She led Martin into the hallway. The interior of the house was sour-smelling and gloomy, but it had once been decorated in the very latest fab 1960s style. The floor was covered with white shag carpet throughout, matted like the pelt of an aging Yeti. The drapes were patterned in psychedelic striations of orange and lime and purple, and white leather chairs with black legs and gold feet were arranged around the room at diagonal angles. There was even a white stereo autochange record player, which reminded Martin so strongly of the Beatles and the Beach Boys and his high school dances that he felt for one unnerving moment as if he were sixteen years old.
‘I’m a widow,’ said Mrs Harper, as if she felt a need to explain why the interior of her house was a living museum of twenty-year-old contemporary design. ‘Arnold died in 1971, and, well – it all just
reminds
me.’
Martin nodded, to show that he understood. Mrs Harper said, ‘
He
didn’t like the Boofuls furniture, either. I mean he actually hated it. But his father had bought it, just before the war. His father was setting up house, you see, and he went to an auction and bought it – well, because it was so
cheap
. It was only afterward that somebody told him who it used to belong to. And what’s more … it used to stand in the very
room
where poor little Boofuls was – you know – done away with. Quite the most awful thing ever. I mean even worse than Charles Manson, because she
chopped
that dear little child into – well, I don’t even like to think about it. And nor does anybody else, more’s the pity.’
‘Can we – er – look at it?’ asked Martin.
‘Well, of course. It’s down in the cellar. I mean it hasn’t seen the light of day since Arnold’s father gave it to us. Arnold didn’t even want it but his father insisted. Arnold never had the nerve to stand up against his father. Well, not many people did. He was an absolute tyrant.’
Mrs Harper led the way through to the kitchen. She stood up on tiptoe, revealing so much skinny leg that Martin had to look away, and groped around on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard to find the key to the cellar.
‘I should sell up, you know, and move to San Diego. My sister lives there. This big old house is such a nuisance.’
She unlocked the cellar and switched on the light. Martin hesitated for a moment and then followed her down the steep wooden steps. The smell of drains was even stronger down here, and it was mingled with a smell of dried-out lumber and cats.
‘You watch your step, now,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘Those last two steps are pretty rotten. We had termites, you know. Arnold thought they were going to eat the whole house right around our ears.’
‘They didn’t touch the furniture?’
‘Don’t ask me why,’ said Mrs Harper, her pink-fingernailed claw illuminated for a moment as she clutched the stair rail. ‘They ate just about everything else. They even ate the handle of Arnold’s shovel, I’ll always remember that. The whole darned handle. But they never touched the furniture. Not a nibble. Perhaps even termites have respect for the dead.’
‘Yes, maybe they do,’ said Martin, peering into the gloom of the cellar.
Mrs Harper beckoned him forward. ‘It’s all over here, behind the boiler.’
Martin caught his sleeve on an old horse collar which was hooked on a nail at the side of the stairs. It took him a moment to disentangle himself, but when he had, Mrs Harper had disappeared into the darkness behind the boiler. ‘Mrs Harper?’
There was no reply. Martin groped forward a little farther. The boiler was heavy cast iron, one of those old-fashioned types, and almost looked as if it had a grinning face on it, with mica eyes. ‘Mrs Harper?’
He came cautiously around the corner of the boiler and there she was. But the back of his scalp shrank in alarm, because she was suspended three feet above the floor, at a frightening diagonal angle, her white bouffant hair gleaming like the huge chrysalis of some gigantic moth.
‘Ah!’ Martin shouted; but almost at the same time Mrs Harper turned her head and he realized that he was looking at a reflection of her; and that the real Mrs Harper was standing beside him quite normally.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said without much sympathy. ‘Did I startle you?’
‘No, I uh –’ Martin gestured toward the mirror that was hanging from the ceiling.
‘Well,’ Mrs Harper smiled. She rubbed her hands together. ‘That was Boofuls’ mirror. That was the very mirror that watched him die.’
