Madonna of the Apes Read online

  ***

  They lay together on her bed after a while, Fred tracing the serpent’s coil around her arm, beginning at the wrist, and finishing at the flat head behind her shoulder. She was obliged to shift position somewhat, in order to accommodate his exploration. “It might be a good name for the snake,” Fred said. “Amnesia.”

  “I’m liking the name,” she said. “I’m enjoying how close we are, and me not having to be anybody.”

  “I’m not forgetting on purpose,” Fred said. “It’s like a hole I fall into, maybe, well, when, if I care about someone. It’s not…”

  “I said, don’t worry about it. Things come to pass. Like me. Waiting for my big break. You know? If you push it nothing happens, nothing comes.”

  “Your big break.”

  “I’m not teaching math in Quincy Community College forever.”

  “If we stretched it out, uncurled it, how long would it be? Is it male or female?” Fred asked.

  “Like I loved making love with you. But next thing you know, it’s done. There has to be the next thing to keep us going. Anticipation, like my uncle says.”

  “Like dinner at Charlie’s?” Fred said.

  “I guess you could anticipate that,” she said. “Though maybe not as much if you’ve ever been there before. More like that man’s box.” She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

  “Box?”

  “You said some man was looking forward to a box. We were talking about anticipation. Tell me about the man’s box.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Fred said. “I was watching out for the man. I never saw it.”

  “See, and that makes it stick in your head. Anticipation. Like stock. People buy what they hope is going to happen. It’s human nature. It’s la condition humaine. You remember the box because you never saw it, whereas if you saw it—well, who’d remember a box?

  “Let’s go eat. Bring your stuff with you, because I’m not coming back after.”

  “My worldly goods,” Fred said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  She strode along the sidewalk, the big black cloth bag she carried swaying lethally from her left shoulder, making it advisable for Fred to keep to her right.

  Charlie’s, six steps down from the sidewalk, on Charles Street, was dressed like an Italian nightclub on a highway outside of town. The music was, or might be, Bulgarian folk rock, and the menu Franco-Lebanese. Once they’d fought successfully for a table, she studied the menu. “You sneaked off the other night. Man of mystery. You left me a ballpoint pen. Touching gesture. I’ve been treasuring it. It said Bic on it. I’ll have the vegetable plate and the fat beans they do here. Fava beans. I could kill for their fava beans. And get me any beer they have on draught.”

  Fred took their order to the counter, paid, and accepted a woman’s promise to deliver the order to their table.

  “Given you know my name and, even after all this, yours has temporarily slipped my mind,” Fred said, “I’m grappling with the question who has the advantage.” He sat across from her with his iced tea. They wouldn’t trust him to carry her beer.

  “Knowledge is power,” she said.

  “Whereas, on the other hand, ignorance is bliss. Also a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Fred said.

  “I’m going to Cleveland,” she countered.

  “Just when I was getting to know you.”

  “A wedding. Leaving Friday morning, back Sunday. I’m maid of honor. You should see the commotion we went through to get half-decent looking matching dresses with long sleeves.”

  “It’s a Muslim wedding?”

  “Carla, my friend, the bride—you met her.”

  “I did?”

  Her food arrived, and the beer, in a slopping mug. “Running. Yesterday morning. Along the river.”

  “That was Carla,” Fred said.

  The woman put a broad brown bean into Fred’s mouth. It was the size of the first joint of his thumb, and spicy. “Anyway, Carla said either we cover our arms, or five bridesmaids get tattoos like mine. There’s six of us. That would have been a bonanza for Big Sid in Hanover, and it would also have knocked their eyes out in Cleveland, from what I hear. But a couple of the girls weren’t really that interested. A tattoo like mine, you have to want it a lot. You have to want it until you die, or at least lose your arm. So we went with long-sleeved dresses.”

  “All the same color,” Fred said.

  “A bridesmaid’s first duty is to make the bride look good,” she said. “By contrast. And the color she chose is going to accomplish that end. I won’t even tell you what the color is, or what they call the color. After the wedding I’ll dye it, and if that doesn’t work I’ll burn it. So, Sunday night, after you left, where did you go?”

