Dressing Up for the Carnival (14 page)

“Do you remember when you and I signed our initial agreement two years ago this March?”

“Of course. A wonderful occasion.”

“Which we celebrated, you’ll recall, with dinner at Mr. Chan’s.”

“The most delicate shrimp dumplings I’ve ever had the pleasure of tasting. Little clouds, saffron-scented. We actually asked the waiter to refill the serving dish, didn’t we?”

“And do you remember the moment when the fortune cookies arrived?”

“How could I forget? Oh! Oh! Mine said, ‘Persevere and you will arrive at truth.’ ”

“You will also recollect that I refused to open my fortune cookie.”

“Because—”

“I knew I was disappointing you, but I am less willing than some to be drawn into the realm of the spurious and superstitious. You will remember that I was not what is known as a good sport that evening.”

“Come, now, Edith-Esther, no one really believes in fortune cookies.”

“You did, at least on that particular occasion. You decreed it was an omen. By perseverance you are going to arrive at the truth of my life. I believe you called it my ‘kernel of authenticity.’ ”

“Oh, yes. That!”

“I admit I was troubled by the phrase. Thinking to myself, what if there were no kernel, what then?”

“I never meant to put forward something you’d find disturbing—”

“I must have lost my rationality, at least for a moment. The fact is, I slipped my fortune cookie into my handbag and brought it home. Just before going to bed I opened it up.”

“Bless you, dear Edith-Esther. And what did it say?”

“It informed me that romance was about to enter my life.”

“Ah.”

“Now do you see why I reject all projections from beyond?”

“But your opening of the fortune cookie suggests, in a sense, your willingness to test your faith.”

“Absolutely not,” she said, draining her cup. “It suggests the opposite. A test of my disbelief.”

One day Edith-Esther’s biographer phoned earlier than usual. He was excited. He’d found something. “I’ve been rereading
Wherefore Bound,
” he said.

Wherefore Bound.
She tried to remember which one that was. Part of an early trilogy. The second volume? Or else the first. The air in front of her eyes filled for a moment with a meadow landscape, classic birds, wild grasses, a blur of shredded cloud. “Oh, yes,” she said.

“Remember Paul Sinclair? He’s the defrocked priest, the one who renounces his faith and—”

“Of course I remember.”

“Your strongest work, in the opinion of the more astute critics—that tiny, ever-diminishing troupe. What I mean is, the character of Paul Sinclair is densely and beguilingly ambiguous.”

“I wouldn’t say ambiguous, not at all, in fact.” She raised her cup to her mouth. Her coffee machine was broken. It was under guarantee, but so far she has been unable to find the required certificate. Meanwhile, she was making do with Nescafé, which she found bitter. “I’d say Paul Sinclair is very firm in his position.”

“The fact is, Edith-Esther, he repeats and repeats his disconnection with the Godhead.”

“Wouldn’t you say that shows—”

“He repeats himself so often that one begins to doubt his doubt. Don’t you see? Protesting too much? It seems very clear to me. Faith’s absence pressed to the wall and brought to question. And then he leads the hundred children on their march and later overcomes—”

“He never admits anything.”

“I was caught too by the symbolism of his lover’s name. Magdalena. Now, there’s a name with spiritual resonance, oh, my, yes, and—”

“I’ve always liked that name. I met someone a long time ago in Mexico named Magdalena, who became—”

“And there’s the place where you’re talking about Magdalena’s lips and you say—surely you remember—you say, ‘her lips form a wound in her flesh.’ ”

“I can’t believe I said anything as silly as that.”

“Wounds, Edith-Esther. The wounds of Christ? Surely that rings a ding-dong.”

“I must have been trying to describe the
color
of her lips, their redness, something like that. Perhaps they were chapped. Perhaps she was suffering from cold sores. I myself used to be troubled by—”

“You’ve always undervalued your own work, Edith-Esther. Rejected any sense of subtext, even when it’s staring you in the face.”

“I’ve never—”

“Why is it you’re always refusing comfort? Why?”

“I don’t know.” She really didn’t. Though perhaps she couldn’t help thinking, it was because she’d refused to offer her readers the least crumb of comfort.

“Never mind, forgive me. It’s part of your charm, Edith-Esther. It’s all right. It’s you.”

“My kernel of authenticity?”

“What a memory you have. You’re teasing me, I know, feeding me back my own nonsense.
Une taquine.
Even over the telephone wire, I can hear you teasing. But yes, it’s true. You’re exactly who you are.”

“Whoever that may be.”

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Edith-Esther. It’s me.”

“So early.”

“I’ve been up all night rereading
Sacred Alliance.
”

“Well”—she gave a laugh, rather a wobbly one—“I’m afraid you can’t describe
that
one as a critical success.”

“Because it was misunderstood. I mean that with all my heart. I misunderstood it myself, initially. That word
Sacred
in the title, it completely escaped me until last night, but now I see exactly the flag you were waving.”

