Emma's Table

by Philip Galanes

  Emma was surprised to find a pane of glass leaning against the back wall of the vestibule—nearly waist-high and eight or nine feet long. It was propped on its side, beneath a row of leather coat hooks. She might have missed it altogether, if she hadn’t seen the frenzy of scratches on its canted surface, plainly legible beneath the overhead light.

  “What the hell is it?” she mumbled, staring at the glass.

  Then she recognized the beveled edges.

  “Oh, no,” she moaned, beginning to understand.

  It was the glass top of her dining table. She was sure of it. “But where’s the rest of it?” she mumbled—the beautiful ebonized base. “And what’s it doing out here?”

  A flash of panic coursed right through her.

  Her eyes landed on two canvas bumpers—propped carefully between the glass and the plaster wall behind it.

  Someone had thought to protect both surfaces.

  “Benjamin,” she said, running into the apartment.

  She’d told them—Benjamin and the new girl, Tina—to switch out the dining table for the Nakashima in the basement, but she never imagined they’d do it that afternoon, with her guests arriving any minute. She and Bobby had only been out for forty-five minutes.

  Emma’s shoes clattered as she ran. She was well beyond caring.

  “Benjamin,” she called, louder that time.

  This would never have happened, she thought, if she’d just stayed at home, fussing over her meal, instead of ordering in from the gourmet shop around the corner.

  Emma ran past the living room and straight through the study.

  She began to feel hot in her heavy fur coat, unbuttoning it as she went. She reached the dining room finally. They were both there—Benjamin and Tina—putting the finishing touches on her Nakashima table. They’d set it beautifully too, she had to admit it, trading the dark-rimmed plates for a creamy porcelain set. The white looked stunning against the burnished walnut top.

  Emma’s heart sank fast.

  “The Tanaguchis,” she cried, boiling over with heat. They’d be here any second. He’d see the table that she’d stolen out from under him. Emma shucked off her coat and dropped it on the floor. Her assistants looked on in quiet amazement. It was nothing like her to drop a coat.

  Tina moved to pick it up, but Emma shook her head, warding her off.

  “How did you get it up here?” she asked. The two of them couldn’t have moved it themselves. It must weigh a thousand pounds.

  Benjamin smiled, as if the question itself were a compliment.

  If he were any closer, she might have slapped his face.

  She never should have gone into the park with Bobby, no matter how sweetly he asked.

  “We found some porters,” Benjamin said. “Down in the basement.”

  “Working on Sunday?!” she asked.

  Emma could scarcely believe her bad luck.

  “Aren’t there rules about that?” she said, in desperation.

  The building’s rules covered every eventuality. She couldn’t imagine there wasn’t something to prohibit their moving furniture on a Sunday afternoon—as if the violation itself might cause the table to float away, straight out the dining room window and back down to the basement where it belonged.

  “They didn’t mind at all,” Tina said.

  Emma gazed at the girl in her black sweater and nearly matching slacks. She sighed in exhaustion and despair.

  Blacks are hard, she thought, almost sympathetic with the girl.

  The worst thing, of course, as far as Emma was concerned, was that she’d asked Benjamin to coordinate the table move herself—during his presentation, not an hour before. She’d walked back to the dining room to verify that the old chairs would work with the Nakashima.

  Emma shook her head: no one to blame but herself.

  She should have been clearer. She should have told them to wait until after the Tanaguchis left.

  “They promised to get the other one into the basement by six thirty,” Benjamin said, sounding like a show-off.

  Emma checked her urge to snap.

  “We’d better check on that,” he said to Tina, beginning to walk away.

  “Hold on,” Emma told him. She needed to think.

  She had to come up with a solution—and fast! Otherwise, she’d be serving Tanaguchi dinner on a stolen table, his anniversary gift, no less. None of it boded well for her position at the UN.

  Not unless they want a thieving spokesman, she thought.