  “I told you, I do security.”

  She poked with her fork among her colorful array of vegetables, found a suitable victim, and held it in front of her mouth. “Tell me more.”

  Fred said, “Since it’s security, I can’t really tell you. Beyond I was doing security for a guy. Private operation.”

  “You have a beeper or something? I didn’t hear it go off.”

  She bent a roasted carrot into her mouth and chewed it.

  Fred, having drunk his iced tea to the dregs, rattled his ice and fished with her spoon for the lemon slice. He’d ordered something that turned out to be mostly ground lamb. “So she’s going to live in Cleveland? The guy works in Cleveland?”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend. Carla. In the green shorts.”

  “Not only do you remember Carla’s name, you remember her shorts,” the woman said. “There’s hope for you.”

  Fred ate some ice. The lower legs of people lined up to get inside were visible on the sidewalk, standing patiently, their owners facing each other, presumably in conversation, the women’s legs for the most part bare, the men’s in pants.

  “No,” Fred’s companion was saying, “it’s where the church is, and the family, the bride’s family. He’s from Richmond. Virginia. They met here. School. Her family’s Cleveland, they do the whole Cleveland thing there, people send Cleveland-sized wedding presents like they’re going to live in a big house with silver soup tureens, then they come back to their apartment here and there’s nothing to do with the stuff. Except give it away one by one when their friends get married, which is where most of it came from anyway.”

  “Marriage,” Fred said.

  “You got that right. Candlesticks. Soup tureens. What is this, 1760? Thank you notes. Is this a parsnip? And they have to rent a storage locker to keep it in. It’s the quandary of our age. Do they rent a locker in Cleveland, where it’s cheap, or do they pay to ship it here and rent here for three times the money?”

  “Imagine this,” Fred said. “You’re in your dress with the sleeves, whatever the color is. You all march in throwing the roses, whatever it is you throw. And there, over the altar, is one of those old holy pictures. This one shows the Blessed Virgin, sitting on a rock, with the baby on her lap, but he’s reaching out for a fig a monkey is giving him. Or an ape. Or maybe the ape took it from him. You get the idea.”

  “What’s your question?”

  ***

  “Not so much a question,” Fred said. “More along the lines of, Imagine that!”

  The woman pushed her plate aside, still with a third of its original burden. “Have to tell you, Fred,” she said. “I’m not much of a believer. Is it a Garden of Eden idea?”

  “Hadn’t considered that,” Fred admitted.

  “But then there’d have to be two apes. Two of every animal, remember?”

  Fred said, “Something like that. You going to finish your beer?” She pushed it across the table to him. He’d chosen a dark draught for her that had gone warm and still. He polished it off.

  “Those people would kill for our table,” she said. “Let’s have dessert.”

  Half an hour later, after she had damaged and dispersed a bowl of rice pudding, they reached the
street again. The sidewalks were thronged with people, none of whom were the woman’s friends to spread out their arms, calling, “Hi, Manuella!”

  “I’ll walk you home,” Fred offered.

  “Subway,” she corrected him. “Will it rain again, do you think?”

  They both looked at the sky, studying the question, as they walked.

  “Bound to, sometime,” Fred concluded.

  “Back from Cleveland Sunday night.”

  “With a new dress with long sleeves,” Fred remembered. “Can’t you take off the sleeves, when you’re done with the wedding?”

  “Goddamned right. I’ll tear off the sleeves and shorten the skirt by about a yard and a half.”

  “If the dye job works, it could come out looking like your shorts. Red, I remember.”

  “Good for you. Maybe I’ll take the whole top off. I hate the top. It makes my breasts look like I keep them in a box under the bed.”

  They got her to her stop; she placed a kiss in the vicinity of Fred’s face, and rummaged in her bag for a token.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was almost ten by the time Fred reached the alley from which he could overlook the entrance to the Pekham Street building. There was a smell of spring in the air, from the river, stronger even than the smell of the alley. It was raining again or, more exactly, a fine mist hung in the streets, collecting the city’s lights and diffusing them. If he stayed in the alley all night he was going to be wet by morning.

