The Book of Speculation (6 page)

“It isn’t fair,” she says after we’re buckled in and driving back toward Woodland Heights. “You always looked after her. I know you did. Then she leaves and expects you to just drop everything when she calls.” She seems prepped and ready to go on but stops herself with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I’m drunk.”

I smile. “No, you’re not. You’re right, but it’s just how things are.”

“Well, it’s shitty.”

“Sometimes.”

We linger in the doorway to her apartment. I apologize again and promise to pay her back for dinner. She says not to worry about it. Her skin blanches where her hand touches the door frame.

“I need coffee,” she says. “Would you like coffee?” And then, because she’s complained about my family for me, bought me dinner, worn a dress, because we may not have jobs in a few weeks, because of the way her eyes close when she says coffee, and because she’s Alice and in that lives the difference, I take the risk and lean in. Her lips are soft, inviting. At this too, she’s better than me, perfect.

Her bedroom is a mix of practical and whimsical. An imposing hardwood desk lines a wall. Clean, square shelves are filled with perfectly organized books and pictures. Near her window hangs a small mobile made of periwinkles, broken moon snails, and tiny horseshoe crab shells—the sort of thing only a beach girl could love. It suits her. The bed is another matter. A mountain of pillows, different fabrics, sizes, different shades of pink. I start to laugh, but then her hands are on my shoulders, pushing me back, and falling on it is wonderful.

There are snaps and wires, zippers, hooks, and then there is skin, and yes, the freckles on her breasts are every bit as intriguing as the ones by her navel, her neck, and between her thighs. And then there is breath and touching, tracing all the places we’ve hidden from each other. Accustomed to whispering, even our laughs feel hushed, secret. Her hand runs down my back.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

Then there is the taste and feel of our bodies.

*   *   *

Alice sleeps on her side with her knees almost to her chest. She’s fallen asleep this way sunbathing on the beach since we were children. I lie awake, thinking about Enola’s call, the book, the house, and my job. I can’t keep the house if my job goes. Despite what I told Frank, I don’t want to sell, not when my parents are in the walls. I need money. Time. I need to call Liz’s leads. On the desk there is a photograph of Alice as a teenager, holding a giant bluefish. She’s thirteen or so, back when she had bangs. Frank must have taken the picture. Though he’s not in the photo, I can see him staring out at me from her grinning face. I should put my arm around her, but it feels a little strange. I slept with Frank’s daughter.

“You awake?” She sounds drowsy, happy.

“No.”

“Liar. I can feel you tapping your fingers on the headboard. You’re such a twitcher.”

“Sorry.”

“You worrying?”

“No.”

“You’re the worst.”

“I don’t want to keep you up. You look nice when you’re sleeping.” She looks perfect.

She nuzzles her cheek into her pillow and cracks a dark brown eye at me. “Thanks. You know, you don’t have to stay.”

“I want to.”

“I don’t know if I’m ready to see your breakfast face. Go. It’s okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I know where you live.”

*   *   *

I take the turn by the salt marsh hard and the Ford’s wheels spin. Here’s the heart-in-throat feeling I’ve been avoiding. I’m about to lose my job. And the house—I’ve slept with the daughter of the only person who might have been willing to lend me the money to fix it. I don’t feel as badly about it as I should. I don’t feel badly at all, which is worse.

Back in the house I know it’s pointless to try to sleep. It doesn’t take long to find the slip of paper—it’s still in the dresser drawer. There are three names on it: my grandmother’s; a second, Celine Duvel; and there in round, wide cursive is Bess Visser. Alice was right. I can’t resist a puzzle.

The light from Frank’s porch is almost enough to fill the living room. He’s hung up a horseshoe crab shell to dry on his porch railing. It swings a little in the breeze. I think of Alice, alone in bed, and wish I’d stayed.

I write the names in a notebook and set it on my desk. Tomorrow I’ll dig up what I can on them. Then I list every name I’ve ever heard mentioned from my mother’s family—a pitiful handful. I open the book. The pages fall to a detailed yet crude sketch of a tarot card, a tall white building on a dark background rent by lightning. Below the sketch, delicately penned letters name the card the Tower. From a window in the tower, a man leaps, falling to the waves and rocks below.

