by Gene Wolfe
A drop struck Tina in the face, and she sat up. “Hello. I’m Tina.” Her wide hazel eyes blinked slowly before focusing on Lora.
Lora said, “Hello, Tina,” her voice strained.
“I belong to you,” Tina announced. “I’m your doll, and I can talk.”
Lora shook her head. “I’m afraid you don’t, Tina. You’ve got the wrong party. You belong to the man behind you.”
He said, “Hello, Tina. Remember me?”
“A little bit.”
“We used to play in my apartment. You helped me look for lost things, and I read to you. I got you some pretty dresses, and a little tea set.”
Tina nodded. “If you want to have a tea party, I can help you set the table.”
“I do,” he told her, “when we get back home.” To Lora he added, “Sure you don’t want her for Missy?”
Lora shook her head. “I know you mean well, and I have to admit you were right about your doll and I was wrong. You were telling the truth, but it’s a little bit too much like voodoo or something for me. And for Missy.”
“All right, let’s forget about Tina for a minute. When you left you wrote me a note, remember? If you’re nothing more than you say you are, a divorcee with a little girl, why did you tell me about the doors?”
Lora looked puzzled. “What doors?”
He took the note from his wallet, unfolded it, and smoothed it on the table. A drop of salt water dampened one corner like a tear. As he looked up at Lora, Tina giggled.
Lora asked, “What’s so funny, you two?” She had glanced at the note as he opened it; she did not look at it again.
“Your face,” he told her. “You’ve had such great control until now.”
She rose, brushing her lips with her napkin. “If you don’t like my face—”
“Suppose I call Channel Nine,” he said. “Suppose I show them this note, and then I show them Tina. I think the TV news would love Tina. You couldn’t come here again for a long, long time.”
Tina added, “Don’t go away!” A fat diner at the next table glanced toward her and looked quickly aside with the shaken but determined expression of an atheist who has seen a ghost.
“This is crazy,” Lora said. “I should have known it would be, so it’s my fault. Thanks for lunch.”
“I have your picture too,” he told her. When she did not reply, he added, “Sit down.”
Arms extended, begging to be picked up, Tina piped, “You’re so pretty!”
Lora sat. There was no fussing with her chair this time, and her shoulders were squared. “I never allowed you to take my picture.”
“I didn’t.” He paused, trying to frame what he had to say. “Things sort themselves out, don’t they? The things from your world and the things from mine each get together with their own kind. When I was a little boy, my mother used to give me Corn Flakes for breakfast, and I could never figure out why a flake that I put in the middle of the bowl always floated over to one side. I still don’t know, but I don’t think it’s magic, and I don’t think this is, either. It’s probably some sort of law of nature, like gravity. What happens when something belongs to both places?” He waited for her answer.
“Let’s call my world the sea,” Lara said. Her voice was suddenly new; the alteration was minute yet vastly significant —she had given up a hopeless game that no longer entertained her. “And yours the land.”
There were freckles beneath her makeup, and her eyes blazed green.
Lunch with Lara
He sighed, releasing breath he had not been aware of holding. “All right.”
“Heavy things belong to the sea. You may be able to draw them out—” Lara glanced down at Tina, “but if ever they come near the sea again, they will eventually fall in. And when they fall in, they will sink.”
He nodded to show that he understood.
“Lighter things belong to the land. If they happen to fall into the sea, they float. Eventually they are washed to some shore. You wanted to know about things that belong in part to both.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Think of a broken timber from a wreck. It is wood, which floats; but in it are several large nails. The nails are iron, which sinks. If the timber floats at all, it will float nearly submerged. If its wood becomes waterlogged, even a little, the timber will sink; but for a long time it will not lie heavily upon the floor of the sea. The sand will not bury it for years, because for years it will move with the tide enough to shake the sand off. When a storm comes, currents will scour the bottom; then it is possible the timber will be washed ashore.”
There was a sudden silence. At last Tina asked, “Are there really storms like that?”
Lara nodded. “I am the storm.” To him she said, “Now show me my picture, please, and tell me how you got it.”
“All right.” He took a locket of tarnished gold from his left jacket pocket and snapped it open. Lara leaned forward to look; but he did not let her see it for a moment, studying it himself instead. In colors time had softened rather than faded, the old miniature showed him her face in profile, half smiling, a delicate choker of Flemish lace circling her neck, grass-green jade ornaments at her ears.
“If I say I love you,” Lara asked him, “will you give that to me?”
“I love you,” he told her. “Won’t you let me keep it?”
With warm, slender fingers, she turned his hand until she could see the miniature, then nodded.
“Your name’s inside the lid—or one of your names, anyway. Leucothea Fitzhugh Hurst.”
Lara nodded again. “Where did you get it?”
“It was in the secret compartment with Tina. The old sea captain must have had that compartment built so he could hide his valuables in it, and this locket was what he kept in there. I suppose it was in there when he died, and nobody else knew about it.”
“And you want to keep it because you believe it’s a picture of me.”
“I know it’s a picture of you.”
