“Oh, of course!”
I was halfway back to my car when the photographer called out to me.
“Treat Margo kindly, you hear! She’s had a hard life.”
* * *
Cliffside Road incarnated its name, winding along the top of a substantial bluff bordering the surging sea. Wind-warped cedar pines and riotous stands of bayberry bushes and beach roses were the only landscaping. In spots, the land closest to the sea was crumbling under the patient assaults of the environment: on the fractional portion of one house lot, the broken half of a sagging foundation protruded into the air, precariously balanced over the wave-washed rocks below. I supposed that this geological instability explained why the houses here were mainly ramshackle affairs, despite the incredible views, which otherwise would have commanded top dollar.
Could my beautiful mermaid really live in such a neighborhood? I tried to reconcile her youthful proud demeanor, the bold vitality that had first attracted me to her picture, with the shabbiness and poverty I saw around me, but failed.
Driving slowly, I scanned each widely separated mailbox for her name. The sky had gone gray as ominous clouds moved in to occlude the blue. So intently was I focused on each approaching letterbox that when the one bearing Margot Tench’s hand-printed name appeared, I needed an awkward moment to correlate the dwelling I saw with the anticipated mailbox.
In the center of a quarter-acre lot strewn with threadbare tires, a shopping cart and other debris, an old rust-patched Airstream trailer rested on cinderblocks, tethered to civilization only by a drooping power line running from the streetside pole. A few dried stalks of vegetation spiked futilely into the hard ground outside the trailer’s jury-rigged wooden steps recorded the passage of that summer’s sparse flowers. Twin propane tanks huddled against the trailer’s flank like the faulty booster rockets on a doomed space shuttle.
I pulled into a short gravel drive and shut off the car’s engine. My mind had gone blank with despair, and only a crude automatism carried me from the car to the trailer’s flimsy door.
My hesitant knock was answered in reasonable time by the shambling mortal remains of my mermaid.
Margot Tench had not gotten obscenely fat with middle age, just typically, hopelessly stocky. Whatever phantom curves she might have retained were now hidden beneath a cheap shapeless dress and a pilly synthetic cardigan. But the thickness of her calves and ankles—feet shoved into dirty crushed slippers—argued against any concealed treasures of shapeliness. Her distinctive sharp facial features that had once smiled into oceanic infinity had collapsed much like the surrounding cliffs, pillowing downward in crevassed folds. A wild kelp forest of gray hair exhibited a strand or two of fugitive sullen copper amidst the drabness. And whatever height Margot Tench might have once attained in her youth (I realized now for the first time that the addition of the fish tail in the photograph had left me with an impression that she would stand quite tall), she now came up barely to my shoulder.
“What’s your business?” she demanded, in a rough voice coarsened by cigarettes and drink.
“I—I wanted to meet this woman.”
She did not flinch from the sight of the postcard, glancing unblinkingly at what had to be a hauntingly painful image before pinning me with wrinkle-cupped eyes that were a deep marine green.
“You’re thirty years too late. But you can come in anyhow, if you still got a mind to.”
The interior of the trailer was lit by a naked fluorescent fixture flickering in the low ceiling. A metal-topped table paired with two stark chairs took up a lot of floor space near a small sink and countertop hot plate. A spavined recliner faced a TV; a bunk folded downward from the wall. The space smelled like boiled cabbage and mold.
Margot Tench shuffled about. “Let me pump the heat up a little. There. The place leaks air like a goddamn sieve! I was just gonna have myself a beer. Want one?”
“All right, please, I will.”
From a dorm-sized fridge, she withdrew two cans of Golden Anniversary beer. No glass was offered, so I popped my tab and tasted the drink tentatively. It was truly awful.
Margot dropped heavily into a wooden chair. “Have a seat.”
I took the chair opposite her. Beneath the table, our knees nearly touched.
She pushed a chapped, reddened hand through her snarled hair. “Not what you expected, huh? Sorry to let you down. But you might say life let me down first.”
“Would you care to tell me about it?”
She slugged her beer from the can, and then looked wearily at me. “Not a lot to tell, but why the hell not? You look friendly, and talk kills some time, right?
