7.
A soft rain raps against all the windows of Lyra. The entire house is enchanted by the weather’s lullaby and the aroma of butter wafting through it from Ethel’s biscuits. I sit at the table salivating for my meal, like every hungry mammal the world over. Simon, on the other hand, sits observing me as if awaiting my answer to some mysterious question about the origin of the universe.
“Are you waiting for me to say something?” I ask him at last.
“I’ve asked you three times already, and every time I do, you gaze toward the window like I’m not here at all!” Simon shouts.
I spend my days this way now, hunting the passageways for his words. I am looking for their echoes, those scrambling cubs, disappearing over the edge of existence, when Ethel appears.
“If she can’t hear me, maybe you can,” Simon says, turning toward Ethel. “Ethel, I asked my wife if, after all I have done for her—this house, all her diamonds, her beautiful dresses, her pearls, her designer shoes, her silk sheets, all the money I ever made on this godforsaken island, all for her—I asked if she’s ever been anything but sad here.”
“Mr. Simon,” Ethel says, taken aback, and then sets down the biscuits, hunting for the rest of her sentence. “She’s sick.”
“She’s been sick since the day I met her,” Simon says calmly, then stands up, smooths his tie. “I did everything. Everything I could. All I ever did was for her. And now they want to crucify me for it.”
“Simon,” I protest, but manage to say nothing else.
“I’m off to meet Raymond,” he says. “Apparently, we are the only ones left who wish to save this entire cursed enterprise.” Then the front door slams behind him.
Ethel sits at the table in Simon’s absence. The biscuits are devoured before either of us speaks and it is Ethel who disrupts the hush of the rain. “Sometimes I don’t miss having a husband. All men do is complain, complain, complain. They just remember the bad things. Like Mr. Simon doesn’t remember all those times you wore a pretty smile on your face as his belligerent associates got drunk as the devil, carousing right under your nose. You ever think we’d just be better off without men? We should be teaching our girls to use them for all ten minutes they’re worth, then be done for good with all their selfishness.”
“They just take all our strength and grace,” I reply. “And leave nothing behind.”
A soft rain fell, too, on that first day my father escorted me down Ninety-seventh Street toward Riverside Drive. “Strength and grace, Ellie,” my father said before leaving me in the lobby of the Raniers’ building. “Don’t be nervous. Just show up with your strength and grace. There isn’t a hair on your head Mr. Simon won’t love.”
In the elevator to the penthouse, my chest constricted. Just past the fifth floor, the elevator suffered a bump in its ascent. Some poor soul who now haunted the thing he’d helped build, perhaps, or some teenage bride who never dreamed of being a wife. And then the doors opened directly into the apartment. Simon was seated at the piano beside a large window that revealed the breadth of the Hudson, lost in a melody I didn’t then recognize. I was never educated in music. He did not seem to have noticed that I’d arrived. His eyes were closed, his long delicate fingers danced across the keys—this, my first image of him. The song went on for half an hour, it seemed. He turned to me when it was over and his eyes opened, a breathtaking lapis beneath long black eyelashes, brimming with tears. “Miss Cumberland,” he said. “Excuse me—it is just sacrilege to cut Rachmaninoff short. Are you familiar with his work?”
To this day I do not know if his emotions were a response to the music or to my presence. What I do remember is that I felt as though the entire house had eyes and they were scrutinizing me. Suddenly I could not bear the sight of my hideous shoes. They were the color of urine from wear, and here they were mucking up the oriental carpet, adorned with scenes of princes charging toward their princesses in some radiant past. I was so caught up in my shame that I wondered whether, if I were to tuck one foot behind another beautifully, the way a ballerina does in sous-sous, the house might permit the monstrosity of my shoes.
As I stood there, paralyzed by self-consciousness, I did not notice that Simon’s mother was standing in the entryway of the parlor. The house’s eyes belonged to its mistress, after all. “Are you trained in ballet, Miss Cumberland?” she asked. Her gaze performed a grand sweep of me.
“Mrs. Ranier,” I said, instinctively flattening my skirt. I understood that what would follow was a kind of audition, even perhaps an interrogation.
“You are beautiful, it’s true,” she said. I had passed part of the test, then, though Mrs. Ranier’s eyes still ranged over me. She asked questions at speed, without waiting for my answers. I might as well have been standing there naked.
“Simon’s older brother, Joseph, and their father send their regards. They are still at the office. Simon is more like me. He prefers entertainment to paperwork.” She walked over to her son and rested her hand on his shoulder. “Are you a Rachmaninoff aficionada, Miss Cumberland?”
I nodded my head, silent and eager as a fool.
“I’ve brought you a small present.” She had been holding a sizable box in her hands the entire time. I opened it: a fur coat, its scent recalling French perfume, Russian courts, ancient Egypt, Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette. “It’s just a small mink,” she said. “Go ahead—try it on.”
