All Around Atlantis

by Deborah Eisenberg

  For an instant, his eyes flicker over the matches, half of them creased and blackened, then he inclines toward them and inhales, bringing the cigarette to life.

  He leans back, eyes closed, and exhales a rich plume. “Fantastic,” he says. He opens his eyes and smiles at her. “Back to the subject. So. Where were we? Artists: not losing heart. Other painter: not your boyfriend…”

  “Well,” Rosie says. “I was going out with someone, but we broke up this winter.”

  “Pity,” Harris says.

  Rosie shrugs. Another life. Had she even really cared about Ian? No—her magic blood saw to its own cravings.

  Harris is looking at her. “Artist, too?”

  “Oh, no,” Rosie says. “Ian, never.”

  “And what was his field?”

  Rosie frowns. “Well,” she says. “Commodities, basically.”

  Harris inhales, and exhales luxuriously again. “Not for you, was it?” he says. “You found the life restricting?”

  “Yes, I guess…” Rosie says. “I was…Actually, I felt as if I weren’t even alive…”

  “Ah,” Harris says. “That’s the choice, isn’t it. That’s the question. I’m sure it seems very hard to you, an artist’s life. Restlessness, fear, discouragement…despair, yes? Even despair. While for people like me or your ex, it all seems to be under control. And in many ways, it all is under control. I’m sure you artistic types think we have it easy, and we do—aside from the normal quota of human misery, of course. But it’s all settled—it’s settled. We’ve answered the questions a certain way, we’ve made our choices. But then what? Not to say we aren’t…Not to say…which is all very well, but come my age a lot of men look around and say, ‘Wait, this is my life, it’s my only life, the only one I’m ever going to have.’ I know men whose lives were just perfect. Men who had a perfect life and just threw it all over. Left perfect wives, perfect jobs, perfect families…Because they just couldn’t resist some impulse. To spoil the perfect thing, is what some people say. But I think it’s more the thought of…we’re all going to die, do you see? Think of it, Rosie—the cold, the stillness, the finality…” He stubs out his cigarette. “Well. But you must know men like that.”

  For a moment they sit in silence. “It’s dark,” Harris says, in surprise, and switches on a lamp. “There. Let there be…You know, I’ve got so much stuff here I bet you’d really appreciate. Elizabeth and I aren’t collectors in any serious sense of the word, but we have picked up some awfully good things over the years, in my opinion. Should we see if you agree?”

  He takes her through the apartment, turning on little lights over paintings and drawings, which are now hung on all but the bedroom walls, and speaks of each one knowledgeably and lovingly. His hand rests on her shoulder, her wrist, the small of her back, as he shows her around, causing tears to come to her eyes and cruel little flames to flick at her bones, snapping around them like a lash. “What do you think of this?” he says, pausing in front of a painting.

  Rosie’s eyes clear, and the painting appears in front of her. “It’s wonderful…” she says, surprised. The painting’s alight; the whole room is alight. “Really wonderful…”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful,” he says. “That’s right. This is the one.” He gives her a pleased, brief little hug. “You’re very easy to talk to,” he says. “It’s absolutely frightening. I wish you didn’t have to go.”

  She stares at the painting in front of her. Its shapes leap and dance as Harris rests his hand on the back of her neck.

  “I just can’t tell what’s in your mind,” Harris says. “It’s an attractive quality, you know; I’ll bet you’re very attractive to men.”

  She shakes her head, slowly. Hot shame creeps up her skin as she thinks back to the sort of men she used to be attractive to, in the days when it was easier just to fuck the guy instead of having the tedious discussion about why you weren’t going to and then doing it anyhow, to get him to leave. “A long time ago,” she says, “there were a lot of men. But then, thank God, Ian came along.”

  “Hmm,” Harris says. His hand drops away. “Well,” he says again. But this time clearly, it’s an instruction: “I wish you didn’t have to go…”

  Rosie’s heart plunges. “I wish I didn’t, too,” she says, and steps obediently to the door.

  He holds it open and smiles, but when she looks up at him to see what she’s done wrong, his smile fades, and he folds his arms around her. “Going to be here this weekend?” he says into her ear.

