The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories
Read The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories Online
Authors: Jonathan Carroll
Praise for
The Woman Who Married a Cloud
“Carroll’s stories are so richly imaginative, so intellectually daring, you don’t dare read the book end-to-end, so take it slow, a few stories at a time so you can savor them.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR
“Hopefully this new collection of short fiction will shine the spotlight on this incredible writer who deserves superstar status.
The Woman Who Married a Cloud
is dense with thoughtful, haunting tales.” —
San Francisco Book Review
“Readers discovering Carroll for the first time are the literary equivalent of treasure seekers finding a buried chest full of gold, explorers putting their feet to a new continent. . . . These are stories of considerable beauty and grace, even when they hold up the uglier aspects of humanity to closer view. Such things as infidelity, relationship breakdown, terminal disease and other loss are explored, and unimagined deeper truths revealed. In all his fiction, Carroll is a seeker, and a speaker of truths, attempting to find, rather than make, meaning from the randomness in which we live.” —
Edmonton Journal
“There are dogs and children and lost lovers populating these tales, to be sure, and there are fair doses of grief and sentiment in some of them, but mostly there are the lineaments of a vision so distinctive, and so morally grounded, that it hardly bears comparison with anything else in modern fiction at all.” —
Locus
Praise for Jonathan Carroll
“[Carroll is] one of the special ones, one of the few . . . He opens a window you did not know was there and invites you to look through it. He gives you his eyes to see with, and he gives you the world all fresh and honest and new. . . . He has the magic.” —Neil Gaiman
“I love Jonathan Carroll’s books. They are surprising and delightful as Rottweiler puppies—and they bite too.” —Audrey Niffenegger, author of
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Collected Short Stories
Jonathan Carroll
To Beverly—for all and everything
A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings
A Biography of Jonathan Carroll
O
N MY FORTIETH BIRTHDAY,
Lenna Rhodes invited me over for lunch. That’s the tradition—when one of us has a birthday, there’s lunch, a nice present and a good laughing afternoon to cover the fact we’ve moved one more step down the staircase.
We met years ago when we happened to marry into the same family: six months after I said yes to Eric Rhodes, she said it to his brother Michael. Lenna got the better end of
that
wishbone: she and Michael are still delighted with each other, while Eric and I fought about everything and nothing and then got divorced.
But to my surprise and relief, they were a great help to me during the divorce, even though there were obvious difficulties climbing over some of the thorn-bushes of family and blood allegiance.
They live in a big apartment up on 100th Street with long halls and not much light. But the gloom of the place is offset by their kids’ toys everywhere, colourful jackets stacked on top of each other, coffee cups with “World’s Greatest Mom” and “Dartmouth” written on the side. Theirs is a home full of love and hurry, children’s drawings on the fridge alongside reminders to buy
La Stampa.
Michael owns a very elegant vintage-fountain-pen store, while Lenna freelances for
Newsweek.
Their apartment is like their life: high ceilinged, thought out, overflowing with interesting combinations and possibilities. It is always nice to go there and share it a while. I felt pretty good about forty years old. Finally there was some money in the bank, and someone I liked talking to about a trip together to Egypt in the spring. Forty was a milestone, but one that didn’t mean much at the moment. I already thought of myself as being slightly middle-aged anyway, but I was healthy and had good prospects so, So What! to the beginning of my fifth decade.
“You cut your hair!”
“Do you like it?”
“You look very French.”
“Yes, but do you
like
it?”
“I think so. I have to get used to it. Come on in.”
We sat in the living room and ate. Elbow, their bull-terrier, rested his head on my knee and never took his eye off the table. After the meal was over, we cleared the plates and she handed me a small red box.
“I hope you like it. I made them myself.”
Inside the box were a pair of the most beautiful gold earrings I have ever seen.
“My God, Lenna! They’re
exquisite!
You
made
these? I didn’t know you made jewellery.”
She looked happily embarrassed. “You like them? They’re real gold, believe it or not.”
“I believe it. They’re art! You
made
them, Lenna? I can’t get over it. They’re really works of art; they look like something by Klimt.” I took them carefully out of the box and put them on.
She clapped her hands like a girl. “Oh, Juliet, they really do look good!”
Our friendship
is
important and goes back a long way, but this was a lifetime present—one you gave to a spouse or someone who’d saved your life.
Before I could say that (or anything else), the lights went out. Her two young sons brought in the birthday cake, forty candles strong.
