The Ammonite Violin & Others (29 page)

So she cannot give it back, no matter how much she might wish to, and so the painter shrugs and shakes his head and turns away again, leaving her there in the muck. She has sunk in up to her thighs now, and the fleshy, stinging polyps of sea anemones sprout where once a brown thatch of hair concealed her sex. Across the mud, a regiment of crabs are coming for her on jointed, scuttling legs, their pincers held high, waving in time to the music from the docks.

In dreams, she is consumed by silt and sand, by every hungry thing that waits below the waves. She is a feast for all Poseidon’s offspring, and as they enter her—that host of chitinous shells and slithering, eel-formed bodies—and as she screams, a fantastic, towering shadow rises in the east and a roar rides out before it, like the commingled voices of all the tempests since time’s beginning, as the mighty wave bears down upon the town.

Below the murals, the whore named Mary stands up straight and the geologist sits stiff on her granite bench, pretending that she can see the girl. That she can see the
unnatural
red of the noisy new dress, and the insatiable eyes of the painted Dinosaurian gargoyles leering down from their place upon the wall, and that she can see, too, the girl’s unremarkable face, which she has only ever felt with her hands. She inhales the musty smells of the museum; the faint and omnipresent scent of the sea; the whore’s bouquet. She listens, straining now to hear something more than the wind, more than the faint hiss from the gaslight sconces and a buoy clanging disconsolately in the harbor.

“Mary,” she says. “I would ask a favor of you.”

“A
favor?
Does that mean I have a choice?”

“You always have a choice,” the geologist replies. “It’s not like I’m holding a gun to your head, is it?”

“No,” the girl admits. “It’s not like that. So, is this a
favor
I can do sitting down?”

“No,” says the geologist as firmly as she dares, and she grips the razor tighter still. “‘You should remain standing.”

The girl sighs almost as loudly as the wind.

“There is something I would ask you to do, my precious Star of the Sea.”

“Don’t you call me that,” the whore says.

“Why not, Mary? It’s only what your name means.
Mary
, from the Latin,
Maria
, or the Hebrew
Miryam
, and you
are
precious to me.”

“I’m not some sort of goddamn Jewess,” the girl sneers, and the geologist draws in a very deep breath and allows herself the indulgence of folding the blade partway open. When she speaks again, there is only the slightest tremor in her voice.

“No, Mary, you are surely not that. But you wear the name of the Blessed Virgin, the very Queen of Heaven. And you wear it like a crown, like a jeweled diadem, like a new red dress. You wear it well, and always you shine like the brightest star hung above the ocean’s abyss. Even to my blind eyes, you shine.”

“Fine. So what’s the
favor
? I already told you my feet hurt, didn’t I?”

“There is something I would ask you to do.”

“Isn’t that usually how it works, Professor?”

The geologist shuts her eyes again. “Please, Mary, do be quiet. Unless you would have us stop this now, and so seek your evening’s wages in some other, less strenuous quarter.”

The girl shifts fretfully from foot to foot, heel to heel, toe to toe, and again the clacking of her hoots on the marble puts the geologist in mind of the stamping of some bizarre bipedal horse.

“I have appetites,” the geologist says, opening her eyes and folding the razor shut. “And I freely confess, they are strange to me, Mary. I have
terrible
appetites.”

The whore coughs nervously, and then, in a smaller, less strident voice, she says, “I think you would find my blood sour and fouled with spirits.”

The geologist wants to laugh, but she doesn’t. She only permits herself a smile, instead. “I don’t want your blood, Mary, my Star of the Sea. Don’t be so ghoulish. I only suffer from lesbianism. I am not a vampire.”

“And I was only making a fucking joke,” the girl says, unconvincingly. “My feet are killing me, Professor. I don’t see why I can’t do this favor
sitting
.”

The geologist sighs and leans towards the whore, leaning forward but an inch or so, leaning into and through something far denser than the long night of blindness or the stagnant, antique atmosphere of the museum, leaning through her own desire. “
No
,” she says. “I need you to stand, and so you
will
stand. Or you will leave. The choice is yours, as always.”

