The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

by Emily Croy Barker

  But at the edge of the forest, she came to a dead halt. Stretching before her was a lush green lawn surrounding a long reflecting pool. In the center of the water a satyr embraced a nymph, carved in some honey-colored stone. Pouting, the nymph was pushing the satyr away, but not very hard, and meanwhile her draperies were sliding advantageously down her breasts and thighs. The satyr seemed to wink at Nora over his partner’s shoulder. On the other side of the lawn was a tall privet hedge with an oval gateway.

  Puzzled, Nora stepped onto the grass. She couldn’t quite work out where she had gone astray. Perhaps this was another part of the mountaintop that she hadn’t seen before.

  She crossed the lawn and looked through the opening in the hedge. On the other side were gravel paths and a profusion of rosebushes in full bloom. Their scent was overpowering. Nora hesitated for a moment, then followed the path, stopping now and then to bury her nose in the blossoms.

  An arbor with a white lattice gate waited at the far end of the rose garden. Nora pushed it open and discovered an allée of elm trees leading to a folly shaped like a small Greek temple, which turned out to be an entrance to another walled garden, where narrow paths snaked around overgrown beds of lilies and more roses. A small green door in the wall led to a Japanese garden of pines and knobby stones.

  Nora sank down on a bench in the diminutive teahouse beside the pond, where fat red koi were swimming. This garden is incredible, she thought. It must be part of some grand mountain estate, like Biltmore in Asheville. She wondered why no one at the party last night had mentioned it. She watched the rippled reflection of trees in the pond and felt an unusual sense of calm. Normally, she’d be nervous about trespassing on someone else’s property, especially property that obviously belonged to someone very rich. But it was hard to feel ill at ease in the middle of this lush, well-ordered beauty.

  Sooner or later, she would come across a groundskeeper and ask for directions home, or to use a phone. All the plantings looked well tended, and the paths were raked clean. Remarkable that the trees here were in full leaf while those on the mountain still had the gauzy, pale-green foliage of early spring. Perhaps these grounds were situated in some sort of sheltered microclimate that allowed the trees to leaf out and summer flowers to bloom early.

  It was certainly warm enough to be summer already. Nora found, suddenly, that she was very thirsty. She stood up and resumed her walk, wondering if it would be safe to drink from one of the fountains. The garden seemed to have no end to it. She passed through a cobble-paved herb garden; a topiary menagerie of green dragons, unicorns, and other mythological beasts that she didn’t recognize; an enclosure where all the flowers were such a dark purple that they looked black. Finally, after what could have been an hour or just a few minutes of wandering—her watch seemed to be alternately halting and skipping—she turned a corner to find herself facing a brilliant blue swimming pool, surrounded by more of those high, clipped hedges. At the near end of the pool was a pink marble sculpture, something abstract that reminded Nora of an anatomical model. At the other end of the pool were a pair of white lounge chairs and a matching table with a glass pitcher and a couple of glasses.

  The pitcher, dewy with condensation, drew Nora’s attention. Coming closer, she saw it was full of some drink that looked like cranberry juice or iced Red Zinger or even cherry Kool-Aid. Anything cool and liquid was fine with her. She poured herself a drink, ice cubes chiming in her glass, and took a long swallow. Some sort of punch. She couldn’t quite describe the flavor. Draining her glass, she poured herself another.

  “You must be very thirsty,” said a woman’s voice behind her, throaty, amused.

  Nora spun around. The woman standing on the pavement was smiling, but it was hard to see her face beneath the oversize Jackie O sunglasses. She wore a white silk scarf over a glossy pile of chestnut hair. Her dress was also white, a sleeveless, tailored sheath that ended just above her knees. She had the sort of delicate, never-ending legs that movie studios used to insure for their starlets. Around her neck was a choker of pearls so large that Nora thought that they had to be fake, but she wasn’t entirely sure, because everything about this woman screamed money. Nora was too young to remember the Sixties, but this woman looked like her idea of the Beautiful People, what the jet-setters looked like back when jets were still glamorous. On someone else the clothes and hair might have looked campy; on this woman they looked only chic.

