Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 (7 page)

The woman ran her hand along the yellowed index cards on the lower drawers, then pulled one open: a wide, flat drawer containing the eggs of the common woodland mallard. She brushed her fingertips on the mottled brown shells resting on their bed of red felt, then gently lifted one out. When she held it up between her thumb and forefinger, the dim line shone through it. Oologists drilled tiny holes in the sides of their purloined eggs to drain out the yolks and let the delicate shells dry; sometimes they pressed their lips to the wound to suck the moisture away.

She pressed her own lips to the empty egg, and then rolled it along her pale cheek, closing her eyes. I held my breath, fearful that she would press too hard in her urgency and crack the fragile shell, but she rolled it so gently it was as if her hand never touched the surface of the egg. The she laid it back with its empty siblings and looked up at me with those black, imploring eyes. I knelt beside her, close enough to feel her warmth, and watched her slide the drawer shut.

When she pushed her mouth against mine, so hard I could feel her teeth behind her lips, I was too surprised to resist. She was dismayingly strong for something so slight, and so nimble and sure that I couldn't have stopped her hands from pulling my belt clasp open if I had wanted to. And I didn't want to, even for a moment, even with my wife sleeping upstairs and the carton of books pressing into my back when she pushed me onto the floor. She was incredibly light, as if her bones were hollow, and her touch was as delicate as goose down and as quick as hummingbird wings, and it was over as abruptly as it had started. By the time I sat up and realized what had happened she was gone.

I slept later than usual on the steel-and-leather couch in the living room, and was visited in my dreams by wheeling flocks of sparrows. When I woke up, my wife was in the kitchen making an omelet. The acid sting of fresh onions made my eyes water, and I pressed my nose into the clean smell of her yellow hair. But she pushed me away, complaining that I stank of musty old papers, so I left to shower, the memory of my strange visitor running in rivulets down the drain.

The memory came back during the day, though, and I found concentrating at work almost impossible. Everything reminded me of her: the sharp, light letter opener; the desk drawer full of pencils and paper clips; the long, delicate neck of my desk lamp. By the time I left for home I could see her pale hands pressed against my window and her black skirt fluttering on the coat rack. She had said nothing to me, but I knew more than hoped that she would return.

That night I waited until my wife went to bed, and I sat on the porch with MQR's papers. I was reading about his 1913 journey down the Cache River in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker, when I heard the light tap against the window, almost inaudible above the raindrops. I found her waiting on the steps in her black coat with my smudged card again in her bony fingers.

I took her coat, folding it on my chair, and followed her to the back room, which I had left unlocked. We repeated the previous night's scene, with slight variations. This time she went to the drawer full of pale blue robin's eggs, and she wrapped one gently in her damp black hair before kissing it on the end and setting it back as if putting an infant to bed.

This time I was ready for her kiss, but she still overpowered me with her urgent shove. I tried to look up at her face, to hold her head in my palms, but she pinned my arms with her elbows and covered my eyes with her fingers, which were strangely webbed where they joined her hands. She let out a sigh and bit my lip before she stood. I watched her leave—I knew I wasn't supposed to follow—and I tasted the metallic tang of blood on my tongue.

The next morning I managed to avoid my wife completely by rising early—I hardly slept at all, but I didn't feel tired—and going in to work before anyone else arrived. I kept my office door locked but the windows open in spite of the rain. Had anyone looked in, they would have thought me hard at work. But I spent the day sketching eggs on the backs of envelopes: cream-colored hawks, black-striped terns, dainty white hummingbirds. I also tried to draw the woman but all I managed were her bony webbed fingers and round black eyes.

I came home early, before my wife, and went to the back room. In a cardboard box under the window I found some old clothes, and I took out a colorfully striped shirt that had been packed away years ago: orange on blue on green on red, alternating up the sleeves and down the front and back. Once it had seemed fashionable. I put the shirt on, rolling the one I was wearing into a ball, and was surprised to find it still fit, though it was tight in the shoulders.