For a few seconds there’s not even the sound of Mary’s restless feet, just the wind, and the geologist begins to wonder if perhaps tonight she’s pushed too hard. But then the girl’s skirt rustles, and she scuffs at the floor with the toe of a boot.

“I
am
standing,” she says.

“Thank you, Mary. That is very kind of you. Many in your line of work are not so tolerant of my whims. Now, would you come closer, please, and would you kiss me?”

“Will you remove your spectacles?” the whore asks. “I’ve never seen your eyes.”

And you never shall,
the geologist almost says, almost, but then there’s a sudden and unfamiliar flutter in her belly, some unexpected and not wholly unpleasant twinge. None of them have ever seen her eyes, not even the ones she has undressed for and lain with. None of them have ever looked upon the sickly opalescent sheen eclipsing her pupils and retinas, corneas and sclerae. None of them has ever had the gall to ask that she remove her spectacles.

“I warn you, it is not a pretty sight,” she says.

“I don’t expect it to be. It’s a hard world, and I daresay harder on some few of us than on others. I see a lot of ugly things, Professor. Only, sometimes they don’t seem that way to me, if you know what I’m saying.”

“You are an odd one, Mary. Possibly, I have not given you due credit.”

“Possibly, you think all whores cut from the selfsame cloth,” the girl replies. “But I have seen such sights, and never have I turned away. I have seen the ravages of typhus and cholera and the pox. I have seen the innumerable disfigurements life at sea works upon the body of a man. Once, I saw a sailor who’d been mauled by a shark. It took away every tiling below his waist, and yet, by God, he lived on an hour afterwards.”

Again, the flutter deep in the geologist’s gut, and she folds the razor open once more. She hears the girl take a step towards her, and then another.
If I reach out
, she thinks,
if I reach out, I could touch those silken folds again. I could cut
—

“I’ll tell you something else,” the whore says, speaking now with an air of confidentiality, and the geologist realizes that she is being seduced by this filthy, unschooled guttersnipe, this scheming bit of meat and gaudy raiment. But she sits still, and she listens. The razor’s blade is cool against her palm.

“What, Mary? What will you tell me?” she asks.

And the whore takes another step nearer the granite bench. “It was the damnedest thing,” she says. “When I still lived in Gloucester, it came up in the nets of a whaling barque, though I don’t recollect the ship’s name or the name of its captain. But I saw it sprawled there on the dock, after it’d been run through and killed by one of the harpooners. I thought it might have been a mermaid, at the first, like you hear of in tales and chanteys and the like. But it weren’t no mermaid, I’ll swear to that. And if your eyes are even half as fucking unseemly as the eyes I saw that day, I’ll give you the night’s snatch for free.”

“That’s a bold proposition,” the geologist replies, trying to imagine what the girl might have seen lying dead and speared upon the Gloucester docks, what she might have first mistaken for a mermaid.

“My feet hurt like the devil, Professor, and discomfort always makes me bold.”

With her left hand, the geologist removes her pince-nez from the bridge of her nose and then sits and stares unseeing at the spot where she knows the girl is standing. The razor is still open, and the fingers of her right hand have begun the bleed, a fresh gash or an old one reinaugurated for the occasion.

“No, that’s not so fucking terrible,” Mary says, and she bends and cups the geologist’s chin in her hands, and though a streetwalker’s palms are not so soft as the supple hands of idle women, they are sometimes softer than anticipated.

“No?” asks the geologist, folding the razor closed.

“Nothing to make me turn away, but like I said, I seen some unlovely fucking exhibitions of the Almighty’s handwork. So it might be I’m not the one to ask.”

And then she kisses the geologist, exactly as she has been bidden and paid to do, as she has done many times before. Outside the museum, the wild, salty wind cries like a widow mourning at her husband’s grave, and somewhere in this moldering and ramshackle town fetched up like so much foam and flotsam at the edge of the sea, a bell begins to toll the hour.

