Out on the street, Eve called the paramedics and showed them where to go before heading off to find the subway. She asked what hospital Micajah would be taken to, and phoned later that day to check on his condition. He was never admitted, they said. Evidently, the paramedics found nothing seriously wrong.
Was Bethany the contamination Micajah feared? She cannot believe that he had anything to do with her being there that night. He would not have shown Eve pleasure only to put it as a toy into Bethany’s hands. However Bethany got there, the truth is that she, Eve, cannot function in Micajah’s world. She is illiterate in reading its rules and the motives of the creatures in it. And she cannot bring him into hers. The interdimensional realm that popped up to cradle them is gone.
It’s over, she tells herself. Never, for the rest of her life, will she feel that way again. And the torture of knowing that is the price she has to pay for it. She was, she knows, touched by fortune: Larry left, Micajah appeared, the tumblers of a kind fate fell into place. And now they’ve been set spinning again.
The worst anguish is watching that soaring passion shrivel into the past, settling into a niche in her memory, like a niche in a mortuary. She fights back obliquely, by trying to recall the pain of childbirth—the only experience in her life that matches up to the intensity of what she felt with Micajah. But she can’t. Her memory is just a story, framed and tamed, something she knows she once felt: the rushing agony that barely ebbed before it shredded her again, the terror as the epidural needle punctured her spinal cord. It’s hardly more potent than if it had happened to someone else.
Time will sand Micajah down, too, into a story that even she may one day not entirely believe.
She’d imagined their relationship would end in a slow fade—no drama, just graceful acceptance, the two of them wishing each other well. She never thought she’d have to wrench herself away from him. This feels violent, brutal, as if she’s slowly strangling a helpless thing, pressing relentlessly until it stops kicking and the breath is gone.
She put Caller ID on her landline so she knows which calls not to answer. She ignored the barrage of texts and voicemails until it died away. The ink washed off her body, leaving faint stains. She thinks of them as a crash survivor’s scars.
She feels as if she has no skin, no protective membrane around her. The amount of pain in the world is more than she can bear. At times, she longs for Micajah so much that it feels as if her heart is being dragged out of her chest. She’s nauseous, can’t eat; then can’t stop eating, desperate to feel something other than empty. A constant headache rings the socket of her left eye. She thinks of it as the Micajah headache, blurring the sight of that eye and skewing her sense of perspective.
At night, half awake and shivering, she battles with the sheets, as if she’s snared in a net on a stony northern beach. During the day, she’s dim-witted and drowsy, nodding off at the wheel of her car, forgetting appointments, mangling the words for things. Sometimes she’s seized by an urge to scream, and she has to dig her fingernails into her palms to suppress it. Most of the time she’s deadened, all emotion wrung out of her.
All she’s ever lost—Larry, her brother Bill—has become an amorphous mass called Micajah. Bill used to play Bowie on his stereo, and the songs haunt Eve, as if Bill’s ghost is trying to communicate with her. Like Major Tom, she’s lost the connection. Lost all her tethers. Even the umbilical tether is gone. Allan is in another orbit, living his own life. Close as they are, he only waves as he floats by.
This is what she was afraid of when she shut down after Bill’s death and married safe, predictable Larry—that she would fling herself out too far.
She does not want to see friends, because she does not want to talk about Micajah, yet Micajah is all she wants to talk about. Talking about him will nail down their love affair as an objective fact. Her mind is tangled with him: all she knows of him, all she has thought about him, all she expects and suspects and rejects of him. But she is losing him a second time. Hour by hour the reality of what they had is disappearing, undermined and destabilized by the overwhelming presence of Bethany. Why was she there? Did he know she was coming? Is that why he gave me the quaalude?
I should find solace in work, Eve tells herself. But she can’t muster enthusiasm for other people’s gardens and civic plantings. Larry was right: her business was just a plaything. Anything that demands her full attention rips her mind away from its obsession. Anger rushes through the gash, like a bloody pulsing wound.
Her cell phone runs out of battery. She leaves it that way.
