The Inseparables (26 page)

Inside Witherspoon's the heat was off. Henrietta could see her breath leaving her in white, individual storm clouds. A bell had chimed as the door opened, but no one was at the front counter. For a moment she lingered. The shop cat emerged, stalking something. Dust hovered. On the phone he'd given his name as Turner, and she was not sure whether this was a first or a last name. At the counter, she saw Harold's pens for sale, in the same velvet clamshell case she'd picked out for him. Outside, Oona stood at the window with her arms crossed imperiously against her chest. There were moments when Henrietta saw her husband in Oona—moments like this: the stubborn, protective, pugilistic instinct. Maybe something in the chin. Or the cowlick in the right eyebrow. When this happened, Henrietta felt a surge of recognition, then a thrill, then the disappointing crush of her brain putting it all in place, organizing the thought into grief. The experience of missing someone involved a constant negotiation with greed. She wanted all of Harold back, walking the earth, his warm body, his heart going. Not this tiny fraction. The logical, smart, thankful woman in her said, here is a flickering image of the person you miss inside a person you love. Be grateful.

She heard his footsteps before she saw him. Turner came lumbering into the room dressed in black—sweater, trousers, loafers. His hair was slick. The cat followed behind him, thinking maybe he had food. “It's you!” Turner said cheerfully, a stubby arm raised up in salute.

“It's me,” she said, trying to match the mood.

“How funny,” he said. “Not even a few hours after you were gone, a man came in with exactly what you'd described. Right down to a T.”

“You said on the phone.”

He stood at the counter. She waited. She did not know how this was going to go.

“I got a good deal on it,” he assured her.

She braced herself. She had seen the prices these things fetched. Outrageous sums that reminded her that people put value in the strangest stuff. Lately, everywhere she went she saw these foolish spinning things, on homes and schools. At James Hook and Co., on the channel in South Boston, a gilded, gorgeous lobster capped the roof. On the library in Aveline, a grasshopper, gleaming.

Turner put a canvas bag on the counter.

“Is that it?” she asked.

“The weathervane? No.” He pulled the zipper on the bag. “Before we get down to business, I have something I'd like you to sign, if that's not too much trouble.”

He arranged two books on the counter. That old shade of pink. Instinctively she turned to Oona, outside, who stood on her toes, peering. She had her hands up in disbelief.

“You found me out, I guess,” Henrietta said.

“I said you looked familiar!” Turner said, laughing. “Didn't I?”

“You did.”

“Although I can't claim to have remembered on my own.” He brought out the small card onto which she'd written her name and number. “It certainly helped that you left your name with me to Google.”

He put a pen on the counter.

The books on the counter were not the American version but the French.
Les Inséparables.
The cover was the most explicit of the foreign editions published, featuring only a nude woman staring at the camera with a look Henrietta had always taken for severe confusion. As in, why is my picture being taken? Why am I nude? She had detested this choice. She'd written letters in her pidgin French to her editor, claiming that the photograph exacerbated already sticky notions that female sexuality was brainless and supplicating and dumb. The French had loved the diagrams.
Les diagrammes sont incroyables!
The French loved anything that reaffirmed their belief that America was sexually regressive and mindlessly puritanical, and they especially loved that her book had outraged so many people.

She picked up the copy and looked closely at the picture. The model was a girl. A teenager, probably eighteen. Or, knowing the French, sixteen and coaxed into it. Why wouldn't the model look confused? The picture was supposed to be alluring, she knew. A young body. New skin. A darkly lit room. White curtains. A bed in the background, the sheets unmade, as if to invite you, the reader, to come and fuck this girl on this bed. Henrietta thought of Lydia and Lydia's academy full of supposed geniuses, none of them above ogling her picture, fetishizing her, and she thought that here, in this science-fiction century, nothing much had changed. A rite of passage disguised as a harmless prurience or, worse, beauty. The culture kept clamoring for the nipple.

