The Blue Taxi (44 page)

Sarie blinked. Something bad and odd had happened to her eyesight. What room was she in? Where was she, exactly? And how tall?
What
size
was Sarie Turner? Those two men on the floor seemed very far away. Small.
Apples
. What was Mr. Frosty saying? Indeed, which one was Mr. Frosty? Which one was Mr. Turner? She saw spots before her eyes, she
did. The room shook. They were both still on the floor. They clucked. They scratched at things.
Like chickens
, Sarie thought. “Spare parts? But, Mr. Frosty—” Sarie gave Gilbert a pleading look. “We are going to sell the baskets. And
the souvenirs. Gilbert? We were going to discuss it.” She touched her wrist lightly to her forehead, left her hand there for
a moment, bare palm out, like a miner’s lamp. “What
should
we need sparks
for?
” Below her, the two men’s outer edges, their red skins, faded and dissolved; they swelled, and filled the room. She shrank.
She found it difficult to breathe.

“Mrs. Turner?” “Sarie?” “Dear?” “Madame!” She couldn’t hear
them properly. Their heavy voices came to her as if through a long, dry metal drum. She held on to the doorjamb and reached
out for the piano, feeling that her legs had grown so long she might not manage to sit down without some clumsiness, a fall.
And she could not bear to fall.

“Spark plugs?” Sarie heard her own voice rise. “Why spark plugs for our baskets? For the
souvenirs?
”

The men came into focus once again, but they looked tighter, harder, more compact, than they had before. She looked from Gilbert
to the Frosty King. She decided that she did not want to sit.
I will stand right here over them
, she thought,
until they tell me what it means
.

A stillness took hold of the parlor. Both men stopped their laughing as though, without any warning, someone in the wings
had flipped a little switch. What were her eyes doing? Gilbert and the Frosty King seemed to Sarie suddenly immovable and
heavy. Two man-sized balls of lead. The Frosty King’s red face was taken over by a hotly mixed expression: something like
embarrassment, for Sarie, and something like annoyance, for poor dreaming, dreaming, silly, truthless Gilbert Turner. Gilbert,
who still thought Sarie was the finest-looking woman he had ever seen, didn’t realize how serious it all was. He made as if
to stand; said, “Sarie, look at it. Just look.” He held out his open palm, where the single plug was shining. But his wife
was like a statue.

The Frosty King had stopped looking at Sarie and was eyeing Gilbert strangely. He said, very softly, “Gilbert. Gilbert.” Kazansthakis
wanted to restrain him. He laid two fingers on Gilbert’s out-stretched arm like a person looking for a pulse, someone guiding
a blind man. This visit to the Turners’ had not turned out exactly as he’d hoped. “You didn’t tell your wife?”

Gilbert, silenced in mid-chuckle, turned back to his friend. It had not turned out as Gilbert had expected, either. He didn’t
know exactly where to look. He sniffed. All at once, his face felt very bare, too naked. Why was the Frosty King staring at
him so? Why wasn’t Sarie coming down to join them, laugh with them, to see the treasures in the box? Weren’t they just like
jewels? Weren’t they just another form of trinket?

Half to Kazansthakis, half to his still wife, he said: “It was a surprise! I was going to surprise her.” To Sarie he said,
“I was going to surprise you.”

The rest happened very quickly. The Frosty King stood up, downed his grenadine in a single gulp, wiped his mouth with his
own hand, and excused himself to Sarie. “Please come to the Frosty-Kreem sometime. My wife does ask for you.” He patted Gilbert
on the back to give him strength for what he imagined was to come and, without waiting to be shown down to the courtyard,
slipped into the stairwell, muttering, “‘Surprise!’”

Upstairs, loosed, Sarie had one of her
little tantrums
—though it was much, much greater than any in the past. Indeed, she took the news, it seemed to Gilbert, disproportionately
hard. Had she really thought that he was seriously at work considering what she’d suggested lightly only once? Or twice? What
was it, souvenirs? Was it knives or stones? What had she really said? Not much, he thought. No, she hadn’t told him anything.
She’d only made suggestions, after all, for what was to be
his
business. Why
was
she so upset? Would he not be in business principally for
her
, for
Agatha
, for
them?

But Sarie shouted at him. She threw the empty glass hard against the wall and shouted even harder when the clear thing failed
to shatter. She called him names in French. And eventually, she cried. She ran into the bedroom, where she slammed the door
and curled up on the bed.
Spare parts
, Sarie thought. And she said it to herself over and again until she couldn’t hear it anymore, could not cry any longer, and
finally fell asleep.

Outside, it was growing dark. In the silver light, farther down the road, before going to the movies, young men took young
women to the Frosty-Kreem, where Mrs. Frosty was still waiting for her husband and, resentful, was counting up the scoops
she’d doled so she could tell her man exactly what she’d done while he was doing God-knows-what-and-where. In Mansour House,
Bibi was stitching up the envelope with a sense of great things on the way. Nisreen woke up from a nap, came quietly into
the living room, and switched the lightbulb on to safeguard Bibi’s eyes. Farther down, in a different sort of dusk, Majid
stood on his balcony watering the jasmine. He had finished that new poem, called it:
Early on the Avenues
. His skin felt warm, and he began to think of Sarie, hoping she’d come soon. He was sorry to have missed her, wondered idly
how she had seemed to Sugra, what Sugra had thought. He heard Tahir in the parlor, moving, felt a lightness in his heart.
Like a father and a man.