A few days later I was walking down Madison Avenue and, caught by something there, looked in a jewellery-store window. There they were—my birthday earrings. The exact ones. Looking closer, open mouthed, I saw the price tag. Five thousand dollars! I stood and gaped for what must have been minutes. Either way, it was shocking. Had she lied about making them? Or spent five thousand dollars for my birthday present? Lenna wasn’t a liar and she wasn’t rich. All right, so she had had them copied in brass or something and just
said
they were gold to make me feel good. That wasn’t her way either. What the hell was going on?
The confusion emboldened me to walk right into that store. Or rather, walk right up and press their buzzer. After a short wait, someone rang me in. The salesgirl who appeared from behind a curtain looked like she’d graduated from Radcliffe with a degree in blue-stocking. Maybe one had to to work in this place.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes. I’d like to see those earrings you have in the window.”
Looking at my ears, it was as if a curtain rose from in front of her regard, i.e., when I first entered, I was only another nobody in a plaid skirt asking for a moment’s sniff of their palace air. But realizing I had a familiar five grand hanging off my lobes changed everything; this woman would be my slave—or friend—for life, I only had to say which.
“Of course, the Dixies.”
“The what?”
She smiled, like I was being very funny. It quickly dawned on me that she must have thought I knew very well what “Dixies” were because I was wearing some.
She took them out of the window and put them carefully down in front of me on a blue velvet card. They were beautiful and, admiring them, I entirely forgot for a while I had some on.
“I’m so surprised you have a pair. They only came into the store a week ago.”
Thinking fast, I said, “My husband bought them for me and I like them so much I’m thinking of getting a pair for my sister.
“Tell me about the designer. His name is Dixie?”
“I don’t know much, madam. Only the owner knows who Dixie is, where they come from ... And that whoever it is is a real genius. Apparently both Bulgari and people from the Memphis group have already been in asking who it is and how they can contact him.”
“How do you know it’s a man?” I put the earrings down and looked directly at her.
“Oh, I don’t. It’s just that the work is so masculine that I assumed it. Maybe you’re right; maybe it
is
a woman.” She picked one up and held it to the light. “Did you notice how they don’t really reflect light so much as enhance it? Golden light. You can own it any time you want. I’ve never seen that. I envy you.”
They were real. I went to a jeweller on 47th Street to have them appraised, then to the only other two stores in the city that sold “Dixies”. No one knew anything about the creator, or weren’t talking if they did. Both dealers were very respectful and pleasant, but mum was the word when I asked about the jewellery’s origin.
“The gentleman asked us not to give out information, madam. We must respect his wishes.”
“But it
is
a man?”
A professional smile. “Yes.”
“Could I contact him through you?”
“Yes, I’m sure that would be possible. Can I help with anything else, madam?”
“What other pieces did he design?”
“As far as I know, only the earrings, the fountain pen, and this keyring.” He’d already shown me the pen which was nothing special. Now he brought out a small golden keyring shaped in a woman’s profile. Lenna Rhodes’ profile.
The doorbell tinkled when I walked into the store. Michael was with a customer and smiling hello, gave me the sign he’d be over as soon as he was finished. He had started “Ink” almost as soon as he got out of college, and it was a success from the beginning. Fountain pens are cranky, unforgiving things that demand full attention and patience. But they are also a handful of flash and old-world elegance; gratifying slowness that offers no reward other than the sight of shiny ink flowing wetly across a dry page. Ink’s customers were both rich and not so, but all of them had the same collector’s fiery glint in their eye and addict’s desire for more. A couple of times a month I’d work there when Michael needed an extra hand. It taught me to be cheered by old pieces of Bakelite and gold-plate, as well as another kind of passion.
“Juliet, hi! Roger Peyton was in this morning and bought that yellow Parker ‘Duofold’. The one he’s been looking at for months?”
“Finally. Did he pay full price?”
Michael grinned and looked away. “Rog can never afford full price. I let him do it in instalments. What’s up with you?”
“Did you ever hear of a ‘Dixie’ pen? Looks a little like the Cartier ‘Santos’?”
“ ‘Dixie’. No. It looks like the Santos?” The expression on his face said he was telling the truth.
I brought out the brochure from the jewellery store and, opening it to the pen photograph, handed it to him. His reaction was immediate.
“That bastard! How much do I have to put up with with this man?”
“You know him?”
Michael looked up from the photo, anger and confusion competing for first place on his face. “Do I know him? Sure I know him. He lives in my goddamned
house
I know him so well! ‘Dixie’, huh? Cute name. Cute man.
“Wait. I’ll show you something, Juliet. Just stay there. Don’t move! That shit.”
There’s a mirror behind the front counter at Ink. When Michael charged off to the back of the store, I looked at my reflection and said, “
Now
you did it.”