“They have no concern for neighbors who have a business to run, bills to pay, and loved ones to feed,” snapped the manager. “You don’t need to see those antics as you enjoy your coffee, sir.”
“The disruption in your winter garden,” said Fiyero. “That was someone trying to break down your wall into that yard, and get them out alive.”
“Don’t even suggest it,” shot the manager in a low voice. “There are more ears in this room than yours and mine. How do I know who was up to what, or why? I’m a private citizen and I mind my own business.”
Fiyero didn’t take a replacement cup of cherry chocolate. There were racking cries from the mother Bear, and then a silence in the world outside the heavy damask drapes. Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?
He wanted to tell Elphie what he had seen, but he held back for reasons he couldn’t name. In some way, in the balance of their affections, he sensed she needed an identity separate from his. Were he to become a convert to her cause, she might drift away. He did not dare to risk it. But the vision of the battered Bear cub haunted him. He held Elphie the tighter, trying to communicate a deeper passion without speaking it.
He noticed, too, that when she was agitated she was the more liberal in her lovemaking. He began to be able to tell when she was going to say “Not till next week.” She seemed more abandoned, more salacious, perhaps as a cleansing exercise before disappearing for a few days. One morning, as he was stealing some of the cat’s milk for his coffee, she rubbed some oil on her skin, wincing with sensitivity, and said over her shoulder of soft green marble, “A fortnight, my dear. My pet, as my father used to say. I need a fortnight of privacy now.”
He had a sudden pang, a premonition, that she was going to leave him. It was a way for her to get two weeks’ head start. “No!” he said. “That’s not on, Fae-Fae. It’s not all right, it’s too long.”
“We need it.” She expanded: “Not you and I, I mean the other we. Obviously I can’t tell you what we’re about, but the last plans for the autumn campaign are falling into place. There’s going to be an episode—I can’t say more—and I must be available to the network at all times.”
“A coup?” he said. “An assassination? A bomb? A kidnapping? What? Just the nature of it, not the specifics, what?”
“Not only can I not tell you,” she said, “I don’t even know. I’ll be told only my small part, and I’ll do it. I only know it’s a complicated maneuver with a lot of interlocking pieces.”
“Are you the dart?” he said. “Are you the knife? The fuse?”
She said (though he wasn’t convinced): “My dearie, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad. It’s all too expected. Security guards watch me like owls on a mouse. My very presence provokes alarm and heightened vigilance. No, no, the part I’ll play will be a handmaiden’s part, a little assistance in the shadows.”
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“You’re selfish,” she said, “and you’re a coward. I love you, my sweet, but your protests about this are wrongheaded. You just want to preserve my insignificant life, you don’t even have a moral feeling about whether I’m doing right or wrong. Not that I want you to, not that I care what you think about it. But I only observe, your objections are of the weakest sort. Now this isn’t something to be argued. Two weeks from tonight, come back.”
“Will the—the action—be completed by then? Who decides?”
“I don’t know what it is yet, and I don’t even know who decides, so don’t ask me.”
“Fae—” Suddenly he didn’t like her code name anymore. “Elphaba. Do you really not know who is pulling the strings that make you move? How do you know you’re not being manipulated by the Wizard?”
“You are a novice at this, for all your status as a tribal prince!” she said. “Why shouldn’t I know if I was being a pawn of the Wizard? I could tell when I was being manipulated by that harridan, Madame Morrible. I learned something about prevarication and straight talking back at Crage Hall. Give me the credit for having spent some years at this, Fiyero.”
“You can’t tell me for sure who is or isn’t the boss.”
“Papa didn’t know the name of his Unnamed God,” she said, rising and rubbing oil on her stomach and between her legs, but modestly turning her back to him. “It never is the who, is it? It’s always the why.”
“How do you hear? How do they tell you what to do?”
“Look, you know I can’t say.”
“I know you can.”
She turned. “Oil my breasts, will you.”
