He stepped away from Xavier and attended to a schoolgirl who’d come in with a little less than the right change. “Just this once,” he said to her, though he didn’t really mean it. While the Frosty King scooped lemon ice into a cone, Xavier went out to his Citroën and came back with a box that bore the label Fins Pâtés de France. Mrs. Frosty, who’d come out from the storeroom, said she loved pâté and showed him where to put it.
The next day, the Frosty King stepped out of his parlor and, unaccompanied, excited, yes, despite himself, headed for Kikanga. What he held was too important to hang on to, too interesting to take to the Victorian Palm without knowing for certain that Gilbert would be there. He’d put Gilbert Turner down, it’s true, had never thought he’d do a single interesting thing—but now that Uncle James had come so brightly through, what if the plan worked?
Hoping that no police or party chairman on the prowl would stop to ask him how or who he was, or where he might be going (or, indeed, what was in the box), the Frosty King stuck close to the buildings. He did not much care for sun. He infrequently took walks so far from his own shop. He hated, hated, sweat. But he wanted very much to see—was looking forward to!—Gilbert Turner’s face when he showed him what he had.
Upstairs, in number 2, Sarie was staring out the window and biting at her lip. Gilbert, at the kitchen table, sat looking at a picture in The Everyman’s Car Handbook: a watercolor image, delicate and soft, showed a man in steel-blue coveralls scratching at his head with one pink hand while a spotted dog lay loyal at his feet. More attracted by the painting of the man than by the efficient diagram of a standard carburetor on the facing page, Gilbert found his own pink fingers moving to his head. When Sarie, passing close to him, tried to look over his shoulder, he’d said, “Not quite yet, my dear. Not yet,” and covered up the picture. She’d drummed her fingers on the table, bored her worried eyes into his naked brow for almost a full minute, then turned her back to him.
When Kazansthakis came, she was pleasant and polite. Like her husband, she believed in Mr. and Mrs. Frosty. She thought, He’s come to help, give us some advice. Gilbert stood to greet the Frosty King. Without asking what it was, or understanding that it was meant for him, Gilbert took the package. Sarie shook Mr. Frosty’s hand. She asked after Mrs. Frosty, and Kazansthakis winked. “She’s fine, just fine, Mrs. Turner. But she asks after you, and you we do not see.”
Sarie smiled at him, felt that she could trust him. Wished to please him, very much. “I will make you grenadine!” she said, which was special, rare, and of which they were almost out. She slipped into the kitchen feeling, hoping, that at any moment now, the quivering in her stomach might go still. The Frosty King must make everything come right. Gilbert would shape up at last, speak out and get going.
Gilbert didn’t understand at first. While Kazansthakis described circles in the air to loose his shoulders from the walk, Gilbert said, “What’s all this, then?” Kazansthakis pursed his lips and sent his nose to one side of his face, looking for a moment like a trickster at Mbuyu Mmoja Park. “You shall see, my friend!” Kazansthakis cracked his knuckles, rubbed his chest, and grunted. “A gift. Something I am giving you. For your grand and new beginning.” Kazansthakis raised his brow; he winked.
Gilbert, mesmerized, watched as Kazansthakis pulled a handsome pocketknife from his belt loop, knelt, and sliced the box lid’s lips. The cardboard flaps came open like a double door, and Kazansthakis motioned with his head that Gilbert ought to come and see.
Gilbert did not like to kneel or squat. His legs, he’d often felt, were not designed for such an awkward, native posture. But the Frosty King was waiting on the floor. Gilbert, one elbow propped on a splayed knee, tried to look as comfortable as he could; he kept losing his balance. Holding himself up with a palm flat on the carpet, he looked into the box.
With all his reading and his notes, Gilbert should have known exactly what they were. Cylindrical. A dull, flat-headed tip. They looked almost familiar, yes. Did not the pink man have some? A central, bulbous bolt extending into porcelain. What are they? Gilbert frowned. I’ve seen these things before. Five regular, fine grooves. The Frosty King, at Gilbert’s curious silence, took on the air of a highly trained magician who has pulled a rabbit from a tiny hat but hears no audience clap. “Turner!” he said. “Well? Turner. Tell me what you think.”
