Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

by Tanith Lee

  He hardly ever saw her use paper money. She employed plastic, like the rich. But she showed him her account statement on the Intel-V, and it contained only her large debt.

  Picaro thought that perhaps she had found out how to commit fraud, running away when she was too over-drawn and her purchases were refused. But somehow she never was refused, or warned. That had impressed him. He had thought her clever in some way.

  Spending time with her, even sleeping under the same roof as Simoon, seemed good. More—it was nearly exciting. It was like going traveling, or being on a stage, forming the first chord and feeling the watching listeners stir. Always a bit like that. Or, it was like a brand new kind of sexual relationship where there was no sex.

  She was his mother, and he had, for two years—and more, from the first times his father spoke of her—been wrong about Simoon.

  She was amusing and easygoing, and she saw things in a different way. She was young-looking, young enough, and glamorous. Beautiful. Why had he never liked her eyes? They were beautiful eyes, colored like Saké. There was white blood back when, it was that which had changed their color. In a woman less dark, her eyes might have looked less unusual. But that was all they were, unusual.

  The flowers that never died fascinated Picaro, and also other members of the band, on the rare occasions they were in the loft. “Where you get these?” Coal asked. “A special store,” said Simoon. She was frequently mysterious. And Picaro thought her mystery always alluring. She was his mother.

  None of the rest of them knew this. He never said, nor she. They thought she was a wealthy older woman and they had taken up together for a while. The band was jealous, admiring, slightly uneasy.

  But she wasn’t like a mother. She never asked him to do anything, never demanded or requested him to, or interrogated him on where he had been, even when he was gone a month or more. She didn’t inquire about women, or the band. If he told her about them, she listened, nodding, and if she said anything, it was light and casual and noncommittal. There were no traps. He woke up sometimes on the wall-bed and wondered why she had ever freaked him out, and why his father had been irrational in this one area alone. Anything he asked her, she answered. She always had an answer. She seemed to conceal nothing, only her body, modestly closing the annex door, wearing a robe to the bathroom. Somehow, Picaro found he did not observe this modesty himself. He even sunbathed naked on the high-up balcony, and when she brought him tea or a beer or a clip of hasca, neither of them paid any attention to it, his nakedness, her enclosure.

  One morning he woke up and saw her shaking off something from her hand into the bowl of blue flowers.

  “What are you doing, Simoon?” He liked her name, to use it.

  She said, “Giving them breakfast. They’re my babies too.”

  When she went into the gallery where the cookery was done, Picaro got up and stood over the flower bowl and saw in the water, not quite yet dissolved, a little coil of red.

  “Looks like blood.”

  “That’s what I give them. How else do they live on and on.”

  And Picaro had not minded.

  Oh God, he’d probably thought she meant she bought it somewhere, the blood, ready-dried, to feed plants.

  One night, when she had been to watch the band in a bar in a street named for an arrow, he met her by chance after, on the pavement walk. She wasn’t always there to watch, nor available afterwards. He would look up and see her, part of the audience, often with some man paying her court, or he’d catch the firefly spark of the jewel in her mouth.

  On Arrow Street he had come out with a black girl, and Simoon stood there drinking a glass of grappa, and she smiled her smile, but not showing the peridot.

  For a moment he spoke to her, and the girl, his own age, young and ready for the night, stood with them, leaning on his shoulder.

  “The room will be empty tonight,” said Simoon, though she was standing alone, “so why don’t you use the big bed? If you want. That’s fine.”

  Picaro thought nothing much of it, except it was a generous offer. There were other places to go, but the loft was very private, and cool after dark.

  “Thanks, Simoon.”

  When he and the girl were walking on, swinging their hands together, she said, “Who was that?” And Picaro had said, “She owns the block where I room. Sometimes I can use this apartment, if it’s vacant.” And realized how tactfully Simoon had chosen her words, not to alarm the girl, and now he colluded with the lie. Simoon—his landlady. (She had never offered him use of her bed before—the big bed—that would be good, with the girl.)

