The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  “Oh, stop apologizing! I’m not sure I knew I felt that way about Craig, until he tried to bully me into letting him move in here.”

  “I thought you guys were getting along okay before you went off to stay with Floss and Blossom.”

  “I thought so too, but they persuaded me my standards ought to be higher. They felt that ‘I don’t actually mind hanging out with him, as long as it’s not too often,’ wasn’t good enough.”

  “Well, I’ve been trying to tell you that for years!” Laura said, her black eyes sparkling with indignation. “It’s about time you heard it from somebody – even the Candyfloss Twins.”

  I shook my head. “You know how it is, Laura. I’m just not a good judge of character.”

  “I know no such thing,” Laura said promptly. “What I know is, you made one dumb mistake when we were sophomores and you have never trusted your own judgment again. And,” she added, “at least half of that mistake, if not more, was your aunt’s fault. What did she think she was doing, giving an eighteen-year-old girl the keys to a whole house west of campus?”

  “Making it possible for me to go to the university?”

  Laura snorted. “She could have let you move in with her.”

  “Aunt Georgia values her privacy.”

  “All the same, it was irresponsible of her!”

  My parents had died in an airplane accident, returning from a conference, the summer I was twelve. I’d been lucky that I had family who swooped in to take care of me. My mother’s sister Milly in Beeville had taken me in with her own slightly younger children; I may have done a lot of baby-sitting, and I never learned to love Beeville, but I knew I was lucky to be with my own family instead of being thrown to the mercy of social services. And Aunt Georgia had rented out my parents’ house to help Aunt Milly and Uncle Max with the extra expense of raising me.

  When I graduated from Beeville High at eighteen, to my own astonishment the recipient of the Augusta Engelberger Germanic Studies scholarship to the University of Texas, Aunt Georgia had decided that the house would be better used as a place for me to live than as a source of income. I could always pick up tutoring jobs on campus for a bit of extra cash. So I had become the proud possessor of a set of house keys, the family photo albums, and my father’s Smith and Wesson. Which last I did not learn to use until after the unpleasant incident Laura was referring to. I had no wish to revisit that episode now.

  “Whatever,” I said. “It was a long time ago, and it really doesn’t bother me any more.”

  “Liar,” Laura said without heat. “Want some ice cream? I picked up some Belgian Toffee Chocolate Chip from Amy’s on the way home.”

  Best offer I’d had all day, even counting the Stevensons’ offer for the Harris mansion.

  Over the ice cream she started trying again to apologize about letting Craig in, and I told her again to shut up. “You didn’t know he was lying. And you couldn’t have known about the new tenant, because I went off to the office before you were up this morning.” Trying to find a way to ditch the new tenant, actually.

  “Oh, right, you said you showed a listing this afternoon! How did that go?”

  I rubbed my right eye, where the memory of that sudden migraine still lingered. “All right, I guess. That’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. It, uh, kind of freaked me out.”

  “Did they make an offer or didn’t they?”

  “Oh, they did. They actually offered the asking price!” I mentioned the awe-inspiring sum that Bruce Stevenson hadn’t even blinked at. “There’s no way it won’t be accepted.”

  Laura got the slightly misty-eyed expression that meant she was doing math in her head. I’d known three separate guys who thought she returned their devotion when she looked like that, only to discover that the expression vanished when she finished her calculus homework. “Why aren’t you happier? Shouldn’t the commission on that set you up financially for a while? You won’t need the rent from that room. If you really want your privacy, you won’t even need my rent,” she said, her voice wobbling slightly.

  I got up and circled around the bowls of melting ice cream to hug her. “Don’t be silly. You’re not just a tenant, you’re my friend and my sanity. What would I do without you, Laura Jacobson?”

  “Probably make a lot more stupid mistakes,” Laura said, with a suppressed sniffle. “All right, then, what’s worrying you about the Stevenson commission?”

  I tried to tell her about the strange things that had happened around that showing, and she tried to look as though she was paying serious attention. But her lips kept twitching.