  She rubs her cheek against his marvelous shirt; her heart is beating so furiously that for a moment she can’t speak. “Do you want my number at Jamie’s?” she says.

  “I do,” he says, and releases her. “I certainly do. Maybe we can…grab a pastrami sandwich—I’ll be at loose ends here till Tuesday evening.”

  Paper is waiting at a little maple desk. Rosie writes out her number, and when she hands it to him he puts his arms around her again, adjusts her slightly, and gives her a kiss more debilitating than whole encounters she’s had in bed; so graphic that, hours later, she’s still trembling.

  But he doesn’t call. It’s Sunday evening, and he still hasn’t called. Of course, it’s really only been two days. No, one day, really—Saturday.

  And yet there’s only Monday to go. Well, Monday, and Monday night. And Tuesday, of course—Tuesday during the day…before Elizabeth returns. At least during the day after Lupe leaves.

  “Think you might eat something ever again?” Jamie says, on a visit to the apartment. “Just as a favor to your fans? Or are you intending to spend the rest of your life in this room?”

  Rosie rolls over in bed to face the wall.

  He sighs. “Want to tell me what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” she says. “Nothing. Just nothing.”

  After Jamie leaves, she gets herself into the tub, and stays, for hours, with her friend the duck bobbing blankly between patches of suds on the water’s dirty surface. Her skin is tormented from thinner, but she scrubs away at it, crying.

  Her friend the duck! She grabs it and hurls it into the corner, near the toilet. Could he have lost her number, possibly? Did he expect her to make the call? Well, but maybe he did, actually…What he’d said was he’d be at loose ends “until Tuesday evening.” And, actually, he might not have put it that way, in fact, exactly, if he wasn’t expecting her to make the call.

  When after the fourth ring he picks up the phone, she can hear a little scrap of voices even before he says hello; obviously he’s in the middle of dinner, or something. A conversation. Rosie uses her thumb to cut the connection, soundlessly. A jolly enough dinner, that’s for sure—they were laughing, all of them, whoever they were. Well, not all of them, exactly—the others were laughing; Harris, the fact is…was chewing.

  Three cheers for Mrs. Howell’s Fiorinal. It’s eradicated the time perfectly. And Rosie has finally, after all these months, got a truly decent sleep. Two dear little pills took care of Sunday night, then three eliminated Monday, and only five more, actually, were needed to roll Wednesday morning right up to Rosie’s bedside.

  For several hours now, Rosie has had to stand up and walk and talk—and she’s been able to, though her hangover still makes an odd, gauzy curtain over everything in view. Just as well: the view has included Elizabeth; the great, rumpled bed, all its noisy turmoil exposed in the glare of Lupe’s day off; and, of course, Harris. Who could not have been friendlier or more pleasant, to Rosie and Jamie as well as to Morgan.

  The five of them have stood together, looking at the bedroom walls. There’s no doubt that Morgan is satisfied, although, Rosie notes through her hangover, he’s more muted—softer—than usual; it’ll probably be some time till he runs into Jamie again. And Elizabeth is clearly pleased, in her surgical way. And, naturally, it’s all just fine with Harris.

  They’re quiet for a minute or so, turned toward the glinting blue out the window as if a trance had fallen over them. Elizabeth
speaks dreamily into the silence. “Let’s get a boat next summer, darling. Let’s get a boat and go sailing off, right into the sky…”

  “We’ll discuss this,” Harris says.

  Elizabeth laughs. “Sloth,” she says affectionately. “You know you’ll love it…”

  They make their goodbyes. Morgan delivers his gracious little speech of thanks to Jamie, and, as Elizabeth begins her gracious little speech of thanks to Morgan, Harris takes Rosie’s hands in both of his and looks at her. “The important thing,” he says in a low, vibrant voice, “is to keep painting, Rosie…Trust your talent. Trust your future.” And he gives her a special little smile—formal, final, but just for her. She’ll see that smile more vividly, she knows, in the starkness of memory, when the curtain rises.

  “It’s been real,” Jamie says to a wall, and turns to Rosie. “Ready?”

  “Just a moment,” Rosie says. “Let me wash my hands.”

