In the living room, Claire played her Leonard Cohen. Suzanne taking her down to the place by the river.
I kept drawing my face.
19
BY APRIL, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper. The Hollywood Hills rose unnaturally clear, as if we were looking at them through binoculars. The new leaves were wilting in the heat that left us sweating and dispirited in the house with the blinds down.
Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate's treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.
'That was my great-aunt Priscilla's,' Claire said. 'She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War.' She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. 'She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman.'
Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. I plucked an onyx ring from the pile between us on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. I slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit my smallest finger, above the knuckle. 'Whose was this?' I held it out so she could see it without moving her head. 'Great- grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne.' Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made me feel large and ill bred. I imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught my least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of me, my gawky arms and legs, I would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold-rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. I gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.
The garnet choker, icy around my neck, was a wedding present from her mill-owning Manchester great- grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes I balanced on my knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by her father's aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. I was wearing Claire's family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.
In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied. No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.
Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.
'They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman.' She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn't want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I'd lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.
Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn't sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn't garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat. She didn't stake the flowers, and now they bloomed ragged, the second-year glads tilting to one side, Mexican evening primroses annexing the unmowed lawn.
Ron was away again, twice in one month, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead. Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him home.
Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to me, her spine threaded like jade.
She reached back for my hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child's, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. I took her hand. She brought my hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. I rested my face on her shoulder, her back was like fire. 'Ron'11 be back soon,' I tried to reassure her.
She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback's rattle. 'It's so hot already. What will I do when summer comes?'
She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.
'We should go to the beach,' I suggested.
She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. 'It's
not that.'
I was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into my hip. I freed one of my hands and reached under myself, pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing.
I handed her the ice-blue stone, the color of my mother's eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. 'This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.' She took it off. 'It was too big for her too.'
Next door, Mrs. Kromach's parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An icecream truck rolled down the street, playing 'Pop Goes the Weasel.' Claire lay down on her back so she could look at me, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink
