The Book of Speculation (19 page)

“I didn’t think he would offer.” The counter is cold when I put my hands against it and lean next to her. I promise to pay it back, but know the words are empty when the amount dwarfs everything. If Frank pays, if he helps at all, he’ll own me.

She says, “That isn’t the point.”

“You’ve seen the house. I don’t have anything.” With each word she feels further away.

“You know,” she says, “you could leave here. Find a job somewhere else. Colleges have rare book rooms, D.C. has archives all over, museums.” Her voice softens. “I could help.”

“I’ve been looking,” I say. “There’s a manuscript curator position in Savannah. It’s an interesting place, a specialty library with museum and historical society ties and everything. They’ve got a canoe trip diary from 1654 that describes the entire coast almost untouched. It’s far, but—”

“Georgia,” she says, establishing the miles in two syllables.

I can’t ask if she would go, though I can see her bent over a book, curled up in the rumpled sheets in an apartment—ours. I can imagine waking up, her back pressed to me, without fear of a collapsing ceiling.

In the dining room Enola swears. A quick look shows her mopping up water. Too thin. Pale. Jumpy.

“It’s my parents’ house.”

I can see Alice’s spine stiffen. “I could say things, you know. I could say things so he wouldn’t give you anything. I could tell him that you fucked me and nearly got me fired. He wouldn’t give you a cent.” She tamps down the grounds with a small weight. It makes a soft thudding sound. Threatening.

“You could.”

“I won’t,” she says. She fills the percolator and plugs it in, and then she’s beside me, her back to the window. “Because I’ve known you my whole life, and there are things you don’t do to people you’ve known your whole life. Keep that in mind.” The sides of our hands touch, the little fingers lining up in a row. “If you take his money, it’s because I let you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. I really am sorry.”

“I’m not hurt,” she says. “And I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

Her presence is like a heartbeat. I feel her skin on mine, electrons and molecules glance each other until pieces of her become me. I wish I could do dinner at La Mer again and not have picked up Enola’s call. I wish I hadn’t taken the books, that we’d never left her apartment, that I’d said something years ago. “You sat behind me in French class,” I say. “Whenever I try to remember French I can hear you conjugating verbs. I hear you all the time.” Her accent had been good. Madame Fournier used to make her recite in front of the class.
“Je suis. Tu es. Il est. Elle est. Nous sommes.”

“Stop,” she says, shaking her head. “I like you, Simon, but I’d rather not look at you right now.”

I pull my hand back from the counter. “Sorry. I just—”

“You’re taking advantage of my father. He’s never gotten over your parents. You have no idea of the years of stories I’ve listened to about Paulie and Dan, Dan and Paulie. You think about how they haunt your life; it never occurred to you that they haunt mine.”

For the first time since we began talking, Alice looks at me. She’s calm, matter of fact. “So when you take his money—because you will—just know that you’re taking it from an old man who’s fixated on his dead friends. You’re asking a lot from me.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You do. You can leave.” She takes a deep breath. “I think maybe you should leave. Maybe I should. I thought—forget it.”

The bubbling of the percolator fills the silence. I stare at the column of her neck; she holds herself so straight that she makes me feel warped.

“I’d like you to leave me alone now.” She says it sweetly and that makes it worse.

I slink back to the dining room, where Enola is telling Leah about the animal tents at the Florida State Fair and Doyle, thankfully, is using his fork. Alice returns with the coffee as though nothing happened and the rest of the meal is unremarkable, except for my shame. Dinner is over when Leah sighs and clears the coffee cups. Alice rises to help and Doyle and Enola scoot for the door.

“Simon, stay,” Frank says before I can leave. “Have a beer with me.”

“No, no. I need to get back.” I say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” yet I wind up on the porch, holding a beer. Our shadows are framed by the silhouettes of horseshoe crabs drying on the railing.

“I don’t feel right about taking your money, Frank.”