It was gorgeous—but so much so that my shoes seemed all the more hideous. I wished to have my very feet amputated. Even more embarrassing, we had not boiled water in the apartment that morning, so I had not been able to bathe. My odor, I was sure, would sully the smell of the coat. I slipped out of it quickly, but I already missed it. It was in that coat that I first felt the assurance that comes with money, the way it falls on a body.
“Do you not fancy it?” Mrs. Ranier asked.
I tried to rearrange my face into an expression of aloofness, as if I had hundreds of such items waiting for me in apartments across New York City. “It fits like a glove, but I’ve been perspiring on account of the . . . the fire,” I said, pinpointing a culprit for the coat’s sudden removal.
“Simon insists on baking this room. He’s the only one of us who enjoys the heat. Well, I have so many more things that would just look splendid on you, Miss Cumberland. I lost my figure after childbirth and my dresses are wasted on me. It is an understatement, on the other hand, to say you are quite the lovely creature.” Mrs. Ranier then pulled Simon up from his happier place at the piano and nudged him forward, toward me. “Simon, Miss Cumberland looks like she would enjoy a walk beside the river. Wouldn’t you, my dear?”
Outside, Simon held his umbrella over me, allowing the rain to fall freely on his own beautiful suit. “My mother always forces gifts on people. I rather wish she wouldn’t. Don’t you think it’s better to choose one’s own presents?”
I was embarrassed to speak, to reveal my inadequacy on the subject. “I suppose, if given the choice,” I said finally, almost inaudibly, wishing the rain could speak in my place.
“If given the choice, it is always better to have what one desires rather than what someone else desires for you.”
Had this conversation occurred years later, I might have understood it from Simon’s perspective. As it was, it took all of me just to nod in agreement rather than gush the name of the one who truly occupied my heart. Thankfully, we soon returned to Simon’s apartment building, where, without much grace, he took my hand. “Well, are you interested in this business of courtship?”
Hours later, my legs were wrapped around Gabriel, as he rode me on his bicycle through the rain, that rain which still has not let up, which taps against my windows until now. His body against mine remained a mystery—the freckles of his neck that disappeared down his clothed back, the stubble of his chin, those eyes that undid my propriety. Where were we going, on that day in particular? Gabriel was riding me away from all inevitabilities. All that wind in my face, my rain-soaked clothes, my clamorous heart, my bright face passing through the streets of New York like a comet—this is my image of freedom still. We were flying.
The rain quiets to a trickle. What remains is my garden, which sleeps surrounding me. Moss clings to the oaks like the parasite time. Mosquitoes take turns piercing my legs. Mina the cat sleeps beside me, dreaming of savannas in Africa. It is near dusk, that most luscious of hours. Ethel has left for the evening. She must be walking against the blackening night along the river shore, where the light from the west lasts longest. Simon never returned after this morning’s outburst. The ugly moments always remain, scattering craters across my disintegrating canvas. It is everything sweet that goes. Presumably Simon is out trying to save his empire. He is too old now to be with one of his lovers, back in Gabriel’s abandoned shed, where he took them to protect my honor and his own. I am certain that an indecent amount of our money went to keeping them silent. I hope a few truly returned his affection.
The ocean beckons me with its mighty drone. I wish only to lie on its surface and float beneath the moon—examine its face, its ridges, its valleys, the crashes it, too, has suffered. In the early years, after Gabriel drowned, I stepped into the sea when it seemed to be at rest, breathing only barely, releasing a trembling wave every minute or so. I told myself: At last you will not be afraid. Gabriel had taught me once how to float—Just lie on your back, let your legs dangle—but when I lay down, I fell through the water’s glass surface. An arm clawed me out from shore, tumbled, then choked me. Nonetheless, the ocean decided it still did not want me. Another wave pushed me just as forcefully back to earth. I lay coughing on the sand until morning, watching the constellations rise and set beyond the moon. I’d again been in the water that had buried Gabriel. I had again drunk in his body. It was his grip in the tug of those waves, the same grip of his hands around my waist on the bicycle, in the animal embrace of love. You can never leave me. Love comes only once in ten thousand years. But he had let me go.
Rather than to the sea, I return to the house—the house that still smells of butter and rain, that still echoes Gabriel’s voice from ten thousand years in the past—to find my husband storming through the door. His face is red, his breath syrupy from drinking. “Joseph removed me from the trust!”
“What trust?” I ask.
Simon storms down the hall away from me, the tantrum of this morning not finished or resolved. “Not you, not right now,” he says, waving his hands in my face. He walks into his office and picks up the phone. “Raymond!” he screams into it.
For the second time in a day, I have made him impatient. Rather than pursue him any further, I think back instead to the ghost bride in Simon’s elevator—the one that made that little bump when I passed floor five—and my father’s mantra of strength and grace. But that elevator, my father’s voice, the wind in my hair on that bicycle with Gabriel, all live so very long ago, and I more and more among them.