All Around Atlantis

by Deborah Eisenberg

  What samples? Rosie glanced at Jamie.

  “You can be perfectly honest with Mrs. Howell, Rosie,” Jamie said.

  “I can’t do any worse than I’m doing now,” the lady said.

  Rosie gasped, as though she’d been slapped. Oh, no?

  “Well, Mrs. Howell,” Rosie said slowly, “It’s your house, after all, and no matter what we think it’s you who—”

  “I see,” Mrs. Howell said. “So. Four against one.”

  Over Mrs. Howell’s shoulder, the others smiled.

  Rosie learned a lot there, she thinks. Well, at least she learned something. And though this place downtown is only her second job, she can clean the brushes without wrecking them or going insane, she can stir the paints and put them out and straighten up at the end of the day without making a mess, she can maneuver her scaffold around with a modicum of authority, she always remembers to lock the wheels on Jamie’s so he won’t go flying through the window, she can navigate the treacherous shoals of someone else’s rooms without dripping, spilling, or breaking a thing, she can manage (once in a while) the huge, necessary array of implements and liquids simultaneously, she’s learned to become invisible at will, and, best of all, she can actually do a bit of the painting, even though this job’s so much fancier and more complicated than the one in Mrs. Howell’s house.

  It’s beautiful, what Jamie’s done, in Rosie’s opinion—no matter what Jamie has to say about it himself. And it’s all but finished. Even the garlands near the bedroom ceiling are all but finished now.

  It was Jamie who painted the forms of the leaves and flowers and fruit, of course, and it was Jamie, of course, who drew them all on the wall in the first place. And Jamie did the complicated shadings and details. But Rosie actually painted a lot of the veining on the leaves and most of the stems, and today Jamie’s going to show her how to make highlights. Without Marina and Jean-Michel around to make her feel terrible, Rosie can manage reasonably well.

  A couple of days later Jamie asks Rosie to work the whole following week all alone. “There’s really nothing left for me to do, now that you’re so expert with the highlighting.”

  “But I can’t,” Rosie says. “I can’t do it if you’re not there. How am I supposed to know what to do?”

  “I’ll draw you a map,” Jamie says. “Look. You know how to do the grapes, right? You know how to do the plums, you know how to do the pears…It’s just a question of where.”

  “But that won’t take much more than a day or two anyhow,” Rosie says.

  “And there are a few other things that have to be done,” Jamie says. “Look, Rosie, there’s some stuff of my own I really want to work on, and I’m going to go truly nuts if I don’t get to it right away. And you know what’ll happen if we both disappear. I mean, they’ll absolutely send in the Marines.”

  “But—” Rosie says.

  “You can,” Jamie says. “I’ve seen you work. Rosie, you can do everything that’s going to be required this week. You can do the highlights, you can stand around on the scaffold looking fabulous, and I know you’ll treat all their tastefully priceless shit with the…the reverence it…Have I ever asked you for anything else? Anything? Please. I’m under a lot of time pressure. And besides. Well, look. Actually, also, I’ve met someone.”

  Rosie stares, trying to let all the meanings of the words come to her, through a closing gate of panic. “Oh,” she says. “Well. So, I mean, do you need Vincent’s room back?”

  Jamie stretches, and yawns. “Hey,” he says in rebuke. “Besides. I doubt this thing with Trevor is going to work out.”

  By Monday afternoon she’s already finished the highlights, and, as instructed by Jamie, she’s working with the blue tape, making a thin gold line around the cornice.

  According to Jamie, this bit is the easiest of all. Just a thin gold line! It hardly even requires a monkey—a one-celled organism with an opposable thumb would do. Right. Of course, it’s all but impossible to get the tape on straight, to keep the interval between the strips even, to restrain yourself from diving down onto the bed to relieve your aching back and arm, to work the tape off at the necessary glacial speed rather than yanking down the whole damn wall…A thin gold line. The horizonless depth. Tiny little boats, bobbing…Rosie is gazing out the window when the door opens and a woman strides in. “Sorry,” the woman says. “Have to get some things. Hope I won’t be in your way.”