  They had a few drinks. Only presently, when they were strolling back to the loft, did the girl say, “You got a thing with her?”

  “No,” he said. “With you.”

  The moment they stepped into the loft, something happened. It was like—a change in the tint of the air.

  He thought at first the girl was impressed by the vast room, the furniture, the fact that there were drinks of all kinds in the coldbocx, and so many music decx. Simoon’s bed was large, clean, with white sheets that smelled faintly of spices.

  “I got to go to the bathroom,” said the girl. He showed her in past the private CX lock. “Whose is all this?” said the girl. And Picaro found he said, “She keeps it for special times.”

  When the girl came back, like the air tint, her face was subtly altered.

  “It’s her’s, this crash?”

  “Yes, I told you.”

  “No, only hers?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I told you that too. She owns all the rooms.” Simoon had looked sufficiently well-off for this to be true.

  “What’s her game?” said the girl.

  Picaro laughed. He put his arms around the girl and kissed her, as they had been kissing all evening. “Forget that. Think about you and me.”

  But again, in the bed, she said to him, “Are you and she making a decx of this?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, things in the walls—making some movie of this, with me.”

  “No,” Picaro said. “You’ve seen the Intel and the electrics—we’re not up to that standard.” He was repulsed that she could suspect him of being a pornographing her. And seeing his repulsion, the girl relented, and they made love, but not quite as they might have done, if they hadn’t had that conversation.

  Later on, they sat out in the loft, and Picaro played for the girl on the luta-guitar, the only instrument he kept there. But she wasn’t listening. She kept looking around.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Is someone in here?”

  He told her no one was there but for themselves.

  “How can you be sure,” she said, “if you never been here before?”

  “I have,” he said. He frowned at her. She knew theirs was not a long-term alliance, the perfume and suppliance of a minute, as the poet said.

  She didn’t want to go back to the bed. They had sex on the floor, Picaro underneath, to cushion her. Midway, she stopped moving. Again she started staring round. “There some animal in here,” she said. “A rat.”

  “No,” he said. “They’re careful with that.”

  “How? You say it’s not that modern, this building, with the electrics and the unstyle screen. So how they keep rats out, huh?”

  “I’ve never seen a rat in this building.”

  His erection was gone, and so was her arousal. They separated, and moodily he lay there and watched the girl begin to dress.

  “I really like you,” she said, contrite. “Come with me.”

  “You have a room?”

  “Part of one. They won’t mind.”

  “No,” Picaro said. He got up and padded to the coldbocx and the girl screeched, a high narrow wavering shriek, so he spun toward her—“What the hell is the matter?”

  “Someone’s here,” she said. She seemed terrified, so he thought her wild on a drug, or off her head. “S
omeone. Something.”

  “Only me. Me and you.”

  “She—she’s put something here. It looks at me. I can see its eyes—goat’s eyes—” yelled the girl, “like she got!”

  And then she ran over the loft and out the door, and he heard her feet skidding and pattering along the hall. And then the hiss of the old lift, taking her down to the street.

  He went on thinking she was out of her mind. He said nothing to Simoon the next day, had only remade her bed with fresh sheets, (afterwards she said that wouldn’t have mattered, what did she care?) He had never taken a woman up to the loft before. He never would again.

  THE LONG, HOT SUMMER came to an end. Autumn filled the city with its smoky nostalgias. The Soundless Band met at Gotto’s Bar, and discussed moving on.

  “Maybe,” said Picaro.

  “You not gonna come, man? Come on. What’s keeping you?”

  “That woman is keeping him,” said Coal.

  Picaro said, “You don’t know a thing.”

  “I know you’re not one of us no more.”

  Omberto said, “Leave it.”

  Picaro said, “Let’s move on then. City to city, nowhere to nowhere. How many decx we made this year?”

  “Seven,” said Omberto concisely.

