The Ammonite Violin & Others (28 page)

“That’s no sort of poem I ever heard,” the girl in the rustling taffeta says, and the geologist wants to inquire exactly what sorts of poems she
has
heard, if her experience has ever strayed beyond doggerel and burlesque, and whether all waterfront whores are such keen cognoscenti of verse. Instead, she recites a few more lines of Tennyson:

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.’

“I have a new dress,” the girl named Mary says, driving the talk in another direction.

“Yes, I think I can hear it,” the geologist replies.

“Ah, but you should
feel
it. Here, give me your hands.”

At first the geologist keeps her hands folded in her lap; only rarely has she allowed herself to touch the girl. It is almost always enough to sit here in the gallery and talk. Usually, it is sufficient to smell the cheap toilet water that she wears, her sweat, a wilted flower in her hair, all the odors that the geologist knows her by.

“It was a gift,” says the girl, those words not at all careless or trivial, but placed artfully, just so. And the thought of someone else spending money on this girl makes the geologist’s heart flutter and begin to race, and clouds her thoughts with bright flecks of jealousy. Hesitantly, the geologist raises her left hand and, hesitantly, she lets her fingertips brush against the cool, stiff folds of taffeta. And then she quickly pulls her hand away again, as though the silk has scalded her, and Mary laughs softly to herself.

“What is the color?” the geologist asks.

“Let me see,” says the girl, and there are a few seconds of silence marred only by the sound of the evening wind sighing off the harbor. “It is the red of the shadow on a rose. A
red
rose.”

“Of course,” the geologist says, though she’d actually imagined it might be a garish sort of aniline yellow.

“It’s almost unnatural, this shade of red, so it took me a moment to think of it.”

“I wish I could see it for myself. Rut I do recall that color.”

“He said that he loved me,” the girl says.

“Who said that?”

“He did.”

“You mean the man who bought you this unnatural red dress?” asks the geologist, and her voice remains calm, steady, as deceptively indifferent as ever, for she is a woman who keeps her emotions to herself, except when she is talking about the murals cr her fossil bones or Lord Tennyson. It hardly matters if this only makes her seem stranger to the pious, muttering people of the town, who have no end of rumors and speculations about the peculiar blind spinster who passes her days talking to rocks, and who lives alone in a garret above a sepulcher for ancient monstrosities.

“Yes,” the girl answers. “He was the one. The man who bought me the dress.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Oh, I am quite cautious,” says the girl. “You might not believe I am, but it’s the truth, all the same.”

“As well you should be,” the geologist tells her, and now it seems as if her fingers are tingling, as if the fabric of the dress, tainted by some burning, caustic substance, some corrosive dye-stuff, has stained her skin. She wipes her hand against her own skirt and tries hard to pay attention to what the girl is saying.

“Perhaps
you
can make sense of it,” says the whore.

“Possibly. Tell me what he said.”

“Well, he would assume the role of my
protector
—his word, mind you.”

The geologist stops rubbing her hand on her skirt and takes a deep breath. “Mary, do you feel like you need protecting?”

“I do not want to be alone—not like you—”

“Of course not.”

“—but I certainly do not feel I need to be
protected
.”

The geologist shuts her eyes, and never mind that it makes no difference, that there is no darkness greater, more absolute, to be found behind closed lids than the darkness that is with her every moment of every day. She shuts her eyes very tightly and hopes that the whore hasn’t noticed.

“Do you love him?” she asks.

And the girl named Mary, Star of the Sea, laughs a cruel, quiet laugh, because it is a silly question.

“Would you please come nearer, Mary? I would have you sit nearer to me.” And now there’s a louder rustle as the girl scoots sideways on the granite bench, decreasing the distance between them by a scant few inches more.

“You should be grateful for the attentions of such a man,” the geologist tells her. And this is only another part of the pantomime, forcing insincerities from her own throat, shaping deceit with her tongue. The words have no flavor whatsoever, no taste, no texture at all. “Indeed, you should be glad to have a willing protector.”