“What else are you going to do? Can’t let the place fall in.” He takes a pull from his bottle. “You can pay it off like a loan.”

I don’t want to talk about money anymore. “Enola said you gave her my mom’s tarot cards.”

“Did I?” He scratches his head.

“Right before she left. You gave them to her.”

“Ah, I remember. They weren’t the sort of thing you’d expressed interest in. Enola came by, said she was traveling like your mom did.” He drinks. I do the same. “It felt like giving them back to your mother.”

“Why didn’t my dad have them?”

“Paulina and I were close, I was just as much her friend as his. I knew her one day longer than your dad. I’m the reason they met.” He taps his foot,
tap, tap, tap,
twitching out the story. “It was the hottest damned summer and nobody was taking boats out because the sun would bake you until your skin split. Her show was in town, I forget the name of it.”

“Carnival Lareille.”

“Lareille, that’s right. Don’t get old—you hit my age and you’ve forgotten more than you’ve ever learned.” He drains his beer and looks across the street to where lights pulse in the front room of my house. Doyle at play. “I figured I’d have a drink, cool off on some of the rides, maybe meet a girl. I saw a line outside this tent where you could get your fortune told. I thought what the hell, and there she was. Prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Your mom, she was striking.”

I’ve heard my father’s side, how Frank had taken him to the show the next night, how that night Mom had been a mermaid in a glass tank, holding her breath for impossible lengths of time, how he loved her at first sight.

“What did she tell you?”

“That I’d find a good woman and that my life would settle,
even though you long to drift like a boat,
she said. She was good.” He stands up, stretches his back, and sets his empty bottle on the porch railing. “Your mom gave me the cards before,” he gestures to the water. “I guess it was her way of saying goodbye. Wish I’d known.”

She’d told me goodbye and I hadn’t known either. “Was she acting strange at all?”

Frank coughs. “Strange was relative with your mother. If she’d seemed different to me or your dad we would have tied her down to stop her.” He looks at my beer and grunts, “Drink up. I’ll show you the shop and we’ll talk about you paying me back. I’d straight up give you money, but the wife would murder me if Alice didn’t skin me first. Something going on with you two? She looked ready to kill you all night.”

“Not that I know of.” Not anymore. He steers me behind the house to the large barn that serves as his workshop.

I’ve looked at the workshop but have never been inside; it was off-limits growing up. The walls are lined with tools, vises, lathes, saws, and things I can’t begin to know the purpose of. At the end of the barn are two drafting tables. Frank leans against one. In the heart of the room a boat’s skeleton waits for its skin.

“Sloop?” I ask, shrugging at the frame.

“Too small for a sloop. A dory, or will be.” He makes a note on a drawing. “You’ll learn. You can work the money off with me, do some of the first part of the finishing, the first sealing coats, nothing detailed. If you do get a job you can work weekends.”

Alice must have told him I was let go. I told her nothing about the house or the money—I broke more rules than she did—but still, it was my failing to disclose.

Behind the drafting table, just past his head, is the most extraordinary thing: a huge dark purple curtain that hangs the full length of the wall. By all appearances it’s velvet. Something about it reminds me of sketches from the book. Curtains drawn over a cage, drapes on the inside of a wagon. “Where’d you get that?”

“What?”

“That’s a theatrical curtain.” At the bottom there’s a chain to weigh it down and seal out light. “Seems out of place in a workshop.” I look around the barn and see a series of small portraits in oval frames hanging in the open wall spaces. Relatives? There’s something vaguely Slavic about them, the moustaches on the men, the curved shape of a young woman’s brow.

“It keeps the glare off the drawings in the afternoon and shuts out drafts in the winter. Was in a box of stuff that belonged to my dad. The pictures were in there too.”

“Family heirlooms, then.”

He shrugs. “Guess so.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“Nope. I never really went in for heirloom stuff. Things are things, you know? I just like them. They make the place look a little nicer, keep it warm.”

