The Darts of Cupid: Stories (27 page)

I HAD EXPECTED to see a layer of wood shavings, or that synthetic straw used by professional packers, or sheets of corrugated cardboard. There was, instead, an expanse of linen—white, fawn, pale blue, and all creased and tired-looking. Forbes said to me, over his shoulder, "Someone’s shirts and pajamas," perfidiously reminding me that he knew I was violating my husband’s wishes. He kept his eyes on me a few heartbeats longer, and then moved to the rim of the chest and swept off the swaths of linen. I saw him bending over some tightly packed rows of woolly nests—brown, black, gray—which I suddenly recognized as my husband’s rolled-up socks. Forbes did not seem to be taken aback. Bending low, he delved speedily among the socks, bringing some out and unfurling them unhesitatingly. His wide shoulders were blocking my view.

I went and stood close behind him. On the ledge of the table, near the chest, there was the silvery glitter of flat, square, and oblong cigarette cases, already a half dozen or more, each different. While I tried to count them he kept unrolling one sock after another, each time yielding one more case. I stopped trying to count them.

I picked up one of the pieces, worked in a pattern of basket weave. "Oh God, look at this," I said in dismay. "All this modern rubbish. It’s nothing—just its weight in silver."

"And who are you to cast contempt on this glowing example of patients’ gratitude toward their beloved doctor?" he said, with mock solemnity. Then, in his ordinary voice, he said, "Don’t worry," and again gave his faint laugh. "I told you I’d take everything." He went on digging and probing in the depths of the woolly nests, with a calm greed that made me shudder. I watched his hands—pale and lean, with long, bony, square-tipped fingers—and sensed that my shudder came from the voluptuousness of a forced surrender. I felt Gordon’s fingers probing and penetrating me, and I heard Gordon say, "I never go myself where my hand has not gone before."

Trying to hide the tears I felt welling up, I turned away, dabbing at my eyes, and then slid out and replaced a few of the tortoiseshell hairpins that were stuck in the twisted strands of the chignon on the nape of my neck.

"Now," I heard Forbes say, and he drew in his breath sharply. Then, in a very low voice, "I’ve got the Odiot."

When I turned to Forbes, he was standing motionless and upright by the table. As though for my pleasure, he had swiftly placed the teapot on its stand and had grouped the jugs and bowl around it like a wreath. In one glance, I took in fluted, bellied curves and embossed garlands of leaves and dog roses. A rage of disappointment flooded over me. Instead of the austere swanlike elegance of the Napoleonic silver I had been visualizing, I was met with the cozy prettiness of some opulent merchant’s tea set. There weren’t even the engraved initials that would have told us it had been manufactured to order.

"Not even a crown, or a coat of arms," I said.

"You thought your—"

"No, no," I said brusquely. "It came to my husband from his sister. She bought it, God knows where."

He said, "As an investment, obviously."

"What on earth did my husband imagine he’d got?" I said. "Empire, my foot."

"It’s 1860," he said without hesitation. "You won’t get more than fifteen thousand francs for it."

I said, "So what? It’s not the— You understand."

"Yes, yes," he said, soothingly. "But it’s quite pretty, really. Look, it’s got that plug on the chain attached to the stand, with the hole on the side, you see. That’s for keeping the tea warm on the stand—now, isn’t that nice?"

I said, "Don’t be beastly. My uncle had an oil sketch by Rubens, but when he took it to Christie’s they said it wasn’t; it was by a contemporary of Rubens. But that’s different, whereas here a child of five could have—"

He said, "It happens all the time."

I went over to Cortona, at his desk. He pointed to the cover of one of the files, and said, "I see the payments are all from a trust account and signed with your name, but with no initials."

Greatly relieved, now that I was safe from any quibbles, I said coldly, "Oh, yes, didn’t you know? I took it for granted you knew." And I showed him my credit card, on which my full name was printed. It bore a hologram picture of a man, which disappeared when the card was moved, like a fold of
changeant
taffeta, which shifts color with each change in the pleating.

When I returned to Forbes, he was considering a pair of tall candlesticks he had brought forth in the meantime. He seemed more upright and at leisure. "They aren’t Renaissance, they’re Victorian," he said. "You can’t pretend surprise over this. You had a jolly good intuition—you told me on the phone, you’ll recall."