  The slip glimmers as though it’s been waiting for her; it tumbles into her arms as she touches it. A rescue? Oh, no, not at all. Rosie stuffs it violently into her backpack as she will later stuff it violently to the rear of Vincent’s dusty shelves, and then, she assures herself, she’ll never give these people another thought.

  But what will they think, Elizabeth and Harris? Or, to put it more precisely, what will Elizabeth think, and what will Harris think? Because—Rosie removes a fleck of paint from the faucet—they’ll be thinking about her, all right. They will. Yes, let them think about her…

  Mermaids

  “Good? not good?” Mr. Laskey said. “What do you say, girls?”

  “Kiss kiss,” Alice said, making two spoons kiss, and Janey was just staring rudely into space, so it fell to Kyla (as it had all day) to make things all right. “It’s perfect,” she assured Mr. Laskey, and, true, the old-fashioned gleam and clatter, the waitresses in their pastel uniforms, the glass dishes with their ice-cream spheres, the other little groups of wealthy tourists and even New Yorkers, all of this would be exactly what her mother was back home picturing.

  Spring vacation had been hurtling down toward Kyla for weeks and weeks, at first just a fleck troubling the margin of her vision, then closer and larger and faster until it smashed into place, obliterating everything that wasn’t itself, and Kyla’s mother was dropping her off at the Laskeys’, where they were waiting for her, and Mrs. Laskey was smoothing Janey’s dress and giving little Alice a hug, and for one fractured and repeating moment Kyla was saying goodbye to Richie Laskey, and then the car door shut Kyla in with Alice and Janey and Mr. Laskey, and Mrs. Laskey and Richie were waving goodbye, and Alice began to cry at the top of her lungs, as though she were being snatched away by killers. “Oh, grow up, Alice,” Janey said.

  The airport was gray and shiny, like a hospital where Kyla was to be anesthetized and detached hygienically from home. A corridor of shiny gray time sucked her in along with Janey and Alice and Mr. Laskey, and then the crowd in which they were to be conveyed away compressed itself into the tube of the airplane.

  “You get the window seat,” Janey said to Kyla. “You’re the guest.”

  Seven days, Kyla had thought; seven days before she could go home, seven days of being the guest, seven days of having to have a good time—even though she was with Janey Laskey. “That’s okay,” she said. “Take it if you want it.”

  “You take it,” Janey said. “I’ve been on lots of planes before. I get to go on planes all the time.”

  Kyla looked around for Mr. Laskey, but he was already settled into the seat across the aisle from Alice, and one of the stewardesses was leaning over him, laughing and laughing, as he told a joke about a fox and a bunny rabbit. And Kyla would have taken the window seat then (because someone should show Janey she couldn’t always get away with that sort of thing) but the thought of her mother’s pleading look intervened, so she just shook her head and sat down, thunk, where she was.

  Janey shrugged. “Okay,” she’d said, squishing her porky rear end past, to the good seat, “I guess some people don’t like it. Some people are scared to look out the window.” She opened the big book she was carrying and squinted down at it, following the print with her finger; her thin hair, the color of cardboard, drooped forward; obviously she should be wearing glasses.

  Poor Janey. “What’s your book about?” Kyla asked.

  Janey jumped slightly. “Oliver Twist?” she said, and looked at Kyla. “Is about orphans.”

  “Sor-ry,” Kyla said.

  Air whooshed through some little spouts above them, the lights flickered, and a heartless angel’s voice instructed them to strap themselves in.

  No, Kyla thought. No no no no no. She closed her eyes; the gravity of her will flowed around the seats and into the little compartments: The plane was growing heavier and heavier—it would sit, the plane, heavy with her will; darkness would come; someone would open the door, and they could all go home. But for one instant there was a flaw in her concentration—or was it in her sincerity? Her will was flicked aside like an insect and the plane rose, through a great roaring.

  The stewardess returned to make a big fuss over Alice. “Kindergarten, already?” she sang out, amazed, to Alice, who confirmed this with a gracious nod. The stewardess straightened up, twirled a bit of stray hair around her finger and tucked it back into place, smiling brilliantly at Mr. Laskey. Janey stared at her with loathing and then turned to the window.

