As you can tell from her bio, Tambour has eclectic interests. As does her narrator in this tale of obsession and discontent.
The weekend at Thoreau’s Retreat was Katie’s idea. Wilder Benn & Ho had just picked up the account. She was elaborately casual when she pitched this togetherness jaunt to me. It’s free, she said, and it might be “sorta fun in a perverted way.” “I’m perverted,” I laughed.
The ads for Thoreau’s Retreat offer a Revive the Mood “Two nights’ accommodation for two. Complimentary nonalcoholic Vermont-grown champagne, resident sensei on call 24/7. Complimentary pocket guides to Vermont wildlife, use of Zeiss Conquest binoculars so you can spot, without disturbing, our natural wonders such as the Great Spangled Fritillary Butterfly and the rare Stinkpot Turtle; and a host of surprises.”
Thoreau’s Retreat is conveniently close to Killington, a fact left out of the literature. After Killington, Katie talked a bit as I drove. What stinks? the promotionals? ads? Thoreau’s Retreat? I didn’t answer, as that would have been interrupting.
I had my own theory about that come-on Thoreau quote next to the rates in the brochure—“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed?”—but I kept my thoughts to myself. Katie does not appreciate comments from people who don’t know anything, unless they are in a focus group.
As soon as we arrived, there was a clash of shoe wear. Katie’s calves won’t tolerate flats, and her feet are naturally pointed. The looks I got were worse than those directed at her, as if I’d bound her into those high heels. I like them, but my taste is only a coincidence. She ignored the scorn but lost her above-all-this composure when the unpaved grounds sucked down her stilettos. The Revive the Mood Special didn’t come with complimentary Dr. Zen shoes.
As to the romantic atmosphere supplied by the sight of other guests, I had forgotten how much even people of wealth can, left au naturel, age to resemble black-and-white films. The gray-and-white, ultra-wrinkled couple checking in before us offended me. “What’s your excuse?” I wanted to yell, but because of Katie, I behaved myself.
We had to walk from the carpark through the commons to our cabin, which welcomed us with a rag rug, two rocking chairs, art over the bed in the shape of the largest picture I’ve ever seen of an asparagus spear, tastefully shot, captioned in faux nineteenth-century handwriting, “THINGS DO NOT CHANGE. WE CHANGE.”—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, and the pièce de résistance of surprises: a jar of Metamucil cookies. The bathroom romanced us with a toilet, douche, stand-up shower, Japanese-style straight-sided cube of a tub, and a notice about the evils of laundering. The toilet had no paper seal to break. I dreaded the bed, but it was the saving grace of the place. Katie flopped on it with a historical romance, grimly determined to last out the weekend, but in no way wanting to compromise herself by experiencing more than she had to. Lucky for her, she didn’t have to dread the resort’s idea of food. It was no worse than her usual. I drove to Killington, where I got a pizza made by someone who thinks that ketchup is Italian. By the time I got back, Katie had found out that Thoreau’s Retreat offers no decadent room service, so she was waiting for me to lead her on another expedition over the grass to the “Commons Lodge,” her heels aerating the soil, me helping to pull her free at each step. I sat with her in the restaurant while she ate. Despite and because of her condition, she stuffed herself full of celery root au jus.
I won’t tell you what Thoreau’s Retreat offers in the way of small-screen adult entertainment. For once, I went to bed before ten o’clock. Katie was asleep before eight. Horrorville it was, but two days without decent food wouldn’t kill me, and the weekend was a good idea. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for a time when I considered walking in the mountains to be exercise. Now a break for forty-eight hours was good for me, as it was so rare; and we needed to have time together enforced upon us, otherwise it never seemed to happen.
The next morning at dawn (the quiet woke me) I was taking the mountain air, perfuming it with a contraband Cohiba while I picked wildflowers for my pregnant wife, when a sparkle of dew caught my eye, and I noticed the gladiolus—not some flopsy yellow common garden flower, but a gladiolus, commonly called the “body” of the three-part bone. The sternum or “breastbone” as it is commonly known. I laid it on my hand and it looked as if the bone were formed for me: exactly the length of my wrist crease to the tip of my middle finger.
