She nodded to me as she came in and wandered from wall to wall, glancing at the paintings with nervous little turns of her head. Her hands, held behind her back, clutched a purse. She had not yet attained the artful guile of poise and positioning that would someday make her the center of attention. The necklace had not yet begun to form.
“Can I help you?” I asked, half rising from my desk. I remember wondering if I might interest her in one of the pathetic landscapes that had come to fill my walls—indeed, whether the listed prices were high enough to match her wealth. I had, at that time, some masticated and mauled views of Voss Bender Memorial Post Office—popular since Lake’s success—as well as some nicely watered-down panoramas of the docks and the River Moth. All made respectable by the nearby presence and divine quality of two Lake sketches of fishermen cutting apart the carcass of a freshwater squid.
She turned to face me, smiled, and said, “I’m Mary Sabon.” Despite her nerves, she carried herself with an assurance I have never had. It rattled me.
“Mary Sabon,” I said.
She nodded, looked down at her shoes, then up at me again. “And you, of course, are Janice. Your brother has told me a lot about you.” And laughed at her cliché.
“Yes. Yes, I am,” I said, as if surprised to learn my own identity. “So you’re Sabon,” I said.
“Indeed,” she replied, her gaze fixed on me.
I said: “Do you know that what you’re doing could get Duncan fired by the Academy?”
It just came out. I didn’t mean to say it. Ever since the Attempt, I haven’t had any tact. (Ever since? You’ve never had any tact!)
Sabon’s smile disappeared, a look of hurt flashing across her face. In that hurt expression I saw a flicker of something from her past coming back to haunt her. I never found out what it was.
“We love each other, Janice,” she said—and there’s a surprise, a shock. Something unexpected brought to the surface by the clacking of keys against paper: she’s just a girl. When we met that first time, she was just a girl, without guile. I am ashamed of something and I’m not sure what. She was young. I was older. I could have crushed her then, but did not know it. (Dead. It’s all dead. It’s all gone. Senseless.)
“We love each other, Janice,” Mary said. “Besides, your brother is a historian. He teaches for now, but he’s working on new books … And, besides, I won’t be a student forever.”
I think now of all the things I could have said, gentle or cruel, that might have led away from a marble staircase, a raised hand, a fiery red mark on her cheek.
I sat down behind my desk. “You know he’s sick, don’t you?”
“Sick?” she said. “The skin disease? The fungus? But it disappears. It doesn’t stay long. It isn’t getting worse. It doesn’t bother me.”
But I could tell it did bother her.
“Did he tell you how he got the disease?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s had it since he was a boy, when he went exploring. You know—BDD. It comes and goes. He’s very brave about it.”
Never mind the magnitude of Duncan’s lie; it was the BDD that caught me. All the breath left my body, replaced by an ache. Before Dad Died was something between Duncan, my mother, and me. (And yet here you are, sharing it in a manuscript that might be read by any old drunk off the street.)
“Are you all right?” she asked.
There must have been a pause. There must have been a stoppage, a shift of my attention away from her.
“I’m fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “As long as you know about it.”
Yes, the fungus left his skin for weeks, sometimes months, but when it returned, it was always more insidious, more draining of his energy. How could I possibly explain to her about Duncan’s obsession with the underground, especially now that he swore it no longer obsessed him?
She smiled, as if forgiving me for something. The simplicity of that smile charmed me for only a moment. Simplicity, where no simplicity should exist. She would always be complex, complicated, devious, in my mind.
“I want to buy a painting,” she said.
I had a feeling this was her last-ditch effort to make nice. She would buy my friendship.
“A painting,” I echoed as if I were a carpenter, a butcher, a priest, anything but a gallery owner.
“Yes,” she said. “What do you recommend?”
This was a good question. I wanted to recommend that she never see Duncan again. That she leave Duncan alone before she hurt him irrevocably. That she never return to my gallery because … because … Did I say these things? No. I did not. I held my tongue and pointed out the most expensive items in my gallery: the two squid sketches by Lake called, perversely, “Gill” and “Fin.”
She nodded, smiled, looked at them, then looked at me. “They’re very nice. I’ll take them,” she said, and, turning, blanched as she noticed the price.
I let her buy them, although I could see they were too expensive even for her. (She didn’t have much money. You made her spend two months’ allowance on those paintings. I bought them from her afterward so she’d have money to live on.)
We exchanged minor pleasantries. At the door, purchases in hand, she turned back to me, smiled, and said, “Maybe someday I can join you and Duncan for lunch with Bonmot.”
For lunch. Under the willow trees. Just the four of us. How comfortable. How perfect. We would eat our sandwiches in the glare of the summer sun and talk of flesh necklaces and how they form and do not form in this forlorn city by the River Moth. Just now, even in remembering this suggestion, I feel that I am drowning.
A blackness grew inside of me, or the fungus overcame me, or any of a number of conditions or situations that you may, reading this, imagine for yourselves, and I said:
“I wonder. What route will Duncan take tonight? The Path of Remembering You or the Path of Forgetting You.”
The painting of the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office actually looked quite striking in the light that pierced the windows and gave my humble gallery a golden hue. The details of that painting became etched in my memory as I stared at it until I could no longer feel the reproach of her gaze and I knew she had gone.
My gallery was empty again. I was alone again. And that was as it should be.
Although I saw Mary on Duncan’s arm a dozen times after that, the next time I spoke to her directly was at the party where she stood waiting for me at the foot of the staircase, the dagger of her comment about Duncan held ready.
* * *
Ironic, really. I have reached out across time and space to construct a mosaic of her in a harsh light, only to find that now, when she shares a room with me, that light fails and finds her nearly … harmless.
Perhaps I have never really understood Sabon. Perhaps she remains the type of cipher who seems more remote the more words I devote to her. Fading into the ink, untouchable.
The fungus in this place has eaten into the typewriter ribbon. I’m typing in sticky green ink now, each word a mossy spackle against the keys. If I could turn off the light, no doubt my sentences would read themselves back to me in a phosphorescent fury—the indignation of creatures uncovered from beneath a rock. (Equipment failures should never be part of your narrative. That’s the first lesson Cadimon Signal ever taught me.) My ink has defected to the cause of the gray caps; not so my blood.