  Horrified, Nora began to apologize. “It must seem incredibly rude for me to help myself this way—well, to be here at all. I got lost on the mountain.” She offered a nervous smile. “Your grounds are so lovely—and I was hoping to meet someone who could show me the way back. I’m very, very sorry to intrude like this. I don’t know what got into me.”

  The woman laughed. “But you were thirsty. Go ahead, drink the rest.”

  She waited expectantly, so Nora raised the glass to her lips. She drank as quickly as she could without gulping.

  “Do you like it?” the woman asked. “A friend of mine gave me the recipe.”

  “It’s delicious,” Nora said politely. “What is in it?”

  “Blood oranges, hibiscus nectar, moonlight!” she said, laughing again. Not quite sure what the joke was, Nora smiled anyway. “But tell me about yourself. You came from the mountain, you say. So far! You must have passed the little graveyard?” The woman drew the last word out, searchingly. Nora could hear the trace of an accent in her voice. Something Italian in the way she caressed her vowels. But there was also a clipped undertone that sounded British, posh, authoritative, making Nora think of nannies and boarding schools and country houses. “It has been so long since I was up there. What is it like now? All the little stones in good order? The fence still standing?”

  “It’s a bit run-down, but everything is still basically upright. A strange place,” Nora said uncertainly. Would this woman think it peculiar if she mentioned Emmeline’s grave and the odd verses on the stone?

  The other woman nodded. “Yes, it is so lonely, in the middle of the woods. There are still woods? And you? What is your name?” Nora gave her name, and the woman smiled. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Nora,” she said.

  “And yours?” Nora asked. She had a sudden, unnerving intuition that the answer would be “Emmeline.” That was silly; she was talking to a flesh-and-blood woman; there was no such thing as ghosts. But she was relieved when the other woman said, with a moment’s hesitation, “You may call me Ilissa. It’s what you’d call a nickname. My full name goes something like this—” She rattled off a rapid string of syllables that Nora couldn’t quite follow. “But that’s too long and boring to say. I make my friends call me Ilissa.”

  “It’s a lovely name.”

  “You’re too kind! But please, sit down. You must be tired with walking so far this afternoon.”

  Nora demurred, apologizing again for her intrusion. She had already imposed enough on the other woman’s good manners. But Ilissa insisted. She had been feeling bored and lonely all day, she said with a brilliant smile. It was wonderful good luck for her that Nora had appeared, and she refused to let her new friend leave—“I’m sorry, I’m just unreasonable!”—until they had had a good long chat. Nora found herself sitting on one of the recliners, sipping another glass of the red punch, and answering Ilissa’s questions. The punch must have had some alcohol in it—maybe that was what Ilissa meant by moonlight—because Nora began to feel a light buzz, and was talking more than she had expected to, trying to make a joke out of some of the things that had gone wrong lately: the problems with her thesis, Naomi’s disapproval, her dead cat, the mouse in the kitchen. Ilissa listened, apparently rapt.

  Although Nora hadn’t meant to mention anything terribly personal, even the details of last night’s humiliating encounter with Dave came spilling out.

  “Oh, but what an idiot,” said Ilissa, clucking her tongue. “Ignoring that other poor girl, toying with your feelings—and then not even seeing to his own pleasure or yo
urs! No one has any fun! Everyone is unhappy!”

  Nora laughed. Last night, she hadn’t considered the situation in exactly that light, but Ilissa had a point.

  “I’m surprised, though, that a beautiful girl like you is unattached. Or did you leave your young man back at your university?” Ilissa said, smiling. She leaned forward and studied Nora’s face. “Wait, I see you have had another disappointment in love recently. This one is more serious than that boy who was so silly last night.”

  Nora gave a feebly dismissive wave of her hand—her litany of woes, she thought, must be getting tedious for this elegant creature. But Ilissa would not be put off. So Nora told her the story of her breakup with Adam and then, because the other woman still seemed so interested, the whole history of their relationship, starting with their flirtation in Renaissance Lyric, when Adam had been impressed with Nora’s knowledge of Elizabethan sexual puns; his specialty was the modern novel. That was almost four years ago. Adam became her ally in that seminar, taught by the ruthless Naomi Danziger, and by the end of the semester, they were a couple.

