How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (21 page)

“Just one click on the Internet…”

All my muscles tense. “You’re not going to read it? For your article or anything?”

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t. Cross my heart.” He crosses his heart. The mattress shifts. “I’m an ethical guy.”

His tongue finds my ear again.

Can I sink any lower?
“The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls.”

“No way!” he exclaims. He laughs. His shoulders rise and fall. The bed shakes. “What a clunker. No wonder it bombed.”

I hoist myself up on one elbow. “It’s the title of a poem by E. E. Cummings,” I sneer. “One of your favorites. One of the poets you turn to for that—let me quote—‘alone-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing.’ One of the poets you read in bed.”

E
leven

I
wrap the farm implements in tissue paper. I use three extra layers for the corn sheller. I tuck all the tools into an old discarded briefcase of my father’s, expandable and with a lock and key. I add some old socks for extra padding. I turn the key in the lock. Just above the brass plate are the initials RGR, half worn away from years of a rain, sleet, snow, and gloom-of-night trudge to Harvard Yard, bulky Emily-knit gloves rubbing against the monogram. I find a bungee cord in the closet. I wind that twice around the case, then attach the metal hooks under the briefcase handle.

I’m taking no chances. Still, when I look at my bundle, I have to pause. Has anything more clearly shouted
Valuables inside
!? I remember reading once about the diamond merchants of Amsterdam. How they walk around with diamonds loose in their pockets, rattling like spare change, or swinging in a cheap plastic bag from the Dutch equivalent of the five-and-ten. Who would ever suspect such humble carriers to contain such important gems?

Nevertheless, I can’t steal a page from a diamond merchant’s book. I’m too new at this game. And too scared. I read the Crime Watch page in the
Cambridge Chronicle
. I know about the gangs of kids in my neighborhood filching hubcaps and car radios. The drug addict who snatched a Gold Star mother’s pocketbook. The mugger who lifted a Rolex off the wrist of a tourist from Bangor, Maine. Just my luck that when my personal thief opened the briefcase, he’d dismiss the contents as junk and toss them away. Thus dooming my treasure, one of a kind, historically priceless, never to grace a pawnshop’s window or appear on eBay or even to end up lovingly catalogued in the collection of a hardened criminal.

I clutch the briefcase with both hands in front of me and walk the two blocks to my place of business. I hug the buildings. I stay away from the curb. How easy for a motorist to reach through an open window and grab my bag. I feel a bit like that marine, the one who follows the president everywhere. You can see him on the news, in photographs, fingers fused to the nondescript valise that holds the phone for ordering a nuclear attack.

An elderly man blocks my path. He wobbles on spindly legs and an unreliable aluminum cane. His hand trembles with the effort of reaching out to me. “Need help with that, young lady?” he asks. “You’re hunched over something awful. It must weigh a ton.”

“No thanks. It’s not as heavy as it looks,” I say. I swing it to demonstrate its eternal lightness of being. Despite their heavy padding, the farm implements clang and clink.

The old man chuckles. “What did you do? Rob Fort Knox?”

In my booth, I set down my bag. Without ballast, my spirits soar. Dealers are hanging around the front desk drinking coffee and trading tales of woe. “So this woman comes up to me holding some god-awful painting of a cat,” I hear one person say. “‘What can you tell me about this work of art?’ she demands. ‘Lady,’ I answer, ‘that’s not mine. That belongs to the guy in the next booth. I’m the one selling the big furniture nobody wants to buy.’” A gale of laughter greets this remark. What’s so funny? I wonder. I know all too well how it feels to pass whole days without a sale. To have something nobody wants.

Though not anymore. Not with the chamber pot. Not with the treasure now hidden underneath a pair of needlepoint pillows. I knock on the flimsy wall between me and Les Antiquaires de Versailles. “Gus?” I call.

He appears right away, like the genie at the rub of a lamp. Some lonely nights, against my better judgment, tamping down the suspicions I was used, I wish I could summon Todd that fast. Isn’t there a chance—however faint—that he manipulated me into bed because he wanted
me,
not my spilled beans? “I’m no one-night-stand kind of guy,” he said when he dropped me off.

“I talked too much. The wine…I might have told you things I didn’t intend…”

He put his hands on my shoulders. He looked me in the eye. “I don’t remember a word you said.”