  How very tactful, Rosie thinks. But she stays put: do they want her to work or not?

  What you can do if something belongs to you! The way you can behave! Rosie always slips into this room, taking care not to disrupt the serenity so carefully tended by Lupe, but this woman just plunges right through it, as though she’d arrived by diving board. Now she’s tossed a suitcase right down on the bedcover—that fragile bedcover. But why not? The suitcase itself is clearly leather, probably as fine-grained as silk.

  The woman goes back and forth between the suitcase and the closet. This is the first time Rosie has seen the closets open. The hangers are the puffy, satiny kind, and the suits and blouses on them are delicious colors: colors that could be worn only by someone who expects people to he glad to see her—coral, pale yellow, the most shamelessly pretty blues. There are plenty of built-in drawers in the closet, too, which must have taken someone a lot of time to make, and racks and racks for shoes.

  The woman pauses to consider. Her eyes come to rest on a tiny lacquer box sitting on the table. She scrutinizes it for a moment, then reaches out and repositions it, almost imperceptibly.

  As if Rosie would have gone near the thing! The woman’s cream silk blouse is escaping from her skirt. She tucks it back in, and Rosie can’t help noticing the little bulge of flesh over the waistband. She did not ask to be up here watching this!

  Flop! Into the suitcase with a dark-blue suit. Now a yellow one. Rosie is surprised by something, she notices; what is it? Ah—it’s the woman’s appearance. Well, she does have good legs, this woman, that’s for sure; anybody might be jealous. Anybody at all. And her hair—thick, glossy, dark gold, like something with a lot of calories. People must just plunge their hands in and grab fistfuls.

  But she isn’t actually beautiful. And, Rosie judges, she probably never really was. She must be around forty, and she looks like she’s been used to getting her way every minute of those years. Well, of course. And maybe people say she’s beautiful without actually looking. But if she were just a few pounds heavier, Rosie thinks, everyone would see how it worked: sheer brute force. No one would mistake it for charm or ability or intelligence, let alone beauty.

  The woman rolls the two suits up into plastic bags—no question she knows what she’s doing. She jostles everything about in the suitcase, roughly and expertly, snaps the bright clasps closed, and clicks on a little lock. She pulls her suit jacket from the closet and puts it on. Goodbye, little bulge! “Harris—” she calls. She stops to listen and then sighs with exasperation, as though she were an actress in a play. “Harris?” And Rosie’s the audience. The woman picks up the suitcase and hurries out of the room.

  Well, she’s gone.

  But the sliding door of the closet is still open. It looks as if someone had slashed the wall, and its insides are all exposed, spilling out of the cavity. A scent, too sweet for Rosie, swells out from it, as if it were warm.

  The room vibrates with silence, as though the woman had slammed the door on her way out. There are a few slight dents in the bedcover, and on it is something green—a cool green. Rosie wipes her hands with a thinner-drenched rag and climbs down from the scaffold, her legs shaking a little, to look.

  It’s a pair of gloves—palms up, wrists tilted away from one another, fingers of one adjacent to the fingers of the other, all slightly curled, as though the body they belonged to were responding to someone’s touch.

  Rosie stands, looking; she glances at her own hand: clean, to all appearances. She extends it and picks up one of the gloves, holding it gingerly between her thum
b and index finger. It’s amazingly pliant and soft—slightly adhesive.

  And so small! Is it possible that this woman’s hand is smaller than Rosie’s? Ladies…used to use talc to get those things on: Rosie observes this fact her memory offers up as if it were a strange object for which she’s just discovered a fascinating use. How tight those gloves must have been—slick smooth, no bones, no veins…

  The door opens; a man is standing in front of Rosie. Saying something; saying, Sorry. Loops of silvery black curls; expensive raincoat folded over one arm. “Sorry, my wife says she forgot her gloves.” The glove is dangling from Rosie’s hand. He sees it. He’s looking at it. What if he tells Jamie? What if he tells Morgan? “I was just—” Rosie begins, and her throat shuts down.

  “Ah,” the man says. “Kind of you, but you wouldn’t have found us in any case. That parking lot’s the size of France.”