Bones, like the salt-and-pepper granite stones in Vermont, rise to the surface of fields each spring when the ground thaws. Sunlight glinted in the sharply defined facet for the third costal cartilage. The convex curve of the lateral border of the gladiolus faced the sky, two facets rising free of the earth.
My mouth flooded with cigar juice as my fingers nosed the ground all around what I estimated to be the dimensions of the whole sternum. Then as delicately as I could, I dug with the tips of my fingers in the sodden but surprisingly hard ground—under the gladiolus, that broad blade of middle section, till it looked like a bridge over a valley. A fist-size rock had to be pried from the sticky soil before I could get to the manubrium. (The articular surface for the clavicle emerged, surprisingly for such dense bone, as a complex splinter surrounded by dark clumps of soil salted with frustratingly bonelike pieces of quartz.) The knees of my weekend chinos were so stained by this time that they would have made a homeless person blush. My fingertips felt abused, my nails looked disgraceful, and my back was sending urgent messages to my brain. Time was passing, though, so in a spirit of no rest for the wicked, I tackled the other end of the bone, the delicate xiphoid process…and spat a cigar stub that looked like a wad of cud when I pulled just wrong and snapped the delicate filliped point.
From my first sight of that tiny pool of dew in the bone facet, I knew this to be not the normal bones that pop out in thaws: cattle, sheep, and deer. That glimmering facet made my heart race. A human breastbone is unmistakable, and anatomy was my favorite subject in med school, however much I love urology. I knew as soon as the gladiolus was exposed in all its length that it had belonged to either a small adult male or a female about the size of Katie.
What finally lay on the palm of my hand—stretching from my wrist crease to the top of my middle finger—was the breastbone itself, the sternum. The body of it was a perfect gladiolus, but both ends of the sternum were damaged—the superior end intriguing as hell; the inferior, a blunt accusation.
Ever since scaring myself as a kid with stories I read by flashlight, I’ve fantasized about finding someone, and here a someone was. Odd to find this, but then I suppose in real life it isn’t skulls that people “find,” but bones that the average person would never know were human. How many people in, say, Brattleboro, let alone Killington or Thoreau’s Retreat, would know a human bone from wildlife? I felt a frisson at the thought of finding this before it was stepped on by an ignorant hiker. Chakra charts don’t teach diddly about bones.
I dug till my fingers said they’d sue me, and then I had to leave. With no tools, I couldn’t dig deep, nor far. I found no other bones, though I expected to find at least the tip of a rib. And I had hoped to find an answer to the mystery of the shattered manubrium, one of the toughest bones to fracture in the human body. I held my breath when I found a bit of metal. A bullet…But once I cleaned it with spit, the bit was only a pebble that I had mistaken for something important because it was time to go. Although I was in sight of the resort, the actual site was featureless, so I pushed the dirt back into the hole I’d made so it would all look like a marmot or some such’s rooting around for food, and I hid my Piaget under the fist-size stone that I planted in the middle of the site.
In the five-minute walk down to our cabin, I remembered the flowers, but it was too late to pick new ones. Instead I swept into the Commons Room and spotted a crystal bowl of crocuses. Perfect, so I took it. If you know what you’re doing and don’t explain, you can do anything.
Katie was conveniently asleep when I got back. I placed the bowl by the bed and went to our bathroom where I wish my
dentist could have seen how gentle and effective a cleaning can be. I used my toothbrush and Katie’s whitening toothpaste.
Job completed, the manubrium was intellectually appealing, although aesthetically flawed. I couldn’t look at the xiphoid process because it annoyed me. But the gladiolus was simply beautiful. I dried the sternum on my towel, rolled it in my clean shirt, and packed it in my suitcase while Katie snored—and I remembered to change my slacks just before she woke, just in time for brunch.
