Madame Mirabou's School of Love

by Barbara Samuel

  “Pam is right,” Evelyn said. “You need to find something with some security. You really are a good fund-raiser. What about museums, those kinds of places?”

  All three looked at me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Offices make me feel claustrophobic.”

  Kit leaned over the table. “You got a settlement, didn’t you?”

  Pam ducked her head, touched her upper lip. “Ahem.”

  “Very funny.” I rolled my eyes. “I did get a settlement. Unfortunately, it was the house, which I blew up.”

  “Oh, you didn’t do it. The house was old! The furnace blew,” Evelyn said, and shuddered as delicately as a woman of her size could. “That’s why I hate vintage anything—houses, clothes, whatever. Too much trouble.”

  “Well,” I said with a shrug, “it blew up, and the insurance company is investigating, so until they rule out arson and negligence, I don’t really have anything but a small—” I used my finger and thumb to illustrate “—stipend, most of which was spent on the move.”

  “He didn’t have to be a cheapskate,” Evelyn said. “Why did he do that? He should be shot anyway.”

  I hated to have to defend Dan, considering, but it had to be said. “Evie, we had a lot of equity in that house. He gave it to me, free and clear.”

  “Blood money,” Pam said.

  “Yes, but it was what I asked for. It was fairly good of him to send me more.”

  Kit put her hand on mine. In the sunlight, the diamonds in her wedding set sparked fire. Of the four of us, she was the wealthiest, and probably the happiest. Everyone who saw her with her husband assumed she was a trophy wife. Her husband was an enormously wealthy corporate executive twenty-five years older than his tiny, fit, blond wife.

  “It’s nice that you want to avoid bitterness, Nicole,” she said, “and I’m glad you have a good attitude, but he’s a bastard and we all know it. You don’t have to stand up for him.”

  “How can a woman just waltz in and take somebody’s husband anyway?” Evelyn asked rhetorically.

  Here we go. My divorce was the only thing we talked about now. “Let’s not—”

  “I knew that night we saw them in Aspen—” Evelyn halted.

  Deep, dead silence swallowed the table. No one met my eyes. Beneath her fine white skin, Evie’s jaw showed a wash of purple. The other two faces were ashen.

  It was very hard to tell if it was a deliberate or a genuine slip of the tongue, but it was out.

  “You knew?”

  I looked at Pam. She rubbed a finger along the rim of her mimosa glass. Kit touched her upper lip with an index finger, as if she was about to say, “Shhh.”

  “You all knew? For how long?”

  “Nikki—”

  I held up a hand. “No, wait, I think I can figure this out. You went to Aspen together and I never even bothered to talk to Dan about my going because I knew he had a conference that weekend and I couldn’t get away.” Inclining my head, I counted backwards in time. “That was more than two years ago.”

  They still didn’t look at me.

  I leaned forward and said, very quietly, “So, my supposed best friends knew for at least a solid year that my husband was cheating on me, and none of you told me?”

  “Nicole—”

  I raised a hand to stop the protestation. Pam fell silent. I lifted a hand to my face, rubbed my forehead. “You know, there you are, thinking you’ve just about gotten through the mortification of this kind of thing, and then you get some new bit of information, and you’re slammed all over again.”

  They looked miserable. But I thought of all the times we’d gone to lunch, to dinner at one or another of their houses, to school carnivals and soccer games, and they’d had this secret. How many times they sat there and made polite conversation, looked me in the eye over chicken Caesar salads, and knew.

  I stood up, threw my napkin down on the table. “I hate this.”

  Pam put her hand around my wrist. Hard. Her fingers were cold. “Nikki, wait.”

  I yanked away from her, not enough to make a scene, just trying to get her to let go. “Please, Nik. Listen.”

  It felt as if there was something caught in my throat. With a panicky sense of airlessness, I sucked in a breath.

  She took it as a sign. “What could we do?” she asked.

  “Tell me?”

  “It’s not that easy. Maybe it would burn out, and he’d get tired of her, and then we’d have been in trouble, too. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal.”

