by Kathe Koja
—like a circus trick like black magic you watched her go fly hurled free by velocity right through the windshield why didn’t the airbag work? yours worked you lived she flew: bright hair black blood there in the street like the worst thing you’d ever seen it was the worst thing and the dog too jesus christ that your dog sir? and you scrabbling through glass for your teeth head spinning mouth a dark wet flap of blood and Oh no you said just like that, the simple round vowels of a clown, a liar, a killer, oh no in simple dismay because time had not stopped when your car had and now she was dead dead forever and you were drunk and alive—
alive, oh
oh no
Where are we going?
Nowhere, baby
—because being alive means you have to live, hospital, police station, lawyer’s office, home—and home become worse than a prison, prison would be a relief, no Elizabeth there with her swollen eyes and ice-cold hands, and Why? she asked you once, just once, everything there in that one word, and of course you had no answer, what answer was there?
Because I was drunk. Because she was whining. Because I didn’t think anything bad would happen.
Because I wanted to.
“You want to be healed, don’t you?” and she’s back in your row now, working her way down, hands on a massive woman in a hideous off-white blouse, she looks like a weather balloon, and she’s mumbling and spitting as the music changes again, going not home but up this time, going up we’re going up, we’re flying, baby, whee! “Sandra, tell me, do you want to be healed?”
“Yes,” like a groaning organ, player piano running down, eyes squeezed shut, and in a few minutes it’ll be over, all over and you can go, go into the light and the heat and the rental car, back home to nothing, nothing—
—and now she’s in front of you, voice and bad glasses and all: and her eyes through those glasses are not what you expected, not professionally kind, not measuring or shrewd but something else, something you don’t like but can’t name, well she can’t name you either can she? but “You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you?” and she not only knows your name but your nickname, the name everyone calls you, she calls you that now as she keeps gazing at you with those eyes, that look you can’t bear, you’re sweating like a pig and all you want to do is run away but—
“You want to be healed, don’t you?”
—in that voice like a lover’s, staring at you in the ozone chill, staring at you like Elizabeth and the cop and the judge . . . and Caitlin, Caitlin Caitlin Caitlin flying through the air, fairy princess, baby gumdrop squashed flat as a bug and—
You want to be healed don’t you?
Don’t you?
—with her hands out and reaching: waiting in the white room of your terror, the palace of your guilt; waiting for you to make a move, to say Yes, I do. I do.
• • •
Don’t you?
• • •
The smell of ozone in your mouth: the flung glass glittering like ice.
OVER THERE
TOUJOURS
Hey, hey, is he in? That’s how they talk to me, these girls, girls with their knee boots and tiny little telephones, leaning against the elevator doors, tugging on their hair, lighting cigarettes—cigarettes! and right on the building wall the sign NO SMOKING. In Italian and English! Hey, is he in?
Foolish, I told my wife, my Lu. These girls—twenty years I am with Señor, and not one of these girls will ever learn my name.
She shrugged; she poured the coffee. Her hair, in the sun through the windows—gold and silver, like a painting, a Titian. Ah, she said, they are infants. Can you be angry with an infant? Besides, Carlos knows your name . . . Maritsa called again this morning. The christening dinner—
Señor may need me. Today the journalists come, and the man from the art school—I will try.
To give the toast, at least? He is your grandson. And Maritsa says—
I took her hand, her left hand with that tiny seed-drop of a diamond; she deserves something grander, I have said this before. I will try.
And then I was on my way, from the table, the apartment with the sunny windows, the terrace where she grows her flowers, pots of white daisies, I used to call her “Daisy,” as if she were an American girl. The smell of French coffee in the hallways, the stone faces at each landing like the saints and gargoyles one sees at cemeteries: weighing, approving, denying— That journalist, that English fellow from Le Pop! said the same last month of me: An aging but formidable factotum, forever looming like a gargoyle over the Ezterhas brand: that is how this business is, if there is nothing to say, still they must say something. This business, where the money flies and they take so many drugs, and the girls—“infants,” yes, and younger all the time, but none too young to spread themselves for anyone, anywhere, at the shows, in the atelier, the things I have seen—!
See them now, this very morning in Gold Street: one busy with her little phone, the other scowling behind round black sunglasses, the Desmundo glasses they all wear this season, leaping up like greyhounds when I approach: “Listen, hey listen, Carlos wants me, he called—” while the other one shoves forward, “Me too—he wants me too!” Breathless and rude all the way up in the elevator, but I make them wait outside, Señor inside with a pair of gloves, blue leather, very nice goods. He pulls on the left, smiles at me, holds out his hand; I adjust the right.
“They sent two pair,” he says, “one red and one blue. Which do you prefer?”
“Red-handed,” I say, “that’s guilty, non?” and he smiles, white as the petals of a daisy. When I first met him, he never smiled at all. “You think of everything, Gianfranco. All right, blue it is.”
“Did you call for models, Señor? From Vita?” and when he nods I let them in: greedy they clamber up beside him, grab his blue hands, no thought between them to thank me who opened the door. But Señor nods as I take the empty glove case from the table, he nods and he smiles as I leave.