To please the Frosty King, Gilbert said, “Oh!” and, “Ah.” Wobbling on his heels, uncomfortable, he waited for knowledge to descend.
Kazansthakis was not fooled. He sighed. “Oh, Mr. Turner, what will we make of you?” he finally said. “You are a dreamer from the start, with your hair high in the clouds. Look again, my friend. Look hard. I got them from Japan!” Kazansthakis parted the brown flaps and held them firmly down.
Gilbert wished the Frosty King would give him just a moment, just some time to think. Feeling small and trapped, he reached out towards the box and placed his hands inside. The shiny necks felt cool and smooth and round. He knew what these things were, he did. But what could they be called?
The Frosty King went on in disbelief: “You must be joking, man,” he said. Gilbert was horridly ashamed. Would the Frosty King abandon him, disgusted? His face went deeply red. He sensed a headache rise; his scalp twitched. Kazansthakis sat back on his heels. His voice was not too hard. “Oh, Mr. Turner. Too many storybooks for you, I think! You can’t see a single thing that isn’t written down.”
Gilbert raised a little cylinder into the air and peered up at its gleam. Longer than my thumb, he thought. He struggled, closed his eyes. I know, he thought, I know. It was important that he say the correct thing. What would Kazansthakis think if he couldn’t name them—these items that (this much he understood) were intended for the business? But, yes. The answer came to him. He pulled on his friend’s arm; his tugging caused the Frosty King to lose his balance and land rolling on his back. “Yes, of course!” At last! “They’re spark plugs!” Oh, he had learned something after all, from that marvelous, valuable book. He was laughing, on the floor.
“They’re spark plugs,” Gilbert said again, and Kazansthakis rolled over and hugged him. “That they are, my friend!” Gilbert felt as tightly held as when he had come home from the Post Office and Sarie’d swung him round. But in Kazansthakis’s strong, thick arms, he felt a certitude he hadn’t in his wife, a wave of manly pleasure. That he was not alone.
“Spark plugs!” It’s going to work! he thought. The car handbook was difficult, indeed, but with such a friend as this—! The Frosty King would help him. He would learn what each thing was, in time. And wouldn’t people shopping for spare parts themselves explain exactly what they needed? They would tell him what was what. And he would write it down and find it. Gilbert hid his face in the crook of Kazansthakis’s shoulder, where the Frosty King was moist and rich from his long walk. The Frosty King was ticklish, and Gilbert’s breath there made him giggle; next, spark plug burning in his hand, Gilbert giggled, too.
When Sarie came out from the kitchen and said, “What are you men doing?” Gilbert, in his happiness, thought that she was lovely. The most magnificent thing on earth. So beautiful! Blond and rosy, graceful! So deserving of his love! He was laughing, still, and happy. “Look!” he said. “Look what he has brought us! Spark plugs!” Sarie looked suspicious, wary of the happiness collecting in her husband and also in the Frosty King, who, still giving the odd giggle, was looking Gilbert over with a proud, approving look, shaking his big head as though Gilbert had performed an admirable feat.
“Spark plugs?” Sarie frowned. She set down the tray she’d come with, approached them. Softly, Sarie said, “But, Mr. Frosty, why? Do you mean for our business?”
Something in her shifted from one foot to the other. Sarie, who had welcomed him so freely, sensed something go dark and felt suddenly indignant—for herself and for her husband. How like theFrostys to imagine they know best, she thought. How like them to act without permission. Who did they think they were? Spark plugs? What fo
r, what for? The front parlor seemed to shimmer. “You have committed a mistake,” she said. “Though of course this is very nice of you to think. But has my husband not explained?”
Kazansthakis did not rise. With a dainty flourish and a bow, he reached over to the table and took his grenadine. He sipped, licked his upper lip. “Thank you, Mrs. Turner.” He raised the glass, which glinted in the light. And, thinking that she, perhaps not unlike her husband, was a little slow, revealed what Gilbert had not thought to, what Gilbert had been saving up for last. “I have brought your husband, this Automotive Turner, his first box of spare parts.” He held the glass up in the air as if making a toast. “To get the business going. Spark plugs. My little gift to you.” He twitched his generous lips, a moue. “Do we like those apples, eh? What do you say to that?”
