The Rose Thieves (11 page)

I myself see, at this moment, a pair of extravagantly, surpassingly gaudy shoes. I give up on my grandfather and put them on.

They are the highest heels I've ever worn, and the minute I stand in them, my body conforms to their dictates: my ankles tilt forward, and every other bone leans back to balance them. I stretch my arm out, bring the other to my mouth with the imaginary pipe, and I am indeed a ridiculous figure. I walk confidently in these shoes, taller and more fluid, and I cannot possibly move like my grandfather now. I stand straighter than I ever have, my breasts thrust forward against the cloth of my shirt, head back, almost thrown back. If I were to laugh right now, it would be a strong but not derisive laugh that I think my grandfather would attend: the laugh of someone who understands what he looks for and what he sees.

Nonchalant

Kate closed Buddy's up early because of the snow. It took all her strength to pull the door shut against the wind, and she felt herself very slight, almost weightless, her hair blowing to mix with the storm. She wore the red scarf she had knitted for Michael, which he hadn't taken to New York with him. He had said then that he'd be back before the cold, but he no longer spoke of returning. Evidently, fiddle players were much needed in New York; Kate hadn't thought he would get enough work to keep him a month, but he'd left in September and it was nearly Christmas now.

Kate's own work kept her in Chiverton. Buddy said she was the best cook he'd ever had, and at Buddy's she could do things according to her mood, serve coq au vin one night and meatball subs the next, boil an egg if someone was allergic, bake a cake if someone was sad. Only Michael had escaped her ministrations, though his name was still on her mailbox and she was still watering his plants.

So let him stay in New York. Carson had a formula for it: If someone has lived away from you as long as they've lived with you (and if the distance is one hundred miles or more), you can't consider yourself in love. Kate tried to be nonchalant—Michael had been mostly a pain in the ass anyway, schlepping home from some woman's apartment with a camellia for Kate, his confessions so detailed he seemed not so much penitent as nostalgic. He had invited her to come to New York with him, but so halfheartedly it would have seemed importunate to accept.

Even in the light of the evening snow, Chiverton was a dingy town, whose tinseled storefronts still displayed the galoshes and baby dolls no one wanted last year. Three blocks east and Kate would be home; three more and the town subsided into fields until the valley sloped up into the hills again. The wreath on the door of The Shamrock, where Michael once played three nights a week, obscured most of the neon Schlitz sign, and Kate peered through the letters, thinking she might find Carson or someone else who'd want to walk with her, but there were only a few kids playing Pac-Man. They spent all their aimless force on the machines, unconcerned with the snow, which sifted through the pools of streetlight onto the little spruces along the sidewalk. Watching them, Kate knew she was absolutely lucky to be here, alone, in a red scarf. Carson would say she was feeling negative ions rather than joy, but the snow tumbled freely out of the pure blue above; science had nothing to do with it.

*   *   *

Carson was going bald. When he was eating lunch at Buddy's and Kate stood at the counter, he knew she could see the spiral of missing hair at his crown, and he sorted through the rest of his hair, trying to push some wisps over the empty spots.

“I'm still kind of a handsome guy, don't you think, Katie?” he asked. She was pulling apart a lettuce for salad. “That Annie in the florist is kind of a snack cake, don't you think? And I think she sorta likes your friend Carson here.”

Carson wore more than one plaid at a time, and he was developing a beer belly despite heroic effort, but he was handsome, and when Kate looked down at his pleading face, she smiled. She knew everyone thought they were lovers. Sometimes she thought so herself.

“You are unquestionably the handsomest regular customer at Buddy's,” she told him, “and Annie's a real Twinkie.”

“Wait,” he said, as she went back into the kitchen. “Katie, wait. What do you mean, regular? What kind of stranger's been coming in here behind my back?” While Kate was trying on several enigmatic looks, in came Terri Brinn, who worked with Carson at the hospital.

“Terri, is there anyone you know—and be honest, I mean really, you can be totally honest—but do you know anyone who can really be said to equal the Carson charm?”