She didn’t object when I said that we needed to leave by two o’clock. I said that I had forgotten about a case I had to check on at Mount Sinai, but I really wanted to get home because being so close to the bone site frustrated me. I needed equipment better than my fingers and some Thoreau’s Retreat Commons Room spoon. And I didn’t want to have to think, on my next dig, whether Katie would be awake.
Monday morning I was back at the clinic, and she was back at the agency. She rang me at eleven o’clock.
“Tell me all you know about incontinence pads.” The first time she’d ever shown an interest.
A typical month—we didn’t see much of each other, and there was no way I could get right back to the site. First, I had a rushed week, then it was off to England, to Freeman Hospital Newcastle Upon Tyne, where Haslam’s “Imaging in Loin Pain Best Practice” would have had me seeking him out during coffee at another time, and David Tolley’s Stuart Lecture, “The Changing Face of Urology—Are We Prepared?” was not obvious. As to my own paper, the topic of urological forensics is a well without end of fascination; but I wished yet again, as I presented my findings, that Katie’s verve were mine when it comes to communication.
But I had to get back to Vermont. Katie was by this time obsessed by Etheria (latest focus-group fave name, Katie said). She wanted me on tap, but not at hand.
Finally, I left work at seven PM one Friday, in a rented Land Rover. I slept somewhere as downmarket as Vermont goes, where I was unlikely to meet a bottle of anything de-alcoholed. Before dawn, I set out with the gear that I bought along the way: a collapsible shovel and a metal detector.
Not being a Daniel Boone sort, I had thought I would never find the place again without the metal detector, but I knew it even in the moon-distorted light, and through the haze of pain I felt when I twisted my ankle between two rocks while I focused not down, but ahead. Approaching…almost…there. Logically, I should have known that I would recognize the spot, considering the number of times I had dreamed the find over the past weeks.
I didn’t expect my watch to be as ruined as it looked, but I’d already claimed it on insurance.
When I began to dig, the only sounds I heard were owl calls.
By the time I had dug a hole big enough to bury a Yeti, the garbage truck was hoeing down its breakfast in Thoreauland.
I found nothing but bittersweet-chocolate-colored dirt and enough quartz pebbles to light Hansel and Gretel’s walk to the wicked witch of Mars. I unearthed nothing else. No ribs, vertebrae, skull, no bullet, bit of iron, wooden cosh—no implement or agent of death; and not even a sliver of shattered bone.
Yet even the telltale heart had an explanation.
I hadn’t told Katie about the bone before, and didn’t plan to tell her. She is conventional about things like insurance and laws, and she would have expected me to alert someone. I don’t know. The authorities, she would have said.
And then I would have given up the precious thing for no reason, and it would be officiously boxed and lost, buried where no thaw would ever expose it.
A couple of weeks passed, busy as ever for both of us, but one Friday we were both able to knock off work by six for a little romantic dinner at a place I thought she’d like.
“Feel like going back to Thoreau’s Retreat?” I asked.
“As paying guests?”
“I guess so,” I said. I abhor wasting money. “What’s wrong? They too cheap to give you another weekend for research?”
“We lost the account.”
“Oh,” I said. I knew she’d feel bad about it, so I changed the subject. “What happened to Etheria?”
“Etheria?” Her fork split an asparagus spear down the middle. Her brow would have creased, if it could have, as she separated a sliver of cheese from the vegetable as carefully as if she were boning a fish.
I couldn’t watch her eat. I hoped the baby wouldn’t come out looking like it had spent its time in her dieting for life.
“The incontinence pads,” I said.
She dropped her fork and knife on the white expanse of plate. “Do you have to do that?”
At that point in our relationship, our chemical attraction was something we could remember, but she didn’t choose to and she made it hard for me to put that attraction above the way she feels about my work, conveniently forgetting how we met. Why is what I do, of the two of us, the unmentionable?
She was at five months then, and a couple of weeks later suffered a miscarriage. I wasn’t surprised, but she was. It was incredibly tough. She’d planned for that baby. We both had. All the emotional capital she’d sunk into it. We almost split up after that but were so busy, it was easier not to.