“And why is that, Professor?”

“It’s a hard world,” the geologist replies. “I daresay harder on some few of us than on others.”

“You mean harder on women like
me
,” the whore says, and it would be impossible to mistake for anything else the cold, indurate note of pique that has crept into her voice. It is altogether too malapropos, too like finding a ruby lying amid the filthy cobblestones, befouled as they are with chamber-pot offal and horseshit and the refuse of fishmongers.

“Yes, Mary. I believe that I mean that precisely.”

And the whore does not reply, and for a moment they sit, side by side, and listen to the Atlantic wind pressing cold and raw against the eaves of the museum.

“I need you to stand for me,” the geologist says at last. “Just there, directly in front of me.” And she points to a spot below the nearest mural, beneath the
Lælaps
and the dying
Hadrosaurus.

“My feet ache something terrible,” the girl complains. “I swear, sometimes I think I’d be better off without them.”

“Please. Just for awhile. Stand for me, Mary. You may remove your boots, if it would help.”

“Is that what you want tonight? You want me to take off my boots?”

“No, Mary. It does not matter to me one
way
or another. I only make the suggestion thinking that it might ease your discomfort.”

“I’ll keep my boots on, thank you all the same,” says Mary. “These marble floors are cold, I bet. I bet they’re almost as frigid as the goddamn bottom of the sea.”

“Maybe,” says the geologist. “I couldn’t say for certain.” And she listens closely as the girl gets up, the delicious rustle and swish of the new red dress, the friction of skirts against petticoats and stockings.

“You want me to stand here? Just stand?”

“Yes. That’s what I need you to do.”

“It’s a queer sort of game you’re playing at, you know that?” The geologist swallows and licks her lips again, wishing that she were not so thirsty, that her parched mouth were not such a distraction.

“Do I pay you any less than the men who expect so much more?” she asks.

“No,” the whore answers. “If you did, I wouldn’t be here, Professor.”

“In point of fact, do I not pay much, much
more?
”

The geologist can almost hear the whore smile.

“A girl has her reputation to consider,” says Mary “Risks weighed against the benefits and all. People talk, you know. There are already men on the docks who will not employ my services because, well, because...” but she trails off, and so the geologist finishes for her.

“Because you come to me, Mary.”

“It makes them nervous, I suspect.”

“But not your protector. It doesn’t make him nervous.”

“No. He understands that it’s only because I’m so well compensated. He knows I’m not a tribade. That if I’m to be found tipping the velvet now and again, it’s strictly business, and in no way pertaining to my habitual proclivities.”

“Of course,” the geologist whispers, so low that Mary almost doesn’t catch the words.

“You just want me to stand here?” the whore asks again, and her heels sound almost like horseshoes clacking against the marble as she shifts from one foot to the other.

“Yes. That’s enough for now,” the geologist replies, slipping her right hand inside a pocket of her skirt. Her fingers close around the pearl-handled razor hidden there, and suddenly her mouth does not seem so very dry, and her heart is no longer racing in her chest. No rosary beads for her, no crucifix, but only the smooth curve of this solid shank for her fetish, her talisman. Nacre stolen from an oyster or mussel’s inner shell to conceal the fine steel edge, which she keeps honed and ready with a leather strop. She squeezes it, imprinting its outline upon her palm, and opens her eyes again. “Don’t slump your shoulders,” she says. “Stand up straight.”

