by Saints
The only reason I even looked in the shop window was the owner, an oversized man, with ginger mustachios almost out to his ears and ginger whiskers down his front, with a shiny bald head, dressed in black leather, heavy with chains and gewgaws, including one dangling skull and crossbones earring. “A club act” I would call him if I’d noticed him while alongside my friend and she would smile. He was striking: meant to be as colorful as possible. Typical in the city. Less so as an antique store owner.
I was also drawn by the profusion of mirrors.
It was unclear whether this was a mirror shop or an antique shop. I stopped at the window after getting the opera house tickets and figured I’d amuse myself for ten minutes by going in. The owner ignored me, involved in a conversation on antique puce Princess phone, adding up invoices on a pocked, old IBM desk calculator.
To my surprise it wasn’t just a store front; smaller rooms extended deep into the block, where surrounding shops still had living quarters.
I ended up looking around in the room furthest from the front door. Suddenly, Mr. Black Leather arrived, stuck out a meaty hand, and said, “Hans Olthen.” Just then we both heard jangled bells signaling someone entering the front door. “Back in a sec,” Hans offered, flirtatiously adding, “Anything or one particularly interest you here?” Before I could answer, he pointed to three floor-model mirrors I’d stopped at and said, “Half off, half off, and don’t bother with that one, it’s flawed.” He flounced off to the front of the store and I heard “Ach, Gretel! Wunderbar!” followed by rapid German.
So, of course, I looked at the three mirrors.
Looking glasses is more like it, since they appeared to be vintage 19th century. Two were faux-Federal style, late in the century with obvious attempts at copying the more prized earlier style with its distinctive architrave top. The third was a puzzler. It too had the faux-Federal style of arched top and double wood sides; but it also had what seemed to be East Asian carvings, finely done, almost hidden on the very dark wood of the two sides. I couldn’t make out the wood used. The other two mirrors were maple and cherry, but while dark as mahogany, this was grained wrong for that and so, enigmatic. It was also larger: almost seven feet by four feet wide and leaning right on the floor, while the others had doubled bottom pieces and one had lion-claw legs.
The discounted two were placed direct to the passing viewer, and their glass was clear if a little blurry at the beveled edges, but without any crazing. The third, larger one was faced away from the viewer. They were all surrounded by Craftsman-Era, fake zinc-shaded lamps set on brown-as-dirt matte ceramic bottoms, which rested on out-of-the-70’s four-foot high stereo speakers. I had to twist myself into a corner to get a good look inside the supposedly flawed mirror and even then, I made out nothing at all. No reflection, never mind a flawed one.
Wait! There it was! A dull reflection of the doorway behind me and my body in the camel-hair overcoat I’d unbuttoned in the warm back room. Despite the lack of sharp reflection, I didn’t see a flaw, until I looked closely, top corners first, then down, and left corner, all of them fine, but wait! There it was. A twist or turn of the glass? In the lower right.
When I knelt to look to see if it was the fault of the glass, suddenly it was clear, quite clear, but instead of reflecting back the closet door like the rest of the glass, it was reflecting green: light green, medium green, even a few deep greens, and as it clarified in front of me, it was reflecting green leaves, branches, portions of a bush and in some motion too, as though it was a video or live action film.
I almost fell over. I did stumble into the closet door. When I crept forward and looked again, the flaw had spread. The entire right side third of the glass was reflecting what looked like part of a forest.
I was trying to make up my mind to call Hans and discuss this with him, when he burst into the room, and said. “It was nothing,” shaking his head, then added. “Silly woman. She can see, no, how completely Gay Gay Gay I am! Interested in the womankind not one bit.” He’d spun about with his words and landed even closer to me than I found comfortable. “But you!” he added. “You, I have definitely seen before.”
“I don’t believe we…”
“No. No. Don’t tell me. You were not so well dressed as this, I think. So maybe that is what off me throws.” Touching his large pink brow as though to recall, “Black or Navy blue tee and maybe, yes, it vas motorcycle boots.”
