping him, and he didn’t want them wondering. The same carpet that lay thick as an animal’s pelt across the floor of the bedroom continued into the bath, although there was in addition to its thick nap and foamy edging a green mat afloat like a rubber raft beside the deep antique tub whose leonine paws sank beneath the pile. Leaping lizards! Riff’s eyes became comic circles. Well, he was limber. He’d get his leg over. Next to the bath, and perhaps now upon a second glance its not pawed but more prehistoric feet, a modern john had been installed, gleaming like a scrubbed face. He’d never dare sit there and sing o solo meo, I come from reo. No jakes this, but commodiously Roman, his bathroom had its own closet, its own radiator too, covered in aluminum paint, a window with indoor shutters, and between the window and the radiator an oak washstand from whose top rose a tall pale candle held in an equally high … what? dicky doodad … which looked to Riff like an oversized wooden spool. Against the spool’s base, if that was what it was, a board bearing the charred image of nuzzling horses leaned like something momentarily left behind. Beneath the dark scar of the design was a message from R. L. Stevenson about the value of friends, shakily handwritten with the same burning tool, while beside the candle and its holder was a purple pitcher and two plaster-pale figures in fancy French court costumes, Riff guessed, along with a commercial blue-and-white mustard pot. Odd mix. Just piss. But how could he not notice the crocheted doilies that had been carefully drooped over each edge of the stand. Just piss and get in the game.

Those plaster figures were a puzzle because the clothes, not the figures, looked naked. Ah … he had it—the pair were part of an abandoned art project. They were modules and were
meant to be painted. Then baked, he bet. Mannikins. What color would he have chosen for the collar and the wide lapel? Mock-ups. Could be fun. Ma-. Ma-. Market. He knew he hadn’t yet found the right word.

On top of the toilet tank he saw, as he aimed, tubes and jars of oils and salves: Potter & Moore Rose Hand & Body Lotion, Hydrox Fresh Tearless Shampoo. My goodness. Hey, don’t miss. He could lie in the tub and luxuriate. Or were these objects, like so much else, here only to be admired? Higher still, on a shelf, a bowl of shaped soaps had been placed: rosettes, butterflies, turtles. Who could be so cruel as to wash those slender wings into flightless lumps? Hey, careful about flopping drops. In among the baby bars he saw a small card. Hope and prayer are the soul’s soaps, it said. Next to the john and its roll of florid paper was a dotted blue enamel sink, as oval as a trotting track. Riff had never seen a thing like that. Its faucets looked normal enough. Perched on the wide ledge that ran around it was, incredibly, a glass swan whose wings were mirrored. Hope and prayer were … were they? … that was mighty wise. Off the end of the cabinet in which the sink was recessed, and at its base, lay a large black cushion with pink cloth ribbons and fabric-formed roses pinned to it with big bright pins, nuzzled by a basket containing an extra roll of pale orange paper—tangerine?—and a jug of foamy bath salts.

Riff retreated, nearly forgetting to flush, forgetting to wash his hands, as he realized (though there was no soap he dared use), descending the stairs with a look he hoped would show he was ready to receive his welcome. At the landing lemon-haired Ruth was still standing in front of a field of something not quite wheat, not quite corn. But a rusty orange. On a path or road of brown. There was another faraway figure in the composition which Riff would have moved to a more prominent place. Imagine owning your own stained-glass window. And a landing alive
with church light. The glass looked scrubbed. Missus Ambrose kept a deeply clean house. Not like the three-sweep, four-swipe dumps he was used to.

The parlor, as he guessed it was, was full of chairs in which no one was sitting. A small TV screen stared out into the hallway and into failing light. Riff bet it picked up only test patterns. A long narrow oak table held wax fruit and magazines—magazines at least, as he saw upon inspection, fifty years old.
The Delineator
. Whazzat? De-line-eater? The newspaper rolled up by the fireplace tongs would probably contain news of the Civil War. The arms of the chairs ended in paws, the feet of the chairs in claws, and hard black leather pads had been hammered into their seats with button-headed nails. Heralded by his wheeze, Mr. Vest appeared. Mother will be right out, he said in his high aerated voice, she’s pothering about in the kitchen. You can see—his gesture was vague—we have a wonderful collection. Quite—yes—impressive, Riff said, uncertain what it was he was supposed to admire. Maybe the pictures in acorn-addled frames.

