Madame Mirabou's School of Love

by Barbara Samuel

  She lifted her head, and I thought of the Day of the Dead skeletons—her eyes were hollowed, her movements jerky and odd. “Look what he’s turned me into,” she said, and put a fist to her heart. “I can’t stand myself. I can’t stand him.” She moaned. “I can’t stand any of this! I don’t know what to do.”

  I reached for her, and she crumpled into my arms, all angles and overheated skin and tears. “You have to let him go, Roxanne. It’s going to kill you.”

  “How could I have done that to Wanda?” She squeezed my upper arm so hard, I winced. “How could I betray my best friend? She’s been so good to me!”

  I felt scared, suddenly, of the agony in her voice. It made me remember a night not long after Dan had moved out, when I couldn’t stop crying for nearly six hours. Every time I’d sort of stop, another giant sucking howl of loss would wash through me, and I’d be back to it. I cried until I couldn’t breathe, until my eyes were swollen practically shut.

  I stroked Roxanne’s hair.

  “I just want to die,” she whispered.

  “I know, honey,” I said. “But you have to live.”

  A keening, husky moan came out of her, almost like a living thing. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed. Things will look better in the morning.”

  “Will they?” she asked.

  I ignored the bristling of dread over my spine. “They will,” I said. “I promise.”

  And I guess she decided to make it so, one way or the other.

  22

  My phone rang early. I was still asleep when I stumbled into the living room and tried to find the cell phone. Tugging it out of my purse, I flipped it open, tossed my hair out of my eyes, and croaked, “Hello?”

  Wanda’s voice said, “Turn on the television. Channel 13.”

  “Wanda?” I peered at the microwave clock. It was only six A.M. “What’s wrong?”

  “Roxanne.”

  My stomach dropped, but it was that odd clunking of expectation. Without a word, I found the remote control and clicked on the television. Nighttime video, shot through with blinking red lights and yellow police tape, showed an ordinary suburban house with a sloping grassy lawn.

  On fire.

  Roxanne’s car was parked in front. “Shit,” I whispered. “Is she okay?”

  “Police have taken a suspect into custody for the fire,” a grave, female reporter’s voice said, “rumored to be the ex-wife of the resident. Apparently, no one was at home when the fire started, and no injuries are reported, but the house is expected to be a complete loss. Back to you, Kara.”

  More video, of Roxanne, looking pale and dull, being escorted down the driveway, wearing the same blouse and skirt she’d been wearing the afternoon before.

  “I feel so guilty,” Wanda said. “Even though I am so mad at her, I wish I could have done something.”

  “Oh, sweetie, don’t. Be mad at her, it will be easier.”

  Wanda wept softly. “But I love her.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you see what you can find out?”

  “Yes. Wanda, I’m so sorry.”

  Her voice was thick. “Me, too.”

  It took some doing, but I finally pieced the details together. Sometime after midnight last night, Roxanne, stone cold sober, drove to the home she had shared with her ex-husband for twelve years and used a key to go quietly through the back door, into the kitchen— where she’d cooked a thousand meals for her now-fragmented family—and calmly, deliberately, set fire to the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bed in the master bedroom. She walked back outside and waited for firefighters to come, too late to save it.

  The news was full of it for days. A classic triangle tragedy, piercing anew each and every time.

  It haunted me. All of it. The layers and layers of betrayals— Grant, then Roxanne with the married men she’d seduced, over and over again, Wanda and Tom.

  In some ways, it was a relief. In some dark part of me, I’d been afraid she would kill herself. Or one of the others.

  What was frightening was that I understood what she’d done. Not only the impulse, but the satisfaction it must have brought. It would have been so much easier to kill Daniel than to live with his betrayal, to recognize, in small ways and large, how enormously he’d let me down. There had been days through those first months after our break that I would have happily tied Keisha up and pulled out her fingernails, one by one. When I would have gladly tortured each of them in front of the other.

  When I would have been deeply thrilled to shoot bullets into their bodies and watch them die.