“I’m not that stupidly male, Elphaba.”
“Yes you are”—she laughed, but lovingly—“come on.”
It was daylight, the wind roared and even shook the floorboards. The cold sky above the glass was a rare pinkish blue. She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands—as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her way.
The collapse of her reticence frightened him more than anything else.
He took some coconut oil and warmed it between his palms, and slid his hands like leathery velvet animals on her small, responding breasts. The nipples stood, the color flushed. He was already fully dressed, but recklessly he pressed himself against her mildly resisting form. One hand slid down her back; she arched against him, moaning. But perhaps, this time, not from need?
Still his hand moved down onto her buttocks, felt between her cheeks, beyond, felt the place one muscle pulled in crookedly, endearingly, felt the very faintest etching of hair beginning its crosshatch shadows, its swirl toward vortex. He worked his intelligent hand, reading the signs of her resistance.
“I have four companions,” she said suddenly, wrenching away in a motion soft enough not to disengage but to discourage. “Oh heart, I have four comrades; they don’t know who our cell leader is, it’s all done in the dark, with a masking spell to shadow the voice and distort the features. If I knew more, the Gale Force could catch me and torture it out of me, don’t you see?”
“What is your object?” he breathed, kissing her, loosening his trousers again, as if this were the first time, his tongue tracing the twisting funnel of her ear.
“Kill the Wizard,” she answered, looping her legs around him. “I am not the arrowhead, I am not the dart, I am just the shaft, the quiver—” She cupped more oil in her hand and as they slid and fell into the light, she made him bright and anguished with oil, took him deeper in than ever before.
“Even after all this time, you could be an agent for the Palace,” she said later.
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m good.”
A little snow fell one week, then some more the next. The feast of Lurlinemas drew nearer. The unionist chapels, having appropriated and transformed the most visible parts of the old pagan beliefs, hung themselves shamelessly in green and gold, set out green candles and golden gongs and greenberry wreaths and gilded fruit. Along Merchant Row, shops outdid themselves (and the churches) in decor, with displays of fashionable clothes, and useless and expensive trinkets. In display windows, papier-mâché figures evoked the good Fairy Queen Lurline in her winged chariot, and her assistant, the minor fairy Preenella, who strewed gift-wrapped delights from her capacious magic basket.
He asked himself, again and again, if he was in love with Elphaba.
He also asked himself why he was so late coming to this question, after two months of a passionate affair; and if he knew what the words even meant; and if it mattered.
He chose more gifts for the kids and for sulky Sarima, that well-fed malcontent, that monster. He missed her a little; his feelings for Elphaba seemed not to vie with those for Sarima, but to complement them. No two women could be more unlike. Elphaba demonstrated the proud independ
ence of Arjiki mountain women that Sarima, married so young, had never developed. And Elphie wasn’t just a different (not to say novel) provincial type—she seemed an advance on the gender, she seemed a different species sometimes. He caught himself with a mammoth erection just remembering that last time, and he had to hide himself behind some ladies’ scarves in a shop until it subsided.
He bought three, four, six scarves for Sarima, who didn’t wear scarves. He bought six scarves for Elphaba, who did.
The shop girl, a dull Munchkinlander midget who had to stand on a chair to reach the till, said over his shoulder, “Just in a minute, ma’am.” He turned to make room at the counter for the other customer.
“But Master Fiyero!” cried Glinda.
“Miss Glinda,” he said, flabbergasted. “What a surprise.”
“A dozen scarves,” she said. “Look, Crope, look who’s here!”
And there was Crope, a little jowly though he couldn’t be twenty-five yet, could he?—looking guiltily up from a display of feathery, plumy things.
“We must have tea,” said Glinda, “we must. Come now. Pay the nice little lady and off we fly.” In her voluminous skirts she rustled like a corps of ballerinas.
He hadn’t remembered her quite so giddy; maybe this was married life. He slid a glance at Crope, who was rolling his eyes behind her back.
