Tightrope Walker (7 page)

I didn’t hear from Joe the next morning, and so, during my lunch hour I doggedly went out and looked
at cars by myself. This whittled down my defenses enough to telephone him from a pay station.

“I thought you’d never call,” he said. “How long are you going to play games?”

I said weakly that I didn’t know what he meant.

“Of course you do. You got back last night, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but it was late and I thought—”

“You thought I’d say Amelia Who.”

I decided to ignore this. I said there was a car, a small truck and a van, and I hoped he knew something that might help.

“I’ll be over at five but how was New York, what did you find out? Any luck?”

“I saw two people, a hurdy-gurdy collector and an actor,” I told him, “and next I have to go to Maine.”

“My God it’s like a scavenger hunt,” he said. “See you at five.”

It was a busy afternoon. Enoch Interiors arrived with a mechanic and they poked and prodded the insides of the old nineteen-forties jukebox. “It’s so deliciously camp,” gloated Mr. Enoch, rubbing his hands together. The bell over the shop door jangled frequently: one of Mr. Georgerakis’ weird bathrobes sold, as well as the stuffed moosehead with antlers, and a box of 78 phonograph records. Suddenly at two o’clock the jukebox lit up with flashing neon lights and roared out the “Beer Barrel Polka.” There were six people in the shop at the time; it was like a party.

All of this increased the momentum I’d returned with from New York, and between sales I began making plans to go to Maine before I lost my courage. I looked up Portland in the atlas, figured routes and mileage and pondered how to handle four or five days away from the shop. The shipment from New York would arrive Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest; I
figured that, allowing for one day to price and sort the new items, I could leave for Maine on Saturday morning. I telephoned Mr. Georgerakis and put my proposition to him.

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said over the phone. “Today I read the newspaper all morning and after lunch I ran the vacuum cleaner for Katina. This is retirement?”

“How much do you think I should pay you for coming in?” I asked.

“This is not the question of a businesswoman,” he told me, “but I appreciate the delicacy. Listen, I’d do it for free but I have my dignity; pay me ten dollars a day but no vacuuming.”

“Mr. Georgerakis, I don’t even own a vacuum cleaner,” I told him.

“God bless you for that, I’ll be there Saturday morning eight o’clock sharp. Consider it balm for my soul.”

When Joe came at five I wondered why on earth I’d felt so afraid; he wasn’t even as handsome as I remembered, just bony and nice-looking, cheerful and somehow very real. “You look good enough to eat,” he said. “What was the chap on Park Avenue like?”

“A dirty old man, I think.”

Joe grinned. “Innocent Amelia, you are getting around. You handled him skillfully, I trust?”

“I bolted.”

“And the actor?”

“Oh, very nice, although we only talked on the stairs.
He
bought the hurdy-gurdy from a cousin, a Miss Harrington, when her estate went on the market. She’s in a private psychiatric hospital in Portland. I suppose she could be mad as a hatter, but I have to try.”

He nodded. “Definitely, since one person’s definition of mad as a hatter is entirely different from another’s.
Actually,” he added, “I’ve called my sister mad as a hatter any number of times.”

“And is she?”

“Oh—absolutely,” he said with mock solemnity and reached for my hand as we walked.

We spent the next two hours peering into and under cars, and another hour excitedly discussing them over meatballs and spaghetti, and in the end I owned a van. It was a really weird one; someone had custom ordered it and then walked out on the deal so that the dealer was very accommodating about the price. It was black as a hearse; with a porthole on either side; and on both the sides and the rear were pale blue ovals on which pictures had been painted of a lighthouse in the moonlight, with thin white lines of surf curling around the gray rocks. The effect of ghostly blues and white on black was altogether spooky, but there was no doubt about what the van would hold: an entire room of furniture if necessary.

“This will certainly amuse my parents,” Joe said. “But I haven’t invited you, have I?”

“Invited me?” I had just unlocked the door of the shop; the bells were still jangling as I reached for the light switch.

With the lights on I saw that Joe was looking pleased with himself. “They’re celebrating their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary on Sunday and I told them I’d bring you. You’ll come, won’t you? If you close the shop in mid-afternoon Saturday we can be there for dinner and they said they’d love meeting you. I can’t wait to have you meet them.”