In dreams, the geologist kneels in the grey estuary muck of low tide, some tide so low that all the bay has drained away into the distance, and everywhere fish lie flopping and suffocating beneath a blazing summer sun. Cod and mackerel, haddock and flounder, starving gills and desperate, bulging eyes as the crabs move in to have their fill of this unexpected banquet. Here and there, the sea’s retreat has exposed boulders which usually lie submerged, and the stones are clothed in fleshy, reeking mats of kelp and Irish moss and knotted wrack. She is naked, with not even a chemise to protect her from the blazing Cyclopean eye of this July or August afternoon, and already her skin has gone a delicate, pale pink; soon enough, it will turn the angry red of a boiled lobster and begin to blister. She has sunken so deeply into the mud that it reaches up above her knees, but at least, she thinks, her legs and feet are covered and safe from the devouring sun. Around her, the hulls and titled masts of stranded fishing boats jab at the blue-white sky, and the city is only a hazy silhouette of gambrel rooftops and church steeples looming above the quay.

“You will burn alive out here,” the painter of landscapes and murals says, but when she raises her head to look at him, stinging sweat trickles down her brow into her eyes, and the geologist blinks painfully and stares down at the mud, instead.

“You’ll bake, poor thing. In the end, this ooze will be your tomb, holding you secret as any trilobite. You will sleep away the ages while your shrouds lapidify about you.”

“I will not dream of you,” she whispers. She tries to stand, but the sucking, squelching mud holds her fast.

“I would have loved you,” the painter sighs. “I would have carried you away from this stinking shore and given you the lights and wonders of the city. I would have given you all my love. I would even have given you a child.”

“I never
wanted
you,” she growls. “I never wanted you
or
your child.” And now the geologist grits her teeth against the salt crystallizing in her eyes.

There’s strange, piping music from the direction of the wharves, and the painter talks of sirens and Odysseus, of mermaids and Andromeda chained upon the Æthiopian shore by jealous Nereids and offered up as a sacrifice by her own father to the monster Cetus. The music is a fever, and his words are fever dreams. They fall from his lips and lie squirming all about her. At least, she thinks, Andromeda hid the sea while she awaited death, cool Mediterranean waves lapping at her heels and toes, not this barren, uncovered littoral plain, this hellish expanse of dying fish and hungry crabs.

“It’s that lie that holds you here,” says the painter. “It’s that lie that took your sight.””

“It was an accident,” she replies, trying not to remember the day and recalling it all too clearly, so many years past, but not the least bit forgotten or diminished, the day a small stoppered bottle of muriatic acid slipped from her fingers and shattered.

“That was what, a week after I returned home? Two weeks, perhaps: I missed my razor almost at once. You stole it from me, didn’t yon?”

“I’m not a sneak thief,” she says, knowing it to be a lie in more ways than just the one.

He bends down, his hand cupped beneath her chin, the callused fingers that never touched her. He kisses her, but those are not the painter’s lips. Those are the lips of Mary or some other whore, the first girl the geologist paid to come to the museum after sunset, or the second, or the third.

“You taste so sweet,” the artist says, speaking with the borrowed voice of a dollymop.

“I am lost,” she says. “I am lost forever.”

“Not lost,” the whore tells her. “You have merely been misplaced. You have lain yourself aside, that’s all.”

And then those callused, masculine fingers wander down to her nipples, the wide brown aureolae which have become encrusted round about with the sharp, scabby plates of barnacles, The painter and all the whores laugh to themselves, and then they are speaking all at once, though not quite in unison, not quite in perfect androgynous syncopation.

“You have need of no other lover than the sea and the stones that are forged within the night of its eternal crucible. You have not any exigency or desire for mere human hearts, nor touch, nor company.”

“Tike it back,” she says, meaning the pearl-handled razor, not those indelible, damning words, for you cannot take back anything so tattooed upon one’s soul. “I would not have it anymore. Take it, please, and then please leave me be.” But she has left the razor in the bureau drawer where she keeps it when it is not tucked into a pocket, or when she is not sitting before her dressing mirror folding it open and closed, open and closed, admiring the polished gleam by lantern light. Marveling at the simplicity of so deadly an instrument just as she admires
Scene in the Museum (1896)
the teeth of venomous serpents or the sickle claws of Jefferson’s
Megatherium americanum.