It’s been months since Eve has gone to yoga class, and when she and Deborah go for their regular post-yoga coffee, it’s odd to see the same pictures of Hawaii on the walls, the for-sale shelf of hand-painted pottery, the cracked leather armchairs, the small rack of CDs by the cash register. Eve’s life has split into before and after, and walking into before gives her a sense of vertigo.
As the barista makes their lattes, she sings along to the stereo.
“Lover we’ll surrender to the sweet smell of nature . . .”
Eve feels the blood drain from her face.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Deborah puts a hand on her arm.
Eve wants to lie, wants to say, “Nothing,” but it’s impossible. The song is dissolving all the neat stories she’s been using to barricade Micajah into a corner of her mind.
“This song,” she says and stops, hating the shake in her voice.
“Gorgeous,” says Deborah. “Never heard it before. Should I have?”
“No.”
“So? What’s the big deal?”
“It was written for me.”
Deborah stares at her with a this-does-not-compute look on her face. Eve glances at the barista, hoping she didn’t hear. She could have shouted and the girl wouldn’t have heard—she’s paying them no more attention than she pays to the posts holding up the ceiling.
The song modifies into an instrumental section: the melody Micajah messaged her that night. The instruments sound exotic; it’s bizarre and beautiful, with a hypnotic rhythm that’s almost a lullaby. The kind of melody that sounds like something you’ve always known in the rushing of your blood, something that seduces you to want to hear it again and again.
The girl sets Eve’s latte on the counter and moves on to the next order. Deborah is holding her coffee already, waiting for Eve to get hers. After a moment, Deborah picks it up and puts it in Eve’s hand.
Still Eve doesn’t turn away from the counter. “Excuse me,” she says to the barista.
The girl looks up with the instant smile of the service profession. “Sure!” she says. “How can I help you?”
“This song,” Eve says. “What is it?”
“Released today. Sick, right? We kind of can’t stop playing it.”
She points to the CDs on the counter.
“New band. This song isn’t on it though. Direct download only.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem!” She returns to the machine, wiping Eve from her consciousness as if she’d never been in it. What if I told her, Eve thinks. She wouldn’t believe me. She’d think I’m insane.
The coffee shop drops away: the chatter of conversation, the rasp of the espresso machine, the whoosh of cars driving by. Eve feels like she’s standing in a column of warm moonlight: the song permeating her, alchemizing away the confusion and suspicion and pain that came in its wake.
Only when the song finishes and another one starts does Eve remember where she is. She turns to Deborah, but Deborah has already settled herself on a sofa in a far corner, absorbed in her phone. Eve’s nerves start to jangle as the spell of the song wears off. She’s regretting telling Deborah, but she’d have had to tell someone. This is too big to hide.
“So some guy wrote that for you,” Deborah says with quiet seriousness as Eve sits down beside her.
Eve just nods.
“Like ‘Angie.’ ‘Light My Fire.’ ‘Layla.’”
“I guess so.”
“Wow.”
Eve has never seen Deborah speechless before.
Deborah picks up the CD. Eve didn’t notice her buying it. On the back is the photo that was taken at the abandoned docks.
“Which one is he?”
Eve points to Micajah.
“Seriously?” That’s Deborah’s expression of disbelief.
The song on the sound system finishes. “Night Blooming Jasmine” starts again.
“The coffee girls sure love it,” says Deborah. “Is that him singing?”
“No.”
Deborah peers at the CD.
“He doesn’t look that young.”
“He’s twenty-eight.”
“So what’s the problem?”
He’s only four years older than my son. But that’s not really the problem. “His world, I guess. It isn’t mine.”
“Well, duh. You could say the same about a hedge-fund manager. Or an astrophysicist.”
“I don’t think I’d fall for a hedge-fund manager or an astrophysicist. Anyway, I’ve never met one.”
“You’d never met a hot young rock-and-roll musician before either. How’d that happen?”
“I knew his father in high school.”
“And he was chasing you too?”
“Nobody was chasing me. It was an accidental meeting on the street, and we had lunch and . . . well, things happened.”
“I guess they did.”
Eve has never seen that look in Deborah’s eyes before: as if her world has shifted on its axis. There’s no hint of jealousy or judgment in her—just something closer to awe.
“Swear to me you won’t tell anyone.”
“If it was me, I’d be hiring skywriters! But don’t worry, I won’t say a word. Except one thing: why the fuck is that great song not on this album? Unless it’s got some bizarro title.”
“Probably the album was already finished when he wrote it. It wasn’t that long ago.”
Deborah is studying the photograph again. She’s longing for the sexy details, Eve knows.
“Was he wonderful?”
“Yes.”
