There was a little jingle of bells as she opened the shop door, and he glanced up from a desk, where he was sitting with his feet up, reading. She looked away instantly, but it was indelible—the impression of the wonderful gray eyes, the broad, handsome, intelligent face, the soft white shirt.
The shop was airy and white. Silk and lace, velvet and beads and chiffon, dresses that would have been worn by lovely women long ago floated on puffy satin hangers.
She stood at a rack, moving the hangers methodically, with a tight heart, not seeing the dresses at all.
Was he looking at her? Or was he reading again . . .
She was twenty. There was plenty of time, assuming that her life were, after all, to work out. She was safely out of the corps, dancing less but dancing real roles . . . Still, so many things could happen—there were so many dangers ahead . . .
There was another little jingle from the door.
The girl entering the shop had been crying, that was clear, though the cold rain wouldn’t have done much for her appearance, either. Sorrow or weather, her face was red and swollen.
This girl glanced, just as Vivian had, at the man sitting at the desk. She glanced at him and then she stood uncertainly in the middle of the room, incongruous, surrounded by the delicate, lovely, costly clothing. It was unlikely that she could afford a single thing in the whole shop any more than Vivian could.
“Hello,” the man said. “Come in. Have a look around.” His voice was mild, kind rather than cheerful, and he had a wonderful accent, American, but very pure.
The girl went over to a rack on the other side of the room and started moving the hangers as Vivian herself was continuing to do. She was wearing the shabbiest possible coat, an old, bedraggled fur thing of the sort that was to be found in junk shops at the time for a few pounds. The fur was hanging off, disgustingly, in chunks, as if she had been flayed.
The clicking of the hangers along the racks continued on both sides of the room, slowly and rhythmically, as if two clocks were each pedantically asserting different hypotheses.
While Vivian moved the hangers at her rack, she turned surreptitiously to watch the other fraud, who was also unable or unwilling to leave the shop. There was no doubt about it—the girl’s long, scraggly hair was wet from the rain, but you could tell, from just that bit of her profile, that those were tears sliding slowly down by her ear, her large nose . . .
Vivian pivoted back to the dresses as the man closed his book and got up from his chair. He disappeared behind a curtain and returned with a little bottle of something. “Hold still, darling,” he said to the girl, and she did.
Vivian dropped her pretense of inspecting the clothing and simply watched as the man patiently, moving from one side of the coat to the other, from the top to the bottom, glued patches of peeling fur back onto it. The girl wearing it stood stock-still. It was all taking a great deal of time.
“There you go, dear,” the man said, straightening up and patting the coat with the girl in it. “Back in business.”
For a moment the girl didn’t move, but then she . . . revolved, actually, just turned on one foot and absolutely melted into the man’s arms, sobbing loudly.
How small the bulky girl looked in his arms! While Vivian watched, the man held her, stroking the dreadful fur, stroking the ratty hair, making comforting sounds—just like a veterinarian—until the girl abruptly took control of herself, sniffed wretchedly, wiped her streaming nose on her abused sleeve, and exited without a word. The man returned to his desk and his book without a glance Vivian’s way.
“Excuse me,” Vivian said after a minute, and he looked up. Her voice was hoarse. “If I cry, can I get a hug, too?”
It had been pure luck; the shop wasn’t his—he had just been minding it that afternoon for a friend. They spent the evening together and then the next day, a Sunday, inside by a fire, though it was only September. Out the window, the air was dark gray and vaporous; the light came up from the earth, reflected by the yellow leaves, the rain-gleaming pavement.
He loved dance, as it turned out, and became a privileged fixture at performances. Now and again he would lounge in the dressing room after a performance and watch in the mirror as she stripped off her sylph’s mask and replaced it with a little light street makeup. His presence was calming and festive. They were all mad for him—the company, the musicians, the director, the choreographers . . . It was as if they had all always found Vivian special.
His work was demanding—he was already beginning to be known. Sometimes he would disappear into it for weeks at a time. And sometimes he would just disappear.
She was dancing radiantly in those days; her body was pure sunlight. They made each other laugh until they reeled like drunks, they walked around the city together at all hours, they lay tangled in her bed with music at top volume, the world swam below them like a plain, as if they had just scaled a mountain.
But he never pretended that they could stay together. When someone tells you that he’ll always love you, she’d thought back then, it means he just never loved you enough.
But the 23 percent of him that was heterosexual, he said, had loved her passionately and exclusively. Love, passion, exclusive . . . Just words; crack them open and they were empty.