  “So tell me,” I finished, “what the hell you find so funny about this situation!”

  A giggle escaped. “All of it? Oh, except for your migraine; I’m sorry about that. Is it better now?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “It went away a while ago. I guess about the time when I was throwing Craig out.”

  “Now that,” Laura said, “could be deeply meaningful. But the rest of the story? Come on, Sienna. A mystery language that has been seen only in a notebook belonging to your disappearing tenant? And you took one look at the notes and decided that the language could be used to do magic? What have you been smoking lately?”

  I held up my spoon. “Ice cream is my drug of choice. And I didn’t even have that when I was out by the lake today.”

  “Well, then. There’s no such thing as magic, Sienna. You probably turned on your extra-charming mode with Bruce Stevenson when he started to look unhappy –”

  “I don’t do that!”

  “Oh, yes you do. I’ve seen you in action before. And don’t get mad. Where’s the harm in it? You’ll get a nice commission, Angie Stevenson gets the showpiece of a house that’ll turn her into a social leader, and Bruce… can’t buy the chairmanship anyway, so he might as well spend his money on a mansion. What’s the problem?”

  I couldn’t think of one, when she put it like that. I scraped the last bits of toffee chunks and chocolate chips out of my bowl. “I think I need more ice cream.”

  7. Secret energy

  Most of the next day was wasted on a Realtors’ Continuing Education class that Aunt Georgia chased me to. Oh, she was right to do so; Texas expects realtors to waste a certain number of hours every two years on this nonsense if we want to renew our licenses, and Aunt Georgia had been generous enough to pay my fees for the bargain package course she’d signed us up for this year.

  It’s just that there’s “Continuing Education,” and then there’s “Continuous Nonsense,” and by me, this particular section of the package course was definitely in the latter category. It consisted of one very long presentation by a wild-eyed, wild-haired lady who had, in my opinion, been fatally influenced by Prosperity Gospel and other heresies. Normally I can sit through these required classes without too much strain. After all, it’s six to eight hours during which I can’t be expected to do anything else, and a girl can always use some quiet time to rethink her current nail polish and lipstick color scheme. During “Breaking Barriers: Fair Housing,” I had decided to switch from Pink Magnolia to Coral Cay, and that had turned out very well.

  But after the first half hour of “The Gospel of GREAT (Great Real EstATe),” I was in danger of breaking my pretty pink coral fingernails. It was that hard to hold myself back from jumping up and screaming at the speaker. In self-defense, I scribbled twice as hard on the legal pad in my brown leather folder. She glanced at me approvingly; there probably weren’t many people in her captive audience who seemed so dedicated to capturing her pearls of wisdom.

  She wouldn’t have been quite so approving if she’d been able to read what I was writing. It started with, “No! Jesus does NOT want you to be rich! He doesn’t care about that!” and went on through, “Dear God, can you possibly be so clueless that when Jesus said, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions,’ you thought He meant, ‘I have some really great listings?’”

  German script came in handy today, because I didn’t
want anybody reading over my shoulder and getting mad about my reactions. If I’d learned nothing else from Frau Heilemann, I would still have been eternally grateful to her for teaching me that one thing. It made it possible to cover most of a page with my complaints while appearing to be a serious student taking this witch seriously. Even when she strolled down between our desks to sneak a peek at my notes, she had no clue what I’d been writing.

  I was really, really tempted to bail at the lunch break, the more so when my phone (which liked me again, now that it could see my hair) told me there was a message on my voicemail from Dr. Edward Osborne. He remembered me? Amazing. I’d been one of a hundred insignificant freshmen in the survey course on historical linguistics where he only gave one lecture out of five, leaving the heavy lifting to his T.A.

  I decided to put off listening to the message until we got sprung for the day. That way I could while away the second half of this ghastly lecture by speculating on just what bit of linguistic brilliance I’d displayed in that class to make Dr. Osborne remember me from nine years ago.