Sarie blinked. Something bad and odd had happened to her eyesight. What room was she in? Where was she, exactly? And how tall? What size was Sarie Turner? Those two men on the floor seemed very far away. Small. Apples. What was Mr. Frosty saying? Indeed, which one was Mr. Frosty? Which one was Mr. Turner? She saw spots before her eyes, she did. The room shook. They were both still on the floor. They clucked. They scratched at things. Like chickens, Sarie thought. “Spare parts? But, Mr. Frosty—” Sarie gave Gilbert a pleading look. “We are going to sell the baskets. And the souvenirs. Gilbert? We were going to discuss it.” She touched her wrist lightly to her forehead, left her hand there for a moment, bare palm out, like a miner’s lamp. “What should we need sparks for?” Below her, the two men’s outer edges, their red skins, faded and dissolved; they swelled, and filled the room. She shrank. She found it difficult to breathe.
“Mrs. Turner?” “Sarie?” “Dear?” “Madame!” She couldn’t hear them properly. Their heavy voices came to her as if through a long, dry metal drum. She held on to the doorjamb and reached out for the piano, feeling that her legs had grown so long she might not manage to sit down without some clumsiness, a fall. And she could not bear to fall.
“Spark plugs?” Sarie heard her own voice rise. “Why spark plugs for our baskets? For the souvenirs?”
The men came into focus once again, but they looked tighter, harder, more compact, than they had before. She looked from Gilbert to the Frosty King. She decided that she did not want to sit. I will stand right here over them, she thought, until they tell me what it means.
A stillness took hold of the parlor. Both men stopped their laughing as though, without any warning, someone in the wings had flipped a little switch. What were her eyes doing? Gilbert and the Frosty King seemed to Sarie suddenly immovable and heavy. Two man-sized balls of lead. The Frosty King’s red face was taken over by a hotly mixed expression: something like embarrassment, for Sarie, and something like annoyance, for poor dreaming, dreaming, silly, truthless Gilbert Turner. Gilbert, who still thought Sarie was the finest-looking woman he had ever seen, didn’t realize how serious it all was. He made as if to stand; said, “Sarie, look at it. Just look.” He held out his open palm, where the single plug was shining. But his wife was like a statue.
The Frosty King had stopped looking at Sarie and was eyeing Gilbert strangely. He said, very softly, “Gilbert. Gilbert.” Kazansthakis wanted to restrain him. He laid two fingers on Gilbert’s out-stretched arm like a person looking for a pulse, someone guiding a blind man. This visit to the Turners’ had not turned out exactly as he’d hoped. “You didn’t tell your wife?”
Gilbert, silenced in mid-chuckle, turned back to his friend. It had not turned out as Gilbert had expected, either. He didn’t know exactly where to look. He sniffed. All at once, his face felt very bare, too naked. Why was the Frosty King staring at him so? Why wasn’t Sarie coming down to join them, laugh with them, to see the treasures in the box? Weren’t they just like jewels? Weren’t they just another form of trinket?
Half to Kazansthakis, half to his still wife, he said: “It was a surprise! I was going to surprise her.” To Sarie he said, “I was going to surprise you.”
The rest happened very quickly. The Frosty King stood up, downed his grenadine in a single gulp, wiped his mouth with his own hand, and excused himself to Sarie. “Please come to the Frosty-Kreem sometime. My wife does ask for you.” He patted Gilbert on the back to give him strength for what he imagined was to come and, without waiting to be shown down to the courtyard, slipped into the stairwell, muttering, “‘Surprise!’”
Upstairs, loosed, Sarie had one of her little tantrums—though it was much, much greater than any in the past. Indeed, she took the news, it seemed to Gilbert, disproportionately hard. Had she really thought that he was seriously at work considering what she’d suggested lightly only once? Or twice? What was it, souvenirs? Was it knives or stones? What had she really said? Not much, he thought. No, she hadn’t told him anything. She’d only made suggestions, after all, for what was to be his business. Why was she so upset? Would he not be in business principally for her, for Agatha, for them?
But Sarie shouted at him. She threw the empty glass hard against the wall and shouted even harder when the clear thing failed to shatter. She called him names in French. And eventually, she cried. She ran into the bedroom, where she slammed the door and curled up on the bed. Spare parts, Sarie thought. And she said it to herself over and again until she couldn’t hear it anymore, could not cry any longer, and finally fell asleep.
