Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  In the bedroom she pulled off her hairclip (she had worn it only because Cy liked it) and tossed it on the bureau. If anybody had ever asked, she would have said she definitely liked Cy, otherwise she wouldn't have had him move in. Cy was a wonderful surprise, the way he came on to her when they first met. And he always surprised her when they made love, too, the way he paused to close the curtains so neatly and arrange the candles and pillows just so. He loved to take her to bed and, frankly, it was flattering that something about her enthralled him, whatever it was. In fact, whenever she felt herself drifting from him she felt guilty, but she forgave herself because she knew that Cy had passion enough for both of them.

  Now she tugged the bedclothes straight, or mostly straight—straight enough, anyway—then she stamped into her boots, zipped up her ski jacket, and stepped outside. The air was icy, the sky pure blue, and the sun dazzling. She walked down to the Avenue, singing to herself so softly you wouldn't have heard it unless you were really listening. She stopped at Prospero's Books to buy Teach Yourself Italian, then walked along to the Café Mondello, where she unlocked the back door, laid the book on the shelf over the coat hooks, then locked the door and went off to do her Monday errands, still singing.

  * * * *

  5

  So now Samantha had two things she looked forward to each day. One was her book, Teach Yourself Italian, which she studied whenever she had a break at the Café, and the other was Kate Swift, her instructor at Hard Buns Aerobics. Kate didn't actually have hard buns, but when she stripped down to her sports bra and shorts Samantha could see she did have nice snug buttocks and tight abdominal muscles. And she was totally likeable. After her first day in class Samantha had apologized to Kate, saying, “I'm sort of . . . I mean, my body is sort of . . . Well, you can see it.”

  “Your body looks fine to me,” Kate told her. “These exercises will firm it up a bit, but mostly they'll improve your cardiovascular system. Your heart will have to work less, and that's a good thing.” She smiled. “You probably work enough already.” A lot of the exercises were done to fast rhythmic music, and Samantha especially liked a piece that Kate herself had composed when she was in a rock band. Samantha brought her a pastry every day, saying something like, “This is our almost-no-fat cannoli,” or “Here's something I created, tell me if you like it.” After two weeks of classes they had a glass of wine at La Brasserie and Samantha invited Kate to dinner at the little apartment on Friday night.

  Cy was surprised when Samantha told him that she had invited her aerobics instructor to dinner, and Samantha herself wondered if the get-together would go well. But it did go well, mostly. In fact, Cy chatted very attentively with Kate Swift and was charming in his own way, though at the beginning he did get stuck in an extra long description of how small a nanometer was, saying it was like a marble compared to the size of the earth, or like a penny to so many zillion dollars, or like something to something else and on and on. But he listened unusually well and was obviously happy that they had so much in common, like when it turned out they both liked rock climbing. They talked about ropes and gear and Cy roguishly offered to arm wrestle with her right there at the table, at which Kate laughed and said she was sure he'd win. By the end of dinner Cy's cheeks were pink from drinking so much wine and he looked quite contented. Then Samantha went to get the coffee, ran some water over the dishes, and when she brought the coffee to the table Cy had leaned over to Kate and was quietly saying, “Sam thinks the faucet speaks Italian.”

  “Not the faucet,” Samantha told Kate. “The water. The water running out of the faucet. And only the kitchen faucet.”

  “And Sam doesn't even know Italian,” Cy said.

  “I'm learning it!” Samantha said hotly. “At work. Maia is teaching me. She knows Italian. And a book. Maia says if I can speak Italian, it will add to the ambiance. Customers will like it.”

  “What do you think?” Cy asked Kate.

  “It sounds right to me,” she said. “After all, it's an Italian style café.”

  “I mean about the faucet, I mean, I mean about the water talking Italian.”

  “Oh, that. That's amazing,” Kate said.

  “Amazing? Amazing? It's impossible!” Cy cried. “You actually believe the water talks Italian?”

  “Well, I only just heard it now and it sounds like Italian to me,” Kate said.