When my wife came home, she smirked at the shirt. I tried to tell her I thought I should bring some color back into my wardrobe, but she dismissed me with a wave of her hand and walked away. After she fixed herself supper and disappeared into her own room, I settled onto the couch again with MQR's papers and waited, occasionally looking down to admire my shirt.

When she arrived at a little past midnight—I was dozing on the couch when she knocked—I tried to embrace her on the porch. I wanted to take her there, wordlessly and roughly, to prove that she wanted me and not my great-grandfather's cabinet. But she pushed me away and went to the back bedroom, pausing at the hallway door to look over her shoulder at me and smile. She had never smiled at me before, and the expression was strange on her pale, blank face. I hurried after her.

That night was different from the previous two. She wore a simple brown slip instead of her black skirt and white Oxford, and when I caught up to her she turned to face me and pulled the slip over her head, revealing her pale nakedness. She was slender and boyish in build, narrow-hipped and hairless, though her belly was oddly distended. She waited for me to unlock the cabinet, then knelt and opened the cupboard containing the green heron eggs. While she held one of the hollow shells to her breast, I disrobed and took her from behind, at last in command. She held the egg gently no matter how roughly I applied myself, and she offered it to me over her shoulder. I kissed the egg, and her fingers, and the soft nape of her neck. She leaned forward, let out a cry that was sharp and shrill and only barely human, then pushed me away.

I fell onto my heels and watched her place the heron egg back into its cupboard. Her eyes were solid black disks when she bent down to kiss my forehead, and before I could speak she threw open the window and climbed out into the rain, leaving her dress behind.

In the morning I prepared a breakfast feast for my wife: thick slabs of toast smeared with strawberry jam, soft-boiled eggs, spicy Italian sausages fried until the edges were crisp black. She squinted at me and took just the toast. I ate the eggs and sausage and made more toast, but I was still hungry and stopped for donuts on my way to work.

At work that day I was unusually productive, putting the finishing touches on projects that had languished for weeks and getting a good start on work I had delayed for months. I found the previous day's sketches and put them in my bottom drawer, face down. When I left in the evening, it was with a heart full of pride, and the feeling I had earned whatever pleasure might visit that night.

But when I came home, the door to the back bedroom was open and boxes filled the hallway. I hurried down the hall, but I knew what I would find. My wife was kneeling on the floor, in the spot where the oologist's cabinet had stood, sorting shoes and dishes into cardboard boxes. She heard me stop at the door, and she looked up and smiled with a dramatic gesture at the empty space at the back of the room: “Gone."

"Gone where?” I asked.

"Does it matter? Gone, gone for good.” The she reached into her pocket and took out a business card the color of old vellum. “A collector, in Germany. The movers carted it away this afternoon. And the rest of this—this junk—is going, too."

I took the card, with its dense Teutonic lettering and strange phone number, and hoped it would reveal my lover's name: Giselle, Jarvia, Marlena, Serilda. But it was a man's name, Roderick, from the dark North Sea city of Hamburg.

The movers had not taken the bundle of papers I'd left on the porch, and that night I sat on the steel couch looking at MQR's spindly script without reading the words. When she came again, would she smile over her shoulder as she doffed her dress, would she slip into the newly emptied room and evaporate like a ghost under halogen lamps? Would she still offer herself to me, the owner of a Bauhaus chair, without my magical box of air?

The rain was still falling—it seemed to have rained for years—and at first I thought the crash at the back of the house was a clap of thunder, though I'd seen no lightning. I listened for my wife's footsteps on the stairs, but except for the staccato ping of rain there was silence. When I threw open the back room's door, the window was open and rain spattered in droplets onto the clean wooden floor.

I almost left after I shut the window, but then I noticed, nestled between two boxes that hadn't yet been cleared away, a round, mottled object. It was an egg, more spherical than oblong, cream-colored but speckled with black and brown. When I lifted it, the egg was heavy and warm and slightly damp to the touch, and it smelled of camphor and dust.