“Just you put this on Sir Chuffrey’s account, and this, and this,” Glinda said, mounding things on the counter, “and have them sent along to our rooms in the Florinthwaite Club. I’ll need them for dining so have someone run over with them right now if you would. How dear. So kind. Ta ta. Boys, come along.”
She gripped Fiyero with a pinching hand and steered him away; Crope followed like a lapdog. The Florinthwaite Club was only a street or two over and they could easily have carried the purchases back themselves. Glinda capered and clattered down the grand staircase into the Oak Parlor, making enough noise so that every female resident looked up in a rewarding sort of disapproval.
“Now, you, Crope, there, so you can be Mother and pour when we’ve ordered, and dear Fiyero, you here, right next to me, that is if you’re not too married.”
They ordered tea; Glinda got used to him a bit and began to calm down.
“But really, who would have thought it?” she said, picking up a biscuit and putting it down again, about eight times in a row. “We were the great and the good at Shiz, really. Look at you, Fiyero—you’re a prince, aren’t you? Do we call you Your Highness? I never could. And you’re still married to that little child?”
“She’s grown up now, and we have a family,” Fiyero told her warily. “Three children.”
“And she’s here. I must meet her.”
“No, she’s back at our winter home in the Great Kells.”
“Then you’re having an affair,” said Glinda, “because you look so happy. Who with? Anyone I know?”
“I’m just happy to see you,” he said; and in fact he was. She looked wonderful. She had filled out some. That wraithlike beauty had bloomed but not coarsened. She was more woman than waif, and more wife than woman. Her hair was cut short in a boyish style, very becoming, and there was a tiaralike thing in her curls. “And now you’re a sorceress.”
“Oh hardly,” she said. “Can I even get that damned serving girl to hurry up with the scones and jam? I can not. Yes, I can sign a hundred greeting cards for the holiday season at one go. But it’s a very minor talent, I tell you. Sorcery is vastly overrated in the popular press. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Wizard just magick the hell out of his adversaries? No, I’m content to try to be a good partner for my Chuffrey. He’s at the exchange today, doing financial thingies. Oh do you know who else is in town? It’s too rich, Crope tell him.”
Crope, surprised to be given an opening, choked on his mouthful of tea. Glinda rushed in. “Nessarose! Can you believe it? She’s at the family home over there in Lower Mennipin Street—an address that’s come up quite a lot in the past decade, I might add. We saw her where, Crope, where? It was the Coffee Emporium—”
“It was the Ice Garden—”
“No, I remember, it was the Spangletown Cabaret! Fiyero do you know, we went to see that old Sillipede, do you remember? No you don’t, I can see it in your face. She was the singer who was performing at the Oz Festival of Song and Sentiment the day our Glorious Wizard arrived out of the sky in a balloon and orchestrated that coup! She’s making yet another of her innumerable comeback tours. She’s a bit camp now but so what, it was gales of fun. And there at a better table than we had, I might tell you, was Nessie! She was with her grandfather, or is it the great-grandfather? The Eminent Thropp? He must be eleventy-hundredy years old by now. I was shocked to see her until I realized she went merely to provide him an escort. She didn’t think much of the music—she scowled and prayed all through the entr’acte. And the Nanny was there too. Who would’ve imagined it, Fiyero—you’re a prince, and Nessarose just about installed as the next Eminent Thropp, and Avaric, of course, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, and humble little me-eee married to Sir Chuffrey, holder of the most useless title and the biggest stock portfolio in the Pertha Hills?” Glinda almost stopped for breath, but lunged on kindly, “And Crope, of course, dear Crope. Crope, tell Fiyero all about yourself, he’s dying to know, I can see it.”
Actually Fiyero was interested, if only for a rest from the staccato chatter.