  “The man was out of his depth,” Fred muttered. “Even so, he was too docile. He wants the chest back but he’s not desperate for it. If he knew what it was, he’d be desperate. Ten thousand bucks isn’t much to offer for something that’s worth the gross domestic product of Tasmania.”

  The windows were lighted on Franklin Tilley’s floor. Cracks of light showed around the closed blinds on the Pekham Street side. Fred rang the bell for number 2. No name there. Persons living in Boston were apparently as skittish about revealing their surnames as the city fathers were about committing the names of streets to signs.

  The street door opened on Franklin’s anxious face, floating above that same blue suit. “I was passing by,” Fred said.

  “Fuck you. I’m expecting…”

  “Yes?”

  “I have guests,” Franklin said, shoving at the door.

  Fred reassured him, “I love meeting new people.” He was moving Franklin backward into the hallway while he spoke. “Let’s go up and talk about that chest you want.”

  Tilley hesitated and a confusion of expressions writhed across his face. “Not really a good time,” he protested.

  “Why waste the opportunity?” Fred asked reasonably. “As long as I’m here. This time tomorrow we could all be dead.”

  “Jesus!” Franklin seemed to make his decision while they climbed the stairs. “Don’t mention the chest. I’ll get rid of my guest.” The door to his apartment was ajar and as it opened a young woman looked up from her spot on the rug.

  “Wrong guy,” Franklin told her.

  The little black dress she wore had not been designed to handle the proprieties of sitting on the floor, but she was doing her best, arranged in that way women have that begins in a kneeling position but allows gravity to settle the buttocks on one side or the other of the bent thighs and calves. There was a lot of thigh, and a lot of calf, all in black net stockings—and there was a lot of blonde hair also, in a cloud around a charming, inquiring face. She’d taken her shoes off—house rules—and they sat, black with extravagantly high heels, next to the door, their toes pointing at an angle toward each other.

  “Fred,” Fred said, striding across the rug in his loafers and sticking out a big right hand like a man at a Rotary convention. She held a snifter in both hands, in which amber liquid slopped light. She had to put it down to accept Fred’s hand.

  “Delighted,” she said, lighting the room with a dazzling smile.

  “And you are? Beyond delighted…?” He kept the hand, looking frankly into her large blue eyes.

  “Sorry. Suzette Shaughnessy.”

  “Please, your shoes,” Franklin Tilley tried.

  Fred gestured him to silence, sat next to Suzette Shaughnessy and looked at the walls. Was there less here than there’d been? More? Was it all the same stuff? The not-Cézanne Bathers was in the same place it had been. That had not been the package under Franklin Tilley’s arm earlier. Or if it had been, he’d brought it back. The three million dollar not-Mantegna was also where it belonged.

  “And Frank’s letting you dip your beak into some of his famous brandy,” Fred said. “Good boy, Franklin.”

  Franklin explained, crossing to the sideboard in his stocking feet. “The famous brandy’s gone. There’s Armagnac, Drambuie…”

  Fred gestured the offer away and settled back, stretching his legs and looking at the walls he wasn’t leaning on. Seen for the second time, the mixture was if anything more baffling. With a few odd additions, it was like what you might find in a museum in a large French city in the provinces. For the most part the good stuff was in Paris, where the good people were: the stuff Napoleon stole, or that had been left to the sudden new Republic by a headless count.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Fred told Suzette Shaughnessy. “You staying in town?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “At the Ritz,” she said. So she wasn’t local. Fred, without changing his expression, registered his lucky guess. She palmed her hair back from her face and took a sip from her snifter. Franklin stood with his, looking down at the seated couple.

  “It’s delicious,” Suzette told Franklin. “The Armagnac. But it goes to my head. In a minute I’ll start telling secrets.”

  “We’re all friends,” Franklin said. He tried for the laugh that went with Fred’s Rotarian handshake. “Seriously, though, the offer’s good until Sunday. If you can produce. After Sunday I can’t promise anything.”