There’s a knock on the barn door, Leah with more beer. I refuse but a bottle winds up in my hand. Leah leans in to kiss her husband’s cheek and brush sawdust from his shoulder, gestures made soft by habit. Out one of the windows I can see the Sound all the way to the harbor. The lights from the ferry amble toward Middle Ground Light and eventually Connecticut. People spend their entire lives moving back and forth over the same water, moving but staying.

When my bottle thumps on the drafting table it startles the both of us. A wide sweat mark swipes across the drawing, blurring the ink. I look back up at the curtains. They couldn’t be the same ones, of course. But they’re striking, individual, but very familiar. My eyes come to rest on the oval-shaped painting of a bearded man. His gaze is unsettling. I should check in the book for him, just in case. If only to prove that I’m imagining things.

“The paintings, are they relatives?”

“Might be. Don’t really know. Like I said, they were in a box with the curtains and some of my dad’s things. They were probably my grandfather’s. I think I remember seeing them at his place when I was a kid. He kind of liked to accumulate things.”

The bearded man stares back at me, demanding I look at him, look for him. I’m sure I’ve seen that face staring out at me from a page. “Frank, I’m sorry. I need to go.”

Enola and Doyle are lying on their backs in the sea grass by the bluff, looking at the stars. Enola has one hand behind her head, and the other tucked away in her pocket. The cards again. They don’t notice when I walk past.

*   *   *

The book is on my desk, closed as I’d left it. I start at the beginning, methodically searching for sketches, here a drawing of a tiny horse, one of what looks to be a llama, and there, the frame of a skeleton—the very beginning of a tarot card. A note about shoes and boots, costuming, a wig—and there they are, the curtains—draped over what looks like an animal cage with a young boy sitting inside. Not ten pages after, sketches of a wagon interior, hung with small oval paintings. And after, yes, there is the painting of the bearded man—Peabody’s rendition. I’ve seen the actual thing; it’s more eastern, the book’s sketch vaguely anglicized. An interpretation.

Churchwarry picks up and asks me to wait while he gets rid of someone on the other line. “Dante fanatic. Insufferable man. Thinks he’s my only customer,” he says. “Did you get
Binding Charms
?”

“Yes,” I say, and thank him. “That isn’t why I called, though. I just had the oddest experience. My next-door neighbor, who I’ve known my entire life, has things I’ve seen sketches of in the book.”

“You sound terrible.”

“I’m a little shaken, I just…” The words don’t come.

“What things?” Churchwarry asks. I imagine him pacing the shop. I can hear him prop the door open so that his wife can call down if she needs him. He walks toward what I imagine is the back of the shop, where the shelves are fuller, heavy like the reference shelves at Grainger, and muffle the sound of our conversation.

“Theatrical curtains, portraits.” I hear his chair pull back. Books being moved.

“One curtain looks very much like another, no?”

“They’re the same curtains, Martin, I know it. And the portraits—faces don’t change.”

He pauses for a moment. “Did he say how he got them?”

“He said they were his father’s, possibly his grandfather’s. Who did you say you got the book from? Whose estate?”

“John Vermillion, if I remember correctly. I wouldn’t put much stock in the name, though. As I recall from the rest of the auction, he was a consummate hoarder. There was no rhyme or reason to the lots. Quality books were butted up against ruined paperbacks. Pulp. A total nightmare. We were all bidding on pure speculation.”

“I just—I found out that my mother gave away her things, like she meant to kill herself. I saw the curtains and the paintings he had—my neighbor. My mother, she gave things to him, to the neighbor, to Frank.” It could be so simple. Suicide might run through my family with a genetic marker as clear as blue eyes. Simple and horrifying. Enola, on the lawn with her Electric Boy, carrying in her a thing I am powerless to stop.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and there is kindness in it. “I feel like I may have stirred a pot I shouldn’t have.”