  When the class was over and I checked my voicemail, my castles in the air melted like ice cream in August. He didn’t remember me as a student of his at all: the message was for Koshan Idrisov’s landlady. My tenant, Dr. Osborne said, had brought up some interesting points about Central Asian languages when they met at the conference. He wished to meet with me and discuss Koshan’s work farther. He suggested we meet at Quack’s that evening; would eight o’clock be too late?

  Clearly my name had meant less than nothing to him. There went my self-image: from brilliantly memorable linguistics student to anonymous landlady in four short hours. Sic transit gloria mundi. Or as we say in the vernacular, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

  I fired off a quick text saying that I’d be there and headed back to enjoy the peace of my own house for a nice break before the meeting. Not that it worked out quite like that.

  This time the intruder in my living room was somebody who had a legitimate key to the house, more’s the pity.

  Michael Ryan.

  He was lounging on the futon couch much as Craig had done yesterday, only he managed somehow to look neat and compact rather than a sprawling mess. He got to his feet when I came in, and I noticed with begrudging approval that he’d placed his loafers by the door before putting his feet up on the furniture. Big deal. Just because he wasn’t as obnoxious as some people didn’t mean I had to like having his company forced on me.

  “Sit, sit,” I said, waving my styrofoam box from Milto’s in his direction. “I’m just passing through.” I could eat in the kitchen.

  “Is that dinner?”

  “Great deduction, Sherlock.” I was feeling virtuous; instead of giving in to the lust for gyros with tzatziki that Milto’s often inspires in me, I’d settled for the large Greek salad.

  He sniffed the air. “Salad for dinner? Do you really find that satisfying?”

  Well, no, but after dining on Belgian Toffee Chocolate Chip ice cream the previous night it had seemed like a sensible course correction.

  “I’ve just ordered a pizza,” he said now. “I’d be willing to share.”

  I paused on my way through the room.

  “Italian sausage, sweet red peppers, and double mushrooms,” he said, sounding like somebody leaning out of a car to offer candy to a kid. “And Gaslight is about to start.”

  Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman and double mushrooms? Worked for me. I set the salad box down on the coffee table. “I have to be somewhere at eight,” I said.

  “It’s the early movie, it’ll be over in time.”

  By the time I’d brought plates and forks from the kitchen, the pizza was here and the credits were rolling and I was all ready to immerse myself in Ingrid Bergman’s tribulations. Cath Palug, demonstrating his poor taste in companions, was rolling around in front of the coffee table and inviting Michael to tickle his tummy.

  “Don’t fall for the cat’s blandishments,” I warned him. “We keep a fully stocked first aid kit for people who think he wants them to pet him.”

  “Do you?” Michael reached down between the couch and the coffee table and ruffled the white fur on Cath Palug’s stomach. With impunity.

  “Quisling,” I told the cat.

  “Is that his name?”

  “No, it’s a description of his morals. Or lack thereof. We’ve been calling him Cath Palug.”

  “CaspalAG? What kind of name is that?” He put the stress on the last syllable.

  “Cath PALug,” I said, moving the stress back where it belonged. “Welsh. He was one of the three great plagues of the island of Ynys Môn. And this guy is the great plague of the house of Sienna Brown.”

  “You speak Welsh?”

  “No, I read about him when I was studying Middle French. There’s one poem in which Cath Palug – or Chapalu in the French version – is said to have drowned King Arthur in a bog and taken his place on the throne. After the third or fourth time this guy almost shoved me out of bed, I decided that he was clearly a reincarnation of the Welsh monster-cat.”

  “Strange tastes,” Michael said softly. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  What, shove me out of bed? “Not going to be an issue.”

  He ignored that.

  “Would your other tenant like to join us?”

  Laura’s side of the house was dark. “I expect she’s out. Singing somewhere,” I expanded.

  “What, this early?”