For some time she had evaded Simon, beautiful Simon, who also loved dance, who also loved to watch her, admire her, who perhaps even envied her. So she invited her two indispensable friends to the dress rehearsal of an austere, rather short, superbly effective piece, in which she had the starring role. Afterward the three of them went for champagne and oysters. She had left off any makeup at all, as if to be invisible while she watched the spectacle that was certain to begin in moments.
She had never remotely expected to be able to take up with Phillip again. After a time, she had chucked all her photos of him into a drawer, and it had been many years since she’d actually longed for him. After the commotion between the three of them, life had settled down to two and one. Eventually, she’d practically become a member of the household. Of course, she had other friends, too, and a few decent love affairs happened along that had consumed her interest for a while . . . It was sometime in there that her life as a dancer came to an end—the brutal price dancers pay for making beauty with their bodies.
Still, there was always the feeling that one would get around to being young again. And that when one was young again, life would resume the course from which it had so shockingly deviated.
She cried so rarely. That afternoon in the shop, so long ago, she had laughed instead as he rose to embrace her. But over the past few days, with the memorial looming, she kept losing herself to an undertow of tears. All yesterday she’d felt brittleness fretting her bones, youth streaming from her in galaxies of sparkly molecules . . .
* * *
As she made her coffee, fed the animals, moved quietly around the kitchen for fear of waking the boy, that sensation started up again, the one that had been plaguing her these days, of counting, counting—measuring the distance she was slowly traveling from Phillip’s death, counting the hours until her next class, when the young dancers would come in, not carefree, of course, but with sorrows that might still be reversed or at least compensated for, counting the years since Phillip had left to move in with Simon, the minutes as they passed, while her little flat filled up with trinkets, toys, mementos . . .
* * *
The fourth—fourth!—speech, a heap of platitudes, flatteries, and bizarre flourishes, was building to an unsteady pinnacle of boringness. Any second now, at least, it was sure to finally topple over, and dessert could be brought out amid the rubble. But no—whole new incoherent embellishments were suddenly being encrusted on! How Phillip would have hated this whole event. How he would have laughed, she and Simon had said.
This current speaker was a professor of architecture, German. His hands were shaking slightly as he read on and on, but his voice was a placid monotone. This was no doubt the rough draft of a paper he wa
s preparing for some academic journal. He himself had translated it, as he had modestly noted in his extensive prefatory remarks—hours and hours earlier.
Adam was at Vivian’s right, head pensively inclined, eyes lowered, arms folded—an attitude of devotional attention. His life, which had turned out, apparently to his surprise, to be one of conferences and dinners more or less of this sort, must have given him plenty of opportunity to perfect these stealth naps.
Across the table, Adam’s adorable wife, Fumiko, was surreptitiously playing with her napkin, and next to her Simon was turned slightly toward the speaker with imperturbable courtesy, eyebrows slightly raised.
As opaque as ever, Simon. What was he really thinking about? About Phillip? About the hospital or his patients or his students? About a rendezvous? One couldn’t think about what the professor was saying—it was impossible to know what on earth it was. The professor had little tears in his eyes now. Either he was deeply moved by his speech, or he himself was thinking of something else.
Vivian willed a volley of darts Simon’s way, and he turned, carefully, to glance at her. Age had treated him well. The lucky bastard was just as attractive—and as casually vain—at past seventy as he had been twenty years earlier! She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue so quickly that anyone who happened to look her way would think it was a hallucination. Simon turned back to the speaker with his almost insultingly decorous expression. Oh, that look must drive his colleagues mad!
Truly, she had never expected these plans of Phillip’s to be realized, and despite Simon’s façade of confidence, she doubted that he had either. Homes that supplied their own energy with sunlight and wind, that recycled their water, that returned to the earth what they took from it, and which, despite their humility, were comfortable and pleasing to live in. Phillip’s least glamorous project, the most profoundly ambitious and the dearest to his heart, submerged for so many years in a swamp of bureaucracy, ridicule, and opposition, had been hauled back into the light by a firm of idealistic young acolytes.
People had already moved cautiously into the houses, no insoluble problems had yet appeared, the community was being written up in journals and in glossy magazines. The acolytes were no longer so young, and perhaps no longer so idealistic, but it had to be said that they had reason to be looking as pleased with themselves as they did, tonight. Or almost as pleased with themselves, anyway.
It had been kind of Adam to take time out of his schedule to come over. He was something of a grand presence in his field these days, it seemed, owing to a few seminal studies he had conducted concerning the environmental impact of different sorts of energy. He himself had spoken tonight, and she had been surprised by a flood of affection for this unassuming young man. Well, he was hardly young, either, of course—he was well into middle age, but he seemed like a shy younger relative, whom she was meeting for the first time since his childhood. And when he stood to make his brief remarks, she was warmed by something like pride.
