Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (55 page)

“It wasn’t really Daisy he was trying to capture, it was the past. A past,” she paused to push a strand of hair behind her ear, “that only existed in his mind.”

“I wondered,” he took one of her hands and rubbed his cheek against it, “if ye were so fond of the book because it reminded ye of him?”

“Him?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie’s nothing like Gatsby,” she said sharply, her hand stiff and still in his.

Casey cracked one dark eye open, blowing a soap bubble away from his lips.

“Ye don’t think so?”

“Gatsby was an impostor.”

“Aye, an’ Jamie’s the real thing, is he?” the pressure on her fingers increased, trapping her hand. “An’ I wondered if there wasn’t somethin’ of Daisy in ye, somethin’ cryin’ out for a decision.”

“If Jamie’s Gatsby and I’m Daisy, I suppose you think that makes you Tom. Is that how you see me, some empty-headed female who couldn’t have the man she wanted so took the first fool who wandered past?”

He let go of her hand, dunking his head under water to rinse his hair and emerged spluttering.

“Here,” she said dropping it directly into the water, “is your towel.”

“Thanks,” he replied with no little sarcasm and stood, water cascading down the length of his body, droplets of it trapped here and there in thickets of hair. He gleamed in the dim light of the small room, its confinement making him seem all the larger. Not a body meant for small rooms, she thought, slightly dizzy in spite of her nerves. Pure, male animal, made more potent by the incongruity of his surroundings. A body that could commit violence and tenderness with equal ease.

“Could I have a dry towel, then?” he asked shortly.

“Of course,” she said and went to get another from the freshly laundered stack on the stairs.

He took the towel from her wordlessly, drying himself down with an abrupt economy of movement.

“Is that how you see us, like characters in a sad novel?” she asked quietly as he stepped from the tub, skin steaming with rose-scented vapor.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “I don’t know what I see. I’ve been gone over a month though an’ I missed ye every minute of every hour, dreamed about ye at night, ached for ye ‘til I thought I’d go mad from it an’ then I come home an’ find ye can’t meet my eyes an’ ye can’t bring yerself to our bed with honesty. Aye,” he replied to her startled look, “I know ye don’t have yer monthlies.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

He flushed slightly, “Because ye smell a bit different when ye do, a bit less like strawberries an’ a bit more like the ground they grew in. Earthier somehow.”

“Oh,” she said faintly.

“If ye don’t want to have me in yer bed ye only have to say so, ye needn’t lie about it. I,” he said, briskly toweling his hair, “can manage.”

“Can you?” she asked, for his body despite his protestations seemed to have its own views on the subject.

He took in the direction of her gaze and primly wrapped the towel about his hips.

“Aye, I’ve desire, I’m flesh an’ blood after all an’ it takes little more than ye walkin’ past me to stir it but I’ve scruples as well an’ I’ve no wish to take a woman to my bed who’s longin’ for another man. Mayhap ye like that damn silly book because yer like Gatsby, standin’ on a dock waitin’ for a dawn that isn’t comin’.”

“Casey,” she said, trying to ignore the panic percolating in her veins, “I think—” she hesitated and felt something unfold slightly that had been wrapped tightly since the night on the train.

“Ye think what?” he said impatiently, bending over the tub with the bucket half-full of rose-scummed water.

“I think perhaps you’d best,” she cleared her throat nervously, “take me to bed.”

His eyes met hers and he quirked his eyebrows slightly, “Reassert my claim so to speak?”

She flushed and the folded thing inside of her opened a little more, “Something like that.”

He seemed to consider her proposal for a moment, then holding out a broad callused hand to her, he said, “Aye, perhaps that’s best.”

Her hand, no longer trembling, joined his and she followed in his wake up the stairs and into the bed.

It came to her in odd moments. She could be sipping tea in the morning and suddenly he’d be there, present as flesh, solid as bone. Her own personal demon.

She’d expected Casey’s presence to lessen his somehow, to take away the power of his grip on her thoughts. But he hadn’t.

For a moment, when Casey had first come through the door she’d thought it would work, that his solidity would chase away the ghosts. But then he’d kissed her and she’d tasted violets on his tongue and  had to fight nausea.

“Just these hideous wee candies I’ve grown a strange taste for,” Casey said when she’d asked him what the scent was and handed her an old-fashioned oval tin half-full of candied French violets. The scent sickened her, made her want to crawl into a corner somewhere and hide.

He had been the only one to kiss her, the rest had not. And somehow the touch of his tongue on hers had a brutal intimacy the others had not been able to scar her with. His mouth had tasted strongly of flowers, clean and cloying. His words scented with violets as he whispered them in her ear, whispered all the things he was going to do to her and then did them. The scent of violets, once merely the pretty smell of woodsy flowers, had now become a trigger for nightmares.

Beside her in the bed, Casey turned, mumbled softly and settled again, breath coming in a rumble like that of a contented bee.

It had not been so bad. He had been very, very tender, as though he sensed her fear. She had been surprised when her body responded, softened and yielded, under his hands and mouth. Surprised and relieved. It would be all right now, they would manage.

She watched his face in the strange waxy light of the bedroom and beyond him the curling roses of the wallpaper. And beyond that still a shifting, watery light. The pale green light of Gatsby’s hope.

She believed in the light of dawn and if its promise eluded her today, well then tomorrow, like Gatsby, she would run faster and reach farther until it was secure within her hands.

...I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

She whispered and then closed her eyes to the night and its demons.

The sign above the door read,
‘Herr Blumfeld, Amateur Horologist, Repeating, Musical and Plain Clock and Watchmaker, Etitivator and Collector of Esoterica. Enquire within.’