  “Guess what you can see from up here,” Janey turned back to say to Kyla. “You can see the bodies in the lagoons.”

  “There are no bodies in the lagoons,” Kyla had said firmly, for Alice’s benefit, but Alice was playing happily with the safety instruction card, like someone who has no troubles in the world.

  “They look just like mermaids, except they’re face up,” Janey said. “Their hair floats, and their legs are green and slimy.”

  “Don’t,” Kyla said.

  “Eleven-year-old Courtney Collier disappeared from the mall at ten o’clock this morning while her mother was buying a new tie for Mr. Collier,” Janey said. “‘Courtney was a beautiful little girl,’ authorities said. ‘We’re totally positive it was a sex crime.’”

  Seven days; seven more days. Minus the three hours and fifteen minutes between getting from the Laskeys’ house to wherever it was they were now. Minus this second. Minus this second. Kyla leaned across Janey to see: Naturally there were no dead girls. You couldn’t even see the lagoons—all you could see were clouds.

  Now most of that seven days was over with. Sunday night Kyla had settled into the room she was to share with Janey and Alice, with the blue carpet and the alien blue-flowered wallpaper, and she’d carefully put her clothing into a bureau drawer or hung it on the hotel’s heavy wooden hangers—how strange it looked on those hangers in that big, dark closet that smelled like wood and furniture polish and very faintly of other people, though nobody in particular. Then she and Janey had to play Brides with Alice to calm her down and they had all gone to sleep.

  “I want you girls in bed early,” Mr. Laskey had said, “except on the nights we’ve got tickets. And there are going to be some serious naps around here. Agreed? The days will be pretty strenuous, and I don’t want to arrive back home with three little zombies. Now. I’ll be right next door, but I’m looking forward to a little stress-reduction myself, and you have an entire hotel staff downstairs at your disposal. Kindly take advantage of that unusual fact. If you need anything, Donald will be at the concierge’s desk every afternoon and night.”

  And it had been…strenuous. On Monday evening they’d gone to a restaurant with waiters in tuxedos, where Kyla had worn the new party dress her mother had gotten her for the trip, and Tuesday night she’d worn the dress again, when Mr. Laskey let them stay up late and they’d gone to a show with poor people who were singing and dancing. And yesterday evening they had gone to another amazing restaurant, in Greenwich Village, where everyone—all the waitresses and all the customers—looked like models. And du
ring the days they’d gone to the Empire State Building and the Planetarium and the Statue of Liberty and the Museum of Natural History and various other museums (which Janey claimed to enjoy) and they’d walked in the big, dirty, interesting park with the little fringe of silver buildings at the edges, and they’d gone in a horse-drawn carriage, and had taken a boat around the whole island, and along with all that there had been a revolving display of fascinating delis and coffee shops and people you couldn’t believe had even been born, and long, sludgy naps in the sad blue room where it seemed Kyla had been living with Janey and Alice forever.

  So now there was only tonight and then Friday and then Saturday, and on Sunday they’d get back in the plane, and on Monday morning Kyla would wake up in her own bed and all the big blank obstacles that at one time had been between her and home would have dissolved into a picture she could remember for her mother at breakfast.

  Because at the time something was happening, of course, you didn’t know what it was like. At the time a thing was happening, that thing was not, for instance. New York. New York was what her mother was at home picturing. The place where you actually were was a street corner with wads of paper in the gutter, or it was standing there, facing the worn muzzle of the horse that had pulled your carriage, or it was sitting in front of a little stain on the tablecloth. It really wasn’t like anything—it was just whatever it was, and there was never a place in your mind of the right size and shape to put it. But afterwards, the thing fit exactly into your memory as if there had always been a place—just right, just waiting for it.

  On Monday morning, she would be home. She would be telling her mother over breakfast all about New York. And Kyla would know—because she’d be remembering it—just what New York was like. But today was the biggest obstacle so far. She was so tired that her body kept forgetting to do things in its usual way—even to sit in its chair properly, and Alice was easily upset, as though the nightmares that had plagued her all night long were rustling and hissing at her feet. And Janey was behaving…abominably, so Kyla had to be extra careful about everything. “It’s just perfect,” she said.