  Cy looked from Samantha to Kate, then from Kate to Samantha. “Where's my coffee?” he said briskly. “One of us needs to be sober and it might as well be me.”

  “It's in your cup,” Samantha told him.

  The dinner broke up around eleven. Cy volunteered to walk Kate back to her car, but she said no, her car was just across the street, no need for him to bundle up against the cold just for that. He started to embrace her in saying good-bye, but Kate thrust out her hand, so he shook hands instead, while at the same time she stepped past him and kissed Samantha. After Kate had left, Cy remarked that Kate's breasts were unusually small and high, saying, “That's because she exercises all day. It distorts her hormone balance.” Cy sounded irritated. “And we should get a plumber,” he added.

  “A plumber? Why?”

  “To fix the kitchen faucet.”

  “But there's nothing wrong with the faucet.”

  “There is if it speaks to you in Italian. Can you call somebody?”

  “All right, I'll call somebody,” Samantha said, her voice light and indifferent. “But it won't make any difference.”

  * * * *

  6

  Saturday morning Cy sped off to the MIT nanotech lab to clean up some work. When he returned at noon, Samantha and a skinny guy in blue jeans had their heads together in the kitchen sink, listening to the water rushing from the faucet over dishes in the sink. They turned around and Samantha said, “Cy, this is Mr. Avakian.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” the guy said, an angular young man with a smile who shook Cy's hand warmly.

  “You're the plumber,” Cy said, unzipping his big parka.

  “Mr. Avakian is a linguist,” Samantha said proudly. “That's an expert in language.”

  “A linguist? A linguist? You were supposed to call a plumber!”

  “It's Saturday,” she said. “I phoned all over the place. None of the plumbers would come unless I paid way too much.”

  “Do you know how to fix faucets?” Cy asked Mr. Avakian.

  “He knows all about language.” Samantha said. “He teaches college.”

  “Oh?” Cy looked at this thin young man who had a light bronze stubble on his jaw and was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. “Where do you teach?”

  “At Culinary Arts College,” he said

  “Culinary Arts College? They have linguists?”

  “Right here in Cambridge,” Mr. Avakian said. “On Mount Auburn Street, over by Harvard.”

  “That's where I learned pastry,” Samantha told Cy. “Not at Harvard. At Culinary Arts. So I phoned and asked if any of the professors there knew languages and they gave me Mr. Avakian's name and phone number.”

  “She said it was an emergency so I came right over,” Mr. Avakian told him. “Or I would have shaved.”

  “And did she tell you the faucet speaks Italian to her?”

  “Not the faucet,” Mr. Avakian said. “If you listen closely it's the water coming from the faucet.”

  “The water speaks Italian?”

  “It's really amazing. Yes.” He laughed. “Really amazing.”

  Cy zipped up his parka, saying decisively, “I'm going to get a plumber.” He turned abruptly and left.

  * * * *

  7

  After the sound of Cy's slammed door there was a long moment of silence in the kitchen. Then Samantha said, “Maybe I'm hearing imaginary voices. Maybe I'm just crazy.” She looked at Mr. Avakian, searched his eyes.

  “If two people don't hear the same thing, it doesn't mean one of them is crazy.” He smiled ever so slightly. “It's far more likely one of them is a little d
eaf.”

  “Cy isn't deaf,” she said, rather morose.

  “Some people are color blind. Some are tone deaf. Is it possible he's tone deaf?”

  “Oh?”

  “Some people, even blindfolded, can tell you what key you've struck on the piano. Other people can't tell the difference between C and D when you strike one and then the other. They hear the same sounds each time, even though they're quite different to most people.”

  Mr. Avakian paused, because Samantha was looking at him so fully that he thought she was about to say something, but she didn't say a word.

  “Some people can't hear very, very fine differences in sound,” he continued. “The differences are too small. You told me the sounds to listen to are under or inside the sound of flowing, splashing, gurgling water. Exactly right. But those are very difficult to detect. Impossible for Mr. Giardino to hear them. Or for people like Mr. Giardino.”

  Samantha laughed and waved her hand as if brushing something away. “There's no Mr. Giardino. He's Mr. Kleiner. And I'm Samantha Giardino.”