The tiny shop was buried at the end of a narrow close and had been difficult to find. As she pushed the door in, a set of bells began to play an orderly and precise rendition of one of Bach’s minor fugues. Inside was a veritable cacophony as she’d the misfortune to enter on the precise stroke of four when all the clocks were chiming, singing, ringing, clanging, rolling, hooting and grinding about on their gears. She put her hands over her ears, eyes flickering about the shop in search of the proprietor.

She saw clocks of every variety and description, clocks without hands and clocks with seemingly too many, clocks that appeared to be constructed inside out, clocks with pendulums ticking away the seconds in stately precision. There were clocks with tiny people shuttling in and out of doors upon the quarter, half and full hour, ball clocks that looked like looping labyrinths and in the midst of it all an elf-like creature who emerged amid a cloud of dust, sneezing into a grayish colored rag.

“
Gesundheit
,” she said automatically.

When he smiled, which he did with face crinkling thoroughness, he looked much more like a gnome than an elf.

“Welcome Fräulein, how can I be of service?” he asked, inclining his head slightly down and to one side.

“I am looking for a man who can translate from the Arabic,” she said.

The smile disappeared like dew upon the desert. The little man gave her a sharp look and going to the door of the shop, locked it and turned the sign in the window to read ‘Closed.’

“Where did you hear of such a man?” he asked sharply, face no longer amiable or gnome-like.

“It’s my understanding that Arabic is a close cousin of the Hebrew language and that you are an expert in these languages,” she said as coolly as she could.

Herr Blumfeld laid a speculative finger alongside his nose, tapping the bridge of it three times. She could feel the cogs of his mind turning over with a precision equal to the clocks that surrounded him.

“In Hebrew I am classically trained,” he said quietly, “I can write and understand the three periods of it, Old Testament, Postbiblical and Modern. The language of Zion is my own, with Arabic,” he shrugged slightly, “I am somewhat less steady on my feet, though it is true there are many similarities. If not blood brothers, then the languages are at least kissing cousins. You have something, I believe, for me to look at?” He nodded, indicating the manila folder she carried.

“Yes,” she said and handed him the onion-skinned contents of the folder. He cast a quick glance to the street outside and then carefully unfolded the sheets. He gave them a cursory glance, mumbling a little to himself. There was a gleam of something near to delight in his brown eyes.

“Come Fräulein, we will sit and have tea.”

She followed him towards the back of the shop, past curio cupboards choc-a-bloc with clocks, dusty old books, strange twisted scraps of furniture, delicate bits of crystal and china, as well as many oddly shaped curiosities that defied description.

“Do you know Fräulein, how the dictionary defines esoteric? Anything with a private or secret meaning that is understood only by those who have the necessary instruction or training or more simply as something that is difficult to understand. I am a collector of the oddities of this world, of things that are difficult to understand,” Herr Blumfeld said over his shoulder as he swept aside a curtain, opening the way into a cramped, dark sitting room. “When one is Jewish, one comes to feel esoteric oneself and so I am comfortable with things that do not fit, objects that others have discarded and forgotten. Please, you will sit?” He indicated, with one small, dark hand, a large wing-backed chair swathed in grimy looking brown corduroy.

“Surely clocks are not so difficult to understand?” she asked, settling herself on the chair, discreetly stifling a cough as a cloud of dust rose around her.

“When one,” Herr Blumfeld put an ancient kettle on a gas burner, “collects clocks, one also collects time, which is no simple thing. For how to collect something that is only an idea, agreed upon by the majority of the human race granted, but nonetheless an idea.”

“I thought you only repaired clocks.”

“I do, but one must love the thing one fixes or else one cannot do the job properly. A good doctor will love the mechanisms of the body; he will even love that which is flawed in it. A psychiatrist will be enamored of the processes of the brain and heart. I love the instruments that keep time and yet allow it also to escape. You think it is a mistake, Fräulein, that the part of the clock that allows us to read the time are called hands? It is our attempt to grasp and hold that which cannot be caught.” During this small monologue, he had shuffled about stacking mismatched pieces of china on a silver tray, filling a teapot and then placing the tray on a low spindly table between the two of them, discommoding an assortment of clock workings laid meticulously on an oily cloth.

“You will excuse my untidiness, I am not used to having company and it hardly seems worth it to clean for myself. I had a lady who came and did such things but,” he handed her a cup of tea with a delicate almond cookie balanced precariously on its saucer, “she developed romantic ambitions and I’m afraid I had to let her go.”

“Why time Herr Blumfeld?”

His eyes narrowed slightly and he seemed to give her question due consideration before answering. “The practical answer, Fräulein, is that my father, and his father before him, going back many generations, were clockmakers. It is what I was born to, it is what I knew from the cradle and will take to the grave.”

“And the impractical answer?”

He smiled and nodded, “A romantic I see. The impractical answer is that time is what divides this earthly duration from eternity, the finite from the infinite. Without time there is a void, an unimaginable emptiness that would eat the very sun from the sky. Perhaps you are too young to know this Fräulein, but there is a comfort to be found in numbers, in mathematical equations, an ease not found in less rigorous disciplines.”

“And yet,” she said setting her empty teacup down carefully amidst the miniature pendulums and pinions, “it is mathematics that opened the door to the universe and, some would say, there is not a great deal of comfort to be found in the heavens.”

“There is often a conundrum at the heart of life’s great pleasures Fräulein and even you are not too young to know that. Come, we will speak of less weighty matters. I will show you my clocks.”

He stood and shuffled to a cabinet behind her, unlocking its doors with a key that hung on a string about his neck. She turned about and peered over the top of the chair, trying to ignore the benign stare of a spider descending from the ceiling on a filament of web.