The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The door of the store opened and closed, but she didn’t notice until a voice at her shoulder said, “You’re looking at that notice as though it were a snake with a diamond ring in its mouth.”

  He had quizzical eyes, untidy graying hair and a strong jaw with a huge ink smear along one side.

  “Snake with a what?” she asked.

  “You know. As though you’re wondering, is it a rattlesnake or only a gopher snake? Is it a real diamond or only cubic zirconium? Shall I grab it by the tail and shake the stone loose, or shall I let well enough alone?”

  “I was thinking of grabbing it by the tail,” she said, surprising herself. “I have around fifteen years experience working in a bookstore.”

  “Well, come in!” He bowed toward the door, stretched out a lanky arm to push it open, and beckoned her to follow him down the aisle, turn left, right and left again into an office at the back corner of the building, with both east-and south-facing windows that gave him excellent views of two triangular parking lots and the boulevard that cut across diagonally behind them. He dropped into the chair behind the desk and burrowed in a pile of papers, drawing out two or three sheets before he found what he was looking for.

  “Application,” he said, putting it before her. “Pen,” putting that before her as well. “Complete, while I wander around out there, then I’ll be back.”

  What was she doing? She stared at his retreating back with that same feeling of inexorable reality she’d had ever since Saturday, except for that brief empty time last night, when she’d put the entire matter in other people’s hands and they’d finally quit asking questions. Well, it would be good practice to apply for a job. Marsh and Goose had never given her a reason to look for a new job, though the salary wasn’t great and the benefits were iffy. Working there always had been pleasant.

  Had been. Operative words. Somewhere along the line, during the last couple of days, without quite knowing it, she had reached a decision.

  “Name,” she muttered to herself, reading it from the form. Benita Alvarez. Age. Not quite forty, but so close as made no difference. Residence. Currently staying in a hotel, former residence…former residence? Well, why not? Former residence, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Work experience. Sixteen, no, seventeen years…no, say the first two didn’t count. Lord, she’d started when Angelica was one, so it had been sixteen years when Angelica graduated high school, and that had been a year ago last June. Counting full time only, fifteen and a half years, clerk, bookkeeper, assistant manager, the Written Word. Reason for leaving? Children now living away from home, desire to see another part of the country, have new experiences. Health. Generally good.

  She worked her way down the page. Easy stuff. She lied a little on the education bit. No need to say she’d left high school to get married, just two months before graduation. Odd to think of herself in this strange city, finding herself a familiar ground. It had been Mami who had introduced Benita to Marsh and Goose. “They are homosexual,” she said. “Which means they will not trouble you at work. They are good hearted, which means they will treat you well….”

  “Alberto treats me well, Mami.”

  “Alberto treats you like a servant when he is not drunk, Benita. When he is drunk he treats you like a slave. Now he treats the children like pet dogs. When they grow up a little, he will treat them like dogs who are not pets. In time, you will know that. But if you work for Walter Marsh and Rene Legusier, you will have some security.”

  Stung by this, Benita had cried, “Would you rather Carlos had not been born? Rather Angelica had not been born?”

  “No. Dios siempre bate bendiciones con dolor!” God always mixes blessings with pain. “Your brothers have moved far away, and we see them seldom. You are my only blessing who is with me, and I will not let my blessing be destroyed!”

  It had seemed to Benita that Mami had been in a dreadful hurry to be sure Benita could manage. The reason was clear all too soon. Mami knew she had cancer, though she hadn’t told any of the family. She ended up having several surgeries and chemo, but two years later she was gone. The farm where the family had grown up was hers, inherited from her people, and she left it to Benita and her two brothers. The boys didn’t want to keep it. Benita had no money to buy it from them, so it was sold and she and Bert had gone on living with Bert’s mother on Benita’s money, which had lasted a few years. Papa had a trailer out at the salvage yard, and Benita always thought he’d moved in there with a sense of relief. Mami had been the campesino in the family. Papa had never been that interested in farming, and needless to say, neither was Bert.

