Ray of the Star

by Laird Hunt

  But why don’t I feel more sad?

  It’s this submarine, plain and simple, thought Harry, whose mind had been moving along a roughly parallel track, as it had been, or as it seemed to Harry to have been, with the man under the awning,

  It’s like spending time in a hollowed-out Twinkie, thought Solange, who as a foreign exchange student in Lawrence, Kansas had eaten plenty of them,

  The thing even smells good, thought Harry,

  “What a beautiful night,” they both said,

  and the coincidence, though startling after so long a silence, didn’t seem as extraordinary as it might have given that what they could suddenly see out of the front grill, the half-lit trunks of palms along the beach and ship lights sparkling here and there across the moonlit bay, was indeed beautiful,

  “This is a fine spot, I’m going to leave you here,” Alfonso said,

  “We can roll it back together,” Solange said, and though both of them were sorry to see Alfonso, who came around and put his smiling, still-golden face in the grill, go, it seemed somehow appropriate that they would now have some time even more alone, even if as it turned out it was just to lie there very close to each other and look out over the glittering bay before debarking and making their slow way home through a night that seemed to rise and fall, enormous, like the sea they had left behind them—the sea, as Solange had called it, of commas, each wave a phrase in a sentence that was never quite finished, that would never quite be finished, until of a dreadful sudden it was—to bask separately in the mystery of what was occurring, this gently promising something that felt like it was happening to them.

  As Harry and Solange were drifting off into a short sleep, Ireneo, who had spent more than half the night running down the city’s glowing avenues, rose and took off his shoes, then showered and put his shoes back on and went to see Doña Eulalia, who had asked him, when he had phoned her the previous evening to report, to come and see her at sunrise, a request that she had promptly forgotten, with the result that when Ireneo let himself in and knocked on her bedroom door, she was still, and not for the last time during this account, deep asleep, and was not pleased to be woken, and called Ireneo “Imbecile,” which he did not like, nor, apparently, did his shoes, for they barked out a retaliatory “Smelly old bag” and one or two other epithets that Ireneo, operating under the impression that the shoes spoke to him and him alone, was inclined to thank them for, except that as soon as the epithets had been uttered Doña Eulalia switched on the bedside light, reached for her glasses, peered down at the shoes, then up at Ireneo, at whom she smiled and said, “I once had a pair like that, they are great fun and even useful until they lead you astray, I threw mine into a furnace after they suggested I cut off my index finger and feed it to the cat, but not before, mind you, getting out a kitchen knife and sharpening it, thank God my late husband, who had never liked the look of them, came in and made me take them off, what have yours been saying besides ‘smelly old bag’?”

  “After the centaur sent me off on a goose chase they told me where to look,”

  “For which bit of information I’m inclined to forgive them their insults, though I’m not as inclined, my boy, to forgive you for finding them so agreeably apropos,”

  “You had just called me ‘imbecile,’ Madame,”

  “And so of course I had, for which I apologize, but at any rate, time is almost up and I must see Harry tonight, no more delays,”

  “I’ll speak to him first thing this morning,”

  “Good, and Ireneo,”

  “Yes, Madame,”

  “Do I smell?”

  “You do not, Madame,”

  “I’m relieved, you will watch out for those shoes, they will have you running out in front of cars before long,”

  “I will,”

  “Then that’s excellent, I’ll expect you tonight,”