Outside, it was growing dark. In the silver light, farther down the road, before going to the movies, young men took young women to the Frosty-Kreem, where Mrs. Frosty was still waiting for her husband and, resentful, was counting up the scoops she’d doled so she could tell her man exactly what she’d done while he was doing God-knows-what-and-where. In Mansour House, Bibi was stitching up the envelope with a sense of great things on the way. Nisreen woke up from a nap, came quietly into the living room, and switched the lightbulb on to safeguard Bibi’s eyes. Farther down, in a different sort of dusk, Majid stood on his balcony watering the jasmine. He had finished that new poem, called it: Early on the Avenues. His skin felt warm, and he began to think of Sarie, hoping she’d come soon. He was sorry to have missed her, wondered idly how she had seemed to Sugra, what Sugra had thought. He heard Tahir in the parlor, moving, felt a lightness in his heart. Like a father and a man.
Alone in his front room, Gilbert was exhausted. He was, he told himself, a small ngarawa rigger that has weathered a great gale and must now recall its bearings. He closed the spark-plug box and pushed it up against the bookshelf, feeling that without intending to he had done Sarie a great wrong. Shy, afraid, like a person stepping from a fragile house after a quake, he went into the bedroom, where he kissed his wife’s closed eyes and noticed they were damp. He lay beside her fully dressed, listened to her breathe. She still looked pretty to him, even in her sleep. A big, brave, muscled girl. Outside, in Kikanga and beyond, buses heaved and rattled in and out of town.
Sarie stayed in bed for three long, deadly quiet days, rising to drink water and to pee only when she thought that Gilbert wouldn’t see her. Agatha sat silently beside her on the floor and tried (although she couldn’t really) to read a novel she had found under the bed, a thriller that Sarie had attempted, left, and forgotten to return. Gilbert, cowed first by Sarie’s rage, then by the heady silence, came in now and then, wishing and not wishing that she would come awake. He didn’t know what he would say. He didn’t bring her anything. He didn’t know what his wife needed, and, though he asked himself again, again, he had no idea, really, still, what had happened in the parlor.
At first when Gilbert came to Sarie’s side, she had had the energy, the temper, to turn away from him. And though he wished she wouldn’t, he had been slightly reassured by it, this usual angry sign. On the second day, she stopped moving at all. If he came in and spoke to her, she simply looked ahead of her, right up at the ceiling, never—so it seemed to Gilbert—even blinking. Once, she turned her face just slightly so that she was almost looking at him. But she wasn’t really looking, not at him, or an
ything. Her blue eyes were enormous, and Gilbert walked away, backwards, feeling that she might stab or pierce him with that aimless gaze if he should turn his back. All this for a small misunderstanding, Gilbert thought, amazed. All this for a basket. Sensing that the Frosty King, who knew and loved his own Mrs. Frosty with such ability and grace, expected Gilbert to take care of his own household for a while, he did not go out to the Palm. Kazansthakis, Gilbert felt, had not approved of what he’d seen.
He sought refuge in the books he had, for a whole month now, abandoned. The splendid Sons of Sindbad. He sat down, even put his legs up on the table, but quickly found that the new book could not hold him. It was too enmeshed in this whole story, in the recent past, the now, in his hopes for the bright future. The Clove Tree, an account of silviculture in the islands, which he had read, several times, because it was so clear, fared a little better. Like The Everyman’s Car Handbook, this volume had photographs and drawings, and a list: things that could endanger a clove crop and those that could enhance it. Diseases and their cures.
Afterwards, he went into the bedroom. Sarie’s stubborn silence, her refusal to take food, and her inability to speak made Gilbert feel afraid. He also felt dismissive now and then. Good God. But the stillness that had overtaken Sarie and held her in its grip had also furnished Gilbert’s wife with a kind of special charm. She’s weak, he thought. She requires all of my attention. In the mirror, he could see that he looked pink and that Sarie had gone sallow. She was losing weight. Her long face was growing longer. How small she looked among those dirty, twisted sheets! When Gilbert laced his fingers in the damp mat of her hair, which smelled, she let him, and she began to cry.
The Blue Taxi Page 31