“Flag? Waving? Oh, my. The title, I’m quite sure, was meant to be ironic. I’m certain that was my intention. It’s so long ago, though, and I just this minute woke up. I can’t seem to find my glasses. I know they’re here somewhere. Perhaps I should phone you back when I’m feeling more focused—”

“You remember when Gloria first meets Robin, page fifty-one, and admits the fact of her virginity to him, it all comes out in a burst, not surprisingly, but what she’s really saying is that she’s made a choice, a sacred choice, a declaration about where she ultimately intends to place her devotion—”

“I can’t imagine what I did with those glasses. I left them on the bedside table last night—”

“—and so, when Gloria and Robin go off to Vienna together and after that most unsatisfactory consummation et cetera, and when he goes out to arrange for a rental car and she locks herself in the hotel room—remember—and writes him a note—”

“They’re broken. One of the lenses. The left one. Smashed. I simply can’t understand it—”

“—and the key word in that note is in the last line, the word
intact.
She writes that she wants to keep their one glorious night together
intact,
but what she’s really saying is—”

“Oh, God!”

“Edith-Esther?”

She seemed to be stumbling across a width of unleveled ground, still wet with the morning’s dew. “I’ll have to phone you back, I can’t seem to—”

“—that she will choose celibacy, that her calling lies in the realm of the spiritual, and that she—Are you there, Edith-Esther? Hello? Hello?”

 

 

“Just a quick call. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“I was just lying here dozing. Feeling guilty. Thinking about getting up.”

“I had to know. Have you seen the book?”

“Which book?”

“
The
book. Your biography.
A Spiritual Odyssey
?”

“Oh.”

“Surely it arrived. Surely you’ve had a chance to look at it.”

“I’ve been a little under the weather. Just twinges. And my glasses are broken again.”

“You’re not seriously ill, surely.”

“Too many birthdays. As they say.”

“Not you, Edith-Esther. Not someone with your spirit.”

“My spirit? My what?”

“The cover. What do you think of the cover?”

“Very arresting. It turned out well. But the title—when did you decide to change the title?”

“Last-minute kind of thing. The publisher and I agreed it captured the direction your life has taken.”

“You took out that part in the second chapter about my first communion.”

“No, it’s there. I just gave it a slightly different interpretation.”

“I dropped the host on the church floor and stepped on it.”

“You may remember it that way, but in fact—”

“It’s just ordinary bread, I remember saying to myself. Store bread. White bread. I wanted to see if there’d be any lightning bolts.”

“You were very young. And probably excited. You dropped it by accident, and were so embarrassed you tried to cover it—the host, that is—with your foot.”

“There were no lightning bolts. I was sure there wouldn’t be. There was nothing, only a hard, accusing look from the priest.”

“He understood your embarrassment.”

“His name was Father Albert. You left out his name.”

“He could still be living.”

“He’d have to be a hundred and ten.”

“There might be a lawsuit, though. From the Church.”

“Because he liked little girls? Liked to tickle them under the arms and between the legs?”

“The implications, that’s all.”

“You should have asked me—”

“It isn’t what people want to hear, Edith-Esther. They’ve heard too much of that particular story in recent years. You’d be charged with a psychological cliché, I’m afraid.”

“Clichés are almost always true—have you noticed that?”

“I don’t want to see you represented as one of those insipid victims—”

“I saw early on that my particular kind was considered dangerous and needed to be locked up—in the house, in the convent. Did you know women were excluded from the Latin discourse?”

“Other times, other rhymes.”

“I haven’t been well.”

“You sound extremely weak, Edith-Esther. Your voice. Have you seen a doctor?”

“Do you think I should?”

“I can’t possibly know. But I can tell you one thing. The book is getting a positive response.”

“Really?”

“More than positive. The fact is, people are finding it uplifting.”

“Up-what?”

“I know you detest the word. And the concept. But some of us haven’t your strength. We need encouragement along the way.”

“I never meat to be uplifting. The last thing I wanted was to—”

“Of course not. But your example, Edith-Esther. All you’ve been through. The way you’ve translated your spiritual struggle into enlightenment.”

“My glasses are broken.”

“I’m praying that it hits the best-seller lists by next week.”

“You’re praying? Is that what you said?”

“Edith-Esther, are you there?”

No, she is no longer there. She’s walking down the long green hummocky field, which may not be a field at all but a garden in a state of ruin. Whatever it is, it slopes toward a mere trickle of a river, and this is disappointing, the reluctant flow of water over small white stones, and also the surprising unevenness of the terrain. Ugly, ugly, seen up close. She feels, or else hears, one of her ankles snap. Chitinous. Oh, God. Barbed weeds and rough sedges, they scratch her bare legs and thighs. Luckily she has the sense to squeeze her eyes shut and to make tight fists of her hands. Every muscle in her body tenses against a possible invasion of bees or whatever else might come.

Some years ago Edith-Esther’s pencil jar was stolen from her kitchen by an avid literary groupie. An image of this plain glass jar returns to her at the very moment she stumbles and falls. Probably, before its pencil-jar incarnation, it had held her favorite red currant jelly. Its glassy neck was comfortably wide, the more freely to receive her sharpened pencils and a fat pink eraser with old rubbed edges. There was a serious pair of scissors too, black-handled, and what else? She was forgetting something. Oh, yes. A decorative letter opener given to her by a friend—Magdalena? —with the Latin words RARA AVIS stamped on the handle. A rare bird.