Madeleine set her glass on the old steamer trunk that served as coffee table, and with one finger described a circle around the rim. “Piers thinks they have a kind of power, a sincerity.” Under the stained glass floor lamp, both the burnished leather of the trunk and the burning amber of the scotch were not unlike the color of her hair.
“Is that right?” John was not proud to discover a twinge of jealousy: who was this Piers?
Madeleine nodded. As if she knew what he was feeling, she added, “I think so, too.”
She was speaking of Will Joiner’s box constructions. John had given them to her for her appraisal, or at any rate, given her the two Jess had brought back from Gordie’s a few weeks earlier, seeking John’s professional opinion.
At first he’d demurred. “The world of fine arts, and what I do,” he’d told Jess, “are pretty much apples and oranges.”
“But these are like sets, aren’t they?” she’d pressed, gesturing toward the boxes on the kitchen table. “I mean, what about all your models on the shelves by the washing machine?”
John’s old set models, dating back to his repertory and off-Broadway years, had long resided unceremoniously in the cellar, collecting beards of dust and freckles of mildew. He had not thought of them in a long time and was gratified to hear her mention them, to know they had won her notice. But it made him uncomfortable, too, Jess referring so casually to these most obscure objects, located in the nether regions of their house.
She’d been with the Ryries a mere fortnight at that point, and the effortlessness with which she fit in seemed to refute the prediction John had made last year, when Ricky was pregnant, that a fifth family member would strain their household. Jess had just . . . slipped in. Somehow, their small kitchen table accommodated her without feeling unpleasantly cramped. The extra demands on the upstairs bathroom occurred mostly when the rest of the family was at school or at work. Biscuit seemed unbothered by having to step over the air mattress every time she wanted access to her own bed, and although Paul had made an initial show of wariness, even he had settled into apparent comfort with having Jess around. She was . . .
ingrained
was the word that came to mind. She helped with dishes, folded wash, played Mancala with Biscuit out on the front porch, brought home treats from the bakery, watched
Iron Chef
with Paul in the den, and had long chats with Ricky at the kitchen table—mostly about pregnancy, it seemed to John, and impending motherhood; he could not imagine what this must be like for Ricky, a kind of torture, he would have thought, but he did not see how he could shield her from it when Ricky herself invited, even initiated, these talks.
John alone was less than sanguine about all the apparent harmony. He could not escape the feeling that it was a subtle indictment. Anyone who fit in so naturally, so easily, must inherently belong; it seemed proof of her birthright, her due, of which she’d been robbed. He could not look at her without thinking of all the missing years. Not that she ever mentioned or even alluded to this. This made it almost worse: the fact that she hadn’t come to lay blame at his feet heightened his sense that he deserved it.
So when she’d brought home Gordie’s father’s boxes and a request for help, it had come as something of a relief, and John found himself eager to be of service. Still, he told her regretfully, he wasn’t qualified to assess them. But there was someone in his department who’d once co-curated a costume exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design (a bit of trivia he found himself remembering even as he stood before Jess’s upturned, hopeful face). Madeleine knew people in the art world, he told Jess, hoping it was true—gallery owners, critics, that kind of thing. “I could ask her to take a look at them,” he offered. “If you think that’d be okay with Gordie.”
Madeleine had, of course, been
only too happy to assist in any way, John, any way at all.
He’d brought them to work a few days later, delivered the boxes to her office and then braced himself for a ponderous, highly wrought, yet likely knowledgeable verdict. Madeleine had strolled around to the front of her desk and turned the boxes to face out so that she and John could study them together, side by side. Silent, frowning, alternately donning her Adrienne Vittadini eyeglasses and sliding them off and biting thoughtfully on an earpiece, she had considered each, at length, in turn.
The larger of the two, a wooden milk crate that had been painted white inside and out, housed a polar world in which snow was represented by cotton and soap flake and sequin, and at whose center arose an ice castle made of shards of glass, its turrets frosted with what looked to be sugar or salt. A tiny red and gold oriflamme flew from the uppermost spire. Close inspection showed it to have been made out of a postage stamp. Fixed to the back wall of the crate was a gold metal sun. Closer inspection showed it to be a whistle, fitted into a slat in such a way that the mouthpiece was accessible from the other side. If you blew it, it gave the low warble of a mourning dove.