Deborah smiles, acknowledging that Eve isn’t going to tell any more.
“So why’d you break up?”
Eve has been dreading that question. A stock answer will just send Deborah into hunting mode—and worse, it will feel like a betrayal of what she and Micajah had. She twists her skirt in her hands, trying to find the right words.
Deborah pries Eve’s hands loose and places them on her knees, her own hands covering them.
“It’s okay, honey,” she says. “Deborah’s not as dumb as she makes out. I don’t need to know.”
Eve feels a rush of affection for Deborah. She’s a monster, Eve thinks, but she’s my monster. She wipes away a tear with her finger.
“I do own waterproof mascara,” she says.
“Great,” Deborah replies dryly. “You might want to use it.”
So many questions.
Why the special release? Why not wait for the next album?
Why is Lowell singing her song?
Will anyone figure out that it’s about her?
Will anyone—like journalists—want to find out?
First answer: because it’s too good to hold on to. The band want to play it onstage, and if it gets bootlegged they’ll lose out.
Or: because Micajah wanted to put it out there for me.
Or: because he put it out as a way of getting rid of it, getting it out of his personal life into the open air. It means nothing to him any longer; it’s just a song for the band. Which answers the second question.
But Micajah’s voice, off-key and gravelly, isn’t good enough for a recording. He said that himself. Lowell’s role in the band is to sing. That it’s his voice on “Night Blooming Jasmine” explains nothing.
Eve isn’t convinced that Deborah’s oath of confidentiality will hold. Deborah won’t deliberately break it, but she’ll get excited and let it slip out. There’s only one way to keep a secret, Eve’s mother used to say: don’t tell a soul.
Beyond her immediate circle, will anyone care? If she was famous, or connected to someone famous, of course they would. It’s impossible, she thinks, that anyone would believe a song so special could have been written about an ordinary woman like me. That’s not a magazine story. They’d expect an artist, a kooky bohemian, a fire twirler living a nomad’s life in an old school bus.
If anyone finds out that it’s me and can’t believe it, she decides, that’s their problem. I can’t be the only person in the world whose ordinariness is both real and a disguise.
The song is obviously a classic. Twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, people will play “beat the intro,” sing along with it, fall in love to it. She clicks open iTunes and sees that it’s the number eight download of the day.
She syncs her phone, then figures out how to buy a download of the song for Allan, wondering if he’ll be able to get it in Cambodia. She emails him, telling him only that she loves the song and hopes he will too. He will write back to say yes, he thinks it’s great too, and that they’re playing it in Siem Reap, where the time is so far ahead that tomorrow is already nearly over, and then he will send Eve a YouTube link to some other song that is his favorite of the moment, though he doubts she’ll like it. And he will be right.
Then she checks her inbox and sees an email from someone she’s never heard of, with the subject line “Night Blooming Jasmine.”
She’s unsure whether she should open it. Why would anyone associate her with the song? Could a journalist have found her already—maybe the fat man who was at the photo shoot? If she opens the email, will that be some kind of admission? Maybe it’s just spam—do spammers send out emails with subject lines taken from top ten hits, since nobody opens the I’m-in-trouble kind anymore?
She clicks. The email turns out to be from a law firm:
“Please forgive the informality of this communication,” it begins. “Our client was unable to provide us with a physical mailing address.
“We act for Micajah Burnett. Mr. Burnett has requested us to convey 100% of the publishing rights in the song ‘Night Blooming Jasmine,’ words and music by Mr. Burnett, to you or any entity you name, in perpetuity. As the song has only been released onto the market today, monies have not yet accrued. We welcome your instructions as to how remittance should be made, and an address to which we may send the necessary documentation for your review.”
Eve reads the paragraph again, and once more, before she’s finally taken it in. She’s not sure what publishing rights are, or how much money they might represent. Her mother always said that if something’s too good to be true, that’s probably exactly what it is. Still, it’s hard not to hope. Despite herself, she looks back at iTunes. “Night Blooming Jasmine” is now at number seven.
Out hunting for things for Deborah’s store, Eve wears shoes with a heel that put a sass in her walk. Not because she wants to be noticed, but because it keeps the fizz rising in her. She wants, urgently, to keep that sense of aliveness that the song has restored to her, after the months that almost smothered it and the decade or more in which she didn’t even realize how dead she was.
In junk shops and at flea markets, Eve sees scrimshaw everywhere. Much of it is crude carving on whalebone. Maybe none of it was made for the purpose that Barbara suggested. Still, she thinks of those sea widows building their manless lives, closing their eyes at twinges of pleasure as they hung out the laundry or swept the floor or built up the fire.
