horrer story ... GRANTA...

part 2

The woman looked at me, her expression unreadable. Then she tilted her pitcher toward us and filled the bowl with water. She waited for it to settle, and withdrew a vial from her sleeve. A single drop of oil struck the surface, and after a moment it spread outwards. She cupped her hands around the bowl’s edge and gazed deeply into it.

I looked over at Maxa. Her face had lost its lazy, indolent softness; she was alert, tense, her lower lip pinched beneath her tooth. The woman looked up at me again, and then returned her gaze to the water. ‘You are a conduit for violence, but not a host. It passes through you,’ she said.

‘Is that all?’

‘You will die a violent death.’

I saw Maxa gather the red tablecloth in her hands and feared she would yank the bowl and table over.

‘Maxa,’ I said, ‘she’s just a foolish woman.’

The woman’s eyes snapped at me, and then drifted back down to her bowl.

‘What do you see in there, about my friend?’ Maxa asked.

Back in her flat, Maxa seemed agitated. She spun around, pinching the air as though reaching for something, and finally alighted upon a black box on her vanity. When she opened it, I saw soft spheres resting in between crumpled cloth. She removed one and held it up.

‘A fig,’ she said, ‘all the way from Spain.’ She handed it to me. It was warm and dense and heavy, and a milky drop of nectar clung to the fruit’s opening.

‘Where did you get these?’ I asked.

‘Oh, an admirer left them for me after a show,’ she said. ‘Eat!’

I did not know whether to bite or split, but Maxa bit into hers and I did as well. In the bite, I could see hundreds of tiny seeds, shadowed and clustered like orphans at an open door. I pushed into the opening with my finger, and the fruit clung to me like rugae drawing me in.

‘It’s the flower,’ she said. ‘It’s grown inward, see? It is less beautiful but much sweeter for the effort. I’m told wasps crawl into its depths and die.’

The fruit slid down my throat, but I could not bring myself to take another bite.

Ido not know when I first understood that Marcel was Maxa’s lover; she never talked about him. Marcel was a queer figure, always fluttering and talking, the opposite of Maxa’s languid substance. He was mealy and pale and perpetually damp; something one might uncover by inverting a stone in a garden. His hair was his only redeeming feature; long and soft. But I noticed that her chin twitched downward in his presence, and his never did. I did not like how he touched her, as if he owned her from her skin inward; the way he tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled as if drawing on a leash; and pinched her breasts and thighs as though testing her tenderness.

Ido not know when I first understood that Marcel was Maxa’s lover; she never talked about him. Marcel was a queer figure, always fluttering and talking, the opposite of Maxa’s languid substance. He was mealy and pale and perpetually damp; something one might uncover by inverting a stone in a garden. His hair was his only redeeming feature; long and soft. But I noticed that her chin twitched downward in his presence, and his never did. I did not like how he touched her, as if he owned her from her skin inward; the way he tangled his fingers in her hair and pulled as if drawing on a leash; and pinched her breasts and thighs as though testing her tenderness.

He did not like me either. He called me Maxa’s little Arab, her w***e, her vase de nuit. One evening, after the two of them had polished off a bottle of Arrouya noir, he put his cigarette out in my skirts. I yelped and leapt up from the divan, shaking the material so it did not catch on fire. From beneath heavy lids, Maxa watched this performance without comment, even when I looked at her for guidance. Then, she yawned, her tongue black with wine. Only the next day did she take me out to buy me a new skirt and laughed as if we were dearest and oldest friends catching up after an absence.

It was Marcel’s idea to take us both to see La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It was brand new, and nearly impossible to attend, but Marcel knew a man who knew a stagehand.

The woman shook her head. Maxa dug into her glove and removed another franc. The woman slipped it into her purse and gazed back down.

‘On a distant shore, your lover will find you,’ she said. She looked back at me. ‘What are you?’ she asked, but I had no answer.

Maxa brought me to her apartment for preparation. The dress she’d found was short, heavy with silver beads, beautiful despite being shapeless. When I reached out to run my fingers through the fringe, Maxa slapped my hand away. ‘Hair first,’ she said, pushing me down in her chair.