Come into the Family Memorial Dining Room. Missus Ambrose beckoned. She hadn’t her apron on now, her bust and hips sloped like land seen from a high hill—smoothly and without a wrinkle. Her face remained pale and long. She had itty-bitty eyes, Riff suddenly noticed. Itty-bitty. Like lookouts. The skin of her cheeks seemed drawn, and shone in better light like tile. Here is the Ambrose family, she said with pride, and there is mine, the Meyerhoffs. Across the wall in irregular ranks were photographs and portraits, most small, some oval, one square, many in sepia: solemn faces, hairdos severe, a few beards, carefully combed, ladies in foams of clothing sitting before painted backgrounds in photographers’ chairs, gentlemen standing stiff as death, elbows resting on a cut-off Grecian column or posing beside a cardboard fireplace or in front of shelves of uniformly solemn black frock-coated books.

This is where I serve breakfast from seven to nine. There’ll be fruit and fresh scones. You can have eggs and sausage if you like. Toast too, of course. There’s always butter and warm toast. Mister Ambrose and I dine here in the evening, where we can see our ancestors, all those who brought us to this dear earth, and allowed us to live in the light of the Lord. Missus Ambrose said this last in a tone so matter-of-fact and unaccented Riff felt the strength of her belief like a firm hand on his arm.

You were certainly surrounded here by furniture and family, the old house itself, old oaks too, he shouldn’t wonder, planted by pioneers, knickknacks of every kind, souvenirs and snaps, and memories of when and where you’d acquired this or that, of an aunt … Missus Ambrose said, the one wearing the bonnet and swinging in the swing, even as a child she would rise quite high, it was a somewhat scary sight, though Missus Ambrose smiled at the memory, and Grandfather Meyerhoff, there in the military suit, was actually dressed up for a costume ball where they took your picture after the dancing. Of course Grandfather didn’t dance, he felt it was wicked. He was a most virtuous, most upright man. Riff saw a wooden soldier. I am a man of peace but not a pacifist, his bearing managed to suggest. Missus Ambrose faced her lodger formally. The Lord is a light sleeper, she said, and can rise and make day whenever He wishes. Riff understood that this was an answer without understanding why. On a finely filigreed wooden stand, its supporting legs curving as though outlining a lyre, a decorated glass oil lamp bubbled up into a gulp-sized globe, a globe a lot like the world. Ah, Riff enthused. Missus Ambrose approved. It still glows, she said, not offering to demonstrate, while including the patio he could see through the room’s row of windows in a sweeping gesture of pride and ownership.

Out of sight, the Vest, as Riff preferred to think of him, was coughing violently, putting upon Missus Ambrose’s face a faint
frown, more of annoyance than concern, he thought, before he started at the sight of a huge cushion bristling with hat pins, pearly beaded and roundly knobbed, one headed by an
M
and another topped off with a metal leaf and still another by a glass marble the size of a shooter. There was a sideboard with a large mirror above it which reflected Riff and, distantly, several parlor chairs, barely bulks in the parlor twilight. Nearby, a china cabinet, crammed with plates in stacks and cups on hooks, held on its architecturally ornamented roof a collection of blue, violet, and sea-green bud vases at the same height as the plate rail which ran like a road along the brow of the room’s inner wall, and down which paraded objects of all kinds, not just plates leaning as though into a heavy wind, but salt and pepper shakers, relish dishes, salvers, cheese trays, china-handled fruit knives vased by a tumbler, oval cut-glass bowls propped precariously like pigeons about to poop, Riff disrespectfully thought, surprising himself at the same time by feeling some shame at entertaining the idea.