Later, I fish the Desmundo glasses from the pissoir. Crying, monotonous crying, from outside in the hall. The man from the art school is early, he brings another girl, another bony creature with pale hair and bright eyes, they stay for drinks, they stay for dinner. Señor has far too much wine. Maritsa sends me several angry messages. Lu is asleep when I come home.
• • •
He was half an infant himself when I met him, peasant boy with the loden jacket and the little colored pencils: serving me café noisette, swabbing the table, one shoulder tucked down as if something pained him: Did you eat today? I asked, and he shrugged, he was ashamed. Those crooked, pointed, wolfish teeth; he was ashamed of that, too, and ashamed to have been fired: Three times in one month, from three different cafés. Because I was drawing.
I looked at his pictures, his “girls.” You are not from the city, I said, because already I knew him, I had been waiting for him, I knew exactly what I must do: speak to the café manager, speak to his uncle, some turd from the boroughs blustering, He should be in school, Carlos, not making silly pictures, “fashion,” what do you want with my Carlos?
I want to feed him dinner, I said. To him I said, Go get your things.
For six months he slept in the room off the terrace; he helped Lu water the flowers, he went to the shops and the galleries, he drew many more “girls.” When I bought the apartment on Gold Street, he worried that it was too big, too much: All these rooms? But An atelier, I said, needs space. The clothes followed the drawings, the first show sold all the clothes—and he came to me then, very early, still awake from the night before, and Willys, he said, wants the whole line. And Vogue wants to interview me—she called me a wizard. He looked around the terrace, the pots of daisies, the sun just rising. Jesus! You’re the wizard, you gave me everything, I’d still be in that fucking café if—
Don’t curse, I told him. This was all meant to be. Consider the lilies.
; What?
Señor, I said; he almost flinched, to hear me say it. Señor, it is my will to serve you. Always.
• • •
Since then I have served Señor in many ways: with the journalists and their editors; with the buyers, those sharks, and the stores, the licensing—now they want to put his name on condoms, Ezterhas Golden Fleece, how stupid and vulgar . . . I have served Señor as well with the girls, the models, Señor has a sometimes regrettable taste in models but he is always very sorry afterward, and there is always a new girl, many new girls to choose from for a season or a night. At times he has seemed to prefer one over another, like last winter, that dark one from Vienna with the nervous laugh, when she went back to Vienna Lu sighed: Ah, Carlos, is he missing that little one? Why did she go, do you think?
She went because I bought the ticket, because I called her booker, because I made it plain to her that He deserves better; I am wiser than his own heart in such matters, I do not bend to heat or caprice . . . When it is time for Señor to settle down, I will make certain that his choice is the best one, not like the Viennese girl, or the pale thing last night—
—who is here again, blue slacks, blue blouse, almost demure though none of these girls ever bother with brassieres; in the sunlight her hair is white as bone. No Desmundos for her, her gaze comes squarely to mine as “Good morning, Gianfranco,” and she hands me a little pink bag: amaretti from Sofia’s, the ones I most prefer, a perfect blend of bitter and sweet. Behind me I hear Señor’s approach, rapid, the Hermès loafers he wears slapping against the marble floor.
“Gitte,” he says, with far too much pleasure. “You’re just in time for breakfast.”
She smiles, not at him, but to me. Her smile is very white.
“Please join us,” she says.
• • •
From then on she is here every day, Gitte who smiles, who does not smoke, who speaks very little and never says where she is from, Gitte who brings amaretti for me until I tell her to stop, and yogurt and vitamins and machinery for Señor, today it is an ugly little steel contraption shaped like a pregnant tube: “Look,” says Gitte, manipulating traps and levers until a stream of cloudy green bursts forth, sickening, a color like bile.“It’s a juicer,” she says to my stare. “Avocado juice.”
“Ah. You are a waitress, then?”
She smiles, unperturbed. Señor drinks the bile: “Oh, delicious. You cured my hangover.” As he kisses her, she looks at me.
She is not a waitress, not a model, not a journalist. She came with the man from the art school, but she is not an artist, or a student: Gitte? No, he says when I call, she was in the photography program but that was a while ago. I guess you could call her my assistant, kind of, she did a little bit of everything—
A factotum.
Sure, right . . . She’s amazing, isn’t she? And a monster fan of Carlos, you two have a lot in common, which is true, terribly so, she knew it first but I know it now as well. The juicer, then the bracelet to count his heartbeats, then the walking trip. “Just for the weekend,” Señor says to me, as if the collection is already finished, as if there is not so much work left to do, a tremendous amount of work. “Gitte says we need some fresh air.” I wave one hand at the windows. “I mean—like a getaway.”
“Get away from what?”