  “Good-bye, Madame,” Ireneo said and left the house and immediately started running, but when his shoes began to speak—small recriminations and half-hearted defenses—Ireneo stopped and said, “I’m on to you,” whereupon the shoes fell silent, and Ireneo headed off at a trot to a stand in the market, which opened early and served passable coffee and stuffed pastries, over which, while the curiously invigorating smell of the arriving fish, fruit, and freshly butchered meat wafted past, he could linger until it was time to go and see Harry and put an end to this errand, which had, after all, gone on much longer than should have been necessary, sentiments that overlapped in substantive ways with those being experienced, at that very moment at another market stand that served passable coffee but exceptional pastries, by Alfonso, who was perched, somewhat less comfortably than he cared to be between the connoisseurs, who were much less the worse for wear than he was for having spent the night eating deep fried foods and slurping down chocolate malts at the gallery, where Alfonso had returned after leaving Harry and Solange, not because he had wished to round out his evening with further celebratory activity, but because, at the precise moment that Solange shivered in the Yellow Submarine, one of the connoisseurs had slipped him a note that read, “Come back and see us when you are finished,” and for Alfonso, who had been a grateful recipient of the connoisseurs’ largesse for longer than any other current statue on the boulevard, a request from them was as good as a command, but that they were interested in anything more than his presence on the dance floor as the party trundled on into the wee hours was left unclear until, not terribly long before daybreak, they had danced a moment on either side of and in front of him then taken him by the arms and led him in the direction, as they put it, of a place they could all chat—this stand in the market where the connoisseurs were habitués—about, as it occurred, Harry and, by extension, Solange,

  “So, it’s working,” one of them said,

  “And part of why we asked you to join us for breakfast is just to express the sentiment …”

  “The conviction,”

  “Yeah, the conviction that it couldn’t have been done without your help,”

  “My help?” said Alfonso, the connoisseurs laughed, one of them gave out a short whistle, then another one clapped him on the shoulder and said,

  “No need to be disingenuous,”

  “It’s unappealing,”

  “Unappetizing,”

  “It’s like all that fried food at the party,”

  “Gets to you,”

  “Only with this you don’t want to keep eating,”

  “You don’t want to start eating,” the connoisseurs each picked up the cream-filled pastry they had ordered, wrinkled their noses, and tossed it back onto the counter, while Alfonso, who had a large bite of a similar pastry in his mouth, swallowed slowly, thought of telling Harry the story, of giving him the use of the submarine and putting him into position opposite Solange, of helping him push it each morning, of offering to roll him and Solange through the warm streets, and tried to decide if he had known he was helping, that he was acting, in a sense, as an instrument, but found he couldn’t quite remember, not that it mattered so much, he was happy to help and said as much and the connoisseurs picked up their pastries again and took bites and one of them said,

  “Sending that guy off last night was the best thing you did,”

  “Stroke of genius,”

  “Maybe not genius but it bought us some time,”

  “Come on, this is Alfonso, our friend, let’s call it genius, we can call it genius,”

  “For fuck’s sake, fine, it was a stroke of genius,”

  “Gave Harry his night,”

  “And what a night,”

  “All it takes is one,”

  “For love to come knocking,”

  “Now it doesn’t matter,”

  “They’re both hooked,”

  “Hooked enough, Solange’ll get over it,”

  “Teach her a little lesson, she’ll be fine,”

  “Why would Solange, of all people, need to be taught a lesson?” Alfonso asked, prompting two of the con
noisseurs to smack the other and say,

  “He misspoke, he was thinking about something else,”

  “Criminy, you’re right, I misspoke, I was thinking about something else, apologies, Jesus, of course, poor Solange,”

  “This is about him,”

  “Harry,”

  “Don Quixote,”

  “Ha, ha, ha,”

  “Now it can start,”

  “What can?” said Alfonso,

  “Ah, the poor schmuck,” said one of the connoisseurs,

  “Yeah, the poor schmuck,” the other said.

