Ray of the Star (10 page)

“S
he wants to see
me?”
Harry said,

“Yes,” Ireneo said,

“You’re sure you’ve got the right person?”

“More than,”

“Because if it’s Solange you’re looking for she’ll be here any minute,”

“Solange …”

“The silver angel, the one with the broken face, the one you were looking for,”

“The two of you have struck up an acquaintance,”

“We have, after that night I looked for both of you and found her,”

“Well, my employer would be very happy to greet Solange too, but it’s really you, Harry, she is now eager to speak with,”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,”

“I met a ghost this morning,”

“A ghost?”

“My neighbor’s dead husband, an older gentleman, he has been dead for years,”

“But now he’s not,”

“Well, I suppose technically, of course, he still is,”

“I see, yes, not so terribly odd in and of itself, but I’ll let my employer know, it might be related,”

“To what?”

“I don’t know, in fact, I have no idea,” having said this, Ireneo swept a long finger across his forehead, simultaneously removing a fat bead of sweat that had been threatening to fall at any moment and adjusting the placement of an errant lock of damp black hair,

“Look, if you don’t mind my asking,” said Harry, “Why are you running in place?”

“That’s a long story too, but I can stop any time I want, in case you are wondering,”

“No, I wasn’t wondering that,”

“Well, I can, but that’s not important, what is important is that you accompany me tonight,”

“I’d be delighted to,”

“Excellent, I’ll come and collect you here,”

“What if we meet at the café again, that will give me a chance to get the submarine back where it belongs,”

“I’ll look for you there, just after sunset,”

“Fine,” Harry said, then watched as Ireneo not only jogged off at a brisk pace, but looked down at his feet as he did so and said, “Shut up,” only to come to a dead halt a few paces later, pull off his shoes, throw them against the side of a flower kiosk, start off down the boulevard, barefoot this time, then reappear a moment later, somewhat sheepishly grab up the shoes, and wave at Harry—who felt a little bad for having played witness to such a perplexing sequence of events, and pretended to be looking elsewhere—then put them on and ran off again, clearly muttering to himself, giving, in other words, every indication that he was undergoing some sort of psychotic episode, and while it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Harry’s attitude at watching Ireneo charge noisily off was identical to the one that had struck him earlier in the presence of the Rubinskis, the overlap was enough to make him wince a little at the thought of returning to the state he had been in before Ireneo had appeared and, a moment later, actually clap his hands and give a little jump when he realized that Solange was standing on the other side of the boulevard smiling at him.

I
t took Solange a moment to register that the inter twining of pleasure and concern that she felt dancing across her face as she watched Harry was
actually
dancing across her face, in a kind of variable speed tango, rather than remaining just below its painted surface, and then a moment longer to remember that as she had sat in her apartment applying her silver makeup earlier she had been overcome with an urge to twist and contort her face, to make it do, as she had said to herself, things it hadn’t done in a long time, which hadn’t meant very much to her then as she had made faces at herself in the mirror, but seemed to have more than a little resonance now, as Harry came quickly across the boulevard toward her and the tango stopped as concern bowed and stepped aside, abandoning the floor to pleasure, which did a pirouette and splits, and she felt her face breaking into an outrageous grin, the kind she had once been capable of achieving at a moment’s notice but that had vanished with her young man and gold face paint, and Harry, looking at the grin that had come out to greet him thought, if I ran fast enough and dove I could end up inside that smile and wouldn’t we both be surprised, but Harry didn’t speed up and dive, in fact he slowed down a little as he approached and the smile that lit his face grew softer as he approached, and for a fraction of a second Solange thought, without quite knowing why,
We’re both climbing, but in opposite directions,
and then Harry was standing before her, his eyes beaming, his graying hair catching the light surrounding them, and she was telling him about sitting in front of the mirror that morning making faces and that suddenly now, even though she hadn’t slept at all and was in desperate need of a cup of coffee and a bucket full of pastries, she couldn’t stop grinning and felt like a second-string circus clown, and Harry was saying, let’s go get coffee and a couple hundred pastries, which is more or less what they did—at a third stand at the edge of the market, one Solange had long frequented and which gave them a view both of the Yellow Submarine and the pile of Solange’s gear, which she had left in a heap on her box—and to say that both of them were delighted that the awkwardness they had been aware might be present when they met again in broad daylight did not materialize, would be an understatement of the first order, to borrow the phrase that ran through Harry’s mind as they sat there on their stools at a stand that marked the third point in a roughly isosceles triangle formed by the market’s three coffee stands, the two longer, equidistant lines of which converged on Harry and Solange and their plates full of pastries, which is pretty to think of but also satisfying to note given that, Ireneo having already impacted on Harry’s day, the connoisseurs and Alfonso slid off their own stools and a moment later passed within view of Solange, who had just enough trouble interpreting what struck her as a curiously painful disjunction between the placid faces of the connoisseurs on the one hand and the markedly unplacid face of Alfonso on the other, that she elbowed Harry, pointed at the foursome, which had stopped a moment at the edge of the market to wait for a dolly piled high with battered fish carcasses to trundle by, and quietly asked if she thought they looked “odd” to him, and Harry said they certainly did,