“And Tina.” Lara glanced down at her, a goddess regarding a toy. “Tina’s me as well.”
Tina exclaimed, “I am not!”
He said, “So is Marcella, the movie star. You practically told me so, over the phone when I was in the hospital. You like having names that begin with L, but you don’t always use them.”
“Lara’s a fairly new one,” she admitted.
“I didn’t know then that it’s the one you store your coat under when you come here—Lara Morgan. I found that out later, after I got back.”
She smiled. “That was clever of you.”
“Thanks. I tried to get a job there, but they didn’t want me.”
“You wouldn’t have been happy if I had been Lora Masterman, because Lora Masterman was your psychiatrist’s receptionist; so I was Lara Morgan for you.”
“Uh huh. Maybe you can tell me about something I’ve been wondering about.”
“What my real name is? No.”
He shook his head. “What was wrong with me when I went to Dr. Nilson to start with? Now it’s you, but what was it then?”
Tina asked, “Don’t you feel good?”
“Yes, I do, Tina,” he said. “I feel wonderful.”
“Depression, mostly. There’s a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn’t be a lover worth having. You were one of those lonely men, whether you would admit it to Dr. Nilson or not.”
“‘I wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept me as a member.’ Groucho Marx said that. I watch reruns a lot.” He shrugged apologetically.
“He put it well. You were an only child, and your parents separated while you were still very young. Your mother was your best friend—in fact, your only friend. After your mother died, you managed to cope for a year or so. But you wouldn’t talk to customers, sometimes, and you were drinking too much. The store you work for sent you to Dr. Nilson.”
“You felt sorry for me.”
“I felt so
rry for all of you,” she said. “I still do. You were—you seemed like the best choice.”
“But you didn’t love me.”
“Yes, I did.” She paused so that her next words would sink in. “I loved Captain Hurst, too.”
He had forgotten the locket; he saw it now, lying between their soiled plates, as though he had never seen it before. “Do you really want it?”
“No. I wanted it to remember him by, but that was silly of me and selfish. I couldn’t remember Billy by keeping a picture of myself, not for long; and I think you need it much, much more than I do.”
“His name was Billy?” He was astonished.
She smiled. “It was William, actually. Everyone called him Billy, of course not to his face: Blaze-Away Billy Hurst.” Her hands had been in the purse in her lap; they appeared above the edge of the table clasping a black-bordered handkerchief. “I wish I could cry for him,” she said. “He deserved it. He was brave, and gentle even when he wasn’t sober. But I can’t, not really. I hadn’t thought about Billy for years.”
He snapped the locket shut and dropped it back into his pocket.
Her fingers touched his, then fled. “Would you do me a great favor? Please?”
“Anything,” he said.
“You have Billy’s old desk now? You own it?”
He nodded. “I suppose it must have been his.”
“Then you’ll keep things in it—your papers and so forth. I want you to keep that locket where he kept it. Will you do that for me?”
He nodded again. “If you’ll tell me how he got you to marry him.”
“There isn’t much to tell. We met on shipboard; he was the captain, I was a passenger. If we had merely done what you and I did, it would have been the gossip of the fo’c’sle in an hour. Billy would have done it—he was mad about me—but things would have been very difficult for both of us afterward. There was a parson aboard, so we got him to marry us—a big social wedding, as shipboard weddings go, with the first mate as Billy’s best man and more than half the women as my attendants. It was our celebration of rounding the Cape, too.”
“I see,” he said. “Did one of the passengers paint the picture in this locket?”
Lara shook her head. “It was done in Bombay by the British governor’s wife, after we docked. She was an amateur but really very good.”
“How long did you stay with him?”
“Until he sailed. By that time I had fallen ill and had to be left behind.”
“And I don’t imagine you were still there when he returned. Tina, you’d better go back. Too many people are admiring you.” He picked her up and replaced her in the breast pocket of his jacket.
“No,” Lara said. “What is it you want of me? That I love you? I do already, as much as I’m capable of love; if I hadn’t loved you, I would have stayed with you far longer. That I stay with you for the rest of your life? I can’t do that.”
He told her, “I’ve been thinking about why you picked us—the captain and me; it was because we wouldn’t be believed. If we went through a door and came back to tell about it, nobody would pay any attention to us. Nobody believes sailor’s yarns, and Hurst was a drinker and a hell-raiser from what you’ve said about him. I’m a mental patient, and that’s why you took your job, and why you went back. What is it you want from us?”
“Your love. I want to be loved by a man who doesn’t die because he made love to me. Is that so terrible?”
He shook his head. After a moment he said, “I think you like Billy—like the name. Anyway another Billy told me once that you had a lover called Attis. After I got back, I saw a thing on TV about people down at the library who’d look things up for you. I talked to a woman there, and after she told me about Attis, I asked about books on antiques. I’ve read all of them now, and a few of them three or four times. So I owe you something.”
Lara waved the debt aside.
“Anyway, Attis cut—cut himself for you, because that was what you wanted.”
“No,” she said.