4

Hermelius Peabody’s back was pressed against a wall shelf while his throat was half crushed by the forearm of a surprisingly strong Russian crone. His initial response to Madame Ryzhkova’s request had been negative, but he was rapidly becoming amenable to her position.

“An apprentice?” He coughed. “Madame, Amos is the most profitable Wild Boy I’ve encountered, not to mention that he is without speech. How precisely would you work with him?”

Ryzhkova made a noise that fell between snarl and squawk. “We will work well. The cards say it will be so.”

When Peabody protested, Madame Ryzhkova muttered a stream of Russian that sounded murderous. He’d always been somewhat frightened of her. She had simply appeared one day in New York City as he’d staggered from an inn on the East River wharves. She’d stuck her hand out of an alleyway, addressed him by his proper name, and said she would travel with him because the cards had decreed it. Though Peabody did not trust her, he couldn’t turn away someone with such a pronounced sense of theatricality. Within hours of installing her in a wagon, she’d transformed it into an exotic room of fabric, cushions, and scents that made the head spin. He was certain she knew her way around poisons; she’d once slipped a powder into his food after he’d refused to advance her wages toward a bolt of silk. “You cannot purchase what you have not yet earned,” he’d said. She’d smiled, and at eight o’clock sharp his guts had twisted, curling him up like a pill bug. The next three days were spent sweating in his wagon, shaking, until Ryzhkova appeared.

“Fortunate for you I know how to take pain away,” she’d said, shoving a handful of bitter ashes in his mouth. By sunset he was recovered. Peabody was no fool; Ryzhkova received her advance that very night.

Not three hours after Ryzhkova backed him against the wall, Peabody told Amos the way of it.

“My boy, it is time for you to move on to better things.” He beamed at Amos, who sat on a footstool. Amos shifted nervously and turned his palm upward in question.

“Have no fear; you’ve not done anything wrong, Amos. You were in fact the best Wild Boy I’ve ever had. Therein lies the problem, you see?”

Amos did not.

“You are no longer a boy. To keep you a Wild Boy is to chain your potential.” Peabody ran a hand through his beard in thought. “You’ll find I’ve devised a most exciting opportunity. Madame Ryzhkova’s taken a shine to you. I believe she has need for an apprentice.”

Amos knew some of what Madame Ryzhkova did; her cards told tales people paid handsomely to hear. But there was an insurmountable obstacle to the arrangement: apprentices spoke. He put his hand across his lips and shook his head.

Peabody gently took Amos’s hand from his mouth. “It will be of no concern. I thought upon it and began to understand her reasoning: you will be a lure. I can think of few things more intriguing than a mute fortune-teller. Unspoken futures. You and she will find the way of it. Profits, my boy, just think of it! An abundance of profits.” Peabody slapped his small desk, jostling the inkwell. He tried mightily to ignore the look of terror that crept across his prot
é
g
é
’s face. “Come, now. Change is a wondrous thing. It was change that brought you to me.”

Amos looked at the cushion where he spent his nights, wondering if that would change as well.

“I could never tell you to leave,” Peabody said. “You may stay here as long as you wish. I would like that.”

The transition was noted by a line in Peabody’s book
: 19 June 1794. Wild Boy promoted to Apprentice Seer.

When Amos approached Madame Ryzhkova’s wagon, she opened the door before he knocked. Her hair was pulled back from her forehead by a dark green scarf knotted at the base of her skull. She smiled broadly; he could not remember ever having seen her smile. He blinked.

“Amos. Come in. I have much to show you and we are already behind.” She waved, and Amos observed her swollen, twisted thumb, how it turned sharply and bent away from the rest of her hand, and part of him latched on to this. He followed the crooked little woman into her lair and away from what he’d known.

Her wagon was surprisingly spare. There hung from its walls a few small paintings—swarthy men and an angelic young woman.

“My family,” she said, noting the direction of his gaze. “Father,” she pointed to a thickly bearded face. “Brothers.” Two younger men with Ryzhkova’s intense stare. “Katerina, my daughter,” she gestured to the young woman. “My beautiful Katya.”