  “Finished?” the quizzical person asked from the doorway, eyebrows halfway up his forehead, the ink smear on his jaw longer and darker than before.

  “You have ink on your face,” she said. “You’ve been running your fingers around on your cheek.”

  “Damn,” he said, peering at himself in a glass-fronted cupboard. “I always do that. I’m writing something, and next thing I know I’m tap-tapping on my face. They called me Inky in school. Or worse.”

  “You buy the wrong pens,” she told him. “The kind I buy do not leak.”

  He sat down and gathered up the application. “Um. Um. Um, well, um. Fifteen years? Really?”

  “Really.” She smiled ruefully. “While my children were at home. Now they’re off to school and lives of their own.”

  “Who have you dealt with at Bantam?” he asked.

  She gave him a name. He mentioned several more publishing houses, and she gave him names for each.

  “You’re real.” He sighed. “Halleluja. Now, this is the deal. We have this store. We have branches in Georgetown, Alexandria, and Annapolis with a modest Web-market operation. We’re not Amazon-dot-com, but then we’re showing a profit. I need someone who can take over. How about thirty thousand to start, ninety-day trial, and we’ll talk about a long-term arrangement then?”

  She was shocked into silence. She made twenty at the Written Word. Ten dollars an hour, after all those years. Of course, New Mexico salaries were lower than the average. And this was a lot bigger job.

  He said hopefully. “I’m desperate for someone really good. You’ll start as assistant manager. We need somebody like you, we really do. Someone well educated, personable, capable…”

  She almost blurted out the truth, but managed to keep her mouth shut. She had continued her education. Never mind if it hadn’t been inside ivy-covered walls, she’d done it.

  “I’ll let you know tomorrow,” she murmured, collecting her purse. “I’ll drop in tomorrow morning.”

  “Were you coming in to buy something?” he asked. “When I saw you outside?”

  He took her by the hand, casually, and drew her out into the stacks where he helped her pick half a dozen books, a gift, he said.

  “By the way,” he murmured as he let her out, “my name is Simon DeGreco. My card is here, in the top book, and I’ll be here all day tomorrow.”

  She turned toward him and removed the dark glasses. “If you check my references, please don’t tell either of my bosses where I’d be working. I’ve left a…difficult situation, and I don’t want it to come looking for me.” She looked straight at him.

  His eyes fixed on the swollen eye, now turning shades of chartreuse and pale violet. “I’ll be discreet,” he said, crossing his heart, not making a big thing out of it. She decided she liked him.

  She got back to the hotel at six, and called Angelica from her room before she even put the books down.

  “Sweetie, can you settle down and talk for a few minutes?”

  “I’m on my way out, Mom.”

  “I need to talk to you, Angelica. Really. Right now. And I’m not where you can call me back.”

  Long pause. “Give me ten minutes, Mom. Then call back. I’ll let my ride go on without me and arrange to meet them later.”

  She hung up and sat on the bed, swinging her feet, staring out the window at nothing. She’d never lived in a city, not really. Thou
gh the farm was gone, the house Bert had inherited was more semirural than suburban, and the city wasn’t high density, even in its core. The Washington area was huge, with lots of crime and race problems and poverty. But one could work in Washington and live wherever one wanted. Out in Virginia, or in Maryland, or in Georgetown. Too expensive, probably.

  She glanced at her watch. Five minutes more. She and Angelica talked at least once a week, though it had been two weeks this time. Angelica wasn’t telling her something. She had that feeling the last half dozen times they’d talked. She glanced at her watch again and dialed. She had decided not to mention aliens. Angelica was not very imaginative; she was really more pragmatic and aliens might set her off in the wrong direction. Make it a small inheritance. That was no less unlikely, but it was more believable.

  At the end of five minutes, Angelica asked plaintively, “Mom, who was the cousin who left you the money?”

  “You never knew her, dear. She was a very old lady, and I hadn’t seen her in years. She was fond of my mother. And the money doesn’t amount to much, but it’s enough for me to get away from…well, you know what from. What I really want to know is will you and Carlos…will you be hurt if I do this?”