“You must be kidding.”
“No, no, Hans, that is incorrect,” he lectured himself. “But somewhere…I am so sure.”
“I am not that kind of…”
“No insult intended. I have nothing but respect for…”
“This mirror!’ I interrupted him by changing the subject. “Unlike the others it has no price on it.”
“Because it is flawed.”
“Then, the price…out of curiosity’s sake,” I explained.
“I told you. It is flawed and haunted, yes?”
“Yes. Well, as least about the flaw. I see very fine markings here. What’s the provenance?”
“Provenance is very fine. From upper Nob Hill. Very large house next to Spreckles mansion. Well, on same street. Estate sale. All quite legal.”
“I meant before that? Is it Asian or what?”
His big meaty hands came out and folded in space. “Wish that I knew.”
“Because it might easily go with the dark wood colors in the library of a lady I know.”
Hans peered at the delicate stylized chrysanthemums, and was that an open fan pictured too? “Cannot help. Hans takes notes at estate sales. Not this time. Siamese?” he hazarded.
“Or Javanese. And the flaw?” I turned to touch it on the right side. “Where’s the flaw?”
Because as I looked at it, the green vanished and the glass was clear and shining too.
“Is there!” Hans asserted without even looking. “Take my word. You bring it to that lady. She throw you out the door!”
* * *
“It’s been months, maybe years since Diane has looked so well. She’s positively glowing.”
We were in the lobby of Davies Hall during the interval. MTT was conducting Mahler, a specialty of his, so it was full. I was just beyond the main floor bar, speaking with a blonde of a certain age named Conchita with seven other names, most of them, my friend, Diane, had intimated, husbands she’d divorced or outlived.
“She’s a lovely woman,” I agreed. “Lovely tonight. As are you.”
“Do you think?” she preened. “It’s vintage Balmain. I can’t pull off those new designers. What do they always say, the older, the softer the lines and darker the skin, the more pastel the hues? Back to Diane. May we hope that there will be an announcement soon?”
“An announcement?” I asked, flummoxed.
“No announcement is forthcoming, Conchita, except the symphony will begin, now that we’ve had the overture and song cycle as appetizers and a bit of bubbly.”
Diane slipped a beringed hand through my arm and smiled with her eyes at me, so that we were sharing something at the older woman’s expense.
“But really Diane,” Conchita began, aggrieved. Then we all heard the chimes.
I wasn’t sorry that Diane began to lead us away.
“But wait, darlings. You haven’t told me yet that you’ll both be at Keith and Enrica’s?
Diane waved. We filtered through the orchestra crowd to our fifth row center seats.
“Don’t pay attention to Conchita,” Diane lightly urged. “Listen only to me.”
“Don’t I always?”
We sat and the first violinist appeared on stage and Tilson Thomas himself appeared and the audience settled down. That haunting post-horn motif tore through the silence with its plangent call from afar. I thought about what they had both said. I had made more progress than even I’d expected.
I turned to Diane and she to me and we smiled at the sonic wonders to come.
* * *
“What did you mean
when you said that the mirror was flawed and haunted?”
“Is that what I said?”
“Yes, exactly those words.”
Hans was wearing a variant of his usual dead cow: a vest covering his torso save for his very hairy nipples and his equally hirsute navel. He was certain I’d come to see him and my asking about the mirror was an excuse. He played along or at least pretended to do so.
“Specifically, what did you mean when you said it was haunted?”
He had a feather duster and was dusting all around himself—reminding me of those balletic hippopotami in Fantasia.
“The mirror was wrapped in canvas sheet when I saw. Someone, I don’t remember who, a servant or housekeeper, said it was kept wrapped many years. Wrapped tight and bound tight with cord. No one unwrapped since it was delivered. I think she said it was of danger.” He shrugged.
“Because it was haunted?”
“It’s superstition, is it not?”