“I met Ben Tench in 1965. He was a cod fisherman out of Galilee. That’s a local town up the coast. Awfully handsome guy—nice to women, too. We got married not long after he heard me sing one night at a little party. We had three good years together, before his ship went down with all crew lost. Poor Ben. He didn’t leave me any savings, and I had never even had a job before. I lost our house, and bought this trailer secondhand with a little life insurance money from the fishermen’s co-op. Headed south with some notion of reaching Florida, but my old heap died in Westerly. Been here ever since.”
She lit up an unfiltered cigarette, and I noticed the overflowing ashtray between us. Exhaling a foul cloud, she continued her story.
“What could I do? I set up as the town whore. It wasn’t a bad life, till my looks went. The men were mostly decent—I got this land deeded to me by a customer—and even a few of the local womenfolks liked me well enough. Oh, there were the usual reformers, preachers and cops and the like, but I mostly ignored them. Then there was Nils, Nils Standeven.”
“I’ve met him. He seems like a gentleman.”
Margot’s eyes hazed over. “Oh, that he was. He showed a real interest in my welfare. Set me up with a few modeling jobs, but I never took to that life. I found out you had to mostly screw someone first to get a posing job, so I said, ‘Hell, this is double the work for the same money!’ and I just cut out the posing. Let me see that card.”
I passed over the postcard, and Margot studied it intently. I assessed her tilted face with a grim fascination, but couldn’t begin to fathom the depths of what she might be thinking or feeling.
“Lord, I sure enough was a sweet little piece, wasn’t I? I think I was high on some killer weed Nils shared with me during that shoot. Explains that weird look I had.” She flipped the card back at me, and I let it land atop the table. “If I had just a lousy nickel for every one of these sold, I sure wouldn’t be here today. But all I got was a hundred bucks, and I called Nils generous at the time. Shit.”
I got clumsily to my feet, my rotten leg throbbing.
“Hey, where are you going? We’re just getting to know each other. You look like a classy guy, stay awhile. I haven’t forgotten everything I once knew.”
Horribly, the old woman began to unfasten the top buttons of her dress.
I knocked over my full beer in my haste, and scrabbled blindly at the door handle. Outside, my mind ablaze with shame, self-pity, horror and disgust, I trotted lopsidedly away from my car. I was in no shape to get behind the wheel; I’d have an accident for sure. A short walk in the open air would clear my mind and senses, I felt, allow me to accept my failure and become reconciled to the horrible travesty my mermaid had become.
Across the road, some hundred yards from the trailer, I slowed down and risked a glance over my shoulder.
Margot Tench stood forlornly in the door of her trailer, watching me.
The sky had begun to let down an intermittent drizzle. I flipped up my coat collar and increased my pace.
Something drew me to the edge of the bluff. Perhaps I imagined the clean sight of the innocent sea would restore my heart to me.
Looking back nervously, I saw that Margot had put on a coat and was walking toward me.
The edge of the cliff was capped with brown grass. As I spun about, intending to distance myself from the app
roaching woman, the wet grass and my weak leg both betrayed me, and I went flying over the edge.
I don’t suppose it was more than thirty feet down. But my impact with the deep freezing water felt as if a giant had picked me up by the heels and slammed me against a concrete wall. My right shoulder smashed into a boulder, but luckily the rest of me encountered no rocks. Stunned below the water, I knew I had to struggle or drown, so I battled my way back to the surface.
I was just in time to greet a huge wave with my face. I choked and flailed, but the undertow sucked me further out.
When I came up for the second time, I caught a wild glimpse of Margot Tench standing fixedly atop the cliff. I dragged up enough strength to yell: “Help! Help!”
She didn’t run to summon rescuers, and I recalled with a vivid pang her lack of a phone. Instead, to my utter amazement, she opened her mouth and began to sing.
The husky voice of the old woman was miraculously replaced by a supernal, dulcet sweetness. Wordlessly, the strange entrancing melody lanced out above even the crash of the surf.
But I heard no more. My bad leg cramped then, so severely that it bent me ineluctably in half. The waters swallowed me as I frantically tried to ease my calf and thigh muscles by massaging them with frozen hands I could not even feel. My lungs threatened to explode, and I realized I had lost track of which direction was up.