  “Probably letting somebody buy her dinner before the first show. She’s out most evenings.” I was a little surprised at myself for saying so much; usually I’m a bit cagier when it comes to admitting that I’m often alone in the house at night. But for all he’d inadvertently terrified me on our first meeting, Michael Ryan was coming across now as so completely unthreatening that I couldn’t keep feeling nervous of him. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad having him as a tenant after all.

  The pizza toppings, as well as those he’d listed, also included black olives and pepperoni and caramelized onions. Yep. Potentially an excellent tenant, I thought, digging in.

  For the first hour or so we munched and watched companionably, just enjoying Boyer and Bergman. He commented favorably on the chunks of white feta and the big, salty black olives in the Greek salad; I complimented him on his choice of pizza toppings. He went back to the kitchen and got a couple of cold beers out of the refrigerator; I accepted one.

  “I never can understand,” he commented after a while, “why Bergman doesn’t see how Boyer is manipulating her.”

  “Once people make you doubt your own perceptions, they have incredible power over you.”

  “Yes, but why doesn’t she trust her own perceptions? That’s the bit I don’t get.”

  “You’ve never been in a situation like that.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you have?”

  I shouldn’t have accepted that beer. Yek, do, se. This conversation was reminding me painfully of why I’d studied Farsi. “Some of us don’t need to live through a thing in order to understand it,” I evaded. I wished he would shut up. “Can we just watch the movie already?”

  Not when Michael Ryan had his teeth in an argument, we couldn’t. This was my first experience of one of his major character flaws: he couldn’t just let things go.

  “Sure,” he said, and immediately afterwards: “Suppose I told you that this was a vegetarian pizza. Would that be enough to make you think you’d imagined the Italian sausage topping?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “It seems to in this movie.”

  “No.” I could practically feel my hair writhing against the double scrunchie that was supposed to hold it down. The more annoyed I got, the more it seemed to express its inner frizziness. How could he be so dense? “Boyer doesn’t start with crude, obvious lies that can be easily disproved. He nibbles away at her memories, her feelings… It would be more like gaslighting if you told me… oh… that I came home while you were in the livin
g room because I secretly wanted to spend time with you, even if I hadn’t admitted it to myself.”

  “Do you secretly want to spend time with me?” He looked hopeful.

  “Not if you’re going to continue spoiling a perfectly good movie by arguing.”

  “I can be quiet. With an incentive like that.”

  Incentive? I blinked and mentally replayed the last few things I’d said. “Oh. That was a purely hypothetical argument.”

  He leaned toward me, extending a hand. “Any chance of translating it out of the theoretical realm?”

  How had we ended up sitting side by side on the couch? This man was suddenly way too close. “None!” I set my beer down. I could feel the heat from his body – it was like an assault, having him so near me that I could feel how tense he was – what the hell happened to casually bickering over an old movie? Somehow he was making everything I said mean – far more than I’d intended. And he was looking at me as though he really cared about my response.

  “I have to go.” I couldn’t get up fast enough.

  “Huh? What did I do now?”

  “Nothing,” I said, pushing my feet back into my sandals, “I told you I had to be somewhere later.”

  “You’ve got time to finish the movie.”

  “I’ve lost interest.”

  “Wait! When will you be back?”

  “Later.” I found my keys in the tote bag. “Don’t wait up.”

  I was way early for the meeting with Dr. Osborne. Fortunately, Quack’s wasn’t crowded. I got some hibiscus lemonade and a peach cobbler muffin to make up for the pizza and salad I’d abandoned, and settled down in a back corner. I needed a little calming-down time anyway; I wasn’t quite sure why I’d reacted so strongly to what had to be the mildest hint of a pass I’d ever cut off. Replaying the conversation, I wasn’t even sure Michael Ryan had been making a pass. There was just something irritating about that man, something that made me over-react to every little thing. I really didn’t greet most new acquaintances with a loaded gun, or walk out on them over a disagreement about an old movie. I wasn’t that difficult to deal with… was I?