Tar Baby

3

FOG CAME to that place in wisps sometimes, like the hair of maiden aunts. Hair so thin and pale it went unnoticed until masses of it gathered around the house and threw back one’s own reflection from the windows. The sixty-four bulbs in the dining room chandelier were no more than a rhinestone clip in the hair of the maiden aunts. The gray of it, the soil and swirl of it, was right in the room, moistening the table linen and clouding the wine. Salt crystals clung to each other. Oysters uncurled their fringes and sank to the bottom of the tureen. Patience was difficult to come by in that fuzzy caul and breathing harder still. It was then that the word “island” had meaning.

Jadine and Margaret touched their cheeks and temples to dry the places the maiden aunts were kissing. Sydney (unbidden but right on time) circled the table with steps as felt as blackboard erasers. He kept his eyes on the platter, or the table setting, or his feet, or the hands of those he was serving, and never made eye contact with any of them, including his niece. With a practiced sidelong glance he caught Valerian pressing his thumb to the edge of the soup plate, pushing it an inch or so away. Instantly Sydney retraced his felt steps to clear the plates for the next course. Just before he reached Margaret, who had not yet touched anything, she dipped her spoon into the bisque and began to eat. Sydney hesitated and then stepped back.

“You’re dawdling, Margaret,” said Valerian.

“Sorry,” she murmured. The maiden aunts stroked her cheek and she wiped away the dampness their fingers left.

“There is a rhythm to a meal. I’ve always told you that.”

“I said sorry. I’m not a fast eater.”

“Speed has nothing to do with it. Pace does,” Valerian answered.

“So my pace is different from yours.”

“It’s the soufflé, Margaret,” Jadine interrupted. “Valerian knows there’s a soufflé tonight.”

Margaret put her spoon down. It clicked against the china. Sydney floated to her elbow.

She was usually safe with soup, anything soft or liquid that required a spoon, but she was never sure when the confusion would return: when she would scrape her fork tines along the china trying to pick up the painted blossoms at its center, or forget to unwrap the Amaretti cookie at the side of her plate and pop the whole thing into her mouth. Valerian would squint at her, but say nothing, convinced that she was stewed. Lobster, corn on the cob—all problematic. It came. It went. And when it left sometimes for a year, she couldn’t believe how stupid it was. Still she was careful at table, watching other people handle their food—just to make sure that never again would she pick up the knife instead of the celery stalk or pour water from her glass over the prime ribs instead of the meat’s own juices. Now it was coming back. Right after she managed to eat the correct part of the mango, in spite of the fact that Ondine tried to trick her by leaving the skin on and propping it up in ice, she had dug in her fork recklessly, and a slice came away. Right after that Sydney presented her with a plate of something shaped like a cardboard box. Now she had hesitated to see if the little white pebbles floating in her bowl were to be eaten or not. It came to her in a flash—oysterettes!—and she had dipped her spoon happily into the soup but had hardly begun when Valerian complained. Now Jade was announcing a new obstacle: soufflé. Margaret prayed she would recognize it.

“Mushroom?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Jadine. “I think so.”

“I hate mushrooms.”

“I’m not sure; maybe it’s plain.”

“I like it when it’s hot, plain and fluffy,” said Margaret.

“Well, let’s hope that’s what we get. Omelet’s more likely in this weather.” Valerian was fidgety and signaled for more wine. “The only thing I dislike about this island is the fog.”

“It may not be good for eggs, but it’s doing a good job of souffléing my hair,” said Jadine. “I should have had it cut like yours, Margaret.” She pressed her hair down with both palms, but as soon as she removed them her hair sprang back into a rain cloud.

“Oh, no. Mine’s so stringy now,” said Margaret.

“But it still looks okay. That’s why that haircut’s so popular, you know? Uncombed, even wet, it’s got a shape that suits the face. This shaggy-dog style I wear has to be worked on, and I mean worked on.”

Margaret laughed. “It’s very becoming, Jade. It makes you look like what was her name in Black Orpheus? Eurydice.”

“Chee, Margaret, chee,” said Valerian. “Eurydi-chee.”

“Remember her hair when she was hanging from the wires in that streetcar garage?” Margaret continued to address Jadine.