  Emma was losing her grip. She felt like chopping the table into pieces and using it for firewood.

  “Maybe a tablecloth?” she wondered, picking up the chinchilla from the floor and running her hands across its silky finish, petting it almost.

  “A tablecloth,” she repeated softly.

  It really was a gorgeous table.

  There was no denying that, even as the walls tumbled down around her. A tablecloth wouldn’t be any kind of solution; she knew that—not with the table’s swooping edges. It would be like wrapping a pistol in string and brown paper. It wouldn’t fool a soul.

  “Maybe we should just move the old table back in?” she said.

  Her assistants looked as if she were speaking in tongues.

  “Go see if the old one’s still there,” she said to Benjamin—the doorbell ringing at that very moment, like a period at the end of her odd request.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  It might not be the Tanaguchis, she thought—knowing full well that it was. They were the only guests yet to arrive.

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  Emma walked to the door like a well-groomed Joan of Arc, heading off to battle in a camel-colored twin set. She waved the housekeeper off too; she’d get the door herself.

  It was the Tanaguchis, of course, looking just as chic as she’d imagined, and just as tiny. Mrs. Tanaguchi looked as if she might fit into one of Emma’s pockets. She ferried them into the living room like a runty pair of kittens frisking at her outsized feet. She introduced them to her husband and her daughter, the trainer with the puppy on a short leash.

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” she said, “I don’t believe I know your surname.”

  She was at the height of grandeur on her way to the gallows.

  Bobby knew that well enough. He flashed his wife a look of concern and quickly picked up the slack. “We’ve heard so much about you,” he said, smiling at the new arrivals.

  They beamed right back.

  “Emma is so pleased for this opportunity to work with you at the UN,” he said.

  She knew her position would disappear once Tanaguchi saw what a double-dealer she was.

  “And for such a good cause,” Bobby continued, explaining what little he knew of the enterprise to Cassy and Pete—the Commission on Natural Disasters—drawing them into the conversational loop.

  He asked Tanaguchi to elaborate.

  Emma let her mind wander over a cavalcade of thieveries, the virtual encyclopedia of all her wrongdoings. She kept a mental list at the ready—always had, the better to lacerate herself. She toted crimes from her childhood and from two minutes before, the little maneuverings and big power plays, the ones she’d gotten away with, scot-free, she’d thought, and the ones she’d paid the price for too.

  Her husband offered drinks all around.

  Emma took a glass of wine.

  Hang on a second, she thought.

  Hadn’t she learned this lesson already, while she was rotting in federal prison, no less? Hadn’t she figured out that all those crimes ricocheted straight back to her in the end—every lousy caper she’d ever pulled, even the piddling ones that were scarcely worth her time?

  Especially those, she thought.

  They all came back to haunt her—the public mortifications and private shames. She pictured three hundred stars in a criminal sky, some burning brightly and lasting long, others flickering out fast, and every single one of them just another excuse to run herself down.
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br />   Emma had almost put it together, sitting in that nasty cell of hers.

  Almost, she thought, but not quite—like looking at the picture on a puzzle-box top. She’d understood the broad strokes of it—the image that all those pieces would make—but she’d never assembled them for herself, one by one. It dawned on her then, like a brand-new day, sitting with her family and the Tanaguchis, an untrained puppy on her priceless living room rug.

  Emma felt as if she were clicking the very last pieces into place.

  It’s the secret crimes, she thought—the hidden ones—that were most killing. They were the ones that lasted long after the others were forgotten.

  She knew it then just as well as she knew her own name.

  They were the ones she used against herself—slashing and flogging forever and a day. Emma knew how to torment herself much better than any lousy tabloid or tax auditor ever could.

  Amateurs, she huffed, picturing those ordinary men from the IRS.

  It was perfectly obvious to her then: it was the undiscovered crimes that retained the sharpest edges. They were the ones that made her father right about her all along.

  She’d been going at this all wrong, she decided.

