“I didn’t expect to see someone die today,” she told me quite plainly, after we had finished our strangers’ chatter and settled for a moment in silence.
“No one could.”
“I expected a totally ordinary day,” she said, then smiled with that old glow. “Excuse me, I can tell I’m going to babble, but it’s just nerves. I came out here to buy a camera. I spent an hour looking at all the different kinds, and the man, who’d been so nice, he became concerned when I told him it was for myself. He said, ‘Oh miss, ladies can’t use these, their fingers are too small.’ I got so angry. I stormed out of there. I was furious over this ridiculous man … this stupid comment. That’s what I was doing when we saw the accident. Fuming. Making a whole speech to him in my head. And then. Well.”
“I was eating a pickle.”
“Was it good?”
“It was.”
“See, isn’t it extraordinary these little things? How you wake up in the morning and think everything’s going to be fine.”
“Yes.”
“I mean, you don’t look in the mirror and think, Okay, get ready, just in case you see something horrible today.”
“No.”
We both stared into the cups, at their tidal pools of bits and
leaves; I had learned enough from my mother to tell a lover’s fortune in that cup, but said nothing of what I saw. I poured out the tea. After all, to my beloved Alice I was nothing more than a stranger.
She took a breath, leaned back, looking around her. “Well this is very strange and awkward. You know what, I’m going to go, thank you.”
A panic. She couldn’t go, not yet. Alice was married; she could never link her life to mine; I could not even hope to have her as a friend; but it was not enough just to see her and know that so little had changed. Despite all their fears, we ask very little of the ones who never loved us. We do not ask for sympathy or pain or compassion. We simply want to know why.
“You should stay a little bit. You’re pale. You nearly fainted, you know.”
“You saw that?”
“No, well I …”
Alice smiled and met my eyes—ah the tea leaves there! “It’s terrible when you realize what you’ve become. So I’m this. I’m a woman who faints.” Laughter, brilliant as water.
“No,” I said. “That’s not what you seem like.”
“I’ve become something I used to despise. A heroine in a bad novel.” She spread her hands, laughing again, as if her fate were now complete. She looked like no such heroine: my Alice was dressed all in black, shirtwaist and skirt, bright white cravat, hair pulled into a very masculine driving cap. At her throat she wore an old-fashioned brooch that I recognized as her mother’s; I knew it contained a lock of Mr. Levy’s hair. But she also wore some kind of jacket I had never seen before: wide-lapelled, fitted, embroidered in Oriental coils and arabesques. It wasn’t really that it was too fashionable; it was simply bizarre. Other women in the shop were staring, whispering, perturbed. Alice did not seem to notice. She knocked against the table with a fist, saying, “But I shouldn’t
faint! I shouldn’t be that kind of woman! I’ve seen people die before.”
“Don’t think about that. Drink your tea.”
Her eyes were off in the corner of the room and she herself was far away: “In Turkey—I traveled to Asia years ago—I saw a man stumbling, poisoned, through the streets and he collapsed onto a carpet, dead, just a few feet from me. His face was curled up in … well, in anguish, I guess. The Mohammedan women were wailing in that way, you know.” She did a startling imitation, dovelike and plaintive. “I didn’t faint then.”
“You traveled to Asia?”
“With my husband,” she said, touching on the sad fact at last. I have no idea why she stayed and drank her tea with me, why she told all this to a stranger, but she went on: “That poisoned man, I sometimes wonder if he did it himself, put arsenic in his own mint tea. Over love, I guess. That he didn’t suspect poison would be so painful, so awful, so stupid and unromantic. The moral is: it pays to do your research.” Another laugh, full of chimes, and then—oh wonderful thing—she blushed.
What I wanted from Alice was modest and easy. Not to have her love me—I had no hopes of that—but to answer one question that had maddened me for years after her disappearance. Like the audience member who watches a magician take his silver dollar and make it vanish into a handkerchief, I did not need it back. I only wanted to know how she did it. I wanted to know where Alice had been all of these secret, hidden years.
She was still talking: “You know, I don’t think I want this tea. It’s not enough of a vice. Now’s the time to indulge in a vice, don’t you think? After something horrible.”
“I don’t have many vices.”
“That’s because you’re a man. Everything is a vice for a woman. They don’t have wine here, do they?” She raised an arm and caught a waiter, demanding a glass of wine. They did not serve wine; it
was a tea shop and, besides (his face seemed to say) she was a lady, and it was only the afternoon. Alice seemed annoyed.
I said, “We can go somewhere else.”
Her eyebrows worked in a private fury. “No, forget it. Since no one knows me here, and since you’re a complete stranger, I’m going to have a cigarette. Don’t be scandalized, I’d think less of you. And don’t tell my mother.”
“I don’t know your mother, so I won’t.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, and I lit her cigarette. It was then she noticed my lighter, something Hughie had given me long ago, and its engraving of a lily pad. “Is that from the Conservatory of Flowers?”
I fidgeted with the lighter and slipped it into my vest. “I—I suppose so. It was a gift.”
“Hmm, the old conservatory. Do you know, is the Victoria Regina still alive? Does it still bloom?”
“I haven’t been in a while.”
Alice looked into her tea and her expression stilled completely. She said, very quietly, absolutely to herself, “I’ve been gone so long …” Then she retreated into a place in her mind where I could not follow. With that look on her face, she was indeed a stranger.
I was not saddened by how Alice had changed. Any of her former lovers might have looked at this beauty grown from fourteen to thirty-two, full of such strange and pensive expressions as this one, and felt a watery sadness at what was lost. But I felt no sadness; I was different. I knew more than the easy aspects—her eyes, her voice, her joy—that time leaches from the body: I knew the ominous little cough she gave when she was bored; I knew the smell of the anise seed she used to cover her cigarettes; I knew the tremble of her three visible vertebrae when an idea stirred her; I knew the flutter in her eyelids that meant annoyance at some stupidity; I
knew the tears that came to her eyes the instant before an outburst of laughter; I knew her quivering night-cries, her bathtub operetta voice, her bitten fingers, and her snore. The things I knew, the Alice I knew, could not be touched by time.