The smaller, a cardboard shoe box whose exterior read “Smartfit Rugged Oxford 8.5,” was to John’s eye the more compelling. It held a stage (floorboards made of tongue depressors stained walnut brown, red velvet curtains, klieg lights made of film canisters painted silver) upon which a magician sawed a lady in two. It was at once crude and ingenious. Both the magician and the lady were sculpted of wire, stark yet lyrical. Lyrical, John considered,
in
their starkness. A small music box had been duct-taped to the outside of the shoe box, and a length of fishing line had been rigged so that when the music box’s handle was cranked, the magician really “sawed” back and forth, while the steel comb struck the pins on the revolving cylinder to plink out a thin melody he could not place, something vaguely operatic.
“They do have a certain power,” she’d said. “An integrity. Less Cornell, I’d say, than Finster-esque. Shades of Calder. Obviously, they’re highly representational.” The glasses went on and off again. “There
is
something . . .” She sipped in a breath and held it, tilting her head this way and that for many seconds before expelling it again. “Well, they’re mournful.”
This had been so far from anything he might have expected her to say that John had looked at her in some surprise, without the faintly sardonic smile he usually reserved for interactions with Madeleine. She seemed not to notice but stood looking at the magician’s box, a whiff of theatrics in her posture, yes, but under this genuine feeling; he believed he could see it in the heaviness of her mouth, the slope of her shoulders. He’d never before sought her opinion, let alone her favor, and felt sharply uncomfortable now, in light of her ingenuous willingness to grant it, about the way he and Lance had always treated her as fair game, the butt of so many unarticulated jokes.
Part of the implicit rationale for mocking Madeleine had always been her aggressively sexualized persona, the way she tried too hard, and the conclusion that she was therefore phony. Yet standing so close to her at that moment, seeing not just the bottle-red hair and the tight cashmere sweater but also the perimenopausal down on her cheek, the fine lines around her lips and eyes, the stray fleck of mascara on her lid, John realized he’d been wrong to construe phoniness. What was trying too hard but evidence of innocence, naïveté? He had been, in spite of himself, moved.
When she’d asked whether she might borrow them, take them into the city to show a friend, he’d agreed. That had been over a week ago. This morning she told him she’d had a chance to get her friend’s opinion, and—well, it was
très intéressant
; the friend was eager to see more; Madeleine wanted to pass on his comments in more detail; when would John be free? They compared calendars; no luck. How about sometime after work, then? Why not—tonight? Her place? It made sense; that way he could retrieve the boxes. She jotted down her address; he said he’d call to let her know when he was on his way. It was all so quick and easy, accomplished as though it were nothing, or rather, were something they’d done a hundred times, like agreeing to a date for the next faculty meeting. He knew from the very casualness with which they’d set up the plan that it was not nothing.
A dozen times that afternoon he’d thought about canceling. When Ricky got home from work wearing that brave, effortful smile she wore nearly all the time now and went on tiptoe to rub her nose against his beard. Again when Paul, without being asked, helped him wheel the garbage out to the curb. Again when Jess and Biscuit, standing in front of the living room sofa, folded the laundry together, singing, “There’s a Hole in the Bucket,” over and over and with great feeling, Jess taking the part of Henry and Biscuit the part of Liza. But then he and Ricky had fought while doing the dishes after supper, and she’d accused him—this was new—of not wanting the baby. She claimed she’d been right not to trust him, right to have withheld news of the diagnosis, and while he knew her logic was wrong—had tried explaining to her why it was wrong, why her presumption constituted the very core of their problem, that by not trusting him to respond as she might have wished, she’d robbed them of the chance to find out, together, how he would, in fact,
have
responded—still, her accusation stung more than she possibly could have known.
And now he sat on Madeleine’s gray velvet couch, in her unexpectedly appealing, unexpectedly self-possessed, uncloying little house, and she was leaning forward and asking him something as if for the second time. “. . . if he spoke Italian?” she said. “Your Mr. Joiner?”