I looked at him blankly. “
This
weekend?”

“Right.”

“But Joe—”

“What’s the matter?”

I looked at him and said, “Joe, I’m leaving for Maine early Saturday morning.”

“So soon?” He looked startled. “But that can wait, can’t it? What’s the rush? You can postpone, can’t you?”

I swallowed hard. “I don’t
—
I don’t really think I can.”

He stared at me incredulously. “But Amelia, this will be fun, damn it. We can go swimming, there’s badminton and you’ll really enjoy my sister Jenny. You can’t be serious.”

“But I am,” I said helplessly. “When you talk about swimming and badminton I—I can’t help it, it just hasn’t any reality for me. Going to Maine is something I have to do. I’ve already made all the arrangements, and Mr. Georgerakis is coming in to look after the shop while I’m gone.”

“Amelia,” he said in astonishment, “aren’t you letting this get out of hand?”

“I’m sorry,” I said miserably. “Truly I am.”

“Sorry!” he exploded. “My God, here I am with free time at last and I was hoping, I was planning
—
I thought we really hit it off tremendously well, and damn it Amelia, this woman’s dead, she has to be. But I’m not. Look at me, Amelia, I’m alive and I’m here, and it’s
summer.
”

“I can’t help it,” I said stubbornly. “I just can’t. I have to go to Maine and look for Hannah.”

“You think I invite girls home every weekend to meet my parents?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“You happen to be the first,” he said, and we stared at each other across a vast chasm. “I don’t get it, I honestly don’t get it,” he said furiously, “but I hope you enjoy your damn trip very much.” Giving me a glance to match his voice he stalked out of the shop and closed
the door so hard the bells hanging over it kept clanging and jangling for a full minute.

Well, of course I’d known it would have to happen. I’d really been expecting it, hadn’t I? A part of me whispered, ‘Hurry–run after him and say you’ll go’ but I only stood there, feeling numb. This was the thing about people: they either rejected you or they swallowed you up, and you couldn’t be your own self. If you tried to be yourself, if you asserted, they went away, which is what my mother had always done to punish me, so why not Joe? I had long ago learned anyway that everything I became attached to either went away, changed, or died. Suddenly all my inadequacies rose in me like vomit. I felt guilt at daring to do what I wanted, bruised at hurting Joe and, worst of all, a crushing fear that I might be losing my mind over what could only be an insane search for a dead woman.

Frightened, I reached for a sweater and locked the door of the shop, knowing that this time I was going to Amman Singh as a supplicant, a beggar of alms. I hadn’t seen him for a week; there was so much to tell him and so much I wanted from him. Whatever it was I wanted it badly.

The smell of curry and spices hung in the air outside his door. He was mercifully alone, except for the ubiquitous relatives whom I could hear poking about in the kitchen, talking in low voices. After five flights of stairs I said breathlessly, “Amman Singh, I have to talk to you. Please?”

“I have been expecting you,” he said courteously, and gestured me to sit down beside him.

I sat facing him, my legs crossed under me. “I think I have to tell this like a story.”

He nodded. “You know I enjoy stories.”

I told him about the hurdy-gurdy and about the note I’d found inside of it, and I told him about the people
I’d visited and met since I last saw him. Only when I’d finished did I look at him, and I saw that he had closed his eyes to listen. I remembered his saying once that it wasn’t just to the words he listened, but to what lay behind them, and I wondered what nuances and inflections he heard in my voice to give away my loneliness, my doubts and my sudden terror. I pleaded, “Amman Singh, why am I doing this? Is it destructive? Am I right to do this?”

“Right?” he repeated. “Right?”

“I don’t understand myself, I don’t understand this—this need, this compulsion. Hannah surely has to be dead by now.”

He was silent for a long time and then he opened his eyes. He reached out for my hand and touched it; his grasp felt dry and cool, scarcely flesh at all. “Please,” he said.

“Please what?”

“When the wind frees the seed from the flower,” he said, “and the seed is driven on the breeze across the fields it is not compulsion. The seed is obeying laws we cannot see or know. Trust the wind. One day you will understand.”

“But will I find her?” I asked.

He said, “You will find something.”

“But it’s Hannah I must find!” I cried.

He looked at me and his smile was tender. “Is it?” he asked softly. “Is it?”