  Without moving from the spot, he extends his hand. His eyes are almost black. Watching him, Rosie reaches the second glove from the bed and then steps forward to drop both into his outstretched palm.

  “Thanks.” His hand closes around the gloves, and he smiles. “Thanks very much.”

  On Tuesday the room seems different. To the eye, it’s as usual: Lupe has been here, the closet door is closed, the bed is traceless. But something is altered.

  Rosie reruns the scene that took place right here the day before, trying to slow it down so she can search into its folds and crevices. But with each repeated exposure the scene slips more out of control. Rosie knows very well, for instance, that she was not watching from far above as the man extended his hand. She could not have seen her hair escaping from the scarf it was bound up in. She could not have seen the glistening smear of fresh paint just under her own ear at her jawbone any more than she could have seen herself standing there, staring, dropping the green gloves into the outstretched palm. She could not have observed her T-shirt flutter slightly with her breathing.

  There’s only tinkering left—cleaning up her mistakes and blotches, and she might as well refine some of the highlights and some stems that now look amateurish to her. In the late afternoon, she organizes things for the following day, putting lids on cans and cleaning brushes, and goes to wash up and change out of her painting clothes. The splendid silk slip is still hanging over the screen in the bathroom. Rosie looks at it. She turns away, concentrating on cleaning off the paint she always ends up streaked with, even under her clothing, in the most improbable places, but the slip behind her seems to have some claim on her today; she’d just as soon she’d never seen inside that woman’s closet.

  When Rosie gives the slip just the gentlest tug, it tumbles down, twinkling, into her hands. The slip pours tremblingly around her body, transforming it into a thrilling landscape, all gleams and shadows. Her skin looks an edible white. And the way the thing feels! Rosie lifts her arms; it slides against her. Her painting clothing—shoes, T-shirt, jeans, underwear—lies in a heap at her feet.

  How does that woman look in this? Easy to imagine. Rosie pictures that hair of hers, swooshing around, Harris’s hands in it.

  She closes her eyes to erase the scene. She takes the slip off, sniffs it to see whether her body has left any trace of paint or mineral spirits on it, replaces it carefully over the screen, and breathes in and out to calm her pounding heart. Then she puts on her clean clothes, and returns to the bedroom to collect her things. Out the window, the sails float, so far away. One detaches itself from the blue and flutters off—not a sail, a gull.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you—” a voice says behind her. “I thought you’d gone.”

  Rosie spins around. “Actually,” she says, “I thought you’d gone.”

  Harris blinks, evidently searching his mind. “Oh, I see,” he says. “Other day, yesterday, whatever it was? Just giving Elizabeth a lift to the airport.”

  Rosie stares. The way she just spoke to him!

  He seems not to have noticed, though. “I usually do,” he’s saying, as if this would clear up some confusion. “She says it’s the only time we see each other anymore. Not completely a joke…” He frowns. “Will it bother you if I grab a tie?”

  Will it bother her? Rosie closes her eyes again for a moment.

  Harris pulls a lustrous sheaf of ties from his closet and leafs through it, extracting several. He holds one up to himself, peering at the small mirror over the dressing table.

  Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, Rosie thinks. All of that, and you don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on with another person. “This one, I think,” he says. “Yes?”

  She watches as he makes the knot, his collar up, concentrating—his eyes on her face, as if she were the mirror. It’s impossible for her to turn away from the rapid, complicated performance.

  “Really hate this,” he says, turning down his collar and smiling quickly at her.

  She feels slightly dizzy. “You hate…”

  He gestures, as if the whole thing were simply too difficult to explain. “Oh, putting on a tie at this hour.” He looks at her, apparently for sympathy. “A meeting. In a bar, if you please. Downsizing—this is what it comes to. Now that we’re all laptops and cellulars, there’s no place that isn’t the office. Bar, apartment, plane, car, street…I liked it better when you went somewhere, didn’t you? Well, you’re too young to remember. But you used to go somewhere. There was your desk, there was your secretary. And then, the point is, you left.”

  Rosie looks at him uncertainly.