  “And with which company was that?” asked Picaro.

  Coal said, “You know we don’t have no backers. But we sell on the Intel.”

  “We have a big small minority that follows us,” announced Carlo, primly.

  The jackdaw, which was standing on Omberto’s beer jug, made a cackling sound.

  A few nights before, coming in around three in the morning, Picaro had found Simoon sitting on the floor in the middle of the loft. He had never previously met her in the room at that hour.

  There was no light beyond the fat purple candle standing on its bronze dish. The candle, which no matter how often it was lit, or for how long it burned, never seemed to burn away.

  “Chi’, Simoon,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  On the floor, in the vague mauve light, a scatter of tiny things that looked nearly like a necklace of whitish beads come undone. She put out her hand and swept them up, and slipped them into the pocket of her robe.

  “Just playing a little,” she said. Then she said, “What do you want to happen for you?”

  He hadn’t thought, perhaps. Only expected it. Day by day, hour by hour. Some glowing answer, all the best that he was due. He was sixteen.

  Picaro shook his head.

  She said to him, “I hear you with the citarra, and with those instruments in the band. I hear you singing. You’re so good.”

  Her praise, for some reason (like that first time) made him restless, uncomfortable.

  She said, “You’re better than the others. Did you know?”

  “That’s you talking. You’re biased.”

  “Where do you get these words? Oh, he had you educated nicely. From there. I’m not biased—that’s the way cloth is cut. Help me up,” she murmured, “I sat here so long my legs are already in the bed asleep.

  Somewhere in the dark of dreaming it occurred to him she had been making magic after all, there in the night, for him. He wasn’t offended. It seemed more—touching.

  But when the Band talked of moving on, he decided he didn’t want that. And then he saw he was too settled. It was time to go, to get away from her. She was his mother. He could always come back.

  AND SO THE DAY, scarlet flowers on the balcony throwing open their shutters to the cooling sun. What else happened? Afterwards he could never recall, only those flowers opening, and then sunset, and then going out to play the set in the street named for the Arrow.

  He started with the korah, that night, but then Omberto took that up, his fingers spangling quick as rain across the frets. And Picaro switched to the s’tha. He chose this, he later believed, for the roundness of its hipline under the long, long neck. In origin, it had come from the East, and the seven strings were resined to silk—but it was a new instrument, younger than Picaro. When he glanced up, during one of the prolonged breathless races of the music, when the audience no longer made any noise, did not breathe, or blink, eyes fixed on the band as if hypnotized, he saw Simoon out there, sitting in her pale frock, watching with the rest, looking hungry and enslaved as the rest.

  At the interval she came up, when they were standing at the bar, and the drinks were coming for them. She seemed to brush by no one, was only there.

  In the bar on Arrow Street, the lights were chemical, high-up mercury-colored globes, but at this time of night they were dimmed. Simoon had brought the darkness with her.

  “What will you have, lady?” asked Coal. (Had he ever used her name? No, very likely he hadn’t.)

  Simoon smiled, and said she would have a grappa. The drinks were free for them, of course, or she would have paid, with cash not plastic.

  Carlo didn’t look at her tonight, and perhaps she noticed that. Coal was as courteous with her as he always was when she was there. Omberto drank half his glass, then put it down and spoke to her.

  “You going to let him off the leash?”

  Simoon turned her head to look at him. It was—like the movement of a snake that smiled. “What do you say?”

  “Picar. You going to let him out of jail a while, so we can move on?”

  Omberto had always been the most eager and flirtatious with Simoon, as he was the most rational and placatory during any argument among the band. No longer.

  “He isn’t in jail,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Omberto. “You’ve got to let him free. Christ, even the jackdaw gets to fly about sometimes.”

  Simoon slightly shook her head. It was like a ripple over foliage, no more.

  She kept looking at Omberto.

  He drank the second half of his drink, straight down.