  Kit said, “We didn’t know what to do. It always seemed like you loved each other a lot.”

  “And what if,” Evelyn, ever the practical one, added, “you did know, and were pretending not to, which would be a perfectly valid choice, and then you found out everybody knew?”

  I sighed. Sank down into my chair. “You’re right.” I still felt like I’d swallowed a gallon of vinegar. I covered my face for a moment. “It’s always tawdry, isn’t it? Predictable and tawdry and degrading.”

  Kit rubbed my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, babe.”

  I raised my head. “Can we just not talk about me anymore for today? I’m sick of the subject of my divorce, frankly. I’d like to hear about something else. Anything else.” I looked at them. “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Evelyn said, and raised her glass.

  “Where the hell is our waitress anyway?” Pam said.

  “Here I am!” A brunette with dishpan hands and black slacks rushed into the room, pencil at the ready. “Very sorry, ladies, but we are swamped and two servers quit last night.”

  “Two?”

  The woman waved her hand. “They ran off to get married in Las Vegas. We’ll be up to speed in a day or two when they can hire someone new, but today, I’m begging your patience.”

  Hire someone new. I looked at her, looked back over my shoulder toward the kitchen doors. A swift yearning burst in my mouth, as sharp as a pomegranate seed. I’d loved the restaurant business as a young woman, and had waited tables for quite a few years while I put myself through school. I could do it again. The bustle and hustle appealed to me. And it wasn’t like everyone here was fresh out of school.

  “I’m ready to order,” I said, prompting the others.

  3

  Nikki’s Perfume Journal

  SCENT OF HOURS

  Time: 11 A.M.

  Date: July 2, 1972

  Scents: root beer, coppery river water, bananas, earth, moss, blood, bubble gum, pines

  Bottle: brown soda bottle with a cork

  Notes: picnic in Cheyenne Canyon with my sisters, when Molly stubbed her toe

  After lunch, I was restless. There wasn’t much to do in the empty apartment. I called the insurance company to nag them again. Picked the dead leaves from a few plants. Checked e-mail and found the predictable nothing. Went out to the balcony and leaned on the railing, my heart hollow with longing—a longing for my old life, the things I used to do. Hollow, echoey, empty.

  A lot of it was missing my daughter. Her quicksilver laughter, the way her eyes turned up at the corners, the fierce, concentrated attention she gave to something that caught her. When it grew too terrible, I told myself it was the predictable hunger of an emptynester. I’d had to let her go a little early, but it was the right choice.

  Or at least I thought so most of the time.

  And, okay, the rest of it is, I missed Daniel, too, damn it, whether anyone wanted me to say it or not. His big laugh. His twinkling eyes. The way he sang gospel music in the shower.

  A thousand things. A million.

  Before she’d dropped me off, Pam said, “I know this has been hard, Nicole, but you need to get over the divorce and get moving. I think they have a class at First Presbyterian Church and you could—”

  “No.” I knew about it. I wasn’t going to go and sit around and whine with other divorcées. That was just pathetic.

  How long did this part last? The grieving? Would I just wake up
one morning and realize it had been ages since I’d thought about it?

  I felt raw over the realization that my friends had all known he was cheating on me. How could they have kept quiet for so long! What kind of friends did that?

  It wasn’t that they were bad people. It just suddenly seemed to me that there wasn’t much room in their world for anyone who wasn’t just like them.

  Worse to realize I’d been the same.

  On the horizon, clouds billowed in over the mountains. The wooden railing dug into my elbows, and I felt the rich lunch in my belly, and it suddenly occurred to me that I was thinking of the job at Annie’s Organix. I needed money, and it would at least give me something to do.

  A swoop of anxiety went through my chest. Was this the answer I was looking for? Or was it just some foolish midlife crisis answer that would make me look like an idiot?

  I paced inside, looked at the empty rooms. I hadn’t bothered to go looking for furniture. I hadn’t gone shopping for clothes. I ate frozen meals and cold cereal because it seemed like too much trouble to shop and cook.