And that was when I saw the pair of them, with the hyperacuity of panic, despite the gloomy, turbulent underwater scene resembling planes of fractured green glass.
Powerful golden tails, bountiful buoyant breasts, streamers of bronze hair, cryptic smiles, eyes protected by a transparent membrane, small useless fins on their hips.
Two powerful arms fastened around my sternum from behind and pumped my lungs empty of dead air. But before I could inhale water, a mouth pressed against mine. I clawed wildly, but my wrists were pinioned by irresistible hands.
The air that I desperately drew in from the mermaid’s donor lungs tasted of brine and raw shellfish and saltwater taffy. Her tongue met mine, and then she pulled back.
Seconds later, I lay half out of the water, safe on a pebbled strand.
I listened for Margot’s song, but she must have stopped singing once her sisters arrived, as she realized her summons was successful. Instead, I heard only the common siren of an onrushing ambulance.
My right hand was clenched, I realized. With effort, I forced it open.
Several strands of beautiful red hair curled across my palm.
But even as I stared at them they changed in my sight to Margot’s gray.
RARE FIRSTS
Mamoulian sweated ink. Or so it first appeared in the dim light of the hot slope-ceilinged attic. As generationally undisturbed strata of chimney soot, coal dust, airborne grit and greasy cobwebs mingled with the perspiration on his furrowed brow and bare hairy arms, the stained rivulets came to resemble the flow from a press’s founts, as if the heavy-set laboring man were striving in vain to mint books epidermically.
Surrounded by tottering stacks of unlabelled, crumple-cornered cardboard cartons, by immigrant steamer trunks and old cedar chests, by sad broken toys too memorious to be discarded and musty vintage clothing redolent of dead dreams, Mamoulian resembled some Minotaur in a junk labyrinth. And like the Minotaur of legend, his flaring temper seemed easily provoked.
An old fruit crate laden with Eisenhower-era Reader’s Digests (the mailing labels addressed to “Burton Hollis”) blocked his access to deeper boxes. He shifted the crate to a precarious new position, and triggered a small avalanche of photo-stuffed shoe boxes onto his loafer-shod foot.
“Goddamn it!” He kicked at the spill of Polaroids and Kodaks, sending sheaves of photos skittering across the attic floor. The impact hadn’t really hurt that much, but the incident served as a useful trigger for Mamoulian’s impatient and growing sense of being personally affronted. Look at all this trash! What made people regard the trivial and generic possessions of their lives as so precious? What made them feel they could waste the valuable time of an expert such as himself on such slight pretext? “Please come inspect my dear dead Burton’s books, Mr. Mamoulian. I’m sure he owned something you’d be happy to purchase. Perhaps one or two items are even rare enough that they’ll help stretch out the insurance settlement …”
Playing on his sympathies, that’s all such talk amounted to. Trying to get something for nothing. His hard-earned money for their useless shit. Look at all this crap. Back issues of Time. Book club editions of old novels no one had remembered six months after publication. Mountains of the local newspaper. Grocery-store encyclopedias. That’s what most people thought of as a “library.” God help him, he might die of shock if he ever encountered a real library. He couldn’t recall the last time he had been privileged to handle a bona fide collection. Usually the big dealers with connections got to the rich troves first, leaving Mamoulian to scavenge such dungheaps as this. And his professional sense of pride, reduced and diminished though it might be, would force him to examine every last box, in the slim hope that a real treasure might be lurking, despite all outward signs.
Huffing, dripping black droplets onto the lace of an old wedding dress, Mamoulian uncovered a final box. Anticipating more gratuitous crap, he peeled back the interleaved flaps of the top.
What was inside stopped his laboring breath.
Gaudy paperback covers bright as the day they first hit the drugstore rack caught the spotty luminance from the dusty skylight like a heap of dragon’s gold. Mamoulian picked one up tenderly, with utter disbelief. The spine was uncracked, the cover unfoxed, the pages bright white. And more germane to his monetary pursuits, this was a first edition of Jim Thompson’s The Alcoholics, published by Lion Books, worth easily two hundred, two hundred fifty dollars.