“They make me shiver, those three, as I’m sure you noticed last night, even if you were too discreet to discuss it,” said Solange, her frame vibrating with such force this time that Harry immediately rejected his first impulse, which was to tell her that the three of them made him think of death, then failed to abstain from placing his hand on hers for a moment, a move that filled him with just enough trepidation to make him take it away almost as soon as he had touched her, but Solange, who had been gazing off into space for a moment, with her grin, which had naturally been subsiding anyway, now completely collapsed, came back from wherever—for she couldn’t have quite said herself—her shivering had taken her, looked Harry in the eye and said,

“Put that paw back over here,” and after he had covered her hand again and they had sat there a few minutes without speaking in the center of a cliché that would have struck them both as smashing had they discussed it, Solange said,

“We barely know each other, Harry,”

and Harry said, “That’s true,”

and Solange said, “Let’s address that.”

A
s Solange and Harry deepened their acquaintance—at the coffee stand, against the Yellow Submarine, along the boulevard and the beach and then on Harry’s bed—Alfonso excused himself from the connoisseurs, donned his regalia, leaned back into his hind legs and became a golden centaur, and although he was every bit as magnificent and clearly impressive to the heavy crowds on that day as he was on all the others, behind the gold paint and the shining plastic armor he was filled with more misgiving than his sanguine outlook would generally have indicated, not because, he thought, the connoisseurs had asked him to implicate himself any further in whatever scheme it was they were cooking up, besides relieving Harry of his Yellow-Submarine privileges, which in any case—they had said and he had concurred—Harry didn’t need anymore now that he had “gotten the girl,” but rather because he was no longer sure if it would be fair, in the context of the deception he, Alfonso, was clearly helping to perpetrate, to press Harry to tell him his story, which he really did very much want to hear and which, he knew, and here was the source, or so he thought, of his misgiving, he
would absolutely
press him to tell, regardless of this question of fairness, and the truth was it remained to be seen whether or not what he had done for Harry—rather, obviously, than
to
Harry—which had paved the way for an interview with Solange, and, he thought, probably much more, would retrospectively be seen as a favor: there was some bad business in store for the “poor schmuck”—the connoisseurs never exaggerated and they never lied—but just how bad wasn’t clear …, and now that we’ve had a taste of Alfonso’s not-altogether-admirable line of thought, which continued untainted by any genuine feeling of remorse for most of the afternoon, though not, as we will see, throughout the evening, it might be as well, while we allow Harry and Solange another few hours to exchange stories and hint at others, to tell each other about the ghosts of dead husbands and knife blades and broken faces and black dahlias and shivering fits, but also about other things, a nearby cliff covered in flowers, a favorite novel, the surprising pleasures of working with Lucite, a beach that glowed pale violet in the moonlight, to attend a bit to Ireneo, who as you will recall we left in the midst of an apparent argument with his disgruntled running shoes, which even before Ireneo had left his stand in the market to come and speak to Harry, had set aside their silence and launched into a tirade against both Doña Eulalia and Ireneo himself to do with their stunning incompetence and the shoes’ manifest perspicacity, a tirade that only grew in volume during Ireneo’s conversation with Harry next to the Yellow Submarine and that culminated in a string of epithets so palpably vile that Ireneo tore the shoes off and threw them against the flower stand only to, a moment later, pick them up again and put them back on his feet, whereupon they started cooing and pointing out that not all sinister pairs of shoes were alike no matter what Doña Eulalia had said, and that there were many other factoids that they could share with Ireneo, should he care to keep running and continue listening: they could tell him, for example, a few more things about his mother and her supposed illness, or about where she kept her savings bonds, or about Harry and about that golden centaur, not a bad sort really, but easily manipulated, and about who was manipulating him,

“I couldn’t care less about any of that,” said Ireneo,

“Well, you should,”

“Go on talking if it makes you happy,”

“It does,” said the shoes, “You’ve put your finger right on it, it makes us extremely happy to talk, we almost can’t stand not to,”

“You never spoke in the old days,”

“We spoke all the time, you just weren’t ready to hear us,”

“That sounds like tawdry psychodrama talk,”

“Which doesn’t make it invalid,”

“No, just insufferable,”

“You wound us,”

“I doubt it,”

“You are right to doubt, after all it is doubt that leads straight to the heart of error and out the other side—where are we going?”