  Emma pulled Tanaguchi aside, barely touching the sleeve of his tweedy blazer. “I’d like to show you something,” she said.

  Desperate times, she supposed—and all that.

  Tanaguchi put his drink down—on a mother-of-pearl coaster, she noticed in gratitude—and followed her out of the room. She led him back to the dining room, and pointed straight at her Nakashima table, as if it were a corpse lying in the middle of the road, a hit-and-run victim she’d put there herself.

  There, she thought—the nasty truth, the proof against her plain as day.

  The table was laid with her Sunday best, the crystal and silver and creamy bone china. She hoped he’d see beyond the trappings.

  “It’s beautiful,” Tanaguchi said, nodding his head at her.

  “I stole it from you,” she told him, pointing to the table still, that corpse a near relation to him.

  “No, you didn’t,” he said.

  “Of course I did,” she replied.

  Emma was determined to confess, and he wasn’t going to stop her. No one was going to stop her. She pictured her brand-new position floating away—her UN gig like so much smoke up a redbrick chimney.

  It might have been good for me too, she thought, bidding it a fond farewell.

  “I rigged the whole thing,” she told him. “At FitzCoopers,” she added, as if some clarification were needed.

  Her father must have had a saying about assuming responsibility, some football-coach perversion about wriggling out of it, but she couldn’t think of what it was just then; she didn’t want to either.

  “I knew that,” Tanaguchi said.

  “You did?” she asked.

  Wasn’t this her moment for revealing facts unknown?

  “The people at the auction house told me you wanted it from the beginning.” That was wrong of them, Emma thought, reaching an index finger to the side of the table, running it along the curvy edge. “And I saw you talking to the boy who bid on it,” he added.

  Benjamin, she thought, nodding back.

  She’d been worried about people seeing them together at the auction house, but she’d let her hubris get the better of her by then. She’d assumed she’d gotten away with everything.

  “Believe it or not,” Tanaguchi told her, a flash of pride running through his tiny frame. He stood a little taller, his chest puffed out slightly. “I was free to do as I chose,” he said.

  Emma didn’t know what he was driving at.

  “I could have kept bidding,” he told her, “if I’d wanted to. You had no control over that.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to her.

  “You could have kept bidding,” she muttered, letting it sink in.

  “Of course I could have,” he said, a little pointedly. “We’re all free to do exactly as we choose.”

  She heard the soft reproach in his voice.

  “Still…,” she mumbled. But she didn’t know what to say next.

  “You weren’t exactly gracious,” he said—with considerable tact, she thought, under the circumstances. “But you made it up to me in the end,” he told her, “taking me to SoHo to find another table, and agreeing to chair my committee.”

  Emma felt flustered.

  This wasn’t going anything like she’d expected.

  She looked down at the gorgeous table with a sense of dread. She worried that it might be overdone, with so much silver glinting and all that cut glass.

  She looked at Tanaguchi.

  “I like mine better anyway,” he told her, smiling back.

  “I still want to apologize,” she said. “Let me do that at least.”

  Tanaguchi nodded. “Apology accepted,” he told her, extending his hand.

  Emma took it with great relief, clasping it tight and shaking it hard. One less secret, she thought, halfway to forgiving herself.

  GRACIE SAT IN A SHALLOW GULLY, A DARK RIBBON of wood curving all around her. She was no fan of Emma’s new table: none of the edges were straight, for starters, and the chairs didn’t line up either.

  “My fingers leave marks,” she whispered to her mother, lifting her thumb from the wooden top and studying the print she’d left behind.

  “Don’t touch it then,” her mother replied, a little grouchy.

  Gracie was sitting between her mother and Mr. Blackman, her two favorite people at the table, and even though she was right next to them, she practically had to turn around to see them—that’s how deep the table’s curve went: like she was sitting a row ahead of them at school.

  She tried wriggling her chair a little farther back, but her mother pushed her forward again.