  “He’ll be here Friday, we’ll likely come by Saturday,” Suzette said. Her dazzling smile promised half of everything that had ever existed in the world. In a remarkable feat of gymnastics she rose from the floor in a single fluid movement that managed both to preserve her modesty and to promise the other half. “Mitchell is obviously not coming tonight,” Suzette said. “I can’t wait. Fred, lovely to meet you,” she said, taking his hand again as she swung her bag over her bare shoulder. “My coat,” she commanded.

  “Give me a half hour,” Tilley pleaded. “He gets distracted. He’ll be here.”

  “In that case call me,” Suzette said. “I’m out of here. Get my coat.”

  Franklin disappeared into the bedroom and Suzette repeated to Fred, “At the Ritz. Room 503.” She gave him a moment’s searching glance that went vapid as Franklin came back into the room with a black raincoat, which he helped her get into. “Without it, I don’t think he’ll be interested, but I’ll call you,” she told Franklin. She stepped into her angled shoes without moving them, which made a sort of dance step that kept both men’s eyes firmly on her body until the door had closed behind it.

  The men were left staring as if the sun had suddenly been replaced by some unpleasant damp alternative. He’d stood to see Suzette off. Now Fred sat again in this chairless conceit of a room. He reached for the glass she’d left on the floor and took a sniff before he drank.

  “I expect people to lie to me,” Fred began. “It’s what people do. It’s easy, it’s obvious, it’s normal. So I don’t mind.” Tilley found a spot on the wall perpendicular to Fred’s and sat where he could lean against that. Above him a portrait of a man in a red waistcoat looked Dutch or English, maybe seventeenth century. The man, whoever he was, had money enough to have his portrait done. Or he was dead and his wife wanted to remember him in his red waistcoat.

  “What did she say?” Franklin protested.

  “I’m not talking about the woman,” Fred said. “What she said isn’t my business. No, what bothers me is not understanding a person’s motives. There a
ren’t many motives to choose from, after all. There’s envy, greed, hunger. There’s always sex. This whole thing…” he gestured around the room, “I just don’t understand it.”

  Franklin fiddled with his snifter. He unbuttoned his suit jacket. He stroked the fish on his necktie.

  “If it’s a stage set, what’s the play?” Fred pushed on. “I don’t understand. If you have all this money, why not be comfortable? If you want to have people over, nice people, like that lady, who have coats and shoes, and matching socks, why not be able to offer them a chair? Is it about sex or is that a side issue, maybe an avocation? You pretend the stuff is yours and you don’t want to sell, but everything here has a price tag on it. If you’re just fronting for all these paintings…”

  Franklin said, “I didn’t ask you to come. You came. You want to talk about the chest. Talk. Can you get it? I have to tell you, I’m—I more or less have to have it back.”

  “For example, talking of motives—my motive, coming here alone, is—I’m curious,” Fred said.

  Franklin stroked his fish. “It took me two hours to clean that gun,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that. Grandstanding for the other guy. What did you do next, go back to his place and let him suck you off?”

  “I’m curious about your motives,” Fred continued evenly. “Someone make a better offer? You sell it to one man for five, buy it back for ten, sell it again for twenty? Am I warm?”

  Franklin stroked his fish, then he adjusted the knot, allowing his neck more room. “You have a suggestion?” he asked.

  “Other motives,” Fred mused. “Thinking of you still. Fear is a good motive. People will do a lot when they are inspired by fear. But they don’t necessarily do it well. Fear closes the mind. Whereas curiosity, which opens the mind, might win the prize as the predominating human motive. Curiosity begins before sex, lasts longer, and when you come right down to it, a lot of the sexual instinct is curiosity anyway. Some of the sexual instinct involves issues of domination, true. As well as the internal itch. But curiosity is, of its nature, innocent, don’t you think? It makes us human. Hunger comes and goes, and even plants experience hunger and thirst. After we get so old and sick that hunger and thirst are long lost memories, and even in the face of that last mortal fear, we have to be curious about what’s coming next.”