  “You look pretty good,” said Omberto. “But you’re too old, way too old, for Picar. What are you, sixty, sixty-five? Old enough to be his gran’mumma. You’ve got to look it in the face. You’ve got to get your claws out.”

  Picaro, standing just beside her, hearing these words come out of Omberto’s drink-wet mouth, as if they came out of his own dry mouth, shuddered. Picaro tried to speak, to tell Omberto to close his wet mouth.

  But Picaro didn’t speak, and it was Carlo, rolling his eyes, pulling at Omberto. “Don’t—shit—shit—shut up, shut up.”

  “No. I want her to know.”

  “You don’t—shut up. Shut up.”

  “Yes, she has to know. Let him go. You and he, Simoon, you can’t go anywhere else. You’ve had him sewn on you all summer, but now it’s fall.”

  “Fall,” she repeated. The Amerian word, so apt for autumn, for the time of falling leaves of rust and yellow.

  Picaro pushed his mind around into the bar, from which it had fled, and put out his hand to grasp Simoon’s arm. As if to protect her—or to hold her back.

  But somehow he hadn’t, he didn’t have her arm.

  Instead it was Simoon who had reached out. She took Omberto’s hand, his right hand, and as she took it, the emptied glass fell out of it, one more falling leaf, and it fell so slowly that it would never hit the ground. And between the letting-go of the glass, and the moment when it did hit, did shatter, Picaro heard Simoon speaking low to Omberto.

  “What a beautiful pale hand you have, Omberto. How strong it is. So flexible. A musician’s hand, and you so clever with it. Is there any instrument you can’t play? And you play very well, and you love to play your music, love it like your life, eh, Omberto, with your beautiful strong white clever hand.”

  All that, while the glass was still falling.

  And then the glass met the tiled floor of the bar and burst like a firework.

  Simoon was not in contact with Omberto.

  She moved away, and as she did so, she said to Picaro, “I’ll just get some air. It’s hot in here.”

  Did he see her face? For an instant. He saw, Picaro, she
looked older, old as Omberto had said even, when ten minutes before she had seemed like a woman of forty. And her face, in the dimness, was so velvet black, it was like a panther’s mask. And in the black, her eyes the color of Saké.

  Then she had gone, and Picaro stood and looked at Omberto, who was shaking visibly, from rage or some kind of horror.

  “I had to do that,” Omberto said. “Didn’t I? Yes. What is she? She’s smothering you—”

  Picaro stared at Omberto, still trying to find something to say, but before he could, the lights went out.

  The whole bar reeled in a kind of liquid twilight, where almost nothing but shadows were visible. A cry or two went up. Some inebriated laughter. These lights didn’t fail. So it was another ploy, some piece of fun thought up by the management of the bar. Or a trick, so watch your pocket, watch your purse and jewelry—

  But they were close to the slide where the drinks were served, and Omberto slammed around and stood there, ready for the light to return and another tray of beer.

  And then Picaro saw something, something so soft looking, light as a feather, or a puff ball from some seeding flower, drifting delicately down through the almost-dark. It appeared such a gentle and curious thing that Picaro watched it, captivated, intrigued—to see what it might be. It dropped just where Omberto was, by the slide, where Omberto’s hand was, on the steel of the counter. And then, like the beer glass, the falling autumnal softness struck a surface too. Just there. Just where Omberto was. Where his hand was. His right hand.

  The violence of the noise was impossible—so loud and harsh, full of a crack and splintering, and a spurt of silvery flame that for a second illuminated Omberto, balancing awk wardly, as if half blown over, and screaming. Until the whole bar began to scream too.

  And then the lights splashed on again full pitch, and Picaro could see where the one chemical light bulb, detached from the ceiling, had fallen and detonated against the bar, smashing Omberto’s hand, every bone, cutting and burning Omberto’s hand, every inch—so that it was now a thing, not a hand, and to this blackening and minced thing, this other thing still partly attached, which screamed and drew breath and screamed.

  NO MEMORY EITHER of going back. A gap.