Micajah, for her, has entered that whalers’ realm. They parted; and now she has no idea where on the globe he is, chasing the leviathan of success. There are no reliable lines of communication, though here and there she might receive a message via a meandering route, conveyed by a chance encounter, which will tell her little and will be meaninglessly out of date by the time she receives it. That sight of him on television fits this category. She cannot know, at any given moment, whether he is alive or dead. She imagines that for those women, in a strange way, it stopped mattering. You could not get through years of separation and think in the physical dimension every day, of the dangers of place and circumstance; you would go mad.
As she sits down to her plastic-covered dining table and pulls the damp cloth off the clay, she knows she should be working at her desk, on an unseasonal and lucky commission from a small township sixty miles to the west, but she cannot face it. She’s playing hooky. The promise of those royalties allows her to.
She’s not sure what she wants to make today: only that she wants to do what she wants to do, not another safe planting scheme. She loves gardening, but plodding on the treadmill, as she has to in order to monetize her one real skill, makes her feel dull-headed and lethargic—a feeling she is no longer resigned to. I’m getting bolshie, she thinks. About time.
At her work table, thinking of those municipal flowerbeds, she fashions a tulip. Poor tulips: once, more valuable than gold and treasured for their unique differences, now bred for uniformity, made to stand in regimented rows, the wallpaper of civic landscaping. She lavishes attention on this single one, pictures the tulip that would have sold for millions in seventeenth-century Holland, the tulip that would have been presented to Suleiman the Magnificent or the Emperor Akbar: something splendid. She makes it curvy and bulbous, with flaring petals that promise more, and gives it a long stem.
Holding it upright, she blushes suddenly at the idea that has sprung into her head. In the following weeks, she makes a peony, a jasmine flower, a raceme of lilac. Different shapes, which might provoke different sensations.
She locates a 3D printing service. Resin will be better than clay for her purpose. The printing isn’t cheap; it cleans out her bank account to print three of the four. She does not know where next month’s mortgage payment will come from. But she’s come to think of these flowers as prototypes. If they do what she hopes they will do, she will get someone like Yann to create more beautiful versions for the finished product. And maybe recruit Deborah for the business and marketing side.
For now, she is still experimenting.
A FedEx envelope arrives, containing another large-format envelope on which is embossed—literally embossed—the five names of a Fifth Avenue law firm. This is not Larry’s lawyer. In fact, he never got one. He sent her divorce paperwork downloaded from a legal website, filled out and signed, along with a deed giving her full ownership of the house. As the divorce is uncontested, it will be final soon.
The showiness of the envelope has Robert’s touch. She wonders if Robert is actually with this law firm. His name is not one of the five, but it’s possible they are all dead anyway. More likely he just chose it, spending his son’s money before it’s made. Micajah wouldn’t argue: he’d let his father have his satisfaction. Eve cannot imagine him ever arguing about money. She imagines him working as Yann’s apprentice, penniless, wearing his gold-leaf underwear and sleeping on the sagging sofa, utterly content.
As Eve reads the documents, her hands start to shake. This annoys her. She does not want to feel powerless again. They are full of complicated legal jargon, which she forces herself to comprehend. She has to sign in eight places flagged with sticky arrows.
Between the last two pages, she finds a smaller envelope. Inside is a printout of an airplane reservation. On it, diagonally, is written: “Please use this. M.”
The ticket is to Venice, in two months’ time. The return date is open.
Eve has never been to Venice. She has an idea of it, of course: canals and gondolas and mysterious alleys and damp. She has some notion that the city is sinking—or perhaps it has been saved? There was a time it was all in the news, but she can’t remember what happened, if anything.
As the days pass, Eve realizes that it’s not clear from his note that Micajah will even be in Venice. Could he just be giving her this ticket as a gift? But why Venice, why that date, why not just a travel voucher to go wherever she wants to go?
She pulls her passport out of the filing cabinet where she keeps it along with other important documents. It’s still valid. She will not have to commit herself to the trip by renewing it, or make the trip an impossibility by not renewing an expired one. She can torture herself with indecision for a while longer.
A decision would be just as bad, though. The choice not to go feels both brutal and cowardly. The choice to go feels like walking toward a spinning web of knives.
Perhaps Micajah will be in Venice if she wants him to be. Is she supposed to let him know? That feels wrong—like asking for him back, giving up the power she took when she cut off communication. If he wants to talk to me, she thinks, he has my number. And in that thought is an unspoken agreement with herself that now, if he does call, she will answer.
He doesn’t.
A week before the date of the flight, another email arrives from the lawyer. This one informs her that his client has requested $10,000 to be wired to her bank account, as an advance against the royalties that will start coming to her in a few months’ time.