  The poor schmuck was feeling like anything but as he stood in front of the mirror in his apartment—first smoothing down the slightly wrinkled jeans he had left too long in the pile of clean laundry without folding, then smoothing the short sleeves of his yellow T-shirt with its blue sea bass logo, then pulling on his brown jacket, which did surprisingly well in warm weather, then running his hands through his still-wet hair, which, he had a feeling, would fall wrong all day, despite the solid quantity of hair paste he had applied after washing it—in fact he was feeling almost what one could call excellent, even better than he had felt when he had still been feeling good on the evening he had first met Ireneo and seen Solange, and the prospect of the day about to unfurl before him was so appealing that once or twice as he was going about his ablutions and eating his sausage and bread covered in the extraordinary rose petal jam that Solange had insisted on running inside to get for him when he had dropped her off at her apartment just a few hours previously, he had burst into song, the submarine thing, yes, but also bits and pieces of others that he had not come up with in years, and indeed he was in the explosive middle of one of these bits when he stepped through the doors of his building a few minutes after leaving his mirror behind and ran into Señora Rubinski, who, beaming, said, “Ah, Harry, how perfect, perhaps you would like to join us, my sleepyhead is finally up off the couch, we’re off for a morning walk, no need to wait for evening, here he is,” upon which she indicated, with rather a flourish, an elderly gentleman, the spitting image of the picture Señora Rubinski carried with her, who smiled a little sheepishly, shrugged, and seemed not at all nonplussed by Harry’s rather stunned silence at being presented to a man he could see through, even if only a little—at the right shoulder and the left shin—nor did Señora Rubinski, who had a reputation for moderate prickliness, take poorly Harry’s silence, which went on for the entire time the three of them were standing there, although when after an awkward interval Harry’s hand went slowly up and out, as if in spite of Harry’s reluctance it had decided a proper greeting was in order, a tiny cloud of worry came and rained on the edges of her huge smile, and she bade Harry a hasty farewell and, not quite touching the small of Señor Rubinski’s back, ushered him away, leaving Harry standing there staring after them, at Señor Rubinski in particular, though not, as one might imagine, with his hand still theatrically stretched out before him—he had immediately pulled that back in, placed it in his pocket, and made a nice tight fist of it—thinking, O.K. … and then, probably because he had thought it the night before as he and Solange had stood up straight after climbing out of the submarine and saw both Venus and the moon reflected on the disturbingly shiny waters of the bay, which looked both like and unlike the endless, gentle waters they had seemed to swim through together earlier, It harrows me with fear and wonder, the overly poetic incongruity of which remark, not to mention the terrors to do with numbness and icy water it adumbrated, had kept him from voicing it then but didn’t stop him from murmuring it now as the Rubinskis turned a corner and vanished, and he began making his way to Alfonso’s to collect the submarine and head for the boulevard, with the result that Harry arrived at his now customary spot in a very different frame of mind indeed and the silence that surrounded him inside the submarine, which found itself amplified by Solange’s absence from her box across the boulevard, even though it was past the hour they had spoken of the night before, was for the first time an uncomfortable, almost an untenable silence, a silence harrowed, in short, by fear and wonder, in that uncomfortable order, and so when Ireneo jogged up to the grill of the submarine and cleared his throat, Harry threw open the hatch and stepped out and, without hesitation, vigorously pumped the very real Ireneo’s proffered hand, an operation that was only mildly complicated by Ireneo’s apparent reluctance to stop jogging in place as he delivered his message.

  “She wants to see me?” Harry said,

  “Yes,” Ireneo said,

  “You’re sure you’ve got the right person?”

  “More than,”

  “Because if it’s Solange you’re looking for she’ll be here any minute,”

  “Solange …”

  “The silver angel, the one with the broken face, the one you were looking for,”

  “The two of you have struck up an acquaintance,”

  “We have, after that night I looked for both of you and found her,”

  “Well, my employer would be very happy to greet Solange too, but it’s really you, Harry, she is now eager to speak with,”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,”

  “I met a ghost this morning,”

  “A ghost?”

  “My neighbor’s dead husband, an older gentleman, he has been dead for years,”

  “But now he’s not,”

  “Well, I suppose technically, of course, he still is,”

  “I see, yes, not so terribly odd in and of itself, but I’ll let my employer know, it might be related,”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know, in fact, I have no idea,” having said this, Ireneo swept a long finger across his forehead, simultaneously removing a fat bead of sweat that had been threatening to fall at any moment and adjusting the placement of an errant lock of damp black hair,

  “Look, if you don’t mind my asking,” said Harry, “Why are you running in place?”