In the gloom of a small adjoining alcove, dresses on dressmaker’s dummies huddled like a group in conversation. Riff made out hats: laced, furred, rimmed with roses, of velvet and cloth and straw, feathered and figured, hanging from—it had to be—strings which, almost invisible themselves, disappeared in an upper darkness. There were grand gowns, long skirts, and flouncy jackets in styles he had no name for. The wheezing and the coughing no longer seemed so distant. Concentrate, kiddo, don’t come across as a snooze. So clothes like these would have to be meant for large buxom women. My dear mother was a seamstress, Missus Ambrose informed Mister Riffytear in a manner which expected him, as a cow-handed country male, to take no further interest.

But he did take an interest (following Missus Ambrose around as he once had a paid guide in Mammoth Cave, afraid of
getting lost), in the innumerable number of objects, ornaments, and endearments she had amassed. Mottoes educated every foot of every wall. Riff delayed the tour to read a poem in a more than modest green frame, the words already surrounded by fat watercolor robins who nevertheless failed to weigh down their slim brown flower stems, sturdily upright as wire. Said the Robin, Riff read, to the Sparrow, “I should really like to know Why these anxious human beings Rush about and worry so!” Yes, well, good question. Said the Sparrow, Riff read, to the Robin, “Friend, I think that it must be That they have no Heavenly Father Such as cares for you and me.” Where was the sparrow? Ah, there he was in a cloud of leaves lower left.

There were so many many many things. Riff was quite overwhelmed. He had no idea. We cohabit with microbes and insects, too—in the billions. Without feeling crowded.

Oh dear, excuse me, Mister Riffytear, Mister Ambrose will need a moment of mine. Please to wait in the parlor and we’ll finish our tour from there. I want to show you what porch is reserved for guests and what chairs are safe to sit in. Riff soon stood in the parlor’s gloom like a dummy himself, but unlike the dummies was amazed that so much attention, time, and taste had been lavished on little decorative things, at how many napkins had been needled by diligent fingers, how many pieces of wood had been bent or carved or otherwise teased into imitative shapes, how much glass had been artfully blown, what a number of fanciful forms had been contrived for iron and brass and silver, how many pictures had been painted of birches hanging over streams, how many men in beards and women in flounces had posed for photographers against pasteboard props like solemn-faced politicians or famous singers.

More than fifty years old—jeez. He held
The Delineator, An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Fashion
, up to his eyes,
searching for its date … below a mother and her two sweet children … framed in a frame … January 1903 … as long ago as that. On the other side of the cover was an ad for … for Cottolene … what? The Perfect Shortening. A woman, dressed like a nurse at the front, was holding toward him a plate piled with fat biscuits. Below, in print so fine he could scarcely find it, his eye made old by evening, Riff made out the product’s pitch: How can you expect the purest, most palatable, most healthful food to be made of ingredients obtained from swine? Well, that’s right. How could you? Cottolene is preferable because made from refined vegetable oil and choice beef suet. Suet? Come on. Riff laughed. It is white, it said, and odorless. It is purer, more healthful, more economical than hog lard. Hey, pretty blunt.

Missus Ambrose’s chuckle wasn’t one of amusement. It was an announcement. We shall seem as silly someday, she said. Let’s take a look at our wicker. Riff lay the magazine carefully on the top of its short stack. His hostess nodded toward the pile. My mother’s, she said, and Riff realized that comedy was not on the bill. He’d had a glimpse of the ad on the page facing Cottolene’s come-on: Holiday Gifts for Whist Players. He bet grandfather didn’t approve of cards. For shortening—Cottolene—a name nice as Caroline. He asked: is Mister Ambrose better? There’s just time to see the yard. We’ll go out this way, Missus Ambrose said, leading him toward what he took to be the kitchen. In this house, she said over her shoulder, but for Mister Ambrose and his ailments, we’d be surrounded and kept safe by a better time. Yes, I guess it was a better time, Riff managed. Mister Ambrose pays the price. He has asthma, emphysema, and an artificial larynx. Oh … Oh dear. For every vice you pay a price, she recited, not quite loudly, holding open the screen door for him. And Mister Ambrose had three—three he pays for every day—with weakness, pain, and coughing—with a pitiful
shortness of breath—and one more, I guess, I hadn’t known about, she said, letting the screen slam. Because I smell another cancer coming. There’s your chair.