‘Very nice,’ said Martin. He was beginning to wonder whether it had been such a good idea coming down here to look at Boofuls’ old furniture. Maybe the tedium of retyping his
A-Team
script had something to recommend it. Maybe some memories are better left alone.
‘The chairs and the sofa are back here,’ said Mrs Harper. She dragged at the corner of a dustcover and revealed the shadowy outlines of an elegant reproduction sofa and two matching chairs. They were gilded, French château style, with pale green watered-satin seats – grubby and damp-stained from so many years in Mrs Harper’s cellar. Martin peered at them through the gloom.
‘Do you have any more lights down here?’ he asked.
‘Well, there’s a flashlight someplace …’ Mrs Harper fussed, making it quite obvious that she didn’t want to go looking for it.
‘Don’t worry,’ Martin told her. ‘I can see them pretty good. Is that the liquor cabinet back there?’ He pointed toward a huge rococo piece of bowfront furniture with engraved windows, partially concealed by a sheet.
‘That’s right; and it still has
all
the original decanters, with solid-silver labels. Gin, whiskey, brandy. Not that Boofuls ever
drank
, of course, at his age.’
She thought this was quite amusing and let out a high, whinnying snort.
Martin approached the furniture with a mixture of dread and fascination. He ran his hand along the back of the sofa, and thought,
Boofuls actually sat here
. The experience was more disturbing than he had expected. News clippings and photographs were one thing – but they were flat and two-dimensional. Boofuls had never actually touched them. But here was his furniture. Here were his chairs. Here was the mirror that must have hung over his fireplace. Real, touchable objects. To Martin, they were as potent as Hitler’s shirts, or Judy Garland’s ruby slippers, or Jackie Kennedy’s pink pill-box hats. They were proof that a legend had once been real; that Boofuls had actually lived.
He said nothing for a long time, his hands on his hips, breathing the musty sawdust atmosphere of Mrs Harper’s cellar.
‘You said that nobody was interested in buying them,’ he remarked to Mrs Harper at last.
‘I didn’t say that nobody was interested in
buying
them,’ Mrs Harper retaliated. ‘I simply said that nobody seemed interested in selling them for me. It’s the profit margin, I suppose.’
Martin nodded and looked around him. It was the two chairs he coveted the most – those and the mirror. The mirror would look absolutely stunning on his sitting room wall, instead of all those cuttings and photographs and letters – and it would have a far greater emotional effect. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, yes, here’s my collection of publicity pictures of Boofuls,’ he would be able to announce, ‘And this – this is the actual mirror which was hanging in Boofuls‘ sitting room when he was murdered.’
Shock! Shudder! Envy!
‘Erm … how much do you want for this stuff?’ Martin asked Mrs Harper casually. ‘Chairs, mirror, sofa, liquor cabinet, stools. Supposing I took them all off your hands?’
‘Well … I wouldn’t mind that at all,’ said Mrs Harper. She rubbed the back of the gilded sofa and sucked in her false teeth, and her eyelashes fluttered like chloroformed moths.
‘How much?’ asked Martin, thinking of the $578 sitting in his savings account at Security Pacific. Surely she wouldn’t ask more than five hundred bucks for a few worn-out pieces of 1930s furniture. She might even pay him to cart them away.
Mrs Harper thought for a moment, her hand pressed to her forehead. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve had so many different valuations. Some very high, some very low. But you’re a real Boofuls fan, aren’t you? A genuine devotee. And, you know, it seems kind of
mean
to make you pay an extortionate price – especially since you’re trying to keep his memory alive.’
Martin shrugged, and shuffled his feet. ‘That’s really generous of you. But I wouldn’t like you to take a loss.’
‘Don’t you worry about that. As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is for Boofuls’ belongings to have a loving home.’
Martin looked up at the mirror. Now that his eyes were becoming more accustomed to the shadows, he could distinguish the details of the gilded frame. It was quite a large mirror – six feet wide and nearly five feet high – which had obviously hung over a fireplace. The sides of the frame were carved as luxuriant tangles of grapevines. At the top, there was a grinning gilded face which looked like Bacchus or Pan. The glass itself was discolored and measled at one corner, but most of it reflected back Martin’s face with a clarity that was almost hallucinatory, as if he were actually looking at himself in the flesh, instead of a reflection. No wonder he had been so alarmed to see Mrs Harper floating in the air.