The rest of the wagon held little beauty. Madame Ryzhkova slept on a rough mattress atop a traveling trunk. He imagined such a bed left her bones aching.

As if reading his thoughts, Ryzhkova said, “The seer is a blade. Too much softness dulls the mind. Silks and curtains are for guests.” He must have jumped because she laughed, a sound like wind through grass. “Peabody, he likes too much comfort. Yes, it is good you came here before he made you dull. Now, sit. Listen.”

Where Peabody’s face was full, Madame Ryzhkova’s was hollow, the skin pleated and rumpled. Her nose stood perpendicular to itself, a large protuberance turning its tip sharply downward. Her hair stuck out from beneath her scarf, iron wires pointing in all directions. Amos found her eyes fascinating; dark gray in color, he’d seen their like only in animals—the color of goats’ eyes before they rammed.

She pulled an empty crate into the center of the wagon floor and motioned for Amos to sit beside it. On it she placed a lacquered black box adorned with pictures in brilliant oranges and reds, each outlined with gold. Amos was drawn to a caged bird whose long tail feathers curled around the box’s edge.

“The firebird,” Ryzhkova said. “You like him, yes? You’ll like even better what is inside.”

She opened the box and revealed what looked to be a deck of playing cards. The back of each card was inked a distinctive deep orange. “Watch. Listen,” she said and tugged at an earlobe. She set the box on the floor and began turning the cards face up. Each flip of paper revealed a masterpiece—the tall figure of a woman holding a single sharp sword, the sun beating down on a field, a hand holding a star, all in meticulous detail. The old woman touched them with reverence.

When the crate was covered in cards she said, “I will tell you their names and you will learn their faces, how and where we set them. In this way we speak.” She pointed to the pictures and explained them just as Peabody had once explained people. “Fool is fool because of blind happiness. He does not see misfortune.” The card depicted a young man about to merrily walk off a cliff. “Pride before the fall. He is like a child. Like you.” Ryzhkova smiled. He looked away from her cracked, yellowed teeth to the card and the little dog that pulled at the Fool’s curled shoe.

“Dog means many things. Protector, enemy. It depends.” She talked for hours as her bent hands drew lines and crosses over the symbols. Deep in the night, she patted the crate and chuckled at Amos. “You listen well. We will make good work. I see you yawn. The tired mind does not hear well. To bed with you.” With a light kick to his shin, she shooed him from the wagon. “Tomorrow you will come again and I will teach.”

Ryzhkova instructed after shows, by candlelight. Rich red and blue fabrics were left hanging if she was tired, making Amos’s classroom a gentle chamber for watching, listening, and on occasion vanishing. Ryzhkova’s rhythmic speech lulled him until he became part of the cards, falling into them and letting his body disappear. When this happened, she pounded her boot on the floor and shouted a single guttural word. Once he reappeared she smiled, slapped his hand, and started anew.

Amos began to learn. He grew to love the Fool, saturated with yellow and orange—he liked the dog, how it at the last moment pulled its master to safety. He became accustomed to Ryzhkova’s voice; it reminded him of wind in trees and the days when he had run through forests. Over time he found that even when not in her presence her voice vibrated through him. On evenings between towns he watched Ryzhkova lay cards—a cross with a line down the side. Two cards set across each other, then one above and one below, one to the left and its mirror on the right. Four cards down the side. What was to come, what would affect it, what ruled at the moment, and the question’s outcome. She did readings for unvoiced queries, answering blank nothings.

“Chariot,” she said, and turned a card up on the makeshift table. A man on a throne, pulled by animals with human heads. Amos shifted, uncomfortable at the sight of the uncanny animal men. “Conquest and journey. Triumph. See? Man ruling over beast.” She rubbed her knuckles through his hair and clucked at him as if he were her child. “Paired with this card, makes much good.” She set another card at its side. “World, see?” She raised an arm as though gesturing to the sky. “Not the woman in center but all around the woman, yes?” He nodded, eyes focused on the dancing woman’s bare form and her knowing expression.