  I was sick of being frozen. Sick of being stuck. Even if I did something stupid, it would be movement. I should go apply.

  In the living room, the phone rang, and hoping it was Giselle, calling to tell me about her adventures in London, I dashed back in to answer. “Hello?” I said breathlessly.

  “Nicole?” my mother said.

  Hope burst like an overfilled balloon. “Hey, Mom.”

  “I was just calling to see how you’re doing.”

  “Feeling sorry for myself at the moment, honestly. Wishing I were in London with my daughter.”

  “I can understand that. Don’t let it get you down too much, though. No point in indulging negativity if you can avoid it.”

  “Right.” My throat felt tight, and I had to clear it. Our relationship was, at best, uneasy, but I did love her. “How are you? How’s Bob?” Bob was her fourth husband—my father had been her first— and she and Bob had actually stayed married for more than a decade. He’d been diagnosed with colon cancer and was about midway through the first round of chemo.

  She sighed. “All right. He’s been pretty sick, but he’s got a good attitude.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, I’m fine.” Her voice sounded thin. “Just a little tired.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come down there, Mom?” Not that I wanted to go, you understand. They’d moved to the Phoenix area four years ago, and loved it, but none of their children was anywhere close. My sisters were in Hawaii and LA, the first with her army husband, a major and safe from the current fracas in Iraq; the second an actress in a soap opera. If my mother needed help, there wasn’t really anyone else to go.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You have enough on your plate. Bob’s daughter Carole is going to come next week.”

  “Really.” It was comment more than question, since Bob’s children were not exactly fans of my mother—aka The Hussy Who Stole Their Father. “That’s a surprise.”

  “She’s worried about him. We all are.”

  “I thought it was going well, that they caught it early?”

  “Well, sure, but it’s still cancer, Nicole. It’s still chemo.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

  “Anyway, I called to see how you’re liking your new apartment. Settling in?”

  I looked at it. The walls were still bare. The furniture minimalistic at best. The plants lined up in a row against the wall gave it a little warmth anyway. The clay pots caught the dying embers of afternoon. “I guess. I’ll have it in shape by summer.”

  “I’m sure you will. I think you’re going to like the fresh start, really.”

  “I guess.”

  “You know who I dreamed about the other day?”

  “Nope. Who?”

  “Your friend Mark, remember him? The one who died?”

  Prince Valiant hair, blue eyes, freckles. “Yes.”

  “He was picking carnations,” she said. “Pink carnations. I always have liked the way they smelled.”

  “Me, too.” A little plucking ache pierced my lungs and I walked across the room and rapped on my door. “Hey, Mom, there’s someone at the door. I have to go.”

  “All right, sweetie. Take care.”

  “You’re the one. Do something nice for yourself today, huh?”

  I hung up, and stood for a moment looking at the horizon from my patio. She seemed distracted, tired, aging. The aging was no mistake—I’d been trying not to think about it, but she was nearly seventy. Not young.

  There was too much on my plate to think about that, too, so I turned on the radio to the local classical station and wandered into the spare room with a watering pot to tend the scented geraniums with their lemony and cinnamony deliciousness; a plant called Cuban oregano with spicy, velvety leaves. Pots of carnations, in all colors, an ordinary flower with an extraordinary, peppery scent.

  I’d grouped the sun-loving herbs—hyssop and thyme and pots of ferny French lavender—where they captured the most light, and they were thriving. I poured water into the pots and watched air bubble up from the dirt, distractedly wondering if I was just going to keep them in pots all summer. Maybe I needed to at least get some whiskey barrels for the balcony, repot some of them out there.

  No. What I needed most was a job, to get me out of the house, get some money flowing. Before I could chicken out, I sat down at my desk and wrote a letter of application for the job at Annie’s Organix. Maybe it was crazy. Maybe I was too old. Whatever. It was a least some forward movement. When I finished proofing it, I printed it out, carried it to my car, and drove back to Manitou.