In fact, she had been a little unnerved about the prospect of seeing him after all this time. Of him seeing her, truth be told. Well, but what could you do. She had steeled herself to sit down at the mirror and apply her makeup dispassionately, as if she were a nurse attending to the illness of a stranger. But when the somewhat portly fellow with thinning hair and glasses, who looked nothing at all like Phillip at that age, took his seat next to her, her heart had turned over. It was the glasses. He looked so breakable.
Months earlier Simon had been asked by the event organizers to go over the guest list, and he had conscripted her. That had been a lovely evening, lolling about with Simon. They’d both pretended to be as snooty as teenagers about the prospect of this ceremonial, and when they finished their chore for the organizers they went out for a late dinner at a lively Lebanese restaurant and polished off quite a bit of wine. Eventually they’d stumbled into a taxi together, weak with laughter, their arms around each other. They saw each other so rarely these days! How to explain it? One never managed to see one’s friends any longer; they all said so. It was as if time, once a broad meadow, had narrowed to a slender isthmus.
“Who was that sitting next to you?” Fumiko asked as she and Adam walked back along Piccadilly. “The daffy old lady on your left? I talked to her for a moment before dinner, but there was so much going on.”
“Ah! Well. Yes, she was a good friend of my uncle’s. Vivian. She used to be a dancer.”
“Oh la la!”
Years ago, when his future seemed to have arrived, astonishingly, in the form of Fumiko, and the two of them had solemnly exchanged their histories, including a certain number of humiliating, ridiculous, or bizarre encounters, it was only Vivian of whom he’d been unable to speak, as if at that delicate moment he could have done some damage to the girl in the photo and the mysterious lover toward whom she floated.
“And what about the other one, on your right, the blonde in that dress?”
“Someone with money, I gathered. An enthusiast of Phillip’s. According to her, anyhow, she was instrumental in getting the project off the ground.”
“Well, here’s to the blond lady, then. It’s a fantastic thing.”
“Yes, it is.” Or an irreproachable thing, at least. Possibly if the principles had been widely adopted twenty-five or thirty years earlier, when his uncle had conceived of the project, excellent precedents could have been established and a certain amount of destruction avoided. But a few well-considered houses here and there were hardly going to appease the fierce sunlight and winds that had since been unleashed, or stay the torrential rains and violent floods.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Fumiko said. “I wish we could have brought Nell.”
“So do I. Maybe next year. Spring break.”
“You know there’s a terrible storm at home . . .”
“She’ll be all right. She doesn’t get frightened.”
“Don’t let’s go back to the hotel yet,” Fumiko said. “Let’s just keep walking and walking, please.”
It was May, just as it was when he’d first seen it, the city in bloom, regal and fresh. Warm, too, for London.
“Oh, wait,” she said, and took out her phone. “I want a picture of you right there, to send to Nell.”
They were at a great iron gate, the entrance to a mysterious park. He and Vivian had walked exactly here, more than twenty years earlier, the night before he’d returned to the States, and they had also stopped. “Has this been too strange?” she’d asked.
At the time he assumed she meant was it too strange to be half her age. It had never occurred to him until a minute or so ago that she meant was it too strange to be a proxy immortal. “No,” he’d said, “just strange enough.” She’d laughed and quickly kissed him. “You really are very sweet, you know. Just like Phillip.”
Tonight at the end of dinner he’d kissed her powdery cheek. He helped her up from her chair; she seemed to be having some problem with a knee. He had not said, till next time, and neither, of course, had she.
Fumiko was fiddling with her phone. “A little to your left,” she said.
It would be just twilight at home. Their dignified, ethereal Nell would be comforting her pet mouse while the thunder and lightning raged above her. Almost instantly she’d receive a photo of what was just about to be the world’s very latest moment—by then so long elapsed!
“Okay,” Fumiko said. “Don’t move.”
Acknowledgments
“Your Duck Is My Duck” was published in Fence.
“Taj Mahal” was published in The Paris Review.
“Cross Off and Move On” and “Recalculating” were published in The New York Review of Books.
“The Third Tower” was published in Ploughshares.
Also by Deborah Eisenberg
Short Story Collections
Transactions in a Foreign Country
Under the 82nd Airborne
All Around Atlantis
The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenber
g
Twilight of the Superheroes
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
Copyright
Heartfelt and abiding thanks to the Lannan and MacArthur Foundations—and many thanks also to Kimberly Cutter.
YOUR DUCK IS MY DUCK. Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Eisenberg. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268879-8
Version 06292018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268877-4
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