We stood silent, gazing at the blackened silver: the square, down-tapering columns, two feet tall, topped by head and shoulders of figures—one nymph, one faun—each with upraised arms, bearing rings to hold the candles. And reminded of my husband, robed in toweling, already in his own stele, I seemed to be looking at his face modeled in tarnished silver. But another feeling arose in me as well— a revulsion against an ancient, bawdy joke. As we know, nymphs and fauns are not to be held in awe. They are minor rural deities, given to frolicking among wooded grounds. As painted and sculptured through the ages, the faun leers and the nymph looks frightened. The faun is forever the chaser and the nymph the victim, and though the outcome of their encounter is certain, their amorous situation feels both transitory and nasty.

"They are not really done in the manner of Renaissance grotesques," Forbes said. "I’d say they were realistic portraits—an old boy and a girl."

"Ghastly," I said. "And they’ll be even more repulsive-looking once they are cleaned up."

"Their very ghastliness makes them intriguing, don’t you see?"

"The girl doesn’t look so bad, though," I said. "She’s just a teenage floozy—a salesgirl behind the jewelry counter at Woolworth’s. A thin young vixen, and anemic. She’s never had enough to eat. And they’ve gone all out on her hair— lots of work there, all those curls and waves and tendrils and loose wisps down the shoulders."

He said, "And yet you are terribly upset. And disgusted. Why is that?"

I did not speak.

He said, "The nymph doesn’t look like you, so she is inoffensive. Shall we go a bit further? Shall we say that it is the faun who is the trouble, because he looks like someone you know, doesn’t he?"

"It’s just that he is so old," I said, avoiding his eyes. "He’s about sixty, and I thought fauns were young."

"He is about sixty," he said. "Shall we say he is about the age your husband was when you got married?" He waited and then went on. "He does look rather like your husband, doesn’t he?"

I said, "But my husband never had this revolting goat’s beard. He was clean-shaven."

He said, "Very well, but let’s get to the bottom of this. What is it that reminds you particularly of Dr. Richardes?"

I said, "The superior leer. The way he raises his head—I can just see him saying to someone, ‘You are an ignoramus, you have no right to discuss this subject.’ "

"That is not what hurt you in particular, though, was it?" he persisted. "What is it that you find so shattering?"

I said, "The spite and malice. But smiling always, pretending he was being humorous and kind. It’s a hidden malice, like when he made out he was impoverished—and I believed it. And he did it so as to take this miserable tiny flat we had at the last, and to make me work. Fifteen hours a day I was on my feet looking after him, and not even a char or a part-time nurse to take over."

"An old man and a young wife," he said. "It was his way of tying you down, to make sure you didn’t walk out on him. ‘Till death us do part,’ don’t you know."

I put both my hands over my eyes. I said, "Don’t torture me."

He said, "It’s all over now. Look at me."

I looked up at him with trembling lips. He said, "You are in my hands now. I’ll do what I want with him. I’ll sell him down the river, the way he never wanted to be sold. I’ll get rid of him once and for all. I’ll take everything away from you, and there is nothing to worry about. My shoulders are wide enough."

Looking up at him, I recalled Gordon, after he had made me surrender one of my shameful secrets, saying, "My sweet child, you don’t know the pleasure you are giving me." And then, as so often happened, after I had tried perversely to evade what I was longing for and had made him obtain it by force, he would say, when I returned from the beyond, "That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?"

FORBES TOOK a small magnifying lens out of his coat pocket. "My loupe," he said, and, bending over the faun, he gave a swift scrutiny down one side of the face. "I can’t help being intrigued by him," he said, shaking his head. "Very fine, delicate work here, all this crosshatching, and the wrinkles."

I said, "I wonder if his sister— Maybe she bought the candlesticks as a joke, because of the likeness, to make him stand up on the mantelpiece, holding the candles. They didn’t get on, you know."

He said, "How did your husband get hold of the candlesticks?"

I said, "She gave them to him, with the Odiot, to settle a debt."

He said, "But he left you his heir, entirely and absolutely, of all he possessed, didn’t he? You told me on the phone."

I said, "Yes, of course."