I pressed the heavy egg against my neck; I don't know if I felt something pulsing inside it, or if I felt my own blood rumbling in my arteries. When I held it to my lips, I tasted blood and salt. The shell cracked easily against my tooth, and the yolk slid rich and golden down my chin.

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M. Brock Moorer

There are three kinds of darkness: the first is the icy, terrifying, pitch black you either avoid or jump into like the cold, cold water at the beach, in spring, that swallows you up and steals your breath. Then there is the darkness you just want to get through or move aside with a candle, or flashlight. It is weightless and silent, made to be pushed back and walked through. The third kind is harder to recognize or describe, but I've felt it, warm and feathery light, brushing up against me. It is a place, liquid and right next to us all the time. But no one can touch or hold it.

There aren't many thunderstorms here in Brooklyn. Not like home where they rumble in, all flash and fury, and leave everything dripping green and breathless. Here summer is either cement-hot, or days of drizzling rain. Of course I don't get out much during the day to know one way or another. All of my hours are spent training with Lao, or studying. Mostly history. It's not the kind of history I learned before. Granddad doesn't bother with the Civil War and stuf f like that. I must memorize long, involved family maps and lineage. And battles; battles I've never heard of in places with names that sound made up. Like Ifingard. That's not a real country. I know because I sneaked out one day and looked it up in the bookstore around the corner.

It's hard to sneak away from Granddad's house; the servants tell on me and someone is always watching. But today Mrs. Mowett has the staff polishing silver so I know I have at least thirty minutes. It is worth risking Granddad's anger to stand in that warm and dimly lit place full of strangers and brightly colored books that have no lessons or necessary things inside.

"What are you doing here? Are you skipping school too?” It's a girl's voice, but I'm almost positive it's a boy. A very young boy, it turns out—less than half my height—stands behind me, his head barely reaching the second row of books.

"Yes,” I lie, slowly replacing the almanac on the shelf, then nervously check the clock. If I am not back in time, he will know. Everything in Granddad's house runs on an exact schedule. Except Granddad.

"So are we,” he says. “School is so wretchedly stupid.” But he isn't old enough to be skipping school, at least I don't think he is. I don't remember much about school, except that I hated it, but now I would give anything to sit through boring lectures in a classroom full of other kids who don't say, “My Lord,” after everything.

"Jack, leave her alone,” a bored voice says and I look over to where she sits reading, not even looking up. Usually people are fooled by the suits Granddad makes me wear at all times. Coat and tie and everything scratchy wool, even in summer, and too warm.

"It's okay,” I say, still not sure how to behave with people like this who aren't servants or teachers.

"See,” Jack says loudly and she rolls her eyes.

"She's just saying that to make you feel better,” the girl says and looks at me finally. I wait for the apologies, the “oh, I didn't know you were a boy” stammering but there isn't any.

"No he's not,” Jack pouts, and I really should leave because Granddad could be back at any moment, but I can't. “Did you know the world is getting brighter?” he says. I just shake my head. “Soon it'll be day all night."

"Jack,” she says with a loud sigh, putting down her book. Now it is his turn to roll his eyes.

"I have to go anyway,” I say and the girl just lifts her eyebrows at the young boy as if to say “I told you so."

As I walk away I hear his bright voice behind me. “Is he really a girl?"

"Don't be rude."

"But what am I the prince of?” I ask, trying desperately not to whine. My tie is too tight and I feel like I might choke to death on the chewy bread, but this has been bothering me since that day in the bookstore.

"Be quiet and eat your dinner,” he says without even looking up. Granddad has been in a foul mood for weeks. He hates summer, which is strange. You'd think somebody who likes the sun as much as Granddad would love summer, but not him. “It's all the filthy plants and flowers,” he'd say. I can just imagine him somewhere in permanent winter where the light never stops bouncing off all that white.

"You can't even tell me which country?"

His eyes finally move, flashing at me like hard metallic sunlight. “You'll find out soon enough.” Which is exactly the kind of answer he always gives. Nothing is ever for
right now
. It is always some day far from now.