“You mean the hair in her armpits?” Jadine asked. She was uncomfortable with the way Margaret stirred her into blackening up or universaling out, always alluding to or ferreting out what she believed were racial characteristics. She ended by resisting both, but it kept her alert about things she did not wish to be alert about.

Margaret’s blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes crinkled with laughter. “No, I mean the hair on her head. It was lovely. Who noticed her armpits?”

“I would like to stay well through dessert, ladies, if you please. Could we find another topic?”

“Valerian, could you for once, just once—”

“Say,” Jadine broke in. “What about Christmas? That’s a topic we need to talk about. We haven’t even begun to plan. Any guests?” She picked up the salad utensils from the bowl of many-colored greens Sydney held near her. “Oh, I meant to tell you, the von Brandts sent a note…”

“Brandt, Jade. Just plain Brandt. The ‘von’ is imaginary,” Valerian said.

Margaret took hold of the long wooden handles poking out of the salad bowl that Sydney held toward her. Carefully she transferred the greens to her plate. Nothing spilled. She took another helping and it arrived safely also. She sighed and was about to tell Jade to decline the Brandts’ invitation when Valerian shouted, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

Startled, Margaret looked around. He was glaring at her. Jade was looking at her plate while Sydney leaned near her wrist. “What?” she said. “What?”—looking down at her plate. It was all right, nothing spilled, nothing broken: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber all there. Then Sydney set the bowl on the table and picked up the salad spoon and fork. She had left them on the table.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she whispered, but she was angry. What was so awful about that? They had looked at her as though she’d wet her pants. Then quickly they pretended it had not happened; Jadine was chirping again.

“Well anyway, they want you both for dinner. Small, she says. But the Hatchers are having a big weekend thing. And they want—” She paused for half a heartbeat. Their faces were closed, snapped shut like the lids of jewelry boxes. “They thought you’d like to come for the entire weekend. Christmas Eve, a dinner party; then breakfast, then some boating in the afternoon, then, then a cocktail party with dancing. The Journeymen from Queen of France are playing. Well, they’re not really from there. New Jersey, I think, but they’ve been playing at Chez Marin—” She couldn’t go on in that silence. “What’s the matter, Margaret?”

“Let’s go back to armpits,” Margaret said.

The maiden aunts smiled and tossed their maiden aunt hair.

“We’ll do nothing of the sort. You were saying, Jade?” Valerian drained his wineglass.

Jadine shrugged. “Are you planning Christmas here—or where?”

“Here. Quietly. Although we may have a guest or two.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Tell her, Margaret.”

“Michael is coming. For Christmas.” Margaret’s smile was shy.

“But that’s wonderful,” said Jadine.

“Valerian thinks he won’t. He will though, because I promised him this really terrific present.”

“What? Can you tell me?”

“A poet,” said Valerian. “She’s giving him his favorite poet for Christmas. Isn’t that so, love?”

“You make everything I do sound stupid.”

“I thought I described it fairly.”

“It’s not the words; it’s the tone.” Margaret turned her head to Jadine. “I’ve invited B. J. Bridges for the holidays and he said he’d come. He used to be Michael’s teacher.”

“And Michael doesn’t know?”

“Not exactly. But he’ll guess. I gave him a hint—a big one—so he could. I used a line from one of Bridges’s poems in my letter. ‘And he glittered when he walked.’”

“Then you may as well have your nervous breakdown right now,” said Valerian. “He won’t come. You’ve misled him entirely.”

“What are you talking about? He’s on his way. His trunk’s already been shipped.”

“That is not a line from anything Bridges ever wrote. Michael will think you’re dotty.”

“It is. I have the poem right upstairs. I underlined it myself. It was the one Michael used to recite.”

“Then Bridges is not only a mediocrity, he’s a thief.”

“Perhaps he was using it as a quotation, or an allusion—” Jadine fiddled with her hair.

“He’ll think you’re batty and…”

“Valerian, please.”

“…and go snake dancing.”

“Then I’ll go with him.”

“We’ve been all through this, Margaret.”

“When will you know for sure?” Jadine’s voice affected lightness.

“She already knows for sure. The rest is hope and a determination to irritate me.”

“Irritating you doesn’t have to be determined. All anybody has to do is breathe a slice of your air—”

“Must you always speak in food measurements? The depression is over. You are free to leave something on your plate. There’s more. There really is more.”