Maxa let my hair down and tried to take a brush to it. The brush caught, resisted. She instead ran her fingers through from root to tip, lightly tugging at the snarls and knots. ‘There’s no reason to let it be like this,’ she told me.

In the mirror, my hair made me look indescribably young. I looked away. It’s always been this way I said.

We should change that, Bess

‘Why do you call me Bess?’ I said.

She lifted my hair up like a curtain and let it drop over my shoulders. I thought she would refuse to answer, but when she spoke her voice curved with a smile.

‘Have you read The Highwayman?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘A lover read it to me,’ she said. ‘He brought it from Scotland.’ She fondled the curls that gathered around my ears. ‘A landlord’s daughter falls in love with a brigand, and he is betrayed to soldiers.’

She tugged again, and I yelped at the pain. She rubbed my scalp soothingly and then opened a drawer behind her. With a whisper, she looped a scarf over my wrist, binding it to the arm of the chair.

‘Maxa –’

‘The soldiers come she bound the other arm,and tie Bess – that’s her name, Bess – to her bedpost, and place a musket between her breasts When she lifted the scissors into the air, I struggled against the bonds, but it felt perfunctory. I knew what was going to happen.

‘She knows that they are plotting to kill her lover as soon as he returns, so she finds the trigger of the gun,’ Maxa said. ‘And her finger moved in the moonlight –’

The first cut was crisp and terrible.

‘Her musket shattered the moonlight –’

Another.

‘Shattered her breast in the moonlight –’

Again.

‘And warned him with her death.’

I hadn’t realized how much my scalp had been aching until so much of me was gone. My hair ended in a jagged horizon at my chin. ‘I look like an urchin,’ I said.

‘I should leave you like this,’ she said to my reflection.

I believed that she would, but then she laughed. ‘I’m not finished.’ She pulled the chair sideways and sat directly across from me, bringing the blade close to my face. Every dry snip sounded like a mouse setting off a trap. Dozens of snips, dozens of mice scuttling to their doom.

‘So she died for her lover,’ I said.

‘He dies for her, too,’ she said. ‘At the end. He’s shot down on the road.’

With the weight lifted, my hair gathered up into the curl I hadn’t seen since I was a girl. She oiled it a little, then brought a hot iron to the ends, curling them under. After, she pasted curls to my forehead with petroleum jelly. ‘Spit curls,’ she said. ‘One for every man you’ve kissed.’

‘I haven’t –’

‘Shhh.’

‘Maxa,’ I said, ‘are you still upset about the fortune teller?’

She shook her head as she dragged her finger down her tongue, sharpening the curl by my ear to a point. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not a mulâtresse. That was my mistake. The reading was similarly in error.’

I stared at the tapestry behind her head – some Eastern cloth tacked to the wall; a tableau of tigers and elephants.

‘What are you?’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What sort of an answer is that? You must know.’

‘My mother was a teacher,’ I said. ‘My father died when I was young.’

A bobby pin scraped my skull and I flinched. Maxa looked slightly deflated, but then she busied herself at her vanity. She lifted up one of her bottles and poured out a spoonful. I opened my mouth obediently, like a child, and the liquid was bitter. I asked her what it was, and she did not reply. The powder puff huffed over my face, and I coughed. I felt a warmth gathering in my belly; the air softened. Maxa had been chewing on fennel seed; her breath was sweet.

‘What country did your mother travel to, to teach the heathens?’

I closed my eyes, as if trying to remember, even though I knew

I did not. ‘A warm place,’ I said. ‘She was sent back after the war.’

‘What do you remember, of the warm place?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Trees.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Bess. What kind of trees?’

I tried to imagine them, but as soon as one appeared in my mind’s eye I saw my mother, laughing, bending down for me, and I felt my mouth tremble.

‘Oh oh oh now,’ she said. ‘Never mind. Now is not the time. You have to be still.’

I clenched my anus and felt my organs settle in me. She drew on my face and it felt like she was drawing forever, like she was tracing my whole self because I’d faded away. Like I’d become a smooth dome of skin and she needed to put back what had vanished.

She lifted her gilded hand mirror and inverted it benefits.