She finds it hard to get up in the morning, hard to make herself go to bed. One day she wakes at three in the afternoon, after dozing away most of the daylight hours, and pads downstairs to make coffee, try to function, get to her work. She glances out the window next to the front door and sees a familiar green Chevy Nova. Sitting on top of it, cross-legged, is Micajah.
She feels her insides leap into her throat, as if she’s going to vomit. She shrinks away from the window. Why am I hiding? she thinks. This is my house. He is stalking me. I should call the police.
But then, she thinks, I would have to explain it. And I cannot even explain it to myself.
She moves to a shadowed spot where she can see through the dining-room window without being seen from outside. Micajah is sitting just as he was before, gazing down the street rather than at the house. She wonders how long he has been there. All day? There are no lights on and the garage door is closed, so he cannot tell if she is home. She wonders if he rang the doorbell, and maybe she was so deeply asleep that she didn’t hear it. That’s hard to believe; the doorbell is loud and jangly, so that she can hear it even if she’s at the far end of the backyard. No, he didn’t ring.
She watches him, as resigned and quiet as someone sitting shiva by a deathbed, and understands that this is the last effort, the one that has to be made when all hope is lost. He is expecting nothing from it. This is his strange sense of rectitude, an old-fashioned belief that something truly important must be done in person. He must offer himself; she must reject—not a phone call or an email, but him. If he gets no response from her, whether because she is ignoring him or because she is not home, he will not be back.
He’ll stay until nightfall, she guesses, correctly. Then he will go.
A week passes, then another. Debt collectors’ letters are starting to arrive. She lets the envelopes pile up unopened. Driving, doing necessary errands, she zones out and finds herself in front of Allan’s elementary school, or the dental clinic she used to go to, or the office that used to be Larry’s.
Making her way home along streets made unfamiliar by new development, something catches her eye: a craft store. An impulse seizes her. As she swerves her car across a lane of traffic into the parking lot, the driver behind honks angrily. To her own surprise, she’s laughing.
When Eve finally recharges her phone, it pings crazily with texts and missed calls and voicemails. A few days pass before she builds up the courage to check them.
Eve, my dear. It’s Barbara, Micajah’s friend. I have something of yours. How do I get it to you?
Yann didn’t say whether he’d repaired the instrument or abandoned the job, Barbara tells Eve when she returns the call. They make a date for Eve to collect it. Come soon, Barbara says.
The Long Island Expressway is a skating rink, flooded by the August rain. Eve peers through the windscreen, barely able to see even with the wipers going full blast, and pulls into a lay-by to wait out the storm. She tries to smother her hopes and stay realistic as she sits in her parked car, rain sheeting on the glass. Almost certainly, Yann has not touched it. Even if it could be restored, who knows what damage he saw in Micajah, for which he must surely have blamed her? It would bolster his judgment of her as a silly woman who picks up pretty things and disposes of them with no care for their souls.
In the aftermath of the storm, Barbara’s house looks windswept and lonely. Water drips from curls of peeling paint. Eve notices something she missed before: the cliff the house stands on is crumbling away. In a decade or two, the house will fall over the edge.
She knocks, but hears no reply. She tries the latch. The door is unlocked, so she enters.
The downstairs rooms are empty and cold, and there’s a smell of damp wood where the windowframes leak. Barbara’s spirit is everywhere: in the needlepoint cushions, the weathered silver driftwood holding shells in its hollows, the scrimshaw scattered on tables and windowsills. Eve smiles, remembering Barbara’s bawdy joke and her wish that it was true.
She climbs the stairs and finds Barbara in bed, wrapped in a cardigan and a ragged cashmere shawl even though the room is hot. It has the sweet smell of sickness. Propped against pillows, Barbara is smaller than Eve remembered her. She looks frail.
“You should have told me not to come,” Eve says. “Although, now that I’m here, at least I can look after you a bit.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need looking after. I have a dread of being nursed. Really, I’d rather die, I’ve lived long enough anyway. But thank you.”
Barbara’s eyes are still bright and her voice, though hoarse, has energy in it.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t the big one. Obituarists won’t pursue you as the last person to see me alive.”
“Toss the cat off that chair, and sit down and talk to me.”
