FSF, October 2007 Page 20

  Jack drew the Dale Earnhardt notepad out of his jacket pocket.

  "Here,” he said, handing it to her. “I wrote it all down. This is my way of taking care of you. I paid a lot for this tip, so Barton should make a killing in the next five years. If you put all the money you can get into it, you'll make enough to ... well, at least be comfortable, I hope. Maybe better'n comfortable. If you can raise more money later, put that in, too. Anything you can spare, put it into Barton and then pull it all out five years from today."

  "How do you know all this?"

  He grinned and winked.

  "Some things ain't for mortals t'know."

  * * * *

  After April called his bluff, Kyle had lapsed back into silence. He was almost catatonic now. She'd tried to start a conversation, but he just sputtered and shook his head and clamped his hands over his ears.

  He always did have a way of avoiding things he didn't want to hear, she thought. Just not this physically.

  April felt a wave of relief when she finally heard Jack blow the taxi's horn out in the driveway.

  She stepped toward Kyle, his eyes wide with alarm, and gently took his hands away from his ears.

  "Honey, I gotta go now, but there's something you need to know. If you don't believe anything else I've said, believe this: Your wife made it to heaven."

  Kyle blinked.

  "I ... don't understand."

  "It's true. That's what I came here to tell you. The rest has just been me getting in the way. I'm sorry I couldn't put it to you the way April would, but I'm not her."

  "You said—"

  "No, I'm not April. I'm April's ghost. That's not the same thing. April's soul went off to heaven to be with God, and I'm—I'm what's left behind. April was a good woman, but she had flaws like everybody else. She couldn't be flawed in God's presence, so when her soul went to be with Him she had to leave her selfishness and impatience and jealousy—anything bad or even mediocre. She crawled out of them like a butterfly crawls out of its chrysalis. That's what I am: her chrysalis."

  Her face brightened, and a new light came into her eyes.

  "You should see April now! I got a glimpse of her just as she was leaving, and she was the most beautiful thing you can imagine. She flapped her wings, and it was like seeing every butterfly, everywhere under the sun. It was like they all flapped their wings—all that color and grace and beauty—all at the same time.

  "She asked me to tell you she made it, that she's okay. I almost didn't, ‘cause I knew I'd just mess it up ... which is why I have to leave, too.” She lowered her gaze and looked ashamed. “I'd only spoil your memory of her."

  The taxi's horn blew again.

  * * * *

  Jack was about to sound the horn a third time when the door of the blue and white bungalow opened and April stepped out onto the porch.

  She closed the door and walked down the steps and straight away from the house, not looking back.

  Jack could see her bathrobed hubby watching from the window, looking like his world had just been turned inside out.

  I can't blame him, Jack thought. I hope Patty's doing as well.

  Behind him there was a klatch and a squeak and a bounce and a slam.

  He backed out of the driveway and drove noiselessly up the street. When he turned onto Alvarado, he said, “So how did it go?"

  "Not as good as it could have."

  "Well, you expected that. Did you tell him that he doesn't have to worry—that your soul made it to God and you're just what's left behind?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did he believe you?"

  "I hope so."

  After a few moments of silence April squirmed forward and folded her arms on the back of the front seat. “How ‘bout you? I assume you didn't tell your wife why you're Mr. Wonderful all of a sudden—why you're all her husband's good points with none of the bad."

  Jack kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Not on your life."

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fragrant Goddess by Paul Park

  Paul Park lives in Massachussetts with his family. His recent work has been focused on a quartet of fantasy novels: A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, and The Hidden World. His new story for us makes an interesting counterpoint to Albert Cowdrey's tale in this same issue.

  He was familiar with the house, of course, having seen it in photographs and once in person a dozen years before. He didn't remember it being so huge. He and Sabine had come up the walkway between these same bronze foo dogs, the male with its paw on a bronze ball. Then—still—the windows had been brown with sticky paper, opaque, as Jeremy had pointed out. No one had lived there for many years. The house had been abandoned after Arkady Ferson's death in the early 1970s. There was a suggestion he'd been murdered, a possibility that intrigued Sabine far more than Ferson's small connection with the subject of Jeremy's dissertation. Now the front door stood open and Sabine, he imagined, waited for him inside.