I felt better after leaving Amman Singh, although I didn’t understand what he meant, not then at least. But he had said I would find something, and since I had just lost Joe that was better than nothing. Still, it was astonishing how impoverished and dull my life suddenly looked without Joe. I had thought I’d found a friend. Until now I’d had only one friend, except that
I’d never had any illusions about the bond between Shirley Newcomb and me in junior high school. Shirley had been as fat as I was scrawny, and just as unnoticed. We were united only in our envy of cheerleaders, by our invisibility to everyone in our classes, and our penchant for flunking algebra. I’d never brought her home with me; at best it had been a sickly friendship and when, in our freshman year at high school, she and her family moved away it was almost a relief. After all, we’d never had anything in common but our deficiencies. It seemed kinder to face loneliness alone.

But a grayness, a lack of sun, hung over everything like smog the next day. I tried to go back in time to my life before I met Joe; I tried reliving my gratitude at finding the Ebbtide Shop, and my excitement over buying it, but Joe stood there like a wall, dividing the two worlds. Finding Hannah’s note in the hurdy-gurdy had brought him into my life and now, with equal dispatch, it had removed him. How treacherous fate was!

On Wednesday afternoon the truck brought my goods from New York and in a fury of work I rearranged the shop’s window display, and then I stayed up until midnight painting the last wall of the shop, which I’d been too busy to finish a month ago. I draped a few lengths of the Indian fabric across one wall in a great colorful swath, laid out the blue willow ware, and hung price tags on the line of cuckoo clocks.

On Thursday, after dinner, I dialed Joe’s telephone number just to hear his voice, planning to hang up as soon as he answered. I was denied even that: there was no answer. I called again at midnight, out of some perverse anger, and still there was no answer. Obviously he was finding solace elsewhere: a woman, I thought darkly, and one more amenable than I.

Not entirely sure what “amenable” really meant I looked it up in the dictionary and found that it meant
exactly what I’d thought it meant: capable of submission to test, readily brought to yield or to submit. Unamenable Amelia, I thought with grim humor, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling and hearing my mother saying from her grave, “You see?”

That did it. The next day, Friday, I arose sane, if grief can be called a form of insanity. Joe had come and Joe had gone: never mind, the sun had still risen, I was twenty-two and I had promises to keep. To Hannah. Mr. Georgerakis stopped in at noon to be shown where everything was, and he displayed his usual deadpan self.

“Miss Jones, I worry about you,” he said. “This is the Ebbtide Shop, or maybe Macy’s?”

“Ebbtide,” I said, playing straight man as usual.

“I would never have known.” He shook his head. “Watch your profits, Miss Jones, in this business it’s in pennies, not dollars. Those clocks—”

“Twelve of them for fifty bucks at the auction,” I told him proudly. “I’m selling them for nine ninety-five.”

“Not bad,” he admitted, “but that hearse outside with Ebbtide Shop painted on the side—”

“Not a hearse, Mr. Georgerakis, a van.”

“It could bury you from what it must have cost. Watch out or I’ll charge you twelve dollars a day for my services. Where’s the old jukebox?”

He whistled faintly when I told him the price I’d gotten for it. We shared a cup of coffee and then he patted my hand and said the shop looked just like me, sunny and bright and cheerful. Since I’d just climbed out of the black hole of Calcutta I was inordinately pleased by the compliment.

“See you tomorrow at eight,” he said. “It will be a pleasure.”

Tomorrow at eight … I remembered what that meant—Portland, Maine—and nearly panicked. I had to reread
Hannah’s note three times before my sense of mission was restored and my anxieties banished; my safety zones were being pounded against rocks by a heavy surf. I packed blue jeans, a heavy turtleneck sweater, my windbreaker, pajamas, and toothbrush, and at eight o’clock in the morning I greeted Mr. Georgerakis wearing my ubiquitous beige corduroy suit, this time enlivened by a pink and orange scarf. Half an hour later when I carried my suitcase out to the alley where the van was parked at night I stopped dead in my tracks in shock. Joe was leaning against the side of the van.

“Hi,” he said cheerfully. “If you’d only left this monster of yours unlocked I’d have stowed away and shouted ‘boo’ to you along about Massachusetts. But you locked the darn thing, and anyway I’d have only scared you to death and killed us both.”