The cat mewls in protest and stalks away as Eve settles into a low armchair upholstered in faded blue velvet.
“I won’t ask you what happened between you and our friend. It ought to be of interest only to the two of you. All things have a lifespan, so unless it was untimely murdered, we needn’t mourn.”
“It wasn’t,” Eve says. “The end was strange, and sudden. But I think you’d write it up as natural causes.”
Barbara nods. “Micajah said the same. Though he took it as his fault. He felt he’d hurt you, which pained him.”
“He did. But it’s all right. It was always part of the deal.” Eve is still struggling to make sense of that night—or, rather, struggling to make it not matter. “He didn’t know that,” she adds. “It was the deal I made with myself.”
Barbara takes a drink from the mug beside her bed. “I do love that boy, battered angel that he is.”
“Battered?”
“Has he not told you his story? It’s his to tell, not mine. Perhaps one day when you are friends again, he will.”
Eve shrugs. “Our lives are so different, we might as well live on separate planets.”
“You met once. Why not again? Have you heard the theory of quantum memory?”
“No.”
“It may only be my theory. At my age, it becomes hard to distinguish one’s own thoughts from other people’s. But I believe it is scientifically proven that when atoms collide, which atoms do all the time, they leave an imprint on each other. Two shapes caused by the impact, which fit together—what a plumber would call male and female. And they’re drawn back to that perfect fit. This, by the way, is possibly also the physics of love. And reincarnation.”
She shifts position. For an active woman, being confined to bed is almost as bad as the illness.
“Do you see that painting over there?” Barbara points.
It’s a long, narrow canvas, dark gray at the left side shading into a blaze of gold.
“I won’t tell you who painted it, it’s just distracting. He said it was a picture of my life. I kept it in a closet for a long time—it reminded me too much of what’s gone. He moved on and painted other paintings, just as Micajah will write other songs. But you and I, we have to beware the danger of the muse. These beautiful things freeze us. They steal our life force. We have to reclaim our selves again.”
“Did you love him?” Eve asks.
“Yes. I loved him. Thank you for asking. I did want to say that out loud. And that is all I want to say about it. You notice I am not asking you.”
They share a smile.
“I loved again,” Barbara continues. “And so will you. Don’t hold it against Micajah. You and I were shaped by our parents, and they were shaped by their parents, all of us rolling along twenty-five years behind the times. But the times speeded up and the chain broke. That’s why the young are so dangerous. The matrix of their world is entirely different. What shocks us is ordinary to them.”
The next coughing fit saps her. The light dims in her eyes.
“I should go,” Eve says.
Barbara’s smile is wan and waxy. Eve wonders if, despite what Barbara said, she is dying and has known it for some time.
“The box is downstairs, in the kitchen,” Barbara says.
“I saw it.”
“Good luck, dear girl. Thank you for coming all this way. Will you turn off any lights, as you go?”
Eve would like to embrace her, as she did the last time she left this house. Feeling that it would be an intrusion, she doesn’t. Nor does she dare to say goodbye.
For days, the box sits unopened in Eve’s kitchen, just inside the door where she set it down when she carried it in from the garage. She’s forced to step around it daily, yet she doesn’t move it. There is no place in her house where it belongs. It cannot go into a closet—not yet, anyway. Besides, it may contain a bill, which she will have to pay.
She trips over it and panics that she may have damaged the precious object again—if Yann actually repaired it, which she doubts. The box will have to be opened. Just not today, she tells herself, day after day after day.
The box starts to take on a malevolent cast, lurking by the door. Maybe, she thinks, it carries a curse, as so many old things do. Deborah has always been suspicious of things that are wabi sabi, in the Japanese phrase—beautiful in their imperfection. Might it have survived Auschwitz, Eve wonders, and have been broken by its owner because he was forced to play it as his brothers trudged to their deaths? Might it have seen a pogrom or some other massacre, been gutted by shrapnel from bombers? Might it have crossed a desert on a handcart, the single useless item a refugee couldn’t bear to leave behind, until one day, maddened by thirst, he shattered it with a stone?