  “Come on, sweetie,” she said. “I don’t want any spills.”

  Gracie had an easy enough solution for that. She laid her fork down onto the large white plate, twice as big as any plate at home, or any fork, for that matter.

  It weighs about a million pounds, she thought—that fork fit for a giant.

  Gracie hadn’t liked Emma’s food much either. It tasted funny, she thought, and there was too much sauce.

  She knew better than to complain.

  With her fork set down, and no worry of spills, Gracie tried inching her chair back again. Her mother squeezed her thigh beneath the table.

  Don’t! that touch said, clear enough.

  She felt like a prisoner sitting there at the grown-up table, in such a fancy place. She pushed her chest right into the table’s curve, as if to show her mother how foolish she was being, wanting her to sit so tight.

  Her dress looked pretty against the deep brown wood.

  They go together, she thought, staring down at the combination—the buttery yellow and dark, dark wood. She let her fingers brush against her taffeta skirt.

  She got to wear her pretty dress, at least.

  Things weren’t so bad, she supposed. Gracie didn’t like to be angry with her mother.

  She sat back in her chair and began fiddling with the bracelet on her wrist, pulling the elastic away from her skin and twirling the candy hearts that were strung all around it, each of them printed with a sweet little wish—“Be Mine” in pink, “All Yours” in pale blue. Her grandfather had given it to her on Valentine’s Day, just three days before. She loved that bracelet with all her heart, only took it off to bathe.

  She hadn’t eaten a single candy.

  They were much too pretty for that.

  Gracie lifted the bracelet to her cheek and looked to the mirror on the opposite wall. It wasn’t quite the picture she’d been hoping for: the bracelet was practically invisible on her wrist, and her face so wide—much wider than a face ought to be.

  She saw the man at the head of the table smiling at her, at her reflection anyway. Gracie looked back down into her lap.

  She didn’t like those mirrors at
all, hanging all around the room.

  Like a bathroom, she thought, only a million times worse. There were mirrors on every wall. She’d been tricked into looking at herself all night, sometimes when she least expected it: glancing up at her mother to ask her a question, or peeking at the pretty girl across the table.

  Gracie liked preparing herself before she looked into mirrors.

  She raised her eyes again; the man was smiling at her still—the older one at the head of the table.

  Gracie turned in her seat to face him.

  “Knock, knock,” he said, looking straight at her still.

  Gracie knew what she was supposed to say, but she felt too shy to say it. She looked back into her lap instead, plucking at the candy bracelet.

  “Knock, knock,” the man repeated, a few seconds later.

  She felt a smile blooming on her lips; she couldn’t help it.

  “Who’s there?” she said, still looking down—at her shiny yellow skirt and the bracelet on her wrist.

  “Wanda,” he said.

  “Wanda who?” she asked, looking up at him. Gracie didn’t know this one.

  “Wanda be my Valentine?” he said.

  She giggled and covered her mouth, pressing chubby fingers against her lips. She turned to her mother and saw her smiling too.

  “I like your bracelet,” Mr. Blackman said.

  “She doesn’t eat the candy,” her mother replied. “They’re all there still.”

  Gracie dropped her head again. She didn’t like it when people talked about what she ate—not that that ever stopped them.

  “They had bracelets like that when we were kids,” Mr. Blackman said. “Remember?”

  Gracie peeked up at the mirror again. She watched her mother nodding back.

  “My grandfather gave it to me,” she told him. “For Valentine’s Day.”

  The holiday had been just as bad as Gracie imagined. She’d only gotten a handful of cards—a mere fraction of the number she’d handed out, and so many fewer than the other girls.

  Her face lit up with shame.

  Her handmade cards hadn’t done a thing. But at least it was behind her now. Gracie had gotten through it.

  “You keep your head up, Gracie”—that’s what her grandfather always said.

  But the little girl had deciphered already that head position had very little to do with it. Sometimes it was just about getting things over with.