She has never called herself a medium, this furtive, brown-eyed woman who lives alone where Hull Street crosses Snow Hill Street and runs down to the glassy, slow river. She does not seek to profit from the bereaved, nor to offer solace to grieving widows, widowers, or orphans. She does not hold séances in hushed and darkened parlors, and never has she practiced automatic writing, nor even once communicated with otherworldly spheres via planchettes and elaborate codes of table rapping and the cracking of knuckles. She does not call the dead, for always have they come to her unbidden, in their own time and in their own service. Rarely do they speak to her, and when they do, it is even more rarely that they share words she would dare repeat.

By day, she is a sempstress, an architect with needle and thread and thimble, clothing well-bred Boston women, and she minds her spools and stitches. She has a fondness for old hymns, and often hums them while she works, though she is not particularly religious. Religion has always seemed to her the domain of questions which will be answered in the fullness of time, one way or the other, by and by. Or they will not, in which case it hardly seems they matter very much. She lives in the high gabled house left behind by her mother and father when they passed—only one month apart, one from the other—and she imagines that she will live there until the end of her own days. She has an especial liking for yellow roses, and for mulled cider, as well, and late autumn, and the inscriptions she finds carved on slate headstones when she walks between the rows at Copp’s Hill. Of the latter, she has two favorites, both of which she has copied down and pinned upon the wall near her chifforobe. They offer some comfort on those infrequent occasions when it occurs to her, in passing, that perhaps she is a lonely woman who has simply never paused to recognize her own particular sort of loneliness. One reads:

Sacred to the Memory of
MR. SAMUEL WELLS,
Who resigned this life Nov. 13
^th
,
1804
in the 26 year of his age.

Stop my friends; in a mirror see

What you who ere so healthy be,

Tho’ beauty with rosebuds paint each face.

Coming death will strip you of each grace.

and the other goes:

Here lyes y
^e
body of
MRS AMNEY HUNT
Wife of Mr Benjamin Hunt who died
Nov 20
^th
1769 aged
40 years

A sister of Sarah Lucas lieth here,

Whom I did love most dear;

And now her soul hath too its flight

And bid her spiteful foes good night.

That both Mr. Wells and Mrs. Hunt died in November has always seemed significant, and sometimes this sempstress who is not a medium imagines it a portent of some sort, conceivably that she herself will perish on a chill November day, only after the crisper delights of October have finished, and that thought bestows a certain solace.

She sleeps always above the blankets, for no reason in particular and following from no superstition. This bed was once her grandfather’s, as was once this house the property of that same man, who made his meager fortune importing tea and exporting tobacco. She keeps a sachet filled with dried lavender and thyme beneath her pillow, and on the beside table she keeps a small box made from cherry wood. The lid is finely carved with a scene from Greek mythology—Narcissus gazing longingly at his own reflection while Echo watches bitterly. Inside the box, wrapped in a white linen handkerchief, she keeps her baby teeth and two she has lost as an adult. There is also the cracked arm of a china doll she found lying in the street, years ago, and there is a silver coin, tarnished mostly black, which she thinks must have come from Portugal or Spain.

She does not call them to her. Always, they find her by their own secret wiles, the spirits who come when she is sleeping, or lying awake waiting for sleep. They find
her,
following whatever compass a ghost might hold, slipping in through the inevitable, stingy gaps afforded by all closed doors and windows. They rise up through floorboards, or sift down through sagging ceiling plaster. Or they appear somewhere in the room without having seemed to have entered by any obvious, material route. So, she knows there must be a multitude of invisible doorways that her living eyes cannot discern. They have also risen from the scorched glass chimney of the oil lamp that sits on the table along with the cherry-wood box, and from beneath the bed, too. On more than one instance, they have emerged suddenly from the brick maw of the chimney, sooty and fire lit and scattering ash and embers across the room.