  Vicious. Brutal. Not at all civilized. I know all that. But it doesn’t matter. The betrayal is, too.

  So why did I manage to get through it, and Roxanne didn’t? The question haunted me.

  One night, too unsettled to sleep, I went to the shop. It was past midnight. No one was out in the streets of Manitou, unless you counted the homeless man asleep beneath the street lamp. A big moon, not quite full, shone down over the mountains, huddled around the town in the dark.

  I unlocked the front door and flipped on the light. It was bald and too bright—for winter, I would need lamps. For now, it suited my needs, which were simply to get busy, do something productive. I locked the door behind me for safety and got to work. For the one red wall, Evelyn, with her eye for detail, had found some fantastic shelving of dark wood that had little relief carvings of tigers and elephants along the edges. She said she’d found them cheap at a garage sale, which might well have been true, though I suspected not. She had not let me reimburse her. Against the red, they looked spectacular, and I could hardly wait to put beautiful bottles of perfume on them. With little paper blossoms?

  Mmm. Maybe not. I did think black-and-white photos of elephants would be an excellent addition. The movie Green Card crossed my mind, and I wondered what the sound track to it had been—Enya, maybe? Might be good to get a lot of things like that to help facilitate the mood for shoppers.

  Kit had taped off the floor in a simple diamond pattern, and started filling it in so I could follow along. The colors were an earthy red and softer gold, which sounded too extreme until I saw how she used it on the aged pine floor. It gave it a feeling of old and elegant, a faded ballroom in a faraway land. Filling in the squares was an ideal task tonight.

  As I painted, I kept seeing blips of Roxanne the night she’d betrayed Wanda. Her glazed eyes and bruised chin and swollen face. Her dull voice saying, “I just can’t do this anymore.” The fragility of her collarbone, so modishly extreme.

  Wanda, Roxanne, Tommy. Daniel and Keisha and me. Roxanne and Grant and Lorelei.

  Good sex. Bad sex. Roxanne, for all her blithe posturing, had been having a lot of bad sex, and sex with Tom had been the worst, most self-destructive act of all. Wanda loved them both, and the marriage might survive, but it had taken a pretty serious blow. The friendship would not survive. The betrayal was too severe.

  I thought of Niraj. Tender, open, passionate sex with no painful edges attached. That was how it was supposed to be. I was free, so was he. We were old enough to know what we were doing. Our connection brought no danger to anyone else.

  I sighed. Filling dark yellow paint in a diamond drawn so painstakingly by Kit, I thought of myself at the top of the basement stairs that night, afraid to face the darkness. The spiders. The ghosts. So convinced I couldn’t do it that I’d let a hundred-year-old house that somebody would have loved blow up. I’d been absolutely resigned to going with it.

  Wouldn’t they all be sorry then?

  My lungs constricted painfully, and I reared back on my heels, paintbrush in hand. Putting my other hand to my chest, I tried to ease the awful recognition.

  God! I nearly killed myself that night! It had been passive, a refusal to face the present, to take responsibility for my life as it was, rather than the actively self-destructive things Roxanne had been indulging in. But if I’d gone up with the house, the res
ult would have been the same—Giselle’s mother dead, an ex-wife who couldn’t handle the transition.

  I couldn’t breathe. My heart raced and I put the paintbrush in the can, choking. I had been willing to die rather than change.

  Die, rather than change.

  Wanda said our husbands had all shown bad character, and maybe they had, but where was our own strength of character, mine and Roxanne’s? Where had we gone astray ourselves? It scared me, not knowing.

  Character, Wanda said. It was not okay for a husband to betray his wife. It was not okay. Things happened and that was life, but it was an awful thing to do to someone, and I wanted to say that out loud.

  Without much thought, without even much guilt, Daniel had waltzed away into another life, leaving mine in a zillion tiny pieces and no map for me to put them back together again.

  Something started dissolving, the pressure in my chest turning to tears that ran unchecked down my face. Grief, recognition, a certainty that I had to learn to face up to my life just as it was, in all its mess and mistakes and losses, all its joys and surprises and delights.