  “Oh! Heh. Then you're not—”

  “Married? No,” she said.

  “Ah, what a beautiful name you have, Samantha Giardino!” Mr. Avakian looked delighted.

  “Actually, it's Samantha Primavera Giardino. My middle name is secret, sort of.”

  “Samantha Primavera Giardino,” he recited, his face like the sky at dawn.

  “Please call me Samantha, Mr. Avakian,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Please call me Zeno,” he said, shaking her hand as if he were meeting her for the first time.

  Then Samantha turned on the faucet and they leaned their heads together into the sink. They experimented by turning the tap to different flow speeds and by tilting the bowls and the drain sieve at different angles. It sounded best at a moderate speed with dishes and bowls stacked rather crookedly and the sieve set slantwise in the drain. “That's pure Florentine,” Zeno murmured, bent deeply into the sink. “What we heard earlier, with all those u sounds, that was Sicilian, I believe.”

  “What's it saying?” Samantha asked him, keeping her voice low, her head beside his. “I'm still learning words like aeroplano and turistica from my Teach Yourself Italian book.”

  “A song, a song from—yes! —it's a love song from a comic opera.”

  Samantha suggested that they experiment by holding different things directly in the stream of water. She brought a bunch of grapes to the sink, and the two leaned their heads together and listened intently. At first Samantha heard only the soft syllables of water flowing smoothly around the grapes, then she heard something like actual vocals. She turned to Zeno just as he turned to her. Their faces were so close she could see the glinting of the sun on the red-gold stubble of his jaw and she saw a place where his lip, his tender lip, was chapped from the winter wind. She moved to kiss him or, no, she didn't move, but hesitantly whispered, “I wonder . . . if we . . . should stop.”

  And Zeno, who had grabbed the edge of the sink to stop from falling into her dark eyes, replied quietly, as if out of breath. “I was wondering . . . the same . . . thing.”

  They lifted their heads slowly from the sink so they wouldn't bump each other. Samantha sighed a glum sigh, reluctantly turned off the water, and watched Zeno slip into his thin, threadbare windbreaker jacket. At the door he turned to her and said, “I'm sure you make wonderful pastries.”

  “I'm a pastry chef, that's all,” she told him.

  “That's so great, so impressive,” he said, clearly impressed.

  “Pastry? I don't think so. It's not useful or anything. It's not science.”

  “It's art,” Zeno said.

  Samantha hesitated. “Oh, I don't think anybody would say that. Do you?”

  “Culinary arts are the most necessary arts,” Zeno told her. “It takes great imagination to conceive of a superior food, a confection, a confection that doesn't exist, then to create it. And the creative process is so complex, selecting the products of nature—the right eggs, the particular butter, the special flour, the living yeast. And to bring them together in precisely the right amounts and to transform them by rolling or grating or heating, all at exactly the right time. You must have extraordinary talent to be a pastry chef. I'm sure you make wonderful pastries.”

  “At the Café Mondello, yes. Yes, I do. Yes!” She was so happy, she laughed.

  * * * *

  8

  That was on Saturday. On Sunday Samantha noticed that water swirling down the toilet bowl was making strange new sounds. She flushed it a few times, listening attentively each time. The guttural sounds didn't echo any language she had ever heard, but they did sound angry, more angry than plumbing noise should sound. She hesitated to tell Cy any of this, because she wanted not to upset him, but at the same time she didn't want to keep secrets from him, either. After turning it this way and that in her mind, she decided not to tell Cy about the strange sounds until he told her he'd found a plumber who could replace the kitchen faucet. And, furthermore, she was hoping Cy wouldn't be able to get a plumber.

  On Monday, after aerobics class, Samantha and Kate Swift went to La Brasserie for drinks. As soon as Samantha had swallowed her first sip of wine she set aside her glass and leaned forward, saying quietly, “I met the most wonderful man the other day. I don't know what to do.”

  “What's the problem?” Kate said, also speaking quietly.