  Or else she was watching him from the front windows or the shelter of the porch—he didn't like that idea. The stone walk was a long one. His leg hurt. As he approached, he thought she might be calculating all the ways he'd changed. He saw himself diminishing as he got bigger. He was kind of bald. He wasn't in great shape. And of course he limped. Which would she notice first?

  "Boo!"

  She was perched along the back of the female dog, motionless, invisible, in clear sight. Now she scrambled down, and any consolation that the years might also have treated her unkindly was already gone. In the bright sunlight she seemed radiant to him, dressed in an Indian printed smock above her knees. It fastened with a string around her neck. She hugged him, and he was aware of her smell, which came back suddenly—the same lavender perfume mixed with the same sweat. He felt her naked arms around his neck, aware also of his damp, uncomfortable suit. This was the third time he was in Seattle and he'd never seen a drop of rain—how small she was! He had forgotten.

  Her face was close by his. She'd never been a beautiful woman, he remembered with surprise. Her features had always been too big for her small face. But she had always seemed beautiful—a European trick perhaps—and younger than she was. At twenty-six she'd looked like a teenager, especially at a distance. It was the language of her body—"gamine,” he supposed. Now, as she separated from him and scampered barefoot up the stairs, she looked twenty-six or so.

  He followed her through the line of fat white Ionic columns to the front door. He'd read a little bit about the house, knew, for example, there was a fine Tiffany window over the staircase, and the walls had been hand-painted by ... someone, some marginally famous turn-of-the-century decorative artist—he'd not been interested in any of those things until he'd had to imagine Sabine living here.

  She made a little pirouette in the cavernous, dark entranceway. “I'm so excited to see you,” she said, her accent still thick. When he'd first met her, she'd scarcely spoken any English. Now she was fluent, obviously, and his French was rusty. So they turned naturally to a language they'd never spoken with each other. “I can't wait to show you,” she said. She ran up the double stairway to the landing and stood below the window, a floral pattern of green and crimson glass. She wore an ankle bracelet, he noticed, and the bottoms of her feet were dark.

  "Tell me again how this happened,” he said.

  "I told you on the phone! When Scott and I first moved out here, we bought a house in Fremont—you know? But his parents were living too close by. Once we came by here and there was a real estate sign—I'd told him how I'd knocked on the door with you—do you remember? I had always remembered this place. Always I used to drive past when I had the chance, and when the sign came, Scott said it was an opportunity. But I suppose it was a gift for me—do you know Arkady Ferson also lived in Belgium? We bought it from the Lightbearers Foundation—do you like it?” she asked, as if she were talking about the dress she wore, and which she was modeling for him under the dappled light, and which he di
d like very much. It was blue and red and left her arms exposed. He could see the soft hair in her armpits. And she didn't have to bother with a bra or anything like that.

  Once he had shared a cab with her down Fifth Avenue, thirty blocks in rush hour from the University Club to her apartment—a cold, rainy night, and they had kissed and groped each other the entire way. Her wet shirt had been unbuttoned to her waist. Why hadn't she asked him to come up? No, it was because he had to continue on cross-town. He was meeting Joanna and her parents at some Chinese restaurant on Ninth. All the way there he'd been sniffing himself guiltily, and he was already late, and Joanna was already pissed off. “She has no idea how virtuous I am,” he'd thought as he'd washed his face and hands in the cramped restaurant bathroom. The lavender smell had already dissipated, to be replaced, with any luck, by the scent of Joanna's perfume, the musk oil she used to wear in those days. Sabine had met Scott right after that.

  He stood below her on the stair. She was smiling, and she raised her left hand to her mouth to hide her big teeth—an endearing gesture that he remembered now. Did she ever think about that taxi ride? Was she thinking about it now? He couldn't help himself: “You must be awfully rich!"