  The day was getting dark and blustery as a storm moved in, the clouds lowering hard on the blue peaks all around the tiny town. I had to duck my head against a gust of wind as I got to the front door of the restaurant.

  A sign?

  “Don’t be stupid,” I muttered aloud, and yanked open the door. The lunch rush was well over, and the bartender from earlier was wiping down the stools with a damp cloth.

  “Can I help you?” she asked. “Did you forget something?”

  Suddenly, I felt foolish. She was close to my age, I thought, but with a lean, youthful suppleness to her body that made me think she was probably a runner. Fit, in other words, youthful in body if not face. But I blurted out my wish anyway. “I was hoping to fill out an application. If you haven’t filled the waitress positions.”

  “Oh.” She hid her surprise quickly, her glance flickering down my legs, to the jeans, to the shoes. “Sure. Annie’s not here—she’s gone to do some shopping—but you can fill out the application and I’ll give it to her when she gets back.”

  I filled out the simple application, and asked for a paper clip so I could attach the brief letter explaining my background and the reason for the outdated work credentials.

  “Thanks,” the woman said. “We really need help. Do you have a second telephone number?”

  “No. But I always have my cell with me.”

  “Cool. I’m sure she’ll call you.”

  Outside, I felt oddly buoyant. It was a little crazy. It would probably be a terrible job and I’d quit in a blaze of disaster and despair. If my friends found out, they’d be horrified. I was almost certainly too old to do that kind of work, to brutalize my ancient body that way.

  But standing there on the street in Manitou, which I’d loved all my life, with a wind blowing down from the mountains, carrying the taste of snow that still covered the Peak, I felt a whisper of hope. It might not be the answer, but it was an answer for the moment.

  I didn’t have to be anywhere. The rain hadn’t arrived yet. Manitou was one of my favorite places. A tiny hamlet built on the skirts of Pikes Peak, it was named for healing springs that had drawn tuberculosis patients at the turn of the century. When I was a child, my father brought my sisters and me here on hot summer evenings to eat ice cream and play games in th
e arcade.

  I tucked my hands into my pockets, thinking of the days when my friends and I skipped high school to come to Manitou on the city bus; when the castle was a warren of apartments with red-painted floors; when my father, before his breach, had driven a tourist bus to the top of Pikes Peak. The town was eclectic and odd and beautiful; it attracted bohemians and dreamers, runners and eccentrics.

  I passed a real estate office with notices plastered in the picture window, and slowed down to look at them. Not much available in what would be my price range, and I wandered on. Above the street, elbows and shoulders and knees of brilliant blue mountain rose from the strip of quaint shops—the saltwater taffy bar, the tourist traps with cheap copper bracelets, the boutiques and T-shirts.

  Between the real estate office and the tourist store was a vacant little shop, no more than ten or twelve feet wide. A kitten snoozed inside the dusty window, standing up straight, only his head bowed. His serene oblivion snared me and I paused. Daniel was allergic to cats, but I’d always loved them, and this one had the kind of fur I most liked—not quite long hair, not quite short, just that medium length that was so very, very silky. I could imagine exactly how he’d smell, curled up on my shoulder, the soft fur against my neck.

  Something must have alerted him to my presence, because he startled awake, and dashed into the back of the shop.

  It was only then that I noticed the shop itself. It was a narrow little thing, perfect for something so esoteric and what some might— had—called ridiculous as my hand-blended perfumes. It seemed a place tourists might wander into, and because they’d never see anything like it again, they’d slap money down on impulse for a rare, hand-blended perfume, a single ounce that smelled exactly like the afternoon of their wedding.

  My throat started to close and I turned away. One thing at a time. As if to underscore that idea, my phone buzzed against my leg. I didn’t recognize the number, but answered hopefully. “Hello?”

  “Hi, this is Zara Holsworth, from Annie’s Organix. Annie asked me to call and see if you could come in tomorrow at ten-thirty for an interview.”