  I had to face myself. First.

  And weirdly, I knew exactly what it would take. Standing up, I wiped my cheeks with my palms, then wiped my hands on my soft, old jeans. I marched down the hall to the back room. It was dark. The moon shone through the bank of windows, and I could imagine I was back eighty years. Flipping on the light didn’t make it a lot better—it was just so stark, so obviously ancient. I sniffed, braced myself, and pulled open the basement door.

  The light switch was on the wall just inside the door, and I flipped it on. Below, at the foot of those rickety, open-slat wooden stairs, was a swept concrete floor.

  A spider rushed up the wall toward the ceiling. A plain brown spider, not very big, but I felt an involuntary ripple down my neck. Every cell in my body said, You’ve got to be kidding.

  I went into the shop and picked up one of the old towels scattered around. It was fairly clean. I shook it and put it on my head like a veil, clutching it tight beneath my chin. I could tolerate a spider on a foot or arm, but it caused me serious trauma to imagine them in my hair or inside my clothes. Ick.

  I gripped the towel hard and took a breath, then took the first step.

  And the second. And the thirdfourthfifthsixth, fast, all the way down. I rushed into the open area of the cellar, and blew out like a hardworking athlete. Whispers of air brushed my ankles. Warily, I looked around. There were cobwebs overhead, and I kept the towel tight over my head. I didn’t see any other live spiders, but I felt their eyes from hidden spots, imagined the troops ready to—

  “Stop.” I said the word aloud. A single word. It helped, and I said, “Look around.”

  The furnace was to my right, fairly new-looking. To my surprise, I could actually see the pilot light, which was burning just fine. In the other direction was a good-sized hot-water heater, also fairly clean and new-looking. Next to it, against the wall, were water pipes with large knobs for turning them off and on. I assumed one was hot, the other cold.

  I turned in a circle. There was really nothing else in there. It was old and plain and clean.

  Behind me, I heard a footstep. I startled and whirled around, my skin crawling in terror.

  “Meow-p!” said the kitten, who’d followed me down. He stopped and “meow-ped” again, his eyes a vividly bright yellow. Trotting down the rest of the stairs, he came all the way over, and rubbed against my ankles.

  “Well, it’s about time!” I bent down and picked him up. His fur was as silky as mink, his lean young body strong and giving at once as he tucked his head under my chin and began to purr. I forgot to hold on to the towel, and it fell down around my shoulders, but it suddenly seemed okay.

  Jammed beneath the step was a tarot card. I recognized the bright yellow background and long rectangular shape of it. I bent down to pull it out—the three of cups, which showed a drawing of three women dancing.

  Here was my life. Right now. It didn’t matter what had come before, what I’d believed it might be, where I thought I might go. The only thing that mattered was where I was right now. The path, my choices, external forces had brought me here, to this night, grieving my friend’s devastating choices.

  And celebrating my own.

  Because, somehow, I’d survived.

  It was only as I turned and headed up the stairs that I remembered Mark, and the basement in his grandmother’s house. He swore there were ghosts down there, and went to great lengths to terrify me about it. We crept down there one day and he kicked over a can, and out of it came a gigantic black widow. We both screamed and ran up the stairs, and we never went back down there again.

  Mark had been a gift. His loss, at such a vulnerable time, had taught me early about the capriciousness of life, and the power of grief. But most of all, it had taught me to value the hours of life.

  Every hour.

  Carrying my kitten upstairs, I felt only a small wash of dread, that horror of things chasing you up from the darkness, and I doubted very seriously that I’d go down there again if I could find a way out of it, but I’d done it.

  I’d done it.

  Flipping off the light, I closed the cellar door and put the kitten down. “Let’s go take a bath, huh?”

  He sat on the lip while I filled the giant tub. I didn’t have any clean clothes, and I’d have to sleep on the roof with a quilt and a flat pillow, but that was all right. The room, with its dormers, made me feel cozy, the amber windows full of promise. I climbed into the tub and sank to my neck in copious hot water, and rested my head against the back of the tub. The kitten hopped up and peered at me curiously, then jumped down and made himself comfortable on my discarded clothes. He licked a paw.