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this. You’re trying to ruin it for me, but you’re not going to. I tear my life apart and come down here for the winter and all I ask in return is a normal Christmas that includes my son. You won’t come to us—we have to come to you and it’s not fair. You know it’s not. This whole thing is getting to be too much!”

“Is that a problem for you? Having too much?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, but is it a problem for you? Because if it is I can arrange for less. I could certainly do with less myself. Less hysteria, less shouting, less drama…”

Jadine, unable to think of anything to do or say, watched tomato seeds slide into the salad dressing, and set about applying the principles of a survey course in psychology. During the two months she’d been there, Valerian and Margaret frequently baited one another and each had a dictionary of complaints against the other, entries in which, from time to time, they showed her. Just a May and December marriage, she thought, at its crucial stage. He’s seventy; she’s knocking fifty. He is waning, shutting up, closing in. She’s blazing with the fire of a soon to be setting sun. Naturally they bickered and taunted one another. Naturally. Normally, even. For they were decent people. Over and above their personal generosity to her and their solicitude for her uncle and aunt, they seemed decent. Decent like Sydney and Nanadine were decent, and this house full of decent folk situated in the pure sea air was exactly where she wanted to be right now. This vacation with light but salaried work was what she needed to pull herself together. Listening to Margaret and Valerian fight was a welcome distraction, just as playing daughter to Sydney and Nanadine was.

But recently (a few days ago, last night, and again tonight) flecks of menace lay in these quarrels. They no longer seemed merely the tiffs of long-married people who alone knew the physics of their relationship. Who like two old cats clawed each other, used each other to display a quarrelsomeness neither took seriously, quarreling because they thought it was expected of them, quarreling simply to exchange roles now and then for their own private amusement: the heavy would appear abused in public, the aggressive and selfish one would appear the eye and heart of restraint before an audience. And most of the time, like now, the plain of their battle was a child, and the weapons public identification of human frailty. Still, this was a little darker than what she had come to expect from them. Bits of blood, tufts of hair seemed to stick on those worn claws. Maybe she had misread their rules. Or maybe (most likely) she wasn’t an audience anymore. Maybe she was family now—or nobody. No, she thought, it must be this place. The island exaggerated everything. Too much light. Too much shadow. Too much rain. Too much foliage and much too much sleep. She’d never slept so deeply in her life. Such tranquillity in sleep made for wildness during the waking hours. That’s what it was: the wilderness creeping into Valerian and Margaret’s seasoned and regulated arguments, subverting the rules so that they looked at each other under the tender light of a seventy-year-old chandelier, bought by Valerian’s father in celebration of his wife’s first pregnancy, lifted their lips and bared their teeth.

“…she never liked me,” Margaret was saying. “From the very beginning she hated me.”

“How could she hate you from the beginning? She didn’t even know you.” Valerian lowered his voice in an effort to calm her.

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“She was perfectly polite and gracious to you in the beginning.”

“She was awful to me, Valerian. Awful!”

“That was later when you wouldn’t let Michael visit her.”

“Wouldn’t let? I couldn’t make him go. He hated her; he’d shrink at the very—”

“Margaret, stick to the facts, Michael was two or three. He couldn’t have hated anybody, let alone his aunt.”

“He did, and if you had any feelings you would have hated her too.”

“My own sister?”

“Or at least told her off.”

“For what, for God’s sake. For having a private wedding instead of a circus? You never invite them down here and she’s probably upset about it, that’s all. And this is her way of—”

“Dear God. You have screamed at me for years for having too many people. Now you want me to invite Cissy and Frank. I don’t believe—”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t want her here any more than you do. I am only trying to explain why they didn’t let us know about the wedding. From what I gather—”

“What do you mean us? She invited Michael! But not me!”

“Stacey’s idea.”

“Do you think if Michael got married I would invite Stacey and not her parents?”

“Margaret, I don’t give one goddamn—”

“She’s always treated me that way. You know what she did to me the first day I met her.”

“I suppose I should but I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Sorry.”

“What she said to me that first day?”

“It’s been some time.”

“About my cross?”

“Your what?”

“My cross. The cross I wore. My first communion present. She said for me to take it off. That only whores wore crosses.”