  As Nora went on talking, Ilissa took off her sunglasses to reveal her own eyes: a deep blue-green, slightly aslant. She looked older than Nora had expected. Not that there were any lines around those clear eyes, but her face had a honed, decisive look, as though she were used to being in charge.

  “Oh, he wasn’t good enough for you,” Ilissa said dismissively, when Nora paused after describing Adam’s move to Chicago. “He didn’t know his own mind. Most men don’t, of course—I’ve learned that all too well. He got scared and lonely and he grabbed the nearest woman, this Celeste person. Men! What can you do?”

  Nora couldn’t imagine Ilissa ever having trouble with men straying or not knowing whether they were in love with her or not. She said so, and Ilissa burst into a fit of giggles. “You’re so funny! If you only knew!” she said.

  Then she looked more seriously at Nora. “But the important thing now is to enjoy yourself. A broken heart doesn’t heal until you lose it to someone else. You need diversion. You should simply play, play, play—surround yourself with men until one of them makes you forget all about this poor, childish, confused Adam.”

  “Surround myself with men?” Nora smiled wryly. “As though it were that easy.”

  Ilissa arched her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “As it happens, I am having a party this very night, and I can assure you there will be all sorts of delightful male creatures there. It is exactly what you need. My parties are famous. Everyone always has a marvelous time, they dance, they laugh, they fall in love—sometimes twice or three times in one night. People ask me, ‘Ilissa, what is your secret?’ I tell them, ‘There is no secret. I simply invite my friends, the most beautiful and charming people in the world.’”

  No party was ever so perfect, in Nora’s experience—obviously Ilissa was a bit vain about her gifts as a hostess. Nonetheless, Nora felt tempted. Then she remembered that she was due at the wedding at five. Probably she had already missed brunch. What time was it? Her own watch said 2:38 a.m.—hopeless.

  Ilissa wasn’t wearing a watch. Smilingly, she shook her head when Nora explained that she needed to get back for the wedding. “I forbid it!” She laughed. “I tell you, you have never been to a party like one of mine. You cannot miss this for the world.”

  Nora considered for a moment—this way, she’d avoid both Adam and Dave—then smiled daringly. “All right! I’d love to come. But I should call my friend Maggie, so that she doesn’t think I’ve fallen off the mountain. Would it be okay if I used your telephone?”

  A beat passed before Ilissa answered. Then she raised her hand and made a lazy gesture in the air, indicating something in the distance behind Nora. A jewel on her finger flashed in the sunlight, making Nora blink. “Please, make yourself at home,” Ilissa said.

  Nora twisted around to look in the direction that Ilissa had pointed. “Oh, I didn’t see the house before,” she said. It was a low-slung, modern structure half-hidden behind the tall hedges. She could make out sliding glass doors under a jutting slab of roof. The style complemented Ilissa’s outfit, Nora thought.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I should call now,” Nora said, getting to her feet. To her relief, she wasn’t as unsteady as she had feared. The glass pitcher was empty now, she noticed abashedly. She couldn’t remember whether she had seen Ilissa drink any of the punch. Then Nora looked down at herself and cried out in dismay.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t go to your party!” she said. “I’m a mess.” Her jeans were still muddy from her fall on the path. She could feel patches of damp in her T-shirt, while her hair must be a haystack after getting soaked in the rain. “I look like a refugee,” she said. “What must you think of me?”

  “That’s easily remedied,” Ilissa said. “I’d love to lend you a dress, and of course you can freshen up inside.” She touched Nora’s shoulder lightly, guiding her toward the house. “I’m so thrilled that you can stay for the party,” she added. “I promise you, you’ll have a wonderful night, and I’m sure that you will find plenty of admirers. Perhaps even my son,” she said, with a half smile. “He will be there tonight, and I should warn you, he’s very susceptible to beautiful women.”