He reached out to touch the mirror and felt the chilly glass of its surface, untouched by sunlight for nearly twenty years. How does a mirror feel when it has nothing to reflect – nobody to smile at it, nobody to preen their hair in it, no rooms for it to look at, no evanescent pictures for it to paint of passing lives? ‘
Mirrors are lonely
,’ Tennyson once wrote.
‘Seven thousand,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘How about that?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Martin, caught off balance.
‘Seven thousand for everything,’ Mrs Harper repeated. ‘It’s the lowest I can go.’
Martin rubbed the back of his neck. Seven thousand was out of the question. Even his car wasn’t worth seven thousand. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s more than I can afford. I’m not Aaron Spelling, I’m afraid.’
‘I couldn’t go any lower,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘It would be worth a whole lot more, even if it
hadn’t
belonged to Boofuls.’
‘Well, that’s that, I guess,’ said Martin in resignation. ‘Thank you for letting me look at it, anyway. At least it gives me some idea of how Boofuls’ room was furnished. That could be quite a help with my screenplay.’
‘How much
can
you afford?’ asked Mrs Harper. Martin smiled and shook his head. ‘Nothing like seven thousand. Nothing like
one
thousand. Five hundred, and that’s tops.’
Mrs Harper looked around. ‘I guess I could let you have the barstools for five hundred.’
‘You’d be willing to sell pieces separately?’
‘Well, I wasn’t planning to. But since you’re such a devotee.’
‘Do you think you could sell me the mirror for five hundred? I really covet the mirror.’
Mrs Harper puckered her lips. ‘I’m not at all sure about that. That’s very special, that mirror. French, originally – that’s what Arnold’s father told me.’
‘It’s very handsome,’ Martin agreed. ‘I can just imagine it in my apartment.’
‘Maybe seven-fifty?’ Mrs Harper suggested. ‘Could you go to seven-fifty?’
Martin took a deep breath. ‘I could pay you five hundred now and the rest of it next month.’ That wouldn’t leave him very much for living on, he thought to himself, but if he finished his
A-Team
rewrite tonight and maybe asked Morris to find him a couple of extra scripts to work on – anything, even
Stir Crazy
or
Silver Spoons
.
Mrs Harper stood in silence for a long while, and then she said, ‘Very well. Five hundred now and two-fifty by the end of next month. But you make sure you pay. I don’t want any trouble. I’ve got lawyers, you know.’
Martin found an old wooden fruit box and dragged it across the cellar floor so that he could stand on it to reach the mirror. The late Arnold Harper had hung it up on two large brass hooks, screwed firmly into the joists of the sitting room floor above them. Martin lifted the mirror gently down, making sure that he didn’t knock the gilded frame on the floor. It was desperately heavy, and he was sweating by the time he had managed to ease it down onto the floor. Mrs Harper watched him, making no attempt to assist him, smiling benignly.
‘It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?’ she said, peering into it and teasing her bouffant hair. ‘They sure don’t make mirrors like this one anymore.’
Martin found that he didn’t have the strength to lift the mirror and carry it up the stairs, so he bundled a dustcover underneath one corner of it and dragged it across the floor. Then, panting, step by step, he pulled it up the wooden staircase until he reached the hallway. It took him almost five minutes to maneuver it through the cellar door into the kitchen. Mrs Harper stood halfway up the stairs watching, still offering no help. Martin almost wished that he hadn’t bought the goddamn thing. His arms were trembling from the weight of it. His cheek was smeared with grime and he was out of breath.
‘You can bring your car up to the side of the house if you want to,’ said Mrs Harper – and that was the only contribution she made. Martin nodded, leaning against one of the kitchen cupboards.
‘You’ll take a personal check?’ he asked her.
‘Oh, sure. Just so long as you’re good for it. It’s all money, isn’t it? That’s what Arnold used to say.’