Valerian laughed. “That sounds like her.”

“You think it’s funny.”

“In a way.”

“That your own sister…my God.”

“Margaret, you didn’t have to do it—take it off. Why didn’t you tell her to go to hell?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Because you agreed with her, that’s why.”

“That my bride was a whore?”

“You know what I mean.”

“All I know is that you let her get under your skin and she’s still there after thirty years. You don’t give a gnat’s ass about the wedding. You just wanted to be anywhere Michael is. You can’t stand for him to be wherever you’re not.”

“That’s not true.”

“You wanted to crash some fatheaded wedding because Michael was there. You are too stupid to live.”

“I don’t have to sit here and be called names!”

“Idiot. I married an idiot!”

“And I married an old fool!”

“Of course you did. Who else but an old fool would marry a high school dropout off the back of a truck!”

“A float!” Margaret shouted, and when the wineglass bounced from the centerpiece of calla lilies and rolled toward him he didn’t even look at it. He simply watched his wife’s face crumple and her boy-blue eyes well up.

“Oh,” said Jadine. “This is…maybe…Margaret? Would you like to…” But Margaret was gone, leaving the oak door swinging behind her and the maiden aunts cowering in the corners of the room.

Sydney (unbidden but right on time) removed the glass and placed a fresh white napkin over the wine spot. Then he collected the salad plates, replacing them with warm white china with a single band of gold around the edges. Each plate he handled with a spotlessly white napkin and was careful, as he slipped it from the blue quilted warmer, not to make a sound. When the plates were in position, he disappeared for a few seconds and returned with a smoking soufflé. He held it near Valerian a moment for inspection, and then proceeded to the sideboard to slice it into flawless, frothy wedges.

Jadine considered her soufflé while Valerian signaled for more wine. It seemed a long time before he murmured to her, “Sorry.”

Jadine smiled or tried to and said, “You shouldn’t tease her like that.”

“No, I suppose not,” he answered, but his voice held no conviction and his twilight gaze was muddy.

“Is it because she wants to go away?” asked Jadine.

“Of course not. Not at all.”

“Michael?”

“Yes. Michael.”

He said nothing more so Jadine decided to exit as quickly as she could manage it. She was folding her napkin when suddenly he spoke. “She’s nervous. Afraid he won’t show. I’m nervous. Afraid he will.”

There was another silence as Jadine struggled to think of something purposeful—even relevant—to say. She couldn’t think of a thing so she gave up and said the obvious. “I remember Michael. He’s…nice.” She recalled an eighteen-year-old boy with red hair and cut-off jeans.

“Quite,” said Valerian. “Quite nice.”

“If he does come, as well as his friend, how can it hurt?”

“I don’t know. It depends.”

“On what?”

“Things outside my control. I can’t be responsible for things outside my control.” He pushed away his plate and drank his wine.

Jadine sighed. She wanted to leave the table, but didn’t know how. Does he want me to stay or doesn’t he? she wondered. Does he want me to talk or doesn’t he? All I can do is ask polite questions and urge him to talk if he feels like it. Maybe I should go to Margaret, or change the subject, or have my head examined for coming here. “No one asks you to be,” she said softly.

“That’s not the point, whether I’m asked or not. A lot of life is outside and frequently it’s the part that most needs control.” He covered his lips with his napkin for a while then uncovered them and said, “Margaret thinks this is some sort of long lazy vacation for me, designed to hurt her. In fact I’m doing just the opposite. I intend to go back at some point. I will go back but actually it’s for Michael that I stay. His protection.”

“You make him sound weak, the way you say that. I don’t remember him that way at all.”

“You did know him, didn’t you?” Valerian looked at her with surprise.

“Well, not really know him. I met him twice. The last time when you invited me to spend the summer in Orange County. Remember?” Jadine perked up, animated by her own memory. “My first year at college? He was there and we used to talk. He was…oh…clearheaded—independent it seemed to me. Actually we didn’t talk; we quarreled. About why I was studying art history at that snotty school instead of—I don’t know what. Organizing or something. He said I was abandoning my history. My people.”

“Typical,” said Valerian. “His idea of racial progress is All Voodoo to the People.”