Alone in his front room, Gilbert was exhausted. He was, he told himself, a small ngarawa rigger that has weathered a great
gale and must now recall its bearings. He closed the spark-plug box and pushed it up against the bookshelf, feeling that without
intending to he had done Sarie a great wrong. Shy, afraid, like a person stepping from a fragile house after a quake, he went
into the bedroom, where he kissed his wife’s closed eyes and noticed they were damp. He lay beside her fully dressed, listened
to her breathe. She still looked pretty to him, even in her sleep. A big, brave, muscled girl. Outside, in Kikanga and beyond,
buses heaved and rattled in and out of town.

Sarie stayed in bed for three long, deadly quiet days, rising to drink water and to pee only when she thought that Gilbert
wouldn’t see her. Agatha sat silently beside her on the floor and tried (although she couldn’t really) to read a novel she
had found under the bed, a thriller that Sarie had attempted, left, and forgotten to return. Gilbert, cowed first by Sarie’s
rage, then by the heady silence, came in now and then, wishing and not wishing that she would come awake. He didn’t know what
he would say. He didn’t bring her anything. He didn’t know what his wife needed, and, though he asked himself again, again,
he had no idea, really, still, what had happened in the parlor.

At first when Gilbert came to Sarie’s side, she had had the energy, the temper, to turn away from him. And though he wished
she wouldn’t, he had been slightly reassured by it, this usual angry sign. On the second day, she stopped moving at all. If
he came in and spoke to her, she simply looked ahead of her, right up at the ceiling, never—so it seemed to Gilbert—even blinking.
Once, she turned her face just slightly so that she was almost looking at him. But she wasn’t really looking, not at him,
or anything. Her blue eyes were enormous, and Gilbert walked away, backwards, feeling that she might stab or pierce him with
that aimless gaze if he should turn his back.
All this for a small misunderstanding
, Gilbert thought, amazed.
All this for a basket
. Sensing that the Frosty King, who knew and loved his own Mrs. Frosty with such ability and grace, expected Gilbert to take
care of his own household for a while, he did not go out to the Palm. Kazansthakis, Gilbert felt, had not approved of what
he’d seen.

He sought refuge in the books he had, for a whole month now, abandoned. The splendid
Sons of Sindbad
. He sat down, even put his legs up on the table, but quickly found that the new book
could not hold him. It was too enmeshed in
this
whole story, in the recent past, the
now
, in his hopes for the bright future.
The Clove Tree
, an account of silviculture in the islands, which he
had
read, several times, because it was so clear, fared a little better. Like
The Everyman’s Car Handbook
, this volume had photographs and drawings, and a list: things that could endanger a clove crop and those that could enhance
it. Diseases and their cures.

Afterwards, he went into the bedroom. Sarie’s stubborn silence, her refusal to take food, and her inability to speak made
Gilbert feel afraid. He also felt dismissive now and then.
Good God
. But the stillness that had overtaken Sarie and held her in its grip had also furnished Gilbert’s wife with a kind of special
charm.
She’s weak
, he thought.
She requires all of my attention
. In the mirror, he could see that he looked pink and that Sarie had gone sallow. She was losing weight. Her long face was
growing longer. How small she looked among those dirty, twisted sheets! When Gilbert laced his fingers in the damp mat of
her hair, which smelled, she let him, and she began to cry.

Later, in the quiet, Gilbert thought about what Hazel Towson had said before the Bank, about Sarie not having arrived somewhere.
Perhaps Sarie had been a little off, already, for a while.
She’s got a hard life
, he thought with sympathy.
I haven’t done my best
. And then, though it was quite impossible,
What if she’s pregnant after all?
The thought, which he pushed aside as promptly as he’d had it, made him nonetheless feel warm. He smiled into her scalp.
Far more injured than either of them knew, she let out a wail. “Sarie, Sarie, dear,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

Twenty-one

W
hen the Frosty King saw Gilbert next, he did not mention Sarie. He had, it seemed, decided to assume that Gilbert Turner must
be man enough to handle his own home, and the only thing he’d said had been encouraging and kind: “Once you’ve gotten moving,
Turner, things will be A-Okay and Tip Top.” He had winked, bought his friend a beer, and Gilbert had felt forgiven for an
error—one that he, in fact, still did not quite understand to
be
one, and that he had, in any case, not at all intended. But he did not resent the Frosty King for thinking he’d been wrong:
he liked feeling forgiven. Also, he did love Mr. Frosty and admired him too much to call up any anger or to argue with him
about what wives ought to be told. And, he thought, moreover,
If Sarie were like other women, then, yes, I might have told her. But she isn’t. Look at her, in bed like a stone. She isn’t
really normal
.

Believing that she was unlike any other woman and that only he clearly understood how unbalanced she was, he didn’t put a
lot of stock in the Frosty King’s reaction. Much more comforting and meaningful was that the Frosty King had also generously
forgiven Gilbert for not knowing right away what the packaged things were called.
Friendship
, Gilbert thought.

Kazansthakis, for his part, felt that once you undertook a thing it was foolish to turn back (he had in his own life tried
a great many odd things, knew the value of continual adjustment, and understood that people didn’t often know a lot until
they learned things on the way, because they had no choice). He was also implicated
now in Gilbert’s little business: he had relied for Gilbert’s benefit on some very valuable connections. There was, therefore,
pride at work in what he said—he couldn’t live with failure, not even from a distance, and if Gilbert Turner failed, Mr. Frosty
didn’t think he could envision endless evenings at the Palm again, things as they had been. He would, he knew, leave the man
behind. And so he hoped that Gilbert would succeed.