Señor does not answer. His face looks leaner, its planes more pronounced, like hers; he wears blue now as she does, his hair has been cut very short. Such great changes in such a little time, the girl has been here barely three months; it is monstrous. He fiddles with the heartbeat bracelet, he shrugs, maddening, placating: “I’ll work so much better if I have a chance to relax first, Gitte knows this fantastic walking trail around Soller—”
“Spain! You don’t like the sun, Señor, you have never liked—”
“—and I know—I mean, there’s a little bit of friction between Gitte and you”—he says it that way, her name first—“but if you’d only spend some time with her—You’ve been after me for years to slow down on my drinking, right? Now I have. She’s a good influence on me, you can see that, can’t you?” His voice is a plea, almost a whine. “And she respects you so much, she talks about you all the time, always asking questions—”
What sort of questions? but I do not ask because I know, the same way I know she will come to me next, and she does: dressed in blue so dark it is almost black, like the sea at night, her eyes are black as a barracuda’s and “He’ll work better,” she says, “if he feels better. I can make him feel good . . . Why would you want to ruin that?” I do not trouble to answer. “You ought to come with us.”
“To Spain?”
“To wherever we go.”
I lean very close to her, so close I can smell her scent, bitter and sweet, yes: like amaretti, like almonds, like poison. “I have been with Señor since before you were born,” I say into her ear. “I have seen girls like you come and go, many girls who—”
“There are no girls like me,” she says.
We gaze at one another, there in the hallway, a phone trilling from the office, Señor whistling in the pissoir. Gitte shrugs. “If you don’t come with us,” she says, “you’ll be left behind.” And she walks away, her loafers, Hermès loafers, slapping the floor as she goes: down the hall, off to Spain, deeper and deeper into his heart.
• • •
Does one believe in lamia, in succubae? Did Medusa ever smile? What sort of perfume, one wonders, did Messalina prefer?
• • •
I sit alone on the terrace, still in my dinner jacket; Señor did not attend the Fashion Association’s formal dinner, the annual dinner, everyone was there. In his stead I accepted the award, the “True Visionary” award—visionary, and he now so blind! Lu steps past the doors, calling for me, but the moon is concealed in clouds, her pots of flowers—verbena, lady’s slipper—become obstacles in the darkness. She stumbles, until my hand guides her, draws her to the bench, to my side, and “Here,” I say. “Sit down, I have something for you.”
With my other hand I reach into my pocket for the jeweler’s box, the bright canary diamond to replace the battered solitaire: I tug on her ring finger, tug until she gives a little wail, until the old ring pulls free at last. “For you, my Lu, my daisy. Take it into the light, see what I give you . . . You’re not crying?”
She is crying. “Beautiful,” she says. “Only—my little ring.”
“You deserve better.”
We sit so, I clasping her hand, she wiping at her eyes. Finally “I forgot,” she says, half-rising. “You have a visitor—that nice girl, Carlos’s girl,” who waits for me on the landing, looking up at the gargoyles and the saints as “You come here,” I say; my voice is too loud. “How dare you come here, to my home, after you kept him from the dinner, from the people who meant to honor him.”
“He sent me,” she says, “to tell you.”
I take a step down, two steps. “Tell me what.” Four steps, six. Now I am beside her, looking down at the upturned face, forever looming like a gargoyle and she is really very small, this Gitte, in a new blue dress—one of his dresses, already he has said he will name this collection for her, Toujours Gitte—small as a child, her child’s hand rising, narrow fingers like twigs, if one squeezed them just a bit too hard the bones would snap in two—
“Look,” she says: she wiggles her twig finger: a ring. A diamond ring. “That’s where he was tonight, asking me to marry him.” She smiles; she cannot help herself, foxy, satisfied, those little white teeth. “Don’t you like it? I picked it out myself.”
I do not answer, I cannot, my tongue feels thick and hot; the gargoyles seem to ring her, like Lilith and bad angels, her smile changes, and “Why do you hate me so much?” she murmurs. “I’m a lot like you.”
“You— Where do you come from? No one knows you, no one—”
“With him I can be a q
ueen. Like you were the king for so long. Don’t worry,” softly, cruelly, “there’ll always be a place for you in our lives. Unless you insist on being a prick.”
Now Lu is here, how did Lu come to be here? exclaiming, embracing, admiring the ring, “Why, that is wonderful, Gitte, too wonderful! Gianfranco, you knew? Of course you knew, Carlos tells you everything . . . Oh, we must have a celebration!”
“Carlos will love that,” says Gitte. Her smile is fearless.
• • •
There is a celebration, a large one, everyone wants to attend, from Milan and Paris and New York; there is a wedding, even larger, even the long-ago uncle is invited. I host them both, I pay for everything, I give the toasts, I dance with the bride who wears a dress specially created by her new husband; he may design a whole new line, she says, a special collection for the modern bride. She might be a medieval queen, a Medici, in her headdress and sapphires, ice blue sapphires against her white curls; all the guests say that she looks radiant.
“You look radiant,” I tell her. “You make him very happy, Señora.”
“I’m glad you see that now,” she says.
I give the dinner toast—“May your lives together be the stuff of dreams”—and all the tables applaud. Lu’s eyes shine with tears, she kisses my cheek: “It’s like being the papa, no? Though it tugs at your heart, I know it does, to have to let him go.”