  “Mom, I can’t speak for Carlos. Last year, I didn’t see that much of him. He roomed with those three other guys, and I was in the dorm, and it wasn’t like we were really staying in touch. This year…I have a confession to make. I told you he thought we should share an apartment to save money…”

  “I told you, Angel…”

  “…you told me not to, but he talked me into it…”

  “Oh, Angel! Did you? When?”

  “Since June.”

  “You didn’t tell me! You’ll…you’ll regret it, dear.” She thought of those black, black moods that Carlos had, moods that should be transitory, but in his case were nurtured and fed and coddled until they became a black fog that stretched out interminably until everything around him was ashen and cold.

  Angelica laughed, without humor. “It’s all right, Mom. You can say you told me so. You were right. It’s not working. I’m paying all the bills and doing all the work, and Carlos is just bunking here when he feels like it. He has also instructed me to tell people he is nineteen, not twenty-one, because he’s older than most sophomores and it embarrasses him. That idea came from his new girlfriend who is also a little older than most of us. She also tells him he wears the wrong clothes ‘to impress people,’ that he should have plastic surgery on his nose, and that she can help him with his career as an artist.”

  “Formidable,” said Benita, wanting to laugh and cry, all at the same time.

  “Well, you get the idea why I can’t speak for him. Speaking just for me, however, if you get out of there, I’ll hire a mariachi band and dance a samba in the street for celebration!”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “What I mind was that Dad was Carlos’s role model. Totally self-centered and using you to let him be that way. You remember when we were in high school, Carlos was only one year ahead of me because he was held back in eighth grade? So, we knew the same people, and I heard what he was doing, just what Dad did: sneaking out at night, getting drunk, crashing with his drinking friends so you wouldn’t know. I blackmailed him into going to Ala-Teen, and I went with him. They taught us about drunks having enablers. Carlos figured right away it was all your fault Dad drank, and therefore all your fault that Carlos himself drank. I told him you were an enabler, all right. You enabled us to eat and have a roof over our heads, and if he ever said any such thing to me again, I’d tell you how he felt, and then maybe you and I would just leave him and Dad on their own to enable each other!”

  Benita was for the moment speechless. “Angel. I didn’t know! I didn’t know any of that.”

  “Well, of course not. You had enough to worry about. I told Carlos when he was ready to leave home, he could do what he pleased, but for then he had to shut up and behave or I would definitely talk you into going with me and leaving the two of them on their own. He knew where the groceries came from, and he did settle down and cut out the worst of the stuff.

  “Anyhow, he’s grown up now. He’ll be twenty-two. Whatever he thinks, it’s time you stopped enabling other people so you can enable yourself.”

  “It’s going to be a little complicated. Your father has mortgaged the house, and the bank is going to foreclose. He’ll expect me to step in and stop it, and when he knows I’m not going to do it, he’s going to get belligerent. It’ll be easier for everyone if you just don’t know where I am.”

  “Are you going to get a divorce?” her daughter asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not even thinking about that now.”

  “I say go for it. If you want to tell Carlos, I’ll ask him to stick around here tomorrow night. Call around eight, our time. Okay?”

  Eight their time would be eleven where she was, but she didn’t mention that. All she could think of was what Angelica had gone through. And she’d been only a child!

  She threw herself down on the bed, sprawled every which-a-way like cooked spaghetti, muscles letting go all at once, mind switching from Angelica to the bookstore, back to General Wallace, and then to the creature that had called itself an athyco. Whatever did they really look like? And how could they have gone out of her mind even for a moment? So strange, so wonderful, yet hard to think about. Well, strangeness was hard to think about. Wonder grazes you like a bullet; it zips by and is gone, and all you really perceive is the zing as it goes past, or maybe the pain if it comes too close. It does no good to search for whatever it was, for it never lodges anywhere you can get a good look at it. The truly strange has no hooks of familiarity that one can catch hold of.