“Pardon?”
“Do you know whether he spoke Italian?”
“Oh—no. Not my Mr. Joiner, anyway. Never met him. How come?”
“Because of the way he spelled the name of the song. Did you happen to notice?”
He had no idea what she meant.
“I’ll show you,” said Madeleine, rising. “They’re right up here.” She picked up her drink. He took his and followed her to the tiny hall.
How absurd, he was thinking.
Come up and see my etchings
. Was this really how it happened, how people had affairs; was it really so clichéd? In disappointment and excitement he swallowed the rest of his drink as they mounted the stairs. These were narrow and creaky and slanted drastically to the left. They led directly into a room with low sloping ceilings; only in the very middle could he stand up straight. A skylight showed milky clouds in a purple sky, its pane rattling slightly with a draft. Madeleine switched on the light. It was her studio, he saw, a candyshop mess of fabric and ribbon, artificial flowers and pots of beads, jars of buttons, silks dyed vibrant hues. In one corner a dress model. In another, an ironing board and two sewing machines, one modern, one antique.The walls were papered with costume sketches, some of them watercolored, and pictures torn from magazines or books. John was aware of an urge to lap up these details thirstily, even lasciviously; aware, too, that the urge stemmed as much from his lust for art as for eros. He could see through a dark doorway what must be the bedroom, but knew the room where he already stood was her most intimate space.
On a high drafting table under the skylight sat Will Joiner’s boxes. Madeleine switched on a gooseneck lamp and angled it toward the smaller, magician’s box. She pointed an eggplantcolored fingernail to where a slim wooden plaque, fixed with tiny gold screws to the front of the stage, bore the words O SOLO MIO. “See that?”
“Yeah. I hadn’t before.”
“It’s the song, you know, that plays on the little music box.” She sang a line, badly, then gave an embarrassed smile. “Well, you know. Only it’s supposed to be ‘O Sole Mio,’ S-O-L-
E
, the sun. The way he’s got it—I confess I wouldn’t have caught it; Piers is the one who pointed it out—it’s something like ‘My Loneliness,’ or ‘O Lonely Me.’ You have to wonder,” she said, turning to look at him, “if it was intentional. Or just a misspelling, a coincidence.” Her gaze flitted to and fro between his eyes in the unnerving, too-searching manner of a soap star. “What do you think?” She reached behind the box and turned the tiny handle, as languorously as earlier she’d traced the rim of her glass. The song ticked forth like seconds on a clock, one plucked metal note after another. Onstage the magician, in all his faceless wire melancholy, sawed. The lady lay rigid beneath the movement, a hollow, horizontal twining of unprotesting silver.
John watched, mesmerized, trying to work it out—not just the answer to the question, which seemed bigger, somehow, than Madeleine realized, as if her words were code for things beyond this room (they reminded him of something, what?); but trying to puzzle out, too, what the question itself revealed, not simply about Gordie’s dad, but about him and Madeleine and this rickety charmer of a house with the wintry-eyed cat downstairs; about Biscuit’s fire and Paul’s black eye; about Jess’s baby and Jess as a baby. Madeleine turned and turned the tiny handle. The song continued to come and it came to him then, what the words reminded him of. Intention or mistake. It was Ricky’s Or Game. Funny that Ricky, the quant, would play such a game, a game that demanded all things be stripped of quantifiable worth, a game in which all answers were permitted and no reasons begged or offered.
Sun or lonely?
he could hear her asking, just as clearly as if she’d said it aloud. And then:
We have to decide,
her voice in his mind as distinct as if she’d somehow come into the room, crept up these crooked stairs behind him and spoken, quietly but with great force of truth, her face lovely and worried and tilted toward his, awaiting his reply.
3.
S
ince Baptiste’s mother and sister had come to Nyack, the ban on his going home straight after school had been lifted.
“Yo, what was that anyway?” Paul finally asked. “The knife thing?”
“It happened to my Grann,” Baptiste explained.
“Someone broke in with a knife?”
“A machete. They killed her son.”
“Your father?”