Give him a chance, I tell myself now. Maybe I can learn to like him more. The bird-in-hand approach. Who’s perfect anyway? How can I resent his E. E. Cummings claims when I myself have lied about reading all of Proust? Was I that taken with Ned—or even with Clyde, that liar extraordinaire—from the start?

I’m afraid I’d have to say yes.

Never mind. Todd’s working on a deadline, he’s informed me. “Night and day. Damn shame.” So he is temporarily unavailable for the repeat R & R he assures me he’s pining for. Funny how his unavailability commands the attention that just one in a thousand and one nights of an ongoing assignation would never have drawn. I think of the advice from a fifties dating manual my mother used to scorn: Make yourself scarce, play hard to get, leave them wanting more, let them realize how precious you are. It’s the same with antiques: The one in a million is the one everybody wants, the object of greatest desire. Who even notices the dime-a-dozen quotidian bits and pieces we surround ourselves with? Who even notices the girl next door who once surrounded you?

“At your service, Abby.” Gus salutes. “What’s up?” His mustache is curled and waxed to even more of a fare-thee-well. A watch chain stretches across his brocade vest. All he needs is a white-powdered wig to peg him as a dandy in an eighteenth-century French court. Just the impression I’m sure he wants to convey. He twirls his mustache. He fingers the old acorn-shaped fob etched with somebody else’s coat of arms.

“How’s business?” I ask, wanting to spin out the suspense and milk my climactic scene of all its dramatic possibilities.

“Sold almost a dozen cherubs in the last few days. Not to mention a couple of matched pairs of those china dogs. Dogs and cats, Abby. Haven’t I always told you that?” He pats his brocaded stomach. “And angels, of course.” He pauses. “So where’ve you been lately? I haven’t seen you around here for an age. Are you neglecting your job?”

“I’ve been on the job. Tag sales and the like. Up in New Hampshire.”

He leans closer. He scrutinizes my face. “Alone?”

Do I look different? Does
Had Sex Recently
flame from my face like a tabloid headline? Maybe it takes the cultural intuition of a Frenchman—a French Canadian—to ferret out the kind of change a night in bed with a kama sutra expert might promote. “Of course alone.” I make myself meet his eye.

He winks. “If you say so.”

I switch into my diversionary business mode. “I need your advice,” I plead. I lean over the edge of my chair. I pull out the briefcase. I unwind the bungee cord, taking care that it doesn’t snap and bruise a face apparently already bruised with remnants of lust. I unlock the clasp. I click open the flap.

Gus is all business, too. He lowers himself to the floor. His knees crack and creak. “Ahh,
ma petite chouchoute,
what have we here?”

I check the aisle to make sure no one is walking by. I lower my voice. “You’re not going to believe this,” I whisper.

“Try me.”

I take out the farm implements. One by one I unwrap them. I arrange them on the kilim that covers part of the floor. I’m a doctor laying out her instruments for surgery. Scalpel. Tongs. Retractor. I save the triple-wrapped corn sheller for last. “Voilà!” I exclaim. I hoist it above my head like the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

Gus doesn’t seem to notice. Instead he picks up the branding iron. He is turning it over and over in his hand. He holds it close to the lamp. He tilts the shade. He sticks it next to the bulb. He studies it.

“Never mind that,” I order. “Take a peek at this.”

He looks up. “Oh, a corn sheller,” he remarks in the same blasé tone he might have used to say, Oh, a frying pan.

“You know what it is?”

“Of course. They’re very common.”

I am not deterred. “Not this one,” I stress. I award him my cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile. “This is something else again.”

“How so?” he asks.

“Because…” I say. I stick the utensil two inches in front of his pince-nez—“it was made in Nebraska. It has the initials
WC-EL
scratched right here.” I point. “Willa Cather—
WC
—was the lover of Edith Lewis—
EL
. She was born in Nebraska. She was buried in New Hampshire.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.” I stop. I wait. “Ta-da! This corn sheller belonged to Willa Cather!”

Do I expect him to burst into the “Hallelujah!” chorus? To jump? To throw his hands about and praise the Lord? Maybe a little, because my heart sinks when he says, “So, you’re planning on another coup along the lines of your chamber pot?”

I stiffen. “Why not?”

“I have my doubts.”

“Just because it’s another writer? Another literary artifact? Making the whole thing too neat a package, too convenient to be believable? The lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice-in-the-same-place phenomenon?”