“Do you sell books, too?” she asked.

He shook his head. “This is my mother's,” he said. “She lives with me. Across the road a bit.” He pointed. “She came from France after the war. I remember that when I was younger, she loved this book.”

“Oh did she,” Henrietta said with a wide smile.

“She just thought it was the funniest thing. Every Christmas she reread it.”

“That's a terrible tradition,” Henrietta said.

“And we would always know. We could hear her laughter downstairs. She loved the hot-air balloon especially.”

Henrietta flipped through the pages. Her own mother had never acted scandalized by her book, or ashamed of her. It was important to remember this. A tough woman, born in Odessa, carried to America in the arms of her own mother amid the sewage stink of steerage class, only to steam nurses' uniforms ten hours a day in a factory on West 38th Street as hot as a steel foundry, and her reaction was more pointed. “All the
shtupping
and all the allusions to male genitalia is one thing, hon,” she'd said not long after the book was published and Henrietta was a wreck. “It's just not a very good book, is all.” She was a tiny woman. Everyone was tiny then. A lack of food, of good nutrition, of sunlight. Her lack of height did nothing to reduce her fury, however, or her sense of righteousness, or her confidence. “Forget this happened,” her mother told her, talking about her book. “Do something else with your life.”

“Have you read this?” Henrietta asked Turner.

“This?” He grew instantly twitchy.

“So, yes. I know that look. That's usually the sign that someone has read it.”

“I loved the hot-air balloon!”

“Everyone always did,” she said.

“Because it's sexy
and
dangerous!”

“People say that to me, but I've always imagined it would be cold and cramped and difficult to balance yourself.”

“Also,” he said, a finger raised to make a point. “The diagrams are magnificent.”

She put up her hand. “Please don't. I know.”

“Funny. And vulgar. And occasionally disgusting. Magnificent.”

“Please,” she said, firmer. “I said I know.”

He found this funny. “I assume you would know, wouldn't you!”

She signed the book with the same looping, ugly scrawl she'd used forty years ago. Right after it was published she'd gone to so many bookstores to read and sign.
Meet your happy readers,
her publishers had implored. The lines usually went out the door. They'd set her up at a small card table at the back of the store. Men in suits would file through, straight from the office, liquor on their breath. Buying the book for the wife, they'd say, smiling, lying, eyes on her tits, asking her not to sign at the front but, say, perhaps on one of her diagrams, on the ballast of the hot-air balloon, or on the treasure map trail to the clitoris. She'd needed to bring Harold with her at a certain point. The attention became too much, the brouhaha too ridiculous, and he would stand at the back of the room so that she could find his eyes, or his confident smile, while she signed and signed. Henrietta's usual banter about autographs had not deviated in all these years.
Autographs,
it usually went.
I've never understood them. Especially mine. It's just a scribble and a circle, anyhow. You could do it for yourself if I trained you.
It did not escape her that her shtick was a deflection. The fact was that she had never known how to react to her own notoriety, and so she'd chosen self-deprecation because she thought demeaning herself was charming. She had preached self-confidence to her students all those years ago, and still she kept up with this inane banter. Here was another lecture for her imaginary academic career: A Metaphysical Investigation of Female Self-Criticism: The Socialization of Despair.

Turner smiled when she handed the book back to him. “My mom, she's unwell,” he told her. “And I think she would get a hoot out of knowing that I met you.”

“That's very nice to hear,” said Henrietta. “I hope she feels better soon.”