“I think he wanted me to string cowrie beads or sell Afro combs. The system was all fucked up he said and only a return to handicraft and barter could change it. That welfare mothers could do crafts, pottery, clothing in their homes, like the lace-makers of Belgium and voilà! dignity and no more welfare.” Jadine smiled.

“That’s exactly what the world is waiting for: two billion African pots,” said Valerian.

“His intentions were good.”

“They were not good. He wanted a race of exotics skipping around being picturesque for him. What were those welfare mothers supposed to put in those pots? Did he have any suggestions about that?”

“They’d trade them for other goods.”

“Really? Two thousand calabashes for a week of electricity? It’s been tried. It was called the Dark Ages.”

“Well, the pottery wasn’t to be utilitarian.” Jadine was laughing. “It’d be art.”

“Oh, I see. Not the Dark Ages, the Renaissance.”

“It was a long time ago, Valerian. Eight years? Nine? He was just a kid then. So was I.”

“You’ve grown. He hasn’t. His vocabulary, perhaps, but not his mind. It’s still in the grip of that quisling Little Prince. Do you know it?”

“Know what?”

“That book. The Little Prince.”

“No. I never read it.”

“Saint-Exupéry. Read it some time. And pay attention not to what it says, but what it means.”

Jadine nodded. It seemed like a perfect exit line to her, since she didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t want to pursue his thoughts if they were anything like his eyes at this moment. Without melanin, they were all reflection, like mirrors, chamber after chamber, corridor after corridor of mirrors, each one taking its shape from the other and giving it back as its own until the final effect was color where no color existed at all. Once more she stirred to rise from the table and once more he stopped her, not irritably this time but with compassion.

“Did they trouble you—the things he said that summer?”

“For a while.”

“You knew better?”

“I knew the life I was leaving. It wasn’t like what he thought: all grits and natural grace. But he did make me want to apologize for what I was doing, what I felt. For liking ‘Ave Maria’ better than gospel music, I suppose.”

Nothing on Sydney’s face showed his disappointment that the soufflé had not been completely eaten up by either one of them. He collected the dishes with his look of alert serenity, and stepped through the hair of the maiden aunts with an easy silent tread. He was perfect at those dinners when his niece sat down with his employers, as perfect as he was when he served Mr. Street’s friends. The silver tray of walnuts, the equally silver bowl of peaches he brought in, and a jiffy later, the coffee—all were exactly and surreptitiously placed on the table. One hardly knew if he left the room or stood in some shadowy corner of it.

Jadine leaned her cheek on her fist. “Picasso is better than an Itumba mask. The fact that he was intrigued by them is proof of his genius, not the mask-makers’. I wish it weren’t so, but…” She gave a tiny shrug. Little matches of embarrassment burned even now in her face as she thought of all those black art shows mounted two or three times a year in the States. The junior high school sculpture, the illustration-type painting. Eighty percent ludicrous and ten percent derivative to the point of mimicry. But the American Blacks were at least honestly awful; the black artists in Europe were a scandal. The only thing more pitiful than their talent was their pretensions. There was just one exception: a Stateside Black whose work towered over the weeds like a sequoia. But you could hardly find his stuff anywhere.

“You look sad,” said Valerian. “He must really have made you suffer. You should have mentioned it to me. I wanted that summer to be an especially pleasant one for you.”

“It was. Actually it was good he made me think about myself that way, at that place. He might have convinced me if we’d had that talk on Morgan Street. But in Orange County on a hundred and twenty acres of green velvet?” She laughed softly. “Can you believe it? He wanted us to go back to Morgan Street and be thrilling.”

“Us? He was going with you?”

“Just to get us started. He meant us Blacks: Sydney, Ondine and me.”

“Sydney? A potter?” Valerian turned his gaze toward his butler and laughed.

Jadine smiled but did not look at her uncle.

“You can see how much he knows about Sydney. And I haven’t given you one-thousandth of what I gave him, of what I made available to him. And you have fifty times the sense he does, I don’t mind telling you.” Valerian’s sentences changed tempo. They were slower, and it was taking him longer to blink his eyes. “Margaret did that. She made him think poetry was incompatible with property. She made a perpetual loser of one of the most beautiful, the brightest boy in the land.” He held his forehead for a moment. To Jadine he seemed terribly close to tears and she was relieved when he merely repeated himself. “The most beautiful, the brightest boy in the land.”