“Not that. I’m not much up on farm implements, though I did read a book on them once—there are quite a few avid collectors in Canada—but…” He hesitates.

“But?”

“If I can remember right, there was a company called something like Witchell that produced a slew of them.”

“Which still doesn’t mean…”

“No, it doesn’t, but you need to prepare yourself for disappointment.” He smiles so broadly I can see the gold fillings glint in his teeth.

“Why are you smiling? Considering I’m about to be disappointed. Considering you’re about to tell me my literary corn sheller is merely run-of-the-mill. Run-of-the-cornmeal-mill.”

He keeps smiling. “I’m not telling you anything. We’ll ask Milligan.”

I think of the multiple spreading chestnut trees. “That crook?”

“It
is
his area of expertise.”

I shake my head. I lean back against the chair.

I must look as deflated as I feel because Gus reaches over and taps my shoulder. Is all that gold he’s exposing between his grinning lips
real
? “However…”

“However what?”

He holds up the branding iron. “This particular item.” He twirls it like a baton. Back and forth. Up and down. Figure eights. Fishtails. Arm rolls. I remind myself to ask him about a previous life in a marching band. “I think you’ve got something way, way,
très, très,
valuable here.”

“What?” I exclaim. “That?” I point. My mouth puckers in distaste.

“Let’s take this over to Milligan.” He makes come-hither wiggles with his eyebrows. “Just you wait.”

If you added a bowler and a cane, Fred Milligan could be Charlie Chaplin in
The Tramp.
Which doesn’t inspire confidence. He’s a small man sporting baggy black pants, a crown of unruly curls, a little coal lozenge of a mustache, and pulled-down, sad-clown eyes. His booth is a mess. Buckets and pails crowd the floor, stacks of magazines teeter in the corners, prints of cows and farm houses and fields and, yes, the spreading chestnut tree overlap on the walls like shingles on a roof. A wagon wheel minus most of its spokes leans against a barrel with broken, splinter-threatening staves. In contrast, a three-shelved glass case, lit from within, displays a cache of rusted tools laid out in precise, equally spaced rows. A bottle of Windex alongside a roll of paper towels garnishes the top of the case. A lingering ammonia smell and the sparkling glass testify to a loving, ongoing, however selective, maintenance.

Fred Milligan skips the preliminaries. “What you got there, Gus?” He points to the rewrapped, tissue-papered branding iron.

“Abby here”—Gus nudges my elbow—“and I want your professional opinion.” He pulls off the tissue paper. The crumpled pieces fall to the floor.

Fred Milligan doesn’t notice. His eyes stay on the branding iron. He doesn’t say a word. He breathes in and out with a smoker’s telltale rasp. And then his face and body do this amazing Chaplinesque thing. He sinks to the chair like a rag doll, all the stuffing out of him. His eyes and mouth drop even lower into even sadder expressions. His head flops. If, in a game of charades, his selection ordered him to act out disappointment and boredom and couldn’t-care-less, he’d win first prize. “So?” he asks, in the robotic, without-affect voice of a telephone operator.

Gus puts the branding iron in Fred’s lap. “Quite the poker face,” he adds.

Fred flinches as if Gus has handed him raw sewage. “So, where did you get this?” he asks. Under what rock did you turn up this piece of crap? is what his tone implies.

“At a tag sale in New Hampshire.”

He doesn’t respond.

“I figured it might be worth something,” I blow my own horn, and neglect to mention how I passed over the branding iron in favor of a joint—and less significant—occupant of the same New Hampshire liquor store box.

Gus keeps my secret like a loyal coconspirator.

Fred yawns.

“Is it anything valuable?” I persist.

He yawns again. Unlike Gus, he does not flaunt expensive dental work, but instead chipped teeth dotted with blackened silver overlays. “I’ll tell you what,” he says, syllables flat and uninflected. “I’ll give you a thousand bucks to take this rusted bit of iron off your hands.”

I hold my breath. “Hmm,” I ponder. Gus squeezes my arm.

“Just as I thought,” Gus exults. He slaps me a high five. “You old rascal,” he says to Fred. “There’s no way Abby’s going to sell it to you. Even if you offer ten times your piddling peanut sum.” He pauses. He twirls his mustache. “So you might as well tell us if what we’ve got is what I think it is.”