  It had happened, though. It wasn’t a dream. She really had met weird aliens, Chiddy and Vess, who had done her a good turn, who had to have done it, because it was the only way she could explain how well she’d been doing. She hadn’t cried once. She hadn’t lain awake, worried over what she might have done or said wrong. She hadn’t been concerned about running back home because it was her duty. Somehow, it seemed, Chiddy and Vess had unquirked her.

  7

  senator byron morse

  TUESDAY

  Senator Byron Morse, R–New Mexico, edged his just-waxed black Lexus into the too-narrow space Lupé had left him beside her red convertible, cursing mildly under his breath. Squeezing out of the car, he tugged his suit coat into alignment, picked up his briefcase, gently kneed the door shut and went through into the back hall, which throbbed at him.

  Lupé was definitely home. The house boomed distantly, mute to melody but attentive to the beat. Wherever Lupé was, basses thumped, brasses blared, drums roared and rhythm filled the silence. Which was okay with the senator. He’d married her for her sociability, her elegance, her sleek body and fantastic hair. She made him look good, and since he’d soundproofed his den, he didn’t have to listen to the racket.

  She saw him coming up the stairs. “Hi, By,” she called, feet moving in time to the music, hips swaying. “Home early!”

  He dropped the jacket over the bannister and made a twisting motion with his fingers.

  “Oh, hey, fine. Jussa minute!” And she was off down the hall, doing an exhibition number. The woman was jointless as a snake, and the sight warmed him, though only slightly. He couldn’t afford the time at the moment, and quickies only made Lupé resentful.

  The music softened, the beat relented, she came back, walking. “Janet, she call you.”

  He stopped in his bedroom door. “Janet? What in hell did she want?”

  “I don know, By. I din ask…”

  “Cut the El Paso accent, Loop.”

  “Oh, sorry. I was hearing the Spanish station. It’s catching.”

  “I can’t read your mind, Lupé. Am I supposed to call her?”

  “God! You’re uptight as cheap jeans! Yes, Mr. Senator. She wants you to call her. She says tell you it’s about Timothy.”

 
“And where does she want me to call her? Is she home?”

  “The number’s by the phone in your bedroom. She says try there, if you don’t get her, try her at home.” Lupé drew herself up. “And I wohn bother you any more till you get these little details taken care of. Then mebbe we can say hello, and did you have a good day, and stuff like that.”

  She was off again, back down the hallway to what she called her nido. Her nest. Gaudy pillows and painted furniture, and scented candles for God’s sake, everything ablaze with color. When they went out, she was always dressed in perfect taste, her accent patrician, her manners impeccable, but her private life was carnival in Rio! He hadn’t known of her private preferences until after they were married. He’d never been to her place. Too many eyes in Washington. Too many secretaries keeping track. Luckily the house was large enough she could have the two-rooms-and-bath at the end of the upstairs hall and they could lock the hall door when they entertained. He’d thought the pre-nup was comprehensive, but who would have thought of specifying tasteful home furnishings?

  He tossed the jacket on the foot of his bed, one he’d bought years ago at an antique auction: solid cherry, barely ornamented, built to last. The framed mirror above the matching bureau returned his approved picture of himself: tall, patrician, dignified and solid. His eyes were chilly gray, as was the hint of beard showing along the jawline. Age had its rewards. Now that he was graying, his beard didn’t turn his face gangster blue by midafternoon, the way it used to.

  That had been one of Janet’s favorite comments when she’d had one too many. “I may look like a sack of shit, Byron, but by God, you look and act like a gangster.” Of course, with Janet, even one drink was one too many.

  At fifty pounds overweight with a face like a damp cruller, Janet had had no room to talk. Besides, she was gauche as a pig in a penthouse, and too damned often pregnant. Some women were said to look radiant when pregnant, but Janet hadn’t been one of them. To be honest, he had never seen a pregnant woman who did. Not his wife or anybody else’s wife! To use Janet’s phrase, pregnant women looked like a sack of shit. Even if the process went “normally,” which in Janet’s case it never had, it was still revolting. In his mother’s day, people still observed a period of “confinement,” and that’s the way pregnancy ought to be handled in By’s opinion. Confined. Somewhere else.