“All right, because he thought that was what you wanted.”
“I wanted him not to die!”
“All right,” he said softly.
“But what is it you want from me? I’ve told you what you can’t have, and I’ve told you that you have my love already. I love you as much as I can—as much as I can afford. As much as the old woman at the next table loves some little dog, possibly. What more?”
He knew that she was trying to insult him, but he was not insulted; instead he was happier than he had ever been before. “I want what that dog wants,” he said. “I want to follow you, when I can, I want to help you, whenever I can be of any help, and I want to hear your voice.”
Her fingers drummed the table.
He waited in patient silence; and at last she said, “We’ll have a test, as such things were tested long ago.” She picked up her wineglass and offered it to him, grasping it between her thumb and forefinger at the rim. “Hold the stem with your left hand.”
He did so.
“Now tear off a crumb of that bread. Not a tiny crumb—a piece as big as a crouton. Don’t squeeze it.”
He pulled a small piece from the soft loaf in the basket by the ashtray.
“Now drop it into the wine. If it sinks, you’re free to follow me as long as you wish. But if it floats—”
“If it floats,” he told her, “I will die.”
She nodded. “You will anyway.”
For a moment it seemed the bit of bread scarcely lay upon the wine. Lara murmured something—a prayer, perhaps, or a curse, that he did not understand. Red as blood, wine raced up the snowy sides of the bread, and it sank like a stone.
“So be it,” Lara hissed. She released the glass, and he nearly let it fall.
He did not understand, and would never understand, how she got her coat without going near the hook where it had hung. He snatched down his own and ran after her, ignoring an angry shout from one of Mama’s sons.
To the Fights
At first it seemed that she had vanished in the throng of office workers; then he glimpsed her sleek head, its hair returned to the copper he remembered by the level light of the setting sun. He hurried after her, lost sight of her, found her and lost her once more, yet hurried forward still. Streetlights were coming on, section by section, all over the city.
The streetlights—and yet it had been lunch, surely lunch, that he had shared with Lara. He passed a church where services were in progress; he could hear the throb of the organ and the singing of many voices. Lights within made the stained-glass windows glow like gems. One showed Lara, with a spear in one hand, a mirror in the other. He stopped for a moment to stare, then hurried on.
Someone caught him by the shoulder. “Just where the hell have you been?”
He turned and saw North; as he did, North’s fist slammed into his right kidney. He gasped with pain and doubled over, but the crowd on the sidewalk was so thick, shouting and shoving as it fought to reach three ticket windows, that no one seemed to notice, though perhaps it was only that those who saw them ignored them.
“That’s for leaving me,” North said. North grasped his tie as if it were a leash and led him out of the crowd and into a narrow alley. There he jerked the tie away and swung wildly at North’s face. North stepped inside the blow, there was a red flash of pain, and he was sitting on the filthy bricks clasping his belly and retching.
“That’s twice,” North said. “Get up!”
Tina’s voice, tiny and muffled by his jacket, asked, “Are you sick?”
He smiled and said, “Yes,” suddenly glad that both blows had been too low to harm her.
“What the hell are you grinning for?”
“I’m still alive.” He stumbled to his feet. “Isn’t that enough?”
“For you,” North told him. A door opened, throwing a beam of strong yellow light into the dark alley. “Come on.” North led the way down a steep flight of concrete steps.
&nb
sp; “Where are we going?” he asked. It was an effort to speak, but a distraction from the pain.
“To put on a show.” North chuckled. “Like we did before.”
The steps ended in a wide concrete corridor that stank of sweat. A middle-aged man in a torn T-shirt and khaki trousers hurried past them carrying a stack of clean towels and a bucket of water.
North said, “We’ve got lots of time. They haven’t started the preliminaries. He’ll have one of the big rooms close to the elevators.”
The corridor turned and turned again, growing still wider and still more brilliantly lit. Tight-lipped young women with notebooks and lounging men with cameras clustered at one end. North shouldered them out of the way, seemingly oblivious to their protests and threats. “Come on!” North snapped. “Follow me!”
He followed as closely as he could. They stopped before a wide metal door painted dark green. A big cardboard sign neatly lettered in India ink had been taped to the door at eye level: JOE JOSEPH.
North knocked so loudly it seemed likely that the knocking alone would open the green door, smashing its latch and hinges. A bald man opened it instead and swore. North strode inside, leaving the bald man to push back the men with cameras and the intense young women with notebooks. A flash filled the whole bare room like a bolt of silent lightning before the bald man closed the door.
It was not until he was nearly in the center of the room that he realized that the bald man at the door had been Eddie Walsh. Eddie’s prizefighter, Joe, sat on a masseur’s folding table, wearing blue-and-white boxing shorts, a blue satin robe, and gym shoes, and looking as big as the store.
W.F. glanced up from taping one of Joe’s enormous hands and grinned at him. He tried to grin in return, then bit his lips as he sought to recall the name of the serious-looking blonde in the crimson dress. That would be Jennifer, of course, whom he had never met. Joe’s wife, Jennifer.