In that post-expecting period of adjustment we made time to make some resolutions together.
1. We would try to rediscover each other again;
2. She would try not to be patronizing about my work; and
2a. I would quit smoking the cigars that she said she smelled on my breath.
During the next stage in our relationship, Katie and I stayed home in the evenings and watched movies together. I found the gladiolus invaluable as an aid. I used to sit with it. The facets for the third, fourth, and fifth costal cartilages fit my fingers so perfectly, the gladiolus felt like part of an intimate garment. As I touched the hand-warmed bone, I imagined what had happened. All sorts of lives and deaths danced as the movies played. Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor Camilled in black and white, to the happy tears of Katie while I fondled the bone. The English Patient, something that would previously have had me crawling the walls or snoring in relief, played all the way through while I dreamed with my eyes open, sternum in hand. Thelma & Louise drove cross-country while the bone submerged itself in flesh, grew attachments, developed a life and personality, found an accident waiting to happen, or a murderer. Katie could put anything on, even Fried Green Tomatoes, and I sat through it, rapt.
But she found a new annoyance to complain about.
“Where’d you get that hideous bone?”
I’d already planned what I would say if she asked. “An anatomy kit.”
“Can’t you use a rubber ball?”
I said I liked the bone. It reminded me of med school.
She came home one day with a squeezy in the supposed shape of a brain, a stupid promotional that I can’t imagine why she thought I hadn’t seen. It insulted me as much as if I had proposed a name for that disposable urinary collection device that she of all people had as an account.
She began to work late again and through the weekend, and so did I.
We rarely met, but when I was in her presence, I found that touching the bone soothed me. I could tolerate her presence.
One evening while she was watching, a few drops from my glass of water fell on the bone, magnifying a section. When I wiped it dry, light fell upon it in just such a way that I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, but I wasn’t sure of what I saw. The next day I was able to confirm. The anterior surface of the gladiolus was shallowly adorned with the faintest and finest of carvings—a Victorian monogram, scrolling frills, the finest of lines. Only five millimeters in diameter, I couldn’t make out the letters under any power of magnification because they were both too fanciful and too patchy; but I think there were three (and one of them was an L or a J) surrounded by a garland of flowers (forget-menots?). I cursed the cleaning I had done, so harsh I almost missed this.
The mystery of no other bones was now partly solved, though new mysteries leapt into my mind with the
swiftness of bandits leaping upon a lonely Victorian coach.
The monogram could only have been carved by an expert, I am sure. A skilled engraver. This confirmed some theories I had wanted to firm up.
The more I felt along the gladiolus, the more I knew that its size was exactly Katie’s. I hadn’t thought of her sexually for some time, but now I was drawn to the wide space between her breasts. Her aversion to fat revealed far more of her now than when we met. The attachments of the muscles of her third costal cartilage were so visible that in some lights, they were shadowed as if they had no epidermal cover. She loved her muscles showing, so I could gaze there (when we were together) to my heart’s content (and imagine it at other times). When she was in the mood, as she sometimes still was, I could run my fingertips along her flesh. At those times, we were more powerfully aligned than ever before. I imagined her gladiolus, undressed and gleaming, curving seductively from damp earth…
I wasn’t obsessed or anything. The bone stayed home. Too risky to carry with me—nosy security, luggage loss, the off chance that I’d leave it in my hotel bed during some red-eye packing rush. Anyway, during a conference, I thought about the paper I’d deliver, and then about how I was. When I got home, sometimes Katie was home, too. But always, the bone was there to greet me.
One night I came home about five AM from a conference in Vienna. Katie was in bed. Vienna had been bad. I’d had twenty-two hours to think about how boring I was, how I wished that Katie could sell my ideas. I undressed and got into my side, reaching for the bone on my night table, but my table was bare. It took me shining her light in her face to wake her up.
I had to ask three times before she woke sufficiently to understand. “Sorry, the cleaner threw it out,” she said. She flicked off her light and pulled the sheet over her head.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 29