“It was of danger if it fell on your toes, because it’s so heavy?” I asked.
He emitted what romance novelists term a “mirthless laugh.”
“What is important—is distorted. Because of flaw.”
“And yet I like it very much,” I said. “If it is so awfully flawed and distorted why not sell it to me at a discount? As damaged goods?”
“Well…I haven’t put it up for sale yet.”
“Does that mean you wish me to name a price?” I asked.
“That would be too much of a disregard. Is how you say it?”
“Insult, I think you mean? Too much of an insult?”
“Yes, insult is the word I look. But why talk of flaw things when there are so many perfect things?! For your lady friend, you said.” This last phrase spoken so archly, I could have struck him for his insolence!
“Now you are insult. Subtleties I am aware, yes, but do not exactly understand,” Hans admitted. “I still believe we have met before. Other circumstances. Yes! I believe.”
“I don’t! Now, shall I look into the mirror today?” I asked.
He didn’t protest.
“Where exactly is this confounded flaw of yours?”
He danced a little on tip toes. “Now you not see it,” Pointing to lower righthand corner.
“When do you see it?”
Hans shrugged.
“Have you seen it?”
Hans shrugged again.
“And the haunted story? Fake, I suppose, to jack up the price.”
He handed me a small pad and a chewed up looking stub of lead pencil he kept in his vest pocket. “You make price you want here. Put it on desk when you leave.”
That’s when I knew he hadn’t paid much, or perhaps anything, for it. That it had been part of a general sale of furnishings.
I wrote a price and put it into my pocket.
As though in synch, the front bells jangled and he excused himself and exited. From where I stood, I heard his greeting, “So, Antony. What shall it be today? Perhaps this escritoire they say from Fontainebleau?”
I looked at the mirror again, and there was that green I’d seen before.
I wedged myself in such a way that I could look at it directly, touched the mirror and I’ll be damned if the entire mirror didn’t then clear enough to show that scene. I could make out forest, tropical, perhaps even Amazonian, given all the orchidaceous flowers and lianas. All the while I was thinking “I can see it, yet Hans couldn’t? Or did he not even try?”
The leaves moved and sometimes a twig or branch jerked. As I stood entranced, I began seeing not so much movement as the tiny consequences of small, not visible things moving. I remembered there was a magnifying glass for sale a room away and longed to get it. At the same time, I was afraid to move away from this extraordinary sight for even a second.
I heard sounds coming too, faint at first, what might have been the far-off cries of primates or birds. I’d just absorbed that, when a hummingbird darted into the scene. It went for the inside of an orchid-like bloom of cream spotted with red, hovered and sipped nectar; in profile so that I could make out its bronze and green throat and front feathers. It was about to move out of the picture when it suddenly turned full face and stared.
“It can’t possibly see me, can it?” I asked.
Perhaps in reaction, it darted forward, right to where I thought was the front edge of the glass. Astonishing. I was even more astonished when it darted forward another inch and I would swear its beak—nothing else but the beak—broke that indelible surface.
I must have gasped out loud and fallen back because faster than the eye it darted away and out of sight. I fell into the wall and struck the side of one of the other mirrors there and had to move quickly to keep it and myself from falling.
“Are you okay?” I heard a voice. A distinguished looking African-American man—Anthony?—must have been in the room next to this. He rushed forward to aid me. I thanked him.
“Oh, my!” he said and looked around. “He’s been hiding these from me.”
I moved in front of the “flawed” looking glass but he only had eyes for the smaller ones. “Hans!” he called, then smiled at me saying “That scamp!” I could hear him saying as he went toward the front, “Hans, you naughty, naughty man! You’ve kept these lovely Federal mirrors from me,” the voice diminishing as he went away.
I checked inside the big mirror and thought, I have to know for sure, and closed my eye and stuck a hand in. Opened them to see my fingers right at the branch end of some flowering bush. I grabbed it and snapped off the end. Hearing the other two approaching the room, I pulled my hand back, in time to see the scene in the mirror beginning to dim again. I stashed it in my coat side pocket and strolled as casually as possible toward the front.