“He didn’t turn out the way you wanted?”

“No.”

“You want him to be something else?”

“I want him to be something at all.”

“Maybe he is.”

“Yes. An adolescent. A kitten. But not playful. Complaining. A complaining kitten. Always mewing. Meow. Meow. Meow.”

“You shouldn’t hate him, though. He’s your son.”

Valerian took his hand from his forehead and stared deep into the peaches nestled in their silver bowl. “I don’t hate him. I love him. Margaret thinks I don’t. But I do. I think about him all the time. You know…this isn’t going to sound right…but I never was convinced that she did. Perhaps she did. In her way. I don’t know. But she wasn’t ready for him. She just wasn’t ready. Now, now she’s ready. When it’s over. Now she wants to bake him cookies. See him off to school. Tie his shoelaces. Take care of him. Now. Absurd. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe her. When he was just a little thing I came home one day and went into the bathroom. I was standing there and I heard this humming—singing—coming from somewhere in the room. I looked around and then I found it. In the cabinet. Under the sink. He was crouched in there singing. That was the first time, but not the last. Every now and then I’d come home, he’d be under the sink. Humming to himself. When I’d pull him out, ask him what he was doing there, he’d say he liked the soft. He was two, I think, two years old, looking in the dark for something—soft. Now imagine how many soft, cuddly things he had in his room. Bunny rabbits, slippers, panda bears. I used to try to be it for him, but I wasn’t there during the day. She was though. I sometimes had the feeling that she didn’t talk to him very much, then it would go away. The feeling, I mean. She’d change, she’d get interested in him, read to him, take him to shows, parks. Months would pass. Then I’d come home and he’d be under the sink again, humming that little, I can’t tell you how lonely, lonely song. I wasn’t imagining it; it was lonely. Well, he got older and she’d go hot and cold, in and out. But he seemed to miss her so, need her so that when she was attentive he was like a slave to her. Then she’d lose interest again. When he was twelve he went to boarding school and things were better. Until he came to visit. She would do things—odd things—to get his attention and keep it. Anything to keep his eyes on her. She’d make up things, threats to herself, attacks, insults—anything to see him fly into a rage and show how willing he was to defend her. I watched, and tried to play it down or prove, prove she was making it up. I always checked, it was always nothing. All I ended up doing was making him angry with me. I thought another child—but she said no. Absolutely refused. I have until this day never understood that. When he left for college I was relieved. It was already too late, but I still hoped he’d get out from under her. In a way he has, I suppose. Never visits, seldom writes. Calls sometimes. Complains. About Indians. About water. About chemicals. Meow. Meow. Meow. But he is on his own, I guess. On his own. But now—” Valerian turned to Jadine and stared right at her chin. “Now she wants to get hold of him again. Tempting him with some fake poet. And she wants to go back with him, live near him. For a while she says. Know what that means? A ‘while’? It means as soon as he trusts her again, needs her again, counts on her, she’ll change her mind, leave him. I haven’t seen him for three years, and the last couple of times I didn’t like him, or even know him. But I loved him. Just like I loved the boy under the sink, humming. That beautiful boy. With a smile like…like Sunday.”

The maiden aunts, huddled in the corners of the room, were smiling in their sleep. Jadine flared her nostrils in an effort not to yawn. Another cup of coffee, another glass of port—nothing could bring her alive to the memories of an old man. I ought to be saying something, she thought. I ought to be asking questions and making comments instead of smiling and nodding like a puppet. Hoping there was a residue of interest in her eyes, she held her chin toward him and continued to smile—but only a little—in case what he was remembering was poignant but not happy. Long ago she had given up trying to be deft or profound or anything in the company of people she was not interested in, who didn’t thrill her. Gazing at her stem of crystal she knew that whatever he was saying, her response was going to miss the point entirely. Her mind was in automatic park. She played with the little bit of port, gently swirling it around the well of her glass. “Sunday,” he was saying with the bell-full voice of ownership like “in the land” or “the whole of London” or “tout Paris.” He had a smile like Sunday. His Sunday. She wondered what Sunday was to this tall, thin man with eyes like the gloaming. Light? Warmth? A drawing room full of flowers? He was pouring himself a fifth glass of wine, too morose, too preoccupied with Sundays to think of offering her more. The peaches and walnuts were quiet in their silver bowls. She took a cigarette from a crystal cigarette holder. Next to it lay a round matchbox patterned like an Indian carpet. Inside were tiny white matchsticks with speckled gold heads that exploded with a hiss when struck. Three months, no two, and the quiet to which the house succumbed at night still disturbed her. Sunset, three minutes of Titian blue, and deep night. And with it a solid earthbound silence. No crickets, no frogs, no mosquitoes up here. Only the sounds, heard or imagined, that humans made. The hiss of a gold-headed match; the short cascade of wine into a goblet; the faint, very faint, click and clatter of the kitchen being tidied, and now a scream so loud and full of terror it woke the maiden aunts from their sleep in the corners of the room. And when they saw those blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes gone white with fear, they fled, pulling their maiden hair behind them.