Compared to such histories, Eve’s pain is minuscule. Her heart is not broken. It was secondhand already and she buffed it up for Micajah, and then someone smudged it with dirty fingers. And, she, Eve, decided that she wanted to take it back. She could change that decision; she knows how to use a phone.
What she had was a fantasy. Of course it couldn’t stand up to real life. Just like a delicious meal isn’t meant to be eaten daily for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Looking at it this way, Bethany is the equivalent of a clumsy waiter who spilled a drop of red wine on her skirt.
It’s Sunday, and it’s raining. Eve has no jobs to bid on or design. As she makes the first slice through the tape, she imagines Yann packing up the instrument, fetishizing the protective materials. Bubble wrap and Styrofoam peanuts seem too crude for his artisan’s code. Probably he used sawdust, wadded newspaper.
She lifts the flaps. He did use styrofoam peanuts after all. There is an invoice—just for the cost of the peanuts. Across it is scrawled: “Breaks my fucking heart.”
Even though she’s prepared herself, she takes the disappointment hard. Yann was her only hope of getting the instrument repaired. The man in Paris might as well be on Mars. She’s been counting on this chance find to solve her financial worries. But it seems she’s reached a dead end.
She pulls the case from the box. Polish has been worked into its cracked leather. When she opens it, her heart leaps.
The instrument is even more beautiful than she remembers. Yann has waxed the wood to a deep sheen. She hadn’t realized that some of the vines were broken off, but she sees he has restored the carving too, allowing the vines almost to run wild, but tempering their wildness with an artist’s discretion.
She turns the instrument over, her heart pounding. The gash is gone. Yann has placed vines to mark where it used to be: seams whose meaning only he, Eve, and Micajah will ever know. As she follows the curving vines with her finger, she starts to cry. Only one other time in her life has she cried tears like these: when Allan was born and she saw that he was perfect.
The next day, Eve puts the whole big box, with all its layers of packing, on the back seat of her car and drives into the city. She cannot take the instrument on the train and the subway, or even in a taxi. It’s the kind of thing that gets left in taxis. Irrationally, she fears that the force field of a taxi would wrest it from her. She goes early, before the parking garages fill up. She’s lucky: she will only have to walk three blocks to the auction house.
This is what Yann meant in his note. But his prejudices are not her luxury.
She clasps the case close to her chest as she walks. It seems unreal: to be carrying something worth a hundred thousand dollars along a public street. I look like a crazy lady, she thinks, holding this so tightly; someone might think it’s empty, or that I have my dead baby inside. If I was younger. Maybe they’d think I’ve been carrying it around for a decade.
She concentrates extra-hard on her footsteps, especially when stepping off and onto curbs. This is no time to trip and fall.
Inside the building, she makes her way to the back room, where the oak paneling and spotlights give way to linoleum and strip lighting. She takes a number from the ticket machine on the wall. She knows the drill from last time.
The well-brought-up girls wear cashmere twinsets now, as it’s fall. They flit to and fro, matching up hopeful sellers with jaded experts. Eve asks for her expert by name.
“I’m not sure if he’s in today,” says the girl. “Did you make an appointment?”
“I’ve shown this to him before,” Eve says. “He thought it would be very valuable if I had it restored. And I have.”
“I’ll see if he’s here,” says the girl in a tone that suggests she’s fairly certain he won’t be, and disappears.
He is, though, and eager to see the instrument again. “Quite delectable,” he says, stroking its repaired body as if it were the body of a lover, or—the thought appalls her, for what it tells her about her own mind—the body of a child he’s about to eat.
“Six figures, as I said before,” he continues. “And the first of them is unlikely to be vertical.”
It takes Eve a moment to get his meaning. He’s obviously pleased with his gnomic style of speech. Eve suspects he’s been perfecting it over the years—probably because he’s deeply frustrated. Either the instruments are uninteresting, and therefore bore him, or interesting, which means he wants them for himself but can’t afford them. He’s left with the thin satisfaction of disconcerting sellers with estimates much higher or lower than they expect.
His tongue flicks out to moisten his lips. His prominent Adam’s apple bobs up and down.