  I closed my eyes and thought of all the paths that had had to converge to get me here. How do you love yourself?

  You just do.

  23

  Nikki’s perfume journal

  SCENT OF HOURS

  Time: 4 P.M.

  Date: April 25, 196—

  Elements: mud, water, sweet young sweat, sun-baked hair, scrub oak rotting in the undergrowth, fir, hope

  Notes: Mark and Me

  The Thursday night before Memorial Day weekend, I had a small party in the Manitou apartment, which was slightly less horrendously furnished than the one in Splitsville. I had a futon, but it was a solid wooden one, my own taste, a dark wood with a red-and-yellow patchwork. I’d hung curtains made of old saris woven together in pink and green and gold at the windows, and since chairs were expensive, there were cushions on the floor. Since both places were paid for, there was no reason not to keep them through July. The insurance company had reluctantly approved my claim, and when the money came through, I’d buy new furniture. Eventually, maybe I’d invest in a new home, but not until I knew what shape my life was taking. The patchwork on the futon, the curtains, the pillows reflected my feelings about my life: it was assembled from bits and pieces, but I wasn’t entirely sure where I wanted to live permanently, who I wanted to live with. An apartment was a good way to just be with that transition.

  The one thing I did know is that my perfumes were important. The shop, Scent of Hours, would have a grand opening tomorrow. I’d had it open for a couple of weeks—staffed by Amy when I couldn’t be there, and Giselle was going to work there, too, over the summer. We’d asked the landlord to divide the large bedroom in the apartment into two, and he’d agreed. She very badly wanted to stay in Marin County to go to school, and I’d finally given in because she was so focused on becoming a doctor, and schools were better out there. But we had—all, including Daniel and Keisha, whom I’d made have regular conversations with me—agreed Giselle would also spend a lot more time with me.

  Everyone was here tonight. Kit sat with Wanda near a table with crudités and I knew Wanda was pumping her about how to go to school with children. Tommy was not in evidence. He’d stayed home with the boys. The marriage was shaky, but in some ways
the wreck of his single crash of infidelity had served to throw him right into counseling to manage the losses he’d faced in combat. Maybe it would help.

  Roxanne wasn’t there, either—nor was she in jail, exactly. A court-ordered evaluation had resulted in a need for further diagnosis, and she was in a Denver facility for anorexics. She wasn’t doing particularly well, but I went to see her every other week.

  Happily, a whole group of restaurant friends came, too: Mary, Annie, and Zara, who’d brought a gigantic pitcher of mimosas so we could toast the opening. She sat with Evelyn and Pamela, talking dogs, I thought. They were all big dog-lovers.

  The last person to arrive was Niraj, who entered the gathering of women without even a flicker of consternation. He carried a small package with him. “I finally remembered to bring you the little present I bought in San Francisco after we first met.”

  I laughed. “I forgot!”

  He lifted a palm, cautioning me. “It is only a little thing, remember.”

  “That’s fine.” I tore the paper off. Breath left me. “Niraj!” I said, and started to cry.

  “What is it?”

  I covered my mouth, my view of my little present blurring as life, or the universe or Somebody, offered me proof that they cared, that they knew me, that I mattered.

  It was a small flocked black cat inside a plastic dome that was a bit worse for the wear. A pink ribbon held a golden heart around its neck, and its pink rhinestone eyes matched the pink feather boa behind it. The small bottle of perfume it held was Golden Woods.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to Niraj. To the universe.

  To Mark, wherever he was. I flung my arms around Niraj’s shoulders and let him hug me. “I’ll explain another time.”

  He kissed my ear.

  Zara raised her glass. “I’d like to propose a toast to Manitou’s newest enterprise, Scent of Hours. May the Lady of the Mountain bless it and keep it, and let it prosper for many years to come.”

  I raised my glass. “To the future!”