She stood in the doorway screaming, first at Valerian and then at Jadine, who rushed to her side.

“What? What? What is it?”

But she would not stop. She just balled her beautiful hands into fists and pummeled her own temples, screaming louder. Valerian stared through port-softened eyes at his wife as though he, not she, were in pain.

“What is it, Margaret?” Jadine put her arm around her shoulders. Sydney and Ondine both burst through the other door.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“She hurt herself?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hold her hands or she will.”

“What is it? What happened?”

Then Ondine, fed up, shouted, “Speak, woman!” and Margaret sank to her knees gasping for the breath with which to whisper the words: “In my closet. In my closet.”

“Her what?”

“Her closet. Something’s in her closet.”

“What’s in your closet?”

“Black,” she whispered, her eyes shut tight.

Jadine dropped to her knees and leaned close to Margaret’s face. “You mean it’s dark in your closet?”

Margaret shook her head and put the back of her fist in her mouth.

Then Valerian spoke for the first time since she had come screaming into the room. “Margaret, this is not the Met. It’s a simple house on a simple island. Michael’s not even here yet…”

But she was screaming again and Jadine had to shout, “Tell me! Tell me!”

“In my things!” said Margaret. “In all my things!”

“What’s she saying?”

“Go look in her closet.”

“Take the gun, Sydney.” Ondine was the ranking officer, barking instructions.

“Right!” he answered, and ran back through the door to the kitchen.

“And be careful!” Ondine shouted after him.

“Hadn’t I better call the harbor, Valerian?” asked Jadine.

“Don’t leave me!” shrieked Margaret.

“All right. All right. Nanadine, give her some of that wine.”

“Maybe she’s had enough of that.”

“No. She drank hardly anything.”

“I heard her slam up the stairs in the middle of my dinner,” said Ondine. “Between then and now she could have killed a quart.” Ondine spoke without moving her lips hoping it was enough to keep Valerian from hearing.

“He’s in my things, Jade.” Margaret was crying softly.

“Okay, okay.”

“You have to believe me.”

“I don’t smell anything on her breath; maybe she just flipped.” Ondine was mumbling again.

“Can’t you get her to a chair?” asked Valerian. He hated seeing her bent over like that on the floor.

“Come on, honey. Let’s sit here,” said Jadine.

“What are you doing?” Margaret was screaming again and trying to stand. “Why are you acting like this? He’s there. I saw him. Valerian, please. Somebody better…go, call the harbor!”

“Let’s wait for Sydney before we call the police,” said Ondine.

“She’s drunk,” said Valerian with the wisdom of the drunk, “and nobody’s paid her any attention for a whole hour.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” She looked around at them all. They looked back at her, each thinking why, indeed, he didn’t; and then they heard the footsteps of Sydney plus one. Into the light of the sixty-four-bulb chandelier came Sydney pointing a .32 caliber pistol at the shoulder blades of a black man with dreadlock hair.

“It’s him!” Margaret screamed.

“Have mercy,” said Ondine.

“You can call the harbor now, Mr. Street,” said Sydney.

“I’ll do it,” said Ondine.

Jadine said nothing. She did not dare.

Valerian’s mouth was open and he closed it before saying, in a voice made stentorian by port, “Good evening, sir. Would you care for a drink?”

The black man looked at Valerian and it seemed to Jadine that there was a lot of space around his eyes.