  “The water. I asked him to listen to the water running in the kitchen sink, because I couldn't get a plumber. That's how we met. After he listened he said that Cy was tone deaf and I'm not crazy.”

  “That doesn't sound like a problem,” Kate said.

  “I was thinking about him this morning, all morning long at the café, and then he appeared at the pastry counter, as if I had made him up out of thin air. My heart began to beat so hard I could hardly breathe. There was this rushing noise in my ears, like rain, and it was as if everything in the café disappeared and we were standing there together, just us two, talking in the middle of a rain storm.”

  “Oh, God, wonderful! What did you talk about?”

  “Cannoli, sfogliatelle, and tiramisu is all I remember.”

  They drank and sat in silence a while, then Kate asked, “What are you going to do about Cy?”

  “That's the problem. It would break his heart if we broke up.”

  Kate didn't say anything. At last she drained her glass. “I never had my heart go beating like that,” she said. “Maybe that's true love, which I also never had. There was a guy in the band and whenever I saw him, it felt like a sword going through me, right here.” Kate stabbed her solar plexus. “He was living with a groupie, a girl with a big mouth and blue hair, so I quit the band. After that I had a woman in the sack with me for a while. A needy waif, or so I thought. Stupid me.”

  “It doesn't seem right, everyone getting the wrong person,” Samantha said.

  “I'm going to try men again. They can't be worse than women.”

  Samantha and Kate had a glass of wine every afternoon after aerobics, and Samantha told her how Zeno came into the café every morning to buy a croissant and how she told him about the angry sounds the water made in the toilet bowl. Zeno said he'd come and listen to the water on Saturday.

  * * * *

  9

  That same week Cy discovered it was very hard to get a plumber merely to replace a faucet. Plumbers boasted they couldn't get to him for three to five weeks, or they announced they'd have to replace the entire kitchen sink—pipes, cutoff valves, drain, everything—to make it worth their time. He phoned plumbing companies and individual licensed plumbers every day during his lunch break, but had no luck. Then on Friday one of his calls was answered by a plumber on a cell phone who said, yes, man, he himself was The Water Works Plumbing Company and, yes, he could get there sometime Saturday around noon to replace the faucet. Cy asked was he licensed. The Water Works Plumbing company said no, man, he wasn't licensed. Cy said, “Now that I thi
nk of it, I don't give a damn. Come on Saturday.” He knew Samantha was reluctant to have the faucet changed and he didn't want to upset her and, besides, the plumber might not come, so after turning it around in his mind a few times, he decided not to tell Samantha until a plumber showed up at the door.

  * * * *

  10

  Samantha had invited Kate to stop by the apartment on Saturday, and here she was. Cy, feeling outnumbered, decided to go out to buy plumbing tools in case he had to replace the faucet himself. As soon as he had left, Samantha said, “I haven't told him. I feel terrible.”

  “Haven't told him which?”

  “Both. I haven't told him about the angry water in the toilet bowl or about Zeno.”

  “They say silence is golden,” said Kate.

  “Would you like an espresso and a biscotti?”

  “Absolutely.”

  There was a knock at the door and it was Zeno Avakian in his thin windbreaker, his cheeks red from the cold, a smile on his face. After introducing Zeno to Kate, and Kate to Zeno, Samantha led the way to the bathroom. Samantha flushed the toilet and they all listened to the water—the way it swirled angrily in the bowl and went down with a vomity choking sound. “That's terrible,” Kate said, stepping back. Zeno, staring at the bowl, slowly shook his head. He flushed the toilet and listened attentively, soberly. He flushed it again, listening again. “That's Turkish,” he said at last. “Very vulgar Turkish.”

  “What's it saying?” Samantha asked him.

  “Well.” Zeno hesitated. “As I said, it's bad slang.” It was hard to tell whether Zeno's cheeks were still a bit ruddy from the cold, or if he was ever so slightly blushing.

  “What's it saying?” Samantha asked again. “You can tell us.”

  Zeno cleared his throat. “It's saying, I'm tired of eating all this crap! There's a very vulgar word I translate as crap, but it could be translated as something else.”