Terri regarded her engagement ring with some distress, but finally said, “Hi, Carson. Hi, Katie,” and went to sit at the end of the counter, on the other side of the mailman. Terri lived in the apartment below Kate's, but she had moved in after Michael left, so she, like everyone else, had the wrong impression about Carson. She smiled apologetically as Kate told her the specials. Kate smiled sweetly back at her. Terri would just murder her Don if he seemed to care about another woman's opinion of him.

“Who is it?” Carson was saying. “You can tell me, Katie. I know you, Katie, and it's probably some big dumb goof who hasn't got nearly the Carson savoir faire.” Almost everyone was looking by now, and Kate began to feel she actually had betrayed him.

“It's nobody, Carson. It was a slip. You are by far the most gorgeous hunk of man who's ever slurped his soup at this counter, who's ever deigned to pick his teeth with one of Buddy's toothpicks here.”

“I don't know, Katie, you don't say that with any conviction.”

“Oh,
Carson.
” Kate leaned over the counter and spoke quietly to him, exasperated and laughing. “You know I think you're wonderful.”

“Listen, this other guy didn't go in the flower shop, did he?”

It occurred to Kate that Annie would have been the one who suggested camellias healed all wounds, and she stood up to go back to the kitchen.

“Carson, I'm not thinking of anyone in particular.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Michael, right?”

“Carson, shush. Please?”

“I get it,” he said. The mailman paid for his piece of quiche, taking a toothpick and looking as if he felt a little sad about not being the handsomest man at Buddy's. Kate was careful to touch his hand as she took his money, to smile right into his eyes.

“You can't be in love with a dead horse, Katie,” Carson said. “Step over it and go on.” A familiar argument, but too sensible to work.

“So what's the pathology report?” she asked.

“What? Oh, on the horse? I haven't read it yet.” She always gave him Michael's letters to read. He was, after all, a researcher, and the tortured sentences in which Kate tried to find love he studied with the same reasoning calm he used on white cells devouring each other in a drop of blood.

*   *   *

The snow was an inch thick on the telephone wires, and Terri Brinn, soon to be Terri Brinn Reilly, Mrs. Don, stood on the landing, waiting to ask Kate in for hot chocolate and wedding dress analysis. Kate had never seen her without makeup before, and this new vulnerability (her skin was pocked, but her eyes without the heavy liner were full of shy friendship) became her. Don Reilly's picture dominated her coffee table, as his laugh often dominated the building when he was visiting her. He was a truck driver for a dairy company, and he wore a blue uniform with
DON
stitched on the breast pocket in red.

“My fiancé says I look best in empire waists,” Terry said.
Empire
was a word Kate had never dared to speak, having been told that when used sartorially it was pronounced
ahmpeer.
To hear Terri say “empire” was a relief that nearly made her giggle. Wedding dresses seemed worthy of hours of discussion now, and Kate agreed that Terri would look best in empires, in cap sleeves, in panne velvet and inset lace.

Wedding breakfasts were harder—no pictures—but here Kate had experience. Chicken croquettes looked so stodgy, but lobster bisque was a wonderful color, for February.

“That's soup, isn't it?” Terri said. “Don likes something substantial. Wouldn't Carson want more than soup?”

“Carson eats what I tell him to eat,” Kate said. “But you're right. It should be beer and those sausages—bangers, right? Lobster bisque is too prim. A wedding ought to be vital.”

“Doesn't the royal family serve chicken croquettes?” Terri asked her.

*   *   *

Michael had been in a state of suavity when Kate was last in New York. His apartment was directly over a fish storehouse, but he served brandy in cut glass, had flowers—daisies, not camellias—on the table in a beer mug. The quartz heater glowed like a fireplace, and he even had presents for her, things he had been saving for weeks. She couldn't imagine him seeing a bunch of silk ribbons in a store window, thinking of her, turning back to buy them.

Hardly any subject was comfortable. “What's V.S.O.P.?” she asked.

“Very Superior Old Panacea,” he said. She allowed a wan smile.

She stretched her legs toward the heater. “What does it mean: ‘Heats the surface without heating the air'?” she asked.