Mamoulian set the treasure down gently, and examined the rest of the box’s contents. All Thompson first editions. So hidden from daylight were these books that the dead husband, dear old Burt, must have had a secret noir jones he didn’t want his wife discovering. Chances were she didn’t even know these books existed. Twenty-five-cent paperback originals were now worth a couple hundred each. Over three thousand dollars of profit here.
Quickly, Mamoulian layered a few Readers Digests over the trove. Carrying the box as if it contained his hypothetical firstborn, Mamoulian worked his way out of the maze and back to the attic stairs. He banged his head on a rafter at one point, but made no vicious exclamation. He barely felt the blow, such hunter’s elation filled his veins.
Down in the kitchen, the aproned and bespectacled widow Hollis stood at the stove, tending a pan of boiling water. She smiled tentatively at Mamoulian and his burden, causing him to feel like some comic strip character soliciting cookies from the old lady neighbor.
“I’m just making us some instant coffee, Mr. Mamoulian. I see you found something.…”
“Just a box of old magazines. Generally, these things are a dime a dozen. But I culled a few issues with articles on various celebrities—DiMaggio, Marilyn, James Dean. I can always sell those for a dollar or two. How about twenty-five dollars for the whole box?”
The widow’s smile wavered, then bravely reset itself. “Whatever you think is fair, Mr. Mamoulian.”
Mamoulian rested the box on the kitchen table, hurriedly wrote a check, then picked up the concealed rare firsts and turned toward the door.
“Won’t you be staying for coffee?”
“No thanks. Nervous stomach. Gotta run.”
In his swiftly accelerating old Buick, Mamoulian allowed himself a small smile that quickly broadened into a large grin and then transformed to full-blown laughter. He powered down his window and reached across the seat to the treasure box. He picked up one of the crappy Digests and hurled it out the window, watching it arc like a crippled bird. One after another the worthless magazines flew out to die like literary roadkill on the highway’s shoulder, reading matter for the wind alone.
That sight should really g
ive the widow something to puzzle about next time she drove into town.
* * *
The phone at Mamoulian Rare Books rang, and Mamoulian snatched it up.
“Alex, it’s me. Can I come over?”
Mamoulian sighed at the unexpected sound of his brother’s voice, the nasal whine tempered only slightly by a shred of unwonted humility. “Lev, I run a shop that’s open to the public. How could I keep you out?”
Lev Mamoulian remained quiet a moment, then said, “I’ve had more gracious invitations—”
“Where to? The drunk tank?”
“—but I’ll come over anyway.”
“There are ten bars between your house and here. Do you think you’ll show up sometime today?”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I’m not holding my breath.”
“Goodbye, Alex.”
Mamoulian hung up the phone and returned to his study of several of his competitors’ impressive catalogues. Every one boasted a cyber-address. More and more, his peers seemed to be moving their bookselling enterprises to the Web. Mamoulian knew nothing about the Internet, but suspected that it would soon supersede the old way of doing things, if it hadn’t already. Where such a phenomenon would leave him and other old-fashioned booksellers was not in doubt. Even more in the gutter than he already was, subsisting on scraps, if not out of business altogether.
Slapping down the catalogues onto his desktop, Mamoulian made a silent resolve to do something about getting online. He was too middle-aged and otherwise talentless to change careers now. Evolve or die, that would have to be his motto. Businesswise, he had been stagnating for too long. Surely his wiles and cunning would translate intact to the computer world. There had to be a reasonable profit margin somewhere in cyberspace for the guy with a sharp eye for bargains and more hustle than his peers.
The bearish Mamoulian stood up and, in the absence of any customers, began tidying his already neat store. Two small rooms on the fourth floor of an old office building in a fading downtown, a space about as big as your average ice cream stand. Mamoulian could recall when his neighbors in the building had consisted of an assortment of professionals—dentists, lawyers, architects, jewelers. Now most of the offices served as storage space, holding old files belonging to an insurance company that remained as the sole major tenant. One office was bloated with bags of Styrofoam peanuts—property of the Wrap-and-Pak franchise on the first floor—like some kind of dormitory prank. If his rent hadn’t been frozen decades ago (Mamoulian had earned the undying gratitude of his now elderly landlord by tracking down a copy of St. Nicholas magazine the man had fondly recalled from his childhood, then offering it as a gift), Mamoulian would have moved long ago.
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