I met Hans and Antony coming at me. As they passed I turned and said to Hans. “My offer will be on your desk.”
* * *
“You’re all right with all this, aren’t you?”
“All this” being the open front courtyard of the Legion of Honor set up with café tables and chairs, portable torch heaters, a string quartet playing, delicious food, and Mumm’s and Prosecco served by waiters so smooth they might have been on roller-skates.
I might have answered satirically. Instead I said, “You’re joshing, right? I love all this! I love the place. I love the Vlaminck and Derain exhibit inside. What’s not to like?”
She smiled “When we met, I wasn’t sure you were as much of a culture maven as I am. God knows, Harley wasn’t.”
Harley: her dead husband. Worth who knew how much, exactly. Diane didn’t.
“I am as much of a culture maven as you are. I just haven’t been able to afford it like this before. You know, front row seats at the symphony, boxes at the opera, fund raising galas with five-course dinners.”
“That’s the other thing I have to ask you,” Diana suddenly sounded serious. “Are you all right with someone else…you know, treating you to it.”
“I’m fine with it. I’m delighted with it. But only because it’s you—and not anyone else —who is doing the treating. I feel like we are in this together.”
“We are! We are!”
She became pensive.
“You won’t suddenly get all masculine proud on me and feel vulnerable about it?”
“I don’t think so. Did Conchita say I would?”
“Several of my women friends have had more…more experience in these things, to be completely honest. I’ve always been sheltered. By my parents. By Harley. So I’m reduced to having to ask. So, no qualms?”
“My only qualm is what your friends think of you bringing me everywhere.”
“Do you care?” Diana asked.
“Me? No. Not really. I know that makes me a terrible person.”
“Me either. And, no, it doesn’t make either of us a terrible person.”
“I think it helps that we’re not too different in age,” I offered.
“It helps even more that you are well-read
, knowledgeable, and intelligent on most of the subjects my friends are likely to…”
“Quiz me on?” I tried.
“Now you are being terrible.”
“But yes, thank you.” I agreed. “Except, of course, finances. I’m not very good at that.”
“Thank the Lord,” she laughed. “That’s all Harley thought about!—finances.”
A Romanza by Schubert originally written for the piano was now glittering over our conversation, just as the dessert, a towering Bananas Foster, arrived.
“I couldn’t possibly eat that monstrosity, could I?” Diane said.
To the waiter I suggested. “Why not leave one. We’ll share it.”
“You really are a mind-reader,” Diane said. “I’ll taste yours. But no more.”
“Well, maybe two tastes!”
Just then the transplanted-from-Atlanta heiress named Alexis-something-or-other flowed into one of the recently vacated chairs, followed by her far-too-young new husband.
“Well, darlings. Did you discuss it?” Alexis said stealing sips of the other guest’s bubbly.
“We were working our way to it,” Diane tried shooing her friend away. “Go away!”
“Working our way to what?” I asked and gulped what seemed to be too much dessert.
“The round the world trip!” Alexis said.
“Come with us!” Paul, the new hubby, said to me. “It’ll be fun.”
“It’ll be terrific fun if the four of us go,” Alexis agreed. “You know it will!”
“Well, now that you’ve opened your big mouth, Alex darling, and let the feline out of the Prada,” Diane said humorously. “You two had better go away and let us discuss it. Before the poor man chokes on his bananas and ice cream.”
As they were leaving, Paul turned and I saw his lips move to “Say yes!”
Diane began: “I always wanted to go. Now Alexis has tickets. There’s an itinerary at my place. Nice hotels. Super cruises. But we’d be gone a year and two months. I’ve always wanted to go and never could with Harley. We’ll have separate rooms all the way, because well, we’re just good friends, right? Don’t want to spoil anything by being anything more than that.”