“There is no ‘we’ here, it’s just me and my shoes, out for a run, heading for the beach, la, la, la,” and it was certainly true that Ireneo was making for the beach, but at the last minute, almost in spite of himself, he turned and climbed up one of the high streets that led, by way of wildly interlacing cobblestone streets, to a series of vista points of the bay, including the very cliff mentioned a moment ago, which during the springtime was covered with innumerable white and yellow daffodils, and that now was an immense emerald lawn bordered by a white gravel path and low slate wall, which the shoes said they admired and which Ireneo, almost sprinting, bore down on, as if he meant to leap off it and soar into space, and put an early end, as it were, to the day, and as he got closer and closer the shoes kept talking about the wall and masonry and the masons that had worked on this one and what a bunch of crooks they had been even if they had done nice work, and so when Ireneo swerved at the last minute and deftly sent, instead of himself, the shoes sailing over the wall and out into space, they were still going on about crooks and the corrupt, ancient art of wall building, though one may suppose that as they stopped climbing and started falling, out of this story and into some other, they switched topics, which was what Ireneo, heaving a little after his exertion but satisfied that he had performed his civic duty by disposing of the shoes where no one else could easily pick them up and put them on and more importantly where, should he become tempted, he would have a very hard, not to say impossible time finding them again, now hoped it would be possible for him to do, although the first order of business would be to acquire some replacement footwear, as the sidewalk and street beyond the green lawn sparkled with glass and streaks of oil against which his thin running socks and even thinner soles would be no defense at all.

A
fter spending time on the bed, Harry and Solange spent time at Harry’s kitchen table, where, over a few bites of this and that pulled out of Harry’s small refrigerator, Harry asked Solange to say a little more about the Lucite, he hadn’t quite grasped her interest in deploying it, that substance in particular, and she said that while she hardly understood it any longer herself, the initial impulse had come from a story she had partially overheard as she had leaned one morning against a palm tree and looked out to sea and considered walking into it and contriving not to return, whereupon two old women with thick ankles came and plunked themselves down near her and one told the other a story that she had read in a romantic novel of some sort, and had not approved of, about a boat builder who had lost his beloved wife after a protracted illness and who, in his grief, thinking of the amber pendant she had always worn in which an ant, dead millions of years, had been marvelously preserved, had given such serious consideration to plunging first her remains and then himself in the Lucite solution he used to coat the hulls of his boats that he had gone so far as to set her body on his workbench and to look for a proper receptacle, but as he did this, it seemed to him he felt a hand descend on his shoulder and a voice,
her
voice, whisper in his ear, that his grief was betraying him, and that he should stop and go and announce her death to the authorities and see to a proper burial, and that if he did this, she would come and visit him in his dreams, wearing his favorite dress, a promise Solange had not been able to hear if she had kept, and while all she had left of her young man were scraps, she had immediately gotten hold of some Lucite and begun encasing what she had, not in hopes of provoking an analogous response, she was too grief-stricken to hope for anything, but because—and it was this impulse that had driven her out to the beach in the first place—she had suddenly been overcome by an urge to devour the little pile of bits and pieces she had left of him—which had led her to wonder with horror what she would have done had his entire body been there—to pluck them up and drop them into her mouth, and while that unbidden impulse had remained as she set to work encasing the bits of knife metal in Lucite, it grew less acute over the coming weeks and before long seemed to have vanished altogether,

“Though of course nothing like that ever really vanishes,” Solange said,

“No it certainly doesn’t,” Harry said, and after they had sat silently gazing out over the sun-burnished rooftops around them, he added that while in this particular instance he was not in a position to empathize, he had heard of such cases, notably one involving a Buddhist monk, who had been unable to bear the thought of his dead lover’s body being given up to the flames or to the perceived ignominy of decomposition, and had consequently, presumably because no quieting hand had come down on his shoulder, eaten the body, an act that had, according to the story, cursed him, though Harry couldn’t say whether or not such an eventuality was merited,

“What happened to him?” Solange asked,

“He lived for many years as a madman in the ruins of his own monastery,”

“Then I’m glad that in the end I only nibbled on the end of one of my young man’s shoelaces.”