  “That’s a long story too, but I can stop any time I want, in case you are wondering,”

  “No, I wasn’t wondering that,”

  “Well, I can, but that’s not important, what is important is that you accompany me tonight,”

  “I’d be delighted to,”

  “Excellent, I’ll come and collect you here,”

  “What if we meet at the café again, that will give me a chance to get the submarine back where it belongs,”

  “I’ll look for you there, just after sunset,”

  “Fine,” Harry said, then watched as Ireneo not only jogged off at a brisk pace, but looked down at his feet as he did so and said, “Shut up,” only to come to a dead halt a few paces later, pull off his shoes, throw them against the side of a flower kiosk, start off down the boulevard, barefoot this time, then reappear a moment later, somewhat sheepishly grab up the shoes, and wave at Harry—who felt a little bad for having played witness to such a perplexing sequence of events, and pretended to be looking elsewhere—then put them on and ran off again, clearly muttering to himself, giving, in other words, every indication that he was undergoing some sort of psychotic episode, and while it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Harry’s attitude at watching Ireneo charge noisily off was identical to the one that had struck him earlier in the presence of the Rubinskis, the overlap was enough to make him wince a little at the thought of returning to the state he had been in before Ireneo had appeared and, a moment later, actually clap his hands and give a little jump when he realized that Solange was standing on the other side of the boulevard smiling at him.

  It took Solange a moment to register that the inter twining of pleasure and concern that she felt dancing across her face as she watched Harry was actually dancing across her face, in a kind of variable speed tango, rather than remaining just below its painted surface, and then a moment longer to remember that as she had sat in her apartment applying her silver makeup earlier she had been overcome with an urge to twist and contort her face, to make it do, as she had said to herself, things it h
adn’t done in a long time, which hadn’t meant very much to her then as she had made faces at herself in the mirror, but seemed to have more than a little resonance now, as Harry came quickly across the boulevard toward her and the tango stopped as concern bowed and stepped aside, abandoning the floor to pleasure, which did a pirouette and splits, and she felt her face breaking into an outrageous grin, the kind she had once been capable of achieving at a moment’s notice but that had vanished with her young man and gold face paint, and Harry, looking at the grin that had come out to greet him thought, if I ran fast enough and dove I could end up inside that smile and wouldn’t we both be surprised, but Harry didn’t speed up and dive, in fact he slowed down a little as he approached and the smile that lit his face grew softer as he approached, and for a fraction of a second Solange thought, without quite knowing why, We’re both climbing, but in opposite directions, and then Harry was standing before her, his eyes beaming, his graying hair catching the light surrounding them, and she was telling him about sitting in front of the mirror that morning making faces and that suddenly now, even though she hadn’t slept at all and was in desperate need of a cup of coffee and a bucket full of pastries, she couldn’t stop grinning and felt like a second-string circus clown, and Harry was saying, let’s go get coffee and a couple hundred pastries, which is more or less what they did—at a third stand at the edge of the market, one Solange had long frequented and which gave them a view both of the Yellow Submarine and the pile of Solange’s gear, which she had left in a heap on her box—and to say that both of them were delighted that the awkwardness they had been aware might be present when they met again in broad daylight did not materialize, would be an understatement of the first order, to borrow the phrase that ran through Harry’s mind as they sat there on their stools at a stand that marked the third point in a roughly isosceles triangle formed by the market’s three coffee stands, the two longer, equidistant lines of which converged on Harry and Solange and their plates full of pastries, which is pretty to think of but also satisfying to note given that, Ireneo having already impacted on Harry’s day, the connoisseurs and Alfonso slid off their own stools and a moment later passed within view of Solange, who had just enough trouble interpreting what struck her as a curiously painful disjunction between the placid faces of the connoisseurs on the one hand and the markedly unplacid face of Alfonso on the other, that she elbowed Harry, pointed at the foursome, which had stopped a moment at the edge of the market to wait for a dolly piled high with battered fish carcasses to trundle by, and quietly asked if she thought they looked “odd” to him, and Harry said they certainly did,