For a while she listened to Turner talk of his mother, hearing of her terrific recipes for madeleines, her opinions on Parisian fashion, her frustration over Turner's lack of a wife, her disappointment with how ugly and staid and vapid America had turned out to be. In Henrietta's normal life, which is to say in the life she had before Harold died, she would never have stood for this. This man's odd stories, this strange store, his obese cat. Outside, Oona protested. Her arms were up.
What the hell are you doing? Where's the stupid statue? Did Mr. Mustache steal it?
Henrietta lingered, though, and for a moment she forgot why she was here. He was making her laugh. He told a joke about a customer of his—
A man asked if I had any Rodin. And I thought he had asked if I had any rodents
—admittedly an awful joke, the kind of joke that probably only worked in a place like this, both art- and rat-filled. She found herself accepting his offer to sit. He had a bag of fresh baked bread that he'd brought. His mother's bread. Small and buttered and warm with a trace of the oven. “This is my breakfast,” he said. “A grown man and still,
ma mère
makes my meals for me.” Harold used to have the best bread at the Feast, she found herself admitting. “Harold was my husband,” she said. This, she had decided, was the worst sentence in the English language. Turner listened carefully. In the mornings, if you wandered past, you could smell everything baking, she told him. Harold had a window out to the street, where you could watch the pastry team working. This was when things were good. The pre-debt years. Mornings in the restaurant were the most wonderful times. She would come in by trolley some days, reading a book, and have coffee at the bar beside Harold, or a fried egg made on sourdough that he would grill for her.

“That sounds very nice,” Turner said.

“It was very nice.”

“When did he die?” he asked.

“Not long ago,” she said. Then she caught herself. “Eleven months ago. Three hundred days. Is that long? Or short? I've lost track of how other people think of this.”

He reached out to touch her hand. “It's short, I think,” he said. “But what do I know? I'm here in this shop filled with all of this strange stuff.”

“I used to have boxes of these in my house,” she said, pointing to the book. “They came all the time. Every new edition. I used to hide them from the family. But someone always found them and left them places to embarrass me.”

“Did you throw them away?”

She nodded. “Whenever I found them. But they're like locusts. They descend, often in groups, and they are very difficult to eradicate.”

“You could have made money on them.”

“No, I couldn't have.”

“Especially you. With your fame. Look around,” he said. “There's always money to be made selling your things.”

She wondered what of hers he might want. Would Turner want her clothing? The outfit she wore when she first met Loni Anderson? Would he want her lovely but environmentally disastrous teak bedroom furniture? Her teenage journals, which were squirreled away in the garage and full of lusty paeans to Rock Hudson? How about the copy of the letter that her former colleague from the women's studies department Dr. Darlene McClaren sent to her, which began,
I just wish you'd asked me to read this beforehand. I could have saved you what will surely be an
excoriating embarrassment. I could have told you to quit. To do something else.
Or a copy of the note that Henrietta had sent in return, pointing out that such a remark reeked of patriarchy. The note began,
You're telling me that you know what's good for me?
Would Turner want these?

Oona impatiently knocked on the front window.

“That's my daughter,” she told Turner.

“Checking on you, I suppose.”

“I think you may be right.”

“Asking, who is this weird gentleman harassing my mother?”

Henrietta got up and went to the door, stepping over the cat. Oona, red from the cold, leaned in, shaking her head in disbelief.

“What on earth, Mom?”

“He's
nice.
”

“He's nice?”

“He fed me his mother's bread. He's being nice.”

“The bread is poisoned, probably.”

“Listen to you,” she said.

“Arsenic. Strychnine. Who knows?”

“Who made you so suspicious?”

“You did!”

“Well,” Henrietta said. “He's fine and nice and there's no need to worry.”

Oona threw up her hands. “Does he have the dumb statue or not?”

Henrietta looked behind her. Turner was cleaning crumbs off the counter. “We can go get the dumb statue now,” he said loudly.

“He heard you,” Henrietta said.

“This is weird,” Oona said.

“Also, the bread is not poisoned,” he called out.

“See?” Henrietta said.

“I repeat, this is weird.”

“This is
you
being weird,” said Henrietta. “Arsenic! Strychnine! He's nice. His mother loves my book. He's a fan of mine.”

“Did you say that he was a fan?”

“Of mine!” Henrietta said. “They do exist.”

“But you hate your fans,” said Oona. “They scare you.”