“My secretary will help you with the paperwork. I recommend you choose to illustrate it in the catalogue. We must spend money to make money, as the sages say.” As he settles the instrument back in its case, his fingers loiter on its curves. Dragging them away, he snaps the clasps shut, his long wrists and hands wrapping around the case like tentacles, pulling it toward him.
Eve reaches across the counter for the case. Surprised, he clutches on to it. It’s nearly a struggle before he realizes he has to let go.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Eve says. “Thank you for your time.”
She walks rapidly down the short hallway into the display rooms, her eyes fixed on the exit, imagining armed guards chasing her down, preventing her escape with this treasure that she’s stolen from those who should own it because they can pay. Her edginess subsides only once she’s out in the autumn sunshine, heading back to her car.
She’s known all along what must happen. Yann brought the instrument back to life not so that it can become a collector’s trophy, but so that it can be played. Eve’s role is that of father of the bride: to bestow the treasure on someone who will cherish it above everything.
If she keeps the instrument, she’ll be holding it hostage against the day that Micajah might come back into her life. She could return it to Yann with a request to give it to Micajah, but that seems cowardly: a betrayal of love and nerve.
She drives toward Brooklyn.
She remembers telling the driver of the town car Micajah’s address, as he lay injured on her lap—injuries that he’d brought on himself. She scrapes the ridges of her memory, trying to recall it. No use: neither the street nor the number.
As she drives across the bridge, she recalls the ride on the Vespa: the feel of the wind against her thighs, the moon strobing along the cross streets, its shimmering reflection in the East River. Did they turn left or right after the bridge? All she remembers is riding down a long boulevard toward the moon.
She finds a drugstore parking lot and brings up the subway map on her phone. What station did she go to that morning, her underwear wadded in her handbag? As she scans the map, the station names start to come back: words she saw written in tiles through her tear-blurred eyes. GPS will get her to the neighborhood, at least. Once there, she can cruise the streets until she finds the big metal door.
When she finds it, what then? Does she have to see Micajah face to face? Her fight-or-flight reflex is screaming for flight. But she can’t just ring the bell, leave the box outside, and drive off: what if he’s not home? Could she leave it with a neighbor? Does he have neighbors? Maybe she could find out the name of his agent or manager, and send it care of them—but they might discard it as some crazy fan gift and not even tell him.
There’s the door, harsh and cold. She parks on the far side of the street and sits in her car, looking at it. She checks the windows up above: no sign of whether he’s home. She hopes he isn’t. She does not want him to find her lurking there like a stalker. And she is afraid that he will talk her back with the force of his green eyes.
But if he’s not home, she’ll just have to come back. She notices the address stenciled on the dark bricks, but that’s no use. She can’t send something so precious by UPS.
There is no way around it: she can wait like a cop on a stakeout until he comes outside or comes home—which could be hours, or weeks—or she can phone. It’s been nearly two months, but she hasn’t been able to bring herself to delete his number. A stronger woman would have.
Micajah answers after one ring.
“I’m downstairs,” she says. “On your street. I have to give you something.”
She hangs up before he can question her. As she waits, her imagination turns lurid: she could be waiting to give him a slap, or a gunshot.
There’s a screech as the door slides back a few feet. Wary, Micajah stays in the open doorway. Eve stands next to her car, holding the instrument in its case. She sees shock flood his face as he realizes what she’s giving him. Yet he stays where he is.
The last time she was on this street, her mind was as clouded and dim as the light. Eve still wants answers, but she doesn’t want to confuse things. Now isn’t the time to ask. Most likely, she will never know.
She crosses the street, puts the instrument in Micajah’s hands, and turns back to her car.
She keeps walking.
“I didn’t know what happened till Bethany told me.”
Eve clenches her ears, trying to deafen them. She hears him anyway.
“I didn’t give her a key. She stole it. That day I couldn’t pick up the Nova—”
Eve closes her car door against his words. She starts the engine.
In her peripheral vision she sees him move toward her. For a moment, she’s afraid he’ll do something drastic to hold her back. The instrument in his hand stymies him: he cannot drop it or throw it. He can only watch her drive away.