“Physics,” he said, annoyed. “It's just an advertising gimmick.”

The moon, which had been hanging over the Chock Full o' Nuts sign across the river, dropped into New Jersey. On Michael's dresser was a collection of barrettes, expensive ones in the shapes of leaves, threaded with gold. Kate said nothing. She felt suave too. She didn't feel natural with him until they were making love.

The next days were better. They went walking, around the construction area that was destroying the view from his apartment, down to the fish market, and through all the accessible areas around the harbor. Boarded-up warehouses that had seemed abandoned turned out to be in use, full and quiet. In the grocery store Michael told the manager about her job at Buddy's, saying that she made Chiverton seem cosmopolitan. The man had never heard of Chiverton.

The last night, the moon never rose, but a cruise ship came by so fully lit it looked like a new borough. She stood at the window, watching it, feeling ready to put her hand through the glass, ready to do anything that would break the reserve between them. When he came to stand behind her, anger, fear, and desire kept her still—she wanted both to move toward him and away.

Asleep, he pulled her toward him, trapped one of her legs between his, held her head against his chest. The wind slammed a door somewhere over and over, and Michael spoke in his sleep every time Kate moved or even breathed deeply, saying, “What? What?” as if she were keeping something from him. Awake, he never answered her questions. She thought of oil spreading out over water, wishing something in her could cover him that completely and flexibly. “What?” he said, and she stayed still, staring at the ceiling, wanting to sit up and give him a long, full answer, to talk and talk, telling him what. But she was afraid to wake him, and she wasn't sure she knew.

*   *   *

Falling asleep, Kate had the sense that the snow weighed everything in Chiverton down, solid and safe. The sheets were cool against her skin, and she stretched across the whole bed, glad of the solitude, the perfect, snowy quiet. Don arrived downstairs—even his obnoxious laugh was comforting. He called to Terri from the bathroom, pissing torrents. Beer and bangers for this wedding, Kate thought as she fell asleep. She woke again when he was leaving, just before dawn, but before she knew for sure she was awake, she was lost. Don slammed the front door, and her window burst with shooting, blaring light. A ball of fire was outside, moving in.

Terror is the sudden absence of explanation. This had not the properties of a fire or an explosion or even a vision; it assaulted her senses and ignored her mind. Kate was out of the room and down the stairs in seconds, finding Terri and Don in the hall.

“It's a fire,” she said. “I don't have anything on.”

“God, she doesn't,” Don said. Out of hysteria, a reassuring embarrassment emerged.

“It's the electrical cables,” Terri said. “I called the fire department.” She took off her robe and wrapped Kate in it, so that she was the one undressed, wearing only black panties with pink elephants on them, and matching bra. She pulled Kate upstairs, rewrapped her in one of her bedsheets, and took the robe back. Flashes of electricity spilled through the doorway, lighting their faces weirdly, and static ripped at the air so they had to shout to be heard.

“It's the weight of the snow,” Don said. “Those wires were all frayed. This is an old building.” He was holding Terri, who shuddered with each new flash. Kate stood against the doorframe, holding the sheet tighter. How could she have gone to bed naked, unguarded, last night?

*   *   *

Carson came in at lunchtime and seemed not to notice anything, although Kate was wearing Michael's black corduroys and sweater and had left her hair hanging in tufts over her eyes.

“I've done it,” he said. “I've discovered a cure for baldness, and I'm going to win the Nobel Prize.” He sat at the counter and twirled around on the stool.

“What about cancer?” Kate wanted to smile, but the fire had made her angry and competent. Already she had fed huge breakfasts to the snowplow operators. She seemed to be gliding; each egg broke cleanly, and masses of them stared up at her from the grill.

“First things first,” Carson said, handing her the twist tie from a bread bag. “I like the new-wave look usually,” he said. “It's kinda sexy, those girls with all the hair on one side chopped off? But this is a little hairy for a cook.”

She wanted sympathy but didn't know what to say to get it.

“A fire, huh?” Carson said. “Is the place livable?”

“It's fine,” she said, wishing she could hold out a charred hand as evidence of suffering. “It was like an apocalypse.”