“He’s shy,” Glinda pushed on, “shy shy shy, always was.” Fiyero and Crope exchanged glances and tried to keep their mouths from twitching. “He’s got this so avant-garde little palace of a loft apartment on the top floor of a doctor’s surgery, could you imagine? Stunning views, the best views in the Emerald City, and at this time of year! He dabbles a bit in painting, don’t you dear? Painting, a little musical operetta set design here and there. When we were young we thought the world revolved around Shiz. You know there’s real theatre here now, the Wizard has made this a much more cosmopolitan city, don’t you think?”
“It’s good to see you, Fiyero,” said Crope, “say something about yourself, fast, before it’s too late.”
“You cad, you kid me mercilessly,” sang Glinda. “I’ll tell him about your little affair with—well never mind. I’m not that mean.”
“There’s nothing to say,” Fiyero said, feeling even more taciturn and Vinkus than he had when he first arrived in Shiz. “I like my life, I lead my clan when they need it, which isn’t often. My children are healthy. My wife is—well, I don’t know . . .”
“Fertile,” supplied Glinda.
“Yes.” He grinned. “She’s fertile and I love her, and I’m not going to stay much longer as I’m meeting someone for a business conference across town.”
“We must meet,” said Glinda, suddenly plaintive, suddenly looking lonely. “Oh Fiyero, we’re not old yet, but we’re old enough to be old friends already, aren’t we? Look, I’ve gushed on like a debutante who forgot to splash on her Eau d’Demure. I’m sorry. It’s just that that was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness—and life isn’t the same now. It’s wonderful, but it isn’t the same.”
“I know,” he said, “but I don’t think I can meet you again. There’s so little time, and I have to go back to Kiamo Ko. I’ve been away since the late summer.”
“Look, we’re all here, me and Chuffrey, Crope, Nessarose, you—is Avaric around, we could get him? We could get together, we could have a quiet dinner together in our rooms upstairs. I promise not to be so giddy. Please, Fiyero, please, Your Highness. It would do me such an honor.” She cocked her head and put a single finger to her chin, elegantly, and he could tell she was struggling through the language of her class to say something real.
“If I think I can, I’ll let you know, but please, you mustn’t count on it,” he said. “There’ll be other times. I’m not usually in town so late in the season—this is an anomaly. My children are waiting—have you children, Glinda?”
“Chuffrey is dry as two baked wa
lnuts,” said Glinda, making Crope choke on his tea again. “Before you go—I can see you’re getting ready to dash—dear, dear Fiyero—what do you hear from Elphaba?”
But he was prepared for this, and had readied his face to be blank, and he only said, “Now that’s a name I don’t hear every day. Did she ever turn up? Surely Nessarose must have said.”
“Nessarose says if her sister ever does turn up she’ll spit in her face,” Glinda remarked, “so we must all pray that Nessarose never loses her faith, for that would mean the evaporation of such tolerance and kindness. I think she would kill Elphaba. Nessa was abandoned, rejected, left to look after her crazy father, her grandfather-thingy, that brother, that nurse, that house, the staff—and you can’t even say single-handedly, as she doesn’t have any hands!”
“I thought I saw Elphaba once,” said Crope.
“Oh?” said Fiyero and Glinda together, and Glinda continued, “You never told me that, Crope.”
“I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I was on the trolley that runs along the reflecting pool by the Palace. It was raining—some years ago now—and I saw a figure struggling with a big umbrella. I thought she was about to be blown away. A gust of wind blew the umbrella inside out and the face, a greenish face which is why I noticed, ducked down to avoid the splash of rainwater—you remember how Elphaba hated getting wet.”
“She was allergic to water,” Glinda opined. “I never knew how she kept herself so clean, and I her roommate.”
“Oil, I think,” said Fiyero. They both looked at him. “That is, in the Vinkus,” he stammered, “the elderly rub oil into their skin instead of water—I’ve always assumed that’s what Elphie did. I don’t know. Glinda, if I were to meet up with you again, what’s a good day?”
She rooted in her reticule for a diary. Crope took the opportunity to lean forward and say to Fiyero, “It really is good to see you, you know.”
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