  Then I’m safe from him, was Nora’s first thought. Aloud she said, “I’m sure he’s a little young for me. You can’t have a son who’s more than eight years old.”

  Ilissa gave Nora a little squeeze around the shoulders. “You are too kind! No, I assure you, he is quite grown up. Of course, I was much, much younger when he was born. I will introduce you to him, and you must tell me if you can see the resemblance.”

  “Oh,” said Nora awkwardly, as they passed through the sliding door into the house, “if he’s anything like you, I’m sure I’ll like him very much.”

  Chapter 3

  Silver fish with trailing fins hovered and flickered behind a wall of glass tinted the cool, reassuring green of a dollar bill. Nora regarded them thoughtfully as she rinsed her hair, thinking of the bathroom in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” The slate tub was so large that she could lie back and float full-length without touching the sides. As she sat up again, a few of the rose petals drifting in the warm water clung to her body, a crimson stippling against her skin. It was undoubtedly the most luxurious bath she had ever taken.

  Now that she was alone again, she felt a little puzzled, if flattered, by Ilissa’s kindness. “Why me?” she asked herself. Why would a woman who looked as though she should be sunning herself on a yacht off Capri or going up against Audrey Hepburn for the Holly Golightly role—Nora’s money would be on Ilissa—take it upon herself to befriend a bedraggled stranger who appeared unannounced in her backyard and spent an hour grousing about her love life? Perhaps Fitzgerald was right about the rich being different from you or me. If I lived like this all the time, Nora thought, I might be a nicer person, too.

  Finally, reluctantly, she got out of the water, wrapped herself in a towel so large it trailed on the ground, and went into the dressing room next door. Her stained, wrinkled clothes were gone. On a hanger on the wall was a short red dress with a plunging neckline. Nora was examining it uncertainly when Ilissa entered. She had changed clothes, but her new outfit, a minidress made of gold disks stitched together, still looked like something from a mid-Sixties issue of Vogue.

  Ilissa held the red dress under Nora’s chin and leaned back to consider the effect. “No, no. Too—how shall I say it?—lurid. For you, something with more grace, more sophistication. I have exactly the dress. Just wait.” She disappeared with the red dress and came back with a long black one. “Much better,” she said, putting it up against Nora’s body.

  “It’s really very sweet of you to lend me your dress,” Nora said, “but are you sure—”

  “I have so many clothes, I can’t wear them all!” Ilissa pulled the dress over Nora’s head, tugging the fabric here and there to adjust it. “There!” she said, turning Nora to face the mirror. “I told
you—perfect!”

  As a general rule, Nora hated trying on clothes in the company of saleswomen or friends who poured her into outfits that she couldn’t afford and didn’t like, and then pronounced the effect ravishing. But there was something disarming about the way that Ilissa clapped her hands triumphantly at the sight of Nora in the black dress. And the dress was stunning on Nora, there was no doubt about that—flowing over the lines of her body, somehow making her look taller, thinner, and curvier at the same time.

  “It might have been made for you,” said Ilissa. “Consider it yours, my little present to you. Now, let’s do your hair.”

  Nora protested on both counts, insisting that she couldn’t accept such a generous present, that she could fix her own hair. But she found herself sitting in front of the mirror with Ilissa running surprisingly strong fingers through her hair. “Such a pretty color,” Ilissa said.

  “Well, my natural color is brown,” Nora confessed. “You can tell from the roots. I need to do another rinse soon.”

  “You have no roots,” said Ilissa. She began to comb out Nora’s damp hair.

  Watching Ilissa work in the mirror, Nora was reminded that she still knew almost nothing about her. “What do you do most of the time?” she asked, trying to phrase the question carefully. It seemed out of place to ask someone like Ilissa what she did for a living.

  Ilissa laughed. “Oh, I am always busy!” First of all, she said, there was her devotion to beautiful things. “This house, these gardens, all my own design. You like them? I thought so!” Then she had various interests to look after. Nora assumed that meant investments of some sort: Nora had never quite understood why people with money had to spend so much time managing it, but then she herself had little experience in that area.