I went and stood at his side as he drew out of the chest, with contemptuous speed, a salver and two jugs. "This one is only plated," he said, after barely glancing at it. "Now we are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and here are your rattles, three of them, just as you told me on the phone. Flimsy, and poor workmanship. ‘Behold the child, by nature’s kindly law / Pleased with a rattle, tickled by a straw,’ I don’t think. Away with them to the rubbish dump in Zurich!"

I went out and stood beneath the eaves, staring into the curtain of rain, and I thought of Gordon, greedy to penetrate my thoughts and my body. Gordon the sailor, the slinky, slippery, slithery fish, who had slipped into his watery death in the bathtub, his blood mingling with the water, and had drowned before the blood had ceased to flow from his wrists. And I thought of Forbes the agent—the sliding go-between, the delver, the searcher, the finder—seizing, unwrapping, and disentangling the silver others had worked and fashioned, and then letting it glide through his bony, grasping fingers, passing it on, letting it go.

When I went back inside, the table was blank and empty, and the chest closed. Forbes and Cortona were standing by the desk, bending over some files, talking. Forbes came to me, saying with contained anger, "The fellow wants such a high insurance." Cortona joined us, and we watched the workmen seal the edges of the chest with transparent tape. Cortona handed me a pen and asked me to sign my name in two places, across the tape, and as I did, Forbes, smiling arrogantly, murmured, "You wouldn’t believe it—these precautions. That fellow will wet his pants next."

When we left, Forbes again seated himself in the back of the car and made no move to close the door. Cortona shut it with deliberate slowness, as though just having caged a dangerous beast and wanting to make sure it was safely locked up.

Cortona got in and said, "Where do you want me to take you?" and I said, "To the station, please." He did not ask Forbes. The hostility between the two men was such now that I was convinced that had I not been present Cortona would have driven off, leaving Forbes in the desolate country, in the rain.

In front of the station building, Cortona handed me my suitcase with a gravely deferential bow, and I thanked him with heartiness and repeated my good-byes, as though finding it hard to part with him. Forbes stood a few paces away from us, pointedly aloof, gazing into space. I glanced at him sidewise, then turned and stood facing him and lifted my gaze to his. Our eyes met. His lips twitched, sardonic, triumphant. He did not speak.

I raised and lowered my shoulders, and went through the glazed station doors, which slid open at my approach and slid closed behind me.

MY RETURN JOURNEY WAS unremarkable until after the halt in Como, when the doors of my compartment were wrenched apart by a young man, thickset, with black-rimmed glasses and an inquisitive, canny, impertinent air, bearing a strong resemblance to an Italian journalist I had recently met. The intruder, waving a cigarette in front of his face, said, in English, "Anyone here who can give me a light?"

It was a nonsmoking carriage, and the passengers, all elderly, small-town northern Italians, looked at him as though rendered speechless by some obscenity he had uttered. I opened the jaws of my handbag, saying, "Here," and held my lighter out to him. He took it and enclosed it in his fist.

"How many languages do you speak?" he said unexpectedly.

I said, "Five."

"So do I," he said. "Five or six."

"That’s fine," I said, wondering whether I’d ever see my lighter again.

"What are you?" he said, still standing before me.

I said, "Never mind."

"Where were you born?"

I said, "In a bed."

"You are utterly fascinating," he said. "Tell me what you are."

I said, "Light your cigarette and begone."

He said, "I shall not light my cigarette till you tell me."

Though no one in the compartment had moved, and none were glancing at me, I could feel their concerted pressure on me to get rid of the intruder, who kept looking at me with his fleshy face creased in an impertinent grin.

Forbes, too, had made it plain, in the unspoken dialogue between us, that he had been intrigued by me. He, too, had wanted to find out my birthplace and my background. He had tried to find out my age as well, though it must have been plain to him that I was almost twice as old as he. But, not getting any farther, since I did not volunteer any of this information and he could not demand it, hemmed in as he was by his upper-class breeding, he had penetrated instead into the crooked and involuted paths of my inner maze, where everything was dark, bewildering, and mostly shameful. And now I was faced with this stranger, an emissary sent by Forbes to ask the questions Forbes had wanted to ask, and to extort my answers.