The dog half-opened its eyes and scratched its neck. Then it settled down again and went back to sleep.
“He would be just about your age now,” the woman said.
“Then I seem to have all the parts in your story,” I said. “Both your savior and your son.”
“I suppose you could say that.” Her smile was warm but a bit sad.
My body felt heavy from the morning’s swim, and I thought I might drop off to sleep in the heat—like her dog—so I asked a question that had been bothering me for some time.
“What do you have in your bundle? It must be something very important.”
“A manuscript,” she said, gathering it up in her arms again.
“Well, don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m not going to touch it.”
“You can never be too careful,” she said.
“What sort of manuscript is it?”
“A novel. I’m a writer, and I couldn’t bear to have it stolen. That’s why I take it everywhere I go. You’re a writer,” she added. “You can understand how I feel.”
“Of course, though in my case losing a manuscript wouldn’t make much difference—no one cares what I write … So, did you come here to work on the book?”
“You could say that,” she said. A cicada started to cry in the garden and then fell silent. The sun had slowly made its way across the skylight, leaving the dog in shadow. “When I’m away from home, they sneak in and try to steal what I’ve been writing. I went out to the supermarket, and when I got back the lamp had been moved and the papers on my desk were askew. The next day I took the dog for a walk and my eraser was on the floor and some pages were missing. I could tell someone had been there. It was horrible. But it was no everyday burglar—he was after my manuscript.” She spoke more quickly, her fingers working frantically at the knot on her bundle. “And then that hunchback woman with the glasses published a novel exactly like the one I’d been writing. The same plot, same characters, even the same title. Isn’t that the most horrible thing you’ve ever heard?”
I nodded but said nothing.
“She pretended she’d written it herself and even had the nerve to give interviews. I read that she told them the book was the ‘result of destroying the world [she] had built in all her previous works’—or some such nonsense.”
She snorted and the tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth. It was shockingly red, like the tomatoes I’d eaten the day before.
“So that’s why I carry everything around with me now. You never know when they’ll try again. I’ve got eight hundred pages here; two hundred more and I’ll be done.”
She rubbed her cheek against the bundle.
“Do they have any of your books here?” I asked.
“They do,” she said, standing up and going to one of the shelves. “This is mine—one that managed to escape the burglar,” she said, handing it to me.
I worked on my article in my room until 7:30, phoned my editor, and then went down to dinner: bouillabaisse, salad, and a beer. The evening was still, but there were ripples on the surface of the pool. People were eating out on the terrace.
I had chosen the seat facing away from the view of the ocean, expecting her to appear at some point. I had even moved the extra chairs so the dog would have room.
There were no tomatoes in the salad tonight. I ordered another beer and ate the last few mouthfuls of bouillabaisse. But there was still no sign of her.
Later, in my room, I read “Afternoon at the Bakery.” It was about a woman who goes to buy a birthday cake for her dead son. That was the whole story. I should have gone back to my article, but I read her novel through twice, finishing for the second time at 3:00 a.m. The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again.
Inside the back cover was a short biography of the author—her date of birth, titles of her major works, and the fact that she had disappeared in 1997—and a picture of a woman I had never seen before. She wore glasses and had a hump on her back.
As I was getting ready for bed, I stopped to take a picture of my son out of my wallet. He was turning three when it was taken, just about to blow out the candles on his cake. He was holding a monster doll someone had given him. The corners of the picture were dog-eared, but I would never have a newer one.
“He’ll be eleven this year,” I said aloud. But there was no answer. The boy in the photograph was completely absorbed in his cake. I knew his age, but what good did that do me?
“Why don’t you start with the backstroke?”
She sat under a cloudless sky, waving from the deck chair. I was not particularly good at the backstroke, but I managed a hundred meters. “Marvelous!” she called. The dog watched, his head resting between his paws. “Now the breaststroke. Four hundred meters.”
“Four hundred?”
“I like watching you do the turns,” she said. Sunlight glinted off the bottom of the pool. Legs crisscrossed in front of me; a child’s inflatable ring drifted in the next lane. Fifty, seventy-five, one hundred … I kept track of the total at each turn.
“Four hundred!” I caught my breath for a moment, resting against the side of the pool.
“Wonderful!” she shouted, clapping on and on, the sound filtering down through the water. I took some pleasure in seeing how happy she was. “And for the finale, my favorite. The butterfly, if you please.”
When I was finished in the pool, I had to go to the aquarium to get the last of the material for my article. I even considered asking her to go with me. The aquarium was said to own a dugong—a creature much like a manatee—if it hadn’t died like the dolphins.
But when I completed the last lap of butterfly and pulled myself up on the side of the pool, she was no longer there. The deck chair was empty; the dog, too, had vanished.
The dugong was alive and well and, when I arrived, was eating some lettuce. Later, when I returned from the aquarium, I took a moment to organize the film I had shot and to pack my suitcase. I had to check out before noon, and the article was due to my editor the next day.
“She was an older lady, small, always carried a bundle about this big.” I held up my hands to show him, and the man behind the desk thought for a moment. “And she had a dog with her. A black Lab.”
“Oh, I know who you mean,” he said, nodding at last. “She checked out this morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
But why would she have left without saying good-bye? Without praising my butterfly one last time?
I carried my bags out to the parking lot before going to have a final look at the pool. It was as crowded as ever, umbrellas jostling one another, waiters hurrying about with trays of drinks.
But the chair where she had sat that morning was empty, and on it was her bundle, looking forlorn and almost frightened. I picked it up and untied the knot. Inside was a ream of blank paper.
POISON PLANTS
The first time I met the young man was at a charity concert, just as a children’s choir was beginning an encore of Brahms’s “Little Dustman.”
“Would you like another?” he asked, taking an empty champagne glass from my hand. His white suit—