  He smiles. Oh—this is his home! She picks up her backpack. “Well, goodbye,” she says.

  “Goodbye,” he says. “By the way, why don’t I know your name?”

  “It’s Rosie,” Rosie says.

  “Rosie,” he says, and turns briefly back to the mirror. “Rosie. Well, good. Now we have a basis.”

  It’s Lupe’s day off. And Harris, evidently, is not by nature a housekeeper. The cover has been thrown sloppily over the bed, and a thick book is propped open, pages down, near a pillow. A tumbler containing what seems to be the watery remains of a whiskey sits on the floor by the bed next to a cup holding some boiled-smelling coffee. A robe lies open over the little chair.

  Rosie squints at the book’s cover. Some sort of fancy thriller, it looks like. About high finance. No sign of Harris himself. Maybe he’s in his study. Maybe he’s out…

  Does Rosie hear someone? Yes, someone’s come in. But—oh, no!—it’s Morgan. And of course Jamie’s not around to deal with him. “Hello, there,” Morgan says, inattentively, as he wanders into the bedroom. Does he happen to remember who she is? “How’s it going? Everything fine?”

  He glances around, and Rosie does, too. The glass, the bed, the robe…

  “Looking good,” Morgan comments, vaguely. He stands back from a wall, scrutinizing it, then approaches. He takes a fabric swatch from his briefcase, tacks it up by the window, stands back, and approaches again. “Very, very good. So. She’ll be back Tuesday night, I understand—after the holiday. I’d assume she’ll be pleased, but of course she’ll have to look at it. And if there are no adjustments, perhaps James will want to go ahead and seal it on Wednesday? Do you think?”

  “I guess…” Rosie says. “So, where did she go anyhow?”

  “Sorry?” Morgan raises his eyebrows slightly.

  Rosie looks at him.

  “Oh,” he says. “Business, I suppose.”

  “She travels a lot…” Rosie suggests.

  Morgan is loftily forbearing, as though he were waiting for a child to conclude a tantrum, but after a moment he concedes. “Some high-end international-hotel concern, I believe. Well—” he looks at Rosie, then away. “And where might James be?”

  Where indeed? Jamie didn’t get around to mentioning what she was to do in this contingency. “Actually,” Rosie says, “he’s sick.”

  Terror ripples in the depths of Morgan’s beautiful face, and tears spring, astonishingly, into Rosie’s eyes; it’s as if Jamie really were sick. “It
’s nothing much, I’m sure,” she says. “We ate at the Golden Calf last night. Big mistake.”

  “I see,” Morgan says.

  Obviously he’s realized she’s lying. “That’s too bad. Well, do ask him to give me a call if he has a moment. No, never mind, don’t bother.”

  “Morgan asked if you want to seal it Wednesday,” Rosie says that night.

  “I know,” Jamie says. “He called.”

  “Will that take long?” Rosie asks, though she pretty much knows how long it will take, since she and Jamie sealed the other rooms.

  Jamie shakes his head. “A couple of hours, maybe. How’s it been going, by the way? Any problems?”

  “Problems?” Rosie says. “Painting a line?”

  “Well…” Jamie says. “Listen, if you’ve finished, there really isn’t any reason for you to go back tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got a bit more to do, anyhow,” Rosie says.

  “It’s great you were there when Morgan came by. He won’t show up again, probably.”

  A basis! Rosie is thinking—she’ll probably never catch another glimpse of that person. And did he simply assume she’d know his name? Of course, the fact, ha-ha, is that she did happen to.

  “And in case I haven’t thanked you…This has really been great for me. I’ve gotten a lot done.”

  A lot of what? “I’m going to make some tea,” Rosie says. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks,” he says. “I want to wash my hair. You got any immediate plans for the tub?”

  Rosie wanders into the kitchen. She’s got into the habit of thinking of this as her life, but what is it, really? An accident, a coincidence—nothing. And now Jamie’s letting go.

  Already, in fact, she’s being completely colonized by the first person to happen by. Concentrate, she tells herself. Put the water in the kettle, put the kettle on the stove, turn the burner on, reach yourself a tea bag, and drop it in the cup.