  "Well, no—I don't think so. I mean yes and no—I suppose we are. We have to work, of course."

  Just out of law school when she'd married him, Scott was now the head litigator for a timber company. A novice when Jeremy had known him, now he was some kind of A player, which even on the West Coast stood for something. Since the accident, of course, Jeremy no longer played.

  Had he told her about the accident? He'd mentioned the divorce, he knew. And the tenure decision. When she'd met him he had already been working on his dissertation, his book on Leonardo Fioravanti. Some things hadn't changed, at least.

  But it was squash that had brought them together, at the club where he'd given lessons all through graduate school. The North American Open had been in Seattle that year. During the break after the Women's C quarter-final, he and Sabine had climbed the hill to Arkady Ferson's old house. Jeremy had wondered if any of the Lightbearers still lived there. He was already out of the A draw.

  Now Sabine was talking to him and he realized he wasn't listening. But he followed her from room to room. “...I leave the door unlocked and it is best I do. You know it is the Asian art museum inside the park, and many times people think this house is part of the museum. So they come right into the front hall. I don't like them to call me or ring the bell. But I keep a feather duster beside the door, and if I am downstairs I pick it up. That way they can think I am the maid, something like that. S'il vous plaît,” she said, turning, hands on hips, knees together. “La patronne n'est pas à la maison. It is mostly Chinese people who come in."

  He laughed and she laughed too, hiding her teeth. There was a skylight above the staircase. It filled the upper floor with brightness and shining dust motes. Jeremy wondered if the Lightbearers had ever sealed it up. Or was it only sections of the house that they'd kept dark?

  "You said you had something for me."

  "La, la, la. It is a surprise."

  She showed him her office and her exercise room. It was lined with mirrors and filled with low-tech wooden equipment. Nothing like the machines at the racquet club, they looked like Scandinavian toys for gifted children. When he asked about them, she lay down on one to demonstrate. But then she sat up suddenly, blushing, radiant. “I should wear a different dress,” she said.

  Because of the mirrors. “It's beautiful,” he said.

  Embarrassed, she pointed toward the open window. “I like the roofs best of all. Come with me. Can you, with your leg?"

  "It doesn't hurt."

  "You will have to take your shoes off."

  And so they climbed onto the asphalt and tar. It was like an entire country up there, with mountains and flat places, and the skylight a reflecting pool. “I spend more time here than in the house,” she said—hard to believe. But on the steepest shingles there were marks of little trails, like goat paths in the Alps.

  Following her, he passed a cereal bowl and an empty juice glass balanced on a ledge. He found her squatting on the ridgepole, three stories above the street. He climbed atop a dormer and stood up. He could see the whole neighborhood of mansions, gardens, and big trees. There was a tower in the park across the street. “People come here to make love,” she said. “No, in the cars in that parking lot or by the curb. I don't know why. Look, you can see them—"

  He saw nothing. He was watching her. “Sometimes I like to think about them, shut up in their little cars,” she said.

  And the taxi ride? “What about Scott?” he asked.

  She laughed, hid her mouth. “I hope he has a mistress. Poor man! But you will see—tonight he is going to St. Louis for his business."

  Before Scott she had married an American in Brussels where she was from, a Wall Street type. Once in the United States, he had treated her badly. That was the time Jeremy had known her best, when he was already living with Joanna. She had used to come to lessons close to tears. Squash had started as a way of keeping hold of her first husband, who had not deserved her.

  Now she squatted above Jeremy, knees apart. “What about Joanna?” she asked.

  He shrugged. The subject was unavoidable. And then suddenly Joanna came back to him, an image of her face, her coarse hair and freckled skin. Her beautiful thick eyebrows, the hair on her arms and upper lip. The surprised expression on her face, when he'd seen her the last time. He looked out toward the tower in the park.

  Sabine said, “Once I was up here and it started to rain. But the window slided down and I was trapped outside. So I saw a little man walking there along that street and I had to call out. I told him to go into the house and I led him upstairs with the sound of my voice—la, la, la! Isn't that ridiculous? He was just anyone!"