“It’s strange. You’re very familiar,” she said. “Are you from here?”
“I’ve lived here my whole life.”
Her eyes widened. “Don’t tell me it was South Park …”
“Not South Park,” I lied. “The Mission.”
With no forethought at all, some part of my brain had decided to erase South Park, Grandmother, Father and Mother and Mina and the rest of it. I did it instantly, with no regret. In fact, it was with great relief that I murdered Max Tivoli. It was my first homicide. Alice, of course, did not notice a thing, not even the bloodied hands clasped so calmly before her on the table. Instead, her face brightened at my words.
“The Mission! Did you know a boy named Hughie Dempsey?”
“Not that I recall.”
There, my best friend was gone as well. Corpses were amassing at our feet.
“Oh.” She sniffed and shook her head. “Well, I didn’t go to the Mission much, so I don’t think it was there.”
Alice, you were always so bright and careful in your dealings with the human race. Didn’t you recognize that old neighborman who smiled at you each afternoon as you came back from school? The old fraud who made you Sabbath tea? The bearded humbug who held you to him one night and who tasted, I would guess, like tobacco and rum? I suppose that, for all you knew, the old horrible man was dead or dying in his room in South Park. Before you in the tearoom was no one at all.
“And yet you seem so …” she continued dreamily.
“You said you’d been gone so long. You used to live here?”
“I was born here.”
“But you moved away.”
“Yes,” she said, holding her cup gently, as if to protect it. “We moved away when I was fourteen.”
“Fourteen, that’s young,” I said.
A little chuckle. “Yes, it was.”
“Where did you go?”
“Pardon?”
I could feel the pulse of my heart in my neck. “
Where did you go?
”
Alice seemed to notice my too-loud voice. All these questions, from this oddly familiar stranger. Then, because of course it could not possibly matter, she told me.
But all I said was: “Ah, Seattle!”
“Maybe that’s how I know you. It’s a small town.”
“No, I’ve never been farther than Oakland. I’ve always been intrigued by Seattle.”
This amused her. “Intrigued by
Seattle?
”
“Why did you go there?”
She considered this and held her fingers tightly under her chin. There was a stain of longing in her face that she blotted in an instant. “Family,” she said. “My uncle ran a supply business. We ran all the supplies for the Klondikers, maybe you’ve heard of us. Cooper & Levy.”
Cooper & Levy. Did she even realize that her hiding place was posted in every opera house and evil bar for her foul villain to see? And I had seen it. I had noticed that maddening name Levy shouting at men nightly along the Barbary Coast, but I’d ignored it. Only in the tea shop did I see that I’d been given—plastered before my very eyes—the one great clue I sought. I had merely been too sad to see it.
I said simply: “I’ve heard the name.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Well that was us.” Eyes on her tea.
“Tell me more.”
Alice plucked another cigarette from her reticule and put it to her lips haughtily. She examined my face as I held out a flame. She said, “I’ll tell you for as long as this cigarette lasts, and then I’ll have to go.” She put her lips to the cigarette, the cigarette to the flame, and when she was done she told me all that had happened in the years she spent without me:
“I went to Seattle with my mother. The boat pulled up and the town was smoking. Just tents and scorched buildings, most of the place had burned down a week before—it’s that kind of town. My uncle’s shop was fine, and we bought into his business just in time for the Alaska gold rush. Let’s see if I can still do it.” Then her tone descended into a standard shopkeeper’s recitation: “Cornmeal, dried whole peas, lentils, lanterns, lye, summer sausage, and sleds for sale.”
“No dogs?”
She laughed. “No, they had to find their own dogs. Thousands of men gave up their lives to come there, ready to dig up some gold, all those dreams, it was … well, it was boring. I used to hide in the back on the grain sacks and read, or I’d sneak out with my best friend, the two of us on one of those bone-shaker bicycles—one time we came across a cougar down from the hills! Green feathers in his mouth like he’d eaten someone’s pet parrot. I remember thinking, That poor parrot, still he’s seen more of the world than I have. Mostly it was dull, though, rainy and dull. I was lucky to meet my husband, that’s when I stopped working at the shop. A few years ago we sold the business to the Bon Marché and Mother and I came back.”
The cigarette was a third gone now, faintly crackling. I noticed a detail she had left out. “What about your husband?” I asked.
“He didn’t come.”
“Why not?”
“He’s been dead five years now.”
“You’re a widow. I’m sorry.”
She fingered her mother’s brooch and I saw what I had been too blind to notice—the black skirt, black-bordered handkerchief, jet earrings—that she was a widow many years out of mourning. My heart came alive within my chest.
“He was a professor at the university. Because of him, I saw a little of the world. Turkey, China. And I went to college.”
“You’ve been to college?”
All of a sudden her entire face tensed angrily and she drew back. “You think no woman ever went to college?”
“No, it’s wonderful!”
Coldly: “My cigarette’s almost out.”
I smiled humbly and urged her to talk again, in this brief time while I had her. “Tell me about your husband before it’s out, tell me, please.”
She said it was tuberculosis that killed him. Professor Calhoun, her mustachioed husband, respected anthropologist, dead by the age of forty. There was an ordinariness about the way she said this that shocked me, gave me a sick hope, but then I realized it was something she had been saying almost every day for five years. She wore his hair in that brooch on her lapel; she prayed for him at temple; she was still his loving widow, but time had at least taken the tremble from her voice.