Roy often wondered what the significance was of having a favorite color or number. His favorite color was blue, a common enough preference, he came to learn. His mother’s favorite number was eight: whenever she asked him to guess what number she was thinking of, he always said eight and he was always right. One time she asked him and he guessed eight and his mother said, No, I was thinking of the number four, and Roy said, You’re fibbing, you were thinking of eight, and she laughed and said, You’re right, I was thinking of eight. I can’t help it. You can’t fool me, Roy said, and his mother said, No, Roy, you know me too well.
Roy and his mother played this game often when they were in the car and she was driving. When his mother tried to guess what number Roy was thinking of she usually guessed three or nine and she was correct about half the time, though neither three nor nine were Roy’s favorite number. As Roy grew older, he and his mother played this game less frequently, and by the time he was ten or eleven they stopped playing it for good.
Many years later Roy was walking alone at night on a street in a city his mother had never been to when he thought about their numbers guessing game. He was thinking of the number five and he wished his mother were there because if he asked her to guess she would have said three or nine. Just then Roy passed a house with an open window from which he heard a record playing: Eartha Kitt singing “April in Portugal” in French. He stopped in the street to listen. “April in Portugal” had been one of his mother’s favorite songs when he was a boy; she often used to play it on the piano and sing the lyrics in English, though she could speak French passably well.
Eartha Kitt finished singing and Roy walked on. Any number divisible by three, he remembered, was in certain ancient cultures considered to have mystical or occult significance, but he could not recall why; the number eight placed horizontally was the mathematical symbol for infinity, as well as an overhand knot as illustrated in the Merchant Marine handbook.
The significance of April in Portugal, Roy knew, was that it was the month in which the people in the song had fallen in love. The importance of numbers or colors in one’s cosmology was far more arcane, except, perhaps, to adherents of numerology and whatever students of color symbology might be called. (Colorologists?) Roy had an urge to stop the next person he encountered on the street and ask him or her if he or she could guess what number he was thinking of at that very moment, but he overcame it. Even if the person played along and guessed correctly, Roy knew no meaning could be discerned from it, that nothing profound would be revealed. More significant, Roy thought, was his having been reminded of his mother playing and singing “April in Portugal.” There was no doubt as to its value in Roy’s cosmology.
He could still remember the photograph of Eartha Kitt on the cover of her album That Bad Eartha, bare-shouldered in a black cocktail dress, slinky, cat-like, a vixen amused by the charade. The significance of her come-on-and-try expression had not been lost on him. Roy wondered what Eartha Kitt’s favorite number was.