  What did she mean by this little story, told in this bright tone? He made a calculation: She must not have heard about Joanna's death. No reason she should have. They'd never met, after all.

  He turned back to look at her—smiling, squatting above him on the roof. No reason to bring up something that might cast a pall—literally, he supposed. No—figuratively. No—literally. It was not something he wanted to discuss.

  He said, “After the accident I couldn't forgive her. I thought I could, but I couldn't. I broke my pelvis. I guess I told you."

  "She was driving?"

  "Yes, but it wasn't her fault. It was on the Merritt Parkway. There was a big rainstorm. I looked up at her from the stretcher—she was soaking wet. We'd put off having children until my job was permanent—just as well. She was always careful that way."

  "I did not wish to make you sad. So, and Fioravanti?"

  Jeremy smiled. “I'm surprised you remember. That was the problem, wasn't it? No publications. Or else not enough—no book, at least."

  Once more Sabine tried to change the subject. “I used to love to watch you play."

  And in a little bit, “It's not so wonderful sometimes, having children. Sometimes you feel like an imposter, I suppose. I look at Sophie and think I'm not her mother."

  "I wasn't even competing anymore,” Jeremy said. Embarrassed, he put his hand over his bald spot. “We've all lost something,” he said—a fatuous remark. But she smiled, wrinkled up her nose.

  "Très distingué. But we must not let you get a sunburn for your interview! And besides, I have not shown you what I found!"

  "What did you find?” In fact he was eager to know. That was why he was here, after all, not to reminisce about old happy times.

  "I found it downstairs. You will see!"

  She'd mentioned it on the phone when he had called. Something about Ferson and Fioravanti—his obsession. Now she hid her mouth again; her hand was dark with asphalt. She was laughing at him, he thought. Stringing him along. She didn't move to go until a couple of minutes later—"Oh, damn! There is Sophie, home from school. She won't like her crazy mother up here. Quick, we mu
st get down."

  Carrying a book bag, a girl was walking down the street under the big trees. Sabine crouched out of sight, and then she slid down the shingles toward the back of the house. There she ran along the narrow lip of the roof, thirty feet above the garden, until she came to a small dormer—not the window they had climbed up through. Jeremy followed her more carefully, and by the time he dropped down into her bathroom, Sabine was already filling up a small brass tub, dipping her feet in. “Please, sit here and wash your feet. I had this made expressly. Scott thinks it is some kind of bidet. You must use a loofah and some almond soap."

  He sat beside her on the tub's wooden rail, scrubbing first one foot, then the other. Their thighs touched. Then she slipped away, scuffing her feet along a towel on the floor, leaving dark streaks. “Sophie! Sophie!” she called. “Il y a quelqu'un. ... There is someone you must meet."

  * * * *

  Later, at the conference hotel, lying awake past midnight, Jeremy tried to recompose the afternoon into an erotic history. He needed to calm down and get some rest. His interview was early and he needed this job—a tenure-track position at Butler College. And so he tried to imagine sexual intercourse on the burning rooftop or in the bathroom. That would have been more comfortable, spread out on those fluffy towels.

  But even in his own fantasy he was disturbed by small, fleeting memories of Joanna, her hair coarse and wild as she turned, her expression of surprise as he attempted to embrace her. No, he didn't want to think about that: Back to business. He spat on his palms, got to work. Nose to the grindstone. Hand to the plow. So—the bathroom, then. But there was Sophie outside the door. When he and Sabine had gone downstairs she'd looked at him without a hint of suspicion. And then Scott had shown up, glad to see him, full of old times. Sabine had prepared a meal earlier that day, and now she just had to heat it up in the enormous kitchen. Already she seemed distracted. And she resisted when he asked her to show him the basement—that was the reason he had come, of course. Not to see how rich she was. He persisted. She refused. What was there to see? A bunch of carpeted rooms without any light fixtures. Locks on all the doors.