Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (28 page)

“Yeah, no kidding. What about you? You don’t ever worry about that?”

He gave her his sweet sad smile and shook his head. “Never. The world will always need poets. We’re like the lilies of the field.”

“What about journalists?” Randall appeared behind them, slipping his cell phone back into his pocket. “What are we?”

“Quackgrass,” said Claude.

“Cactus,” said Suzanne.

“Oh, gee. I get it,” said Randall. “Because we’re all hard and spiny and no one loves us.”

“Because you only bloom once a year,” said Suzanne.

“When it rains,” added Claude.

“That was my realtor.” Randall sat and downed the rest of his wine. “Sunday’s open house day. Two o’clock till four. Suzanne, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

He gestured for the waiter. Suzanne leaned over to kiss Claude’s cheek.

“When do you leave for Hydra?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” She looked crestfallen. “That’s so soon!”

“‘The beautiful life was brief,’” said Claude, and laughed. “You’re only here till Monday. I have a reservation on the ferry from Piraeus, I couldn’t change it.”

“How long will you be there? I’ll be in Athens Tuesday after next, then I go to Akrotiri.”

Claude smiled. “That might work. Here—”

He copied out a phone number in his careful, calligraphic hand. “This is Zali’s number on Hydra. A cell phone, I have no idea if it will even work. But I’ll see you soon. Like you said—”

He lifted his thin hands and gestured at the room around them, his dark eyes wide. “This is a miracle.”

Randall paid the check and they turned to go. At the door, Claude hugged Suzanne. “Don’t miss your plane,” he said.

“Don’t wind her up!” said Randall.

“Don’t miss yours,” said Suzanne. Her eyes filled with tears as she pressed her face against Claude’s. “It was so good to see you. If I miss you, have a wonderful time in Hydra.”

“Oh, I will,” said Claude. “I always do.”

—

Randall dropped her off at her hotel. She knew better than to ask him to stay; besides, she was tired, and the wine was starting to give her a headache.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Nine o’clock. A leisurely breakfast, and then . . . ”

He leaned over to open her door, then kissed her. “The exciting new world of California real estate.”

Outside, the evening had grown cool, but the hotel room still felt close: it smelled of sex, and the sweetish dusty scent of old books. She opened the window by the airshaft and went to take a shower. Afterwards she got into bed, but found herself unable to sleep.

The wine, she thought; always a mistake. She considered taking one of the anti-anxiety drugs she carried for flying, but decided against it. Instead she picked up the book Randall had given her.

She knew all the images, from other books and websites, and the island itself. Nearly four thousand years ago, now; much of it might have been built yesterday. Beneath fifteen feet of volcanic ash and pumice, homes with ocean views and indoor plumbing, pipes that might have channeled steam from underground vents fed by the volcano the city was built upon. Fragments of glass that might have been windows, or lenses. The great pithoi that still held food when they were opened millennia later. Great containers of honey for trade, for embalming the Egyptian dead. Yellow grains of pollen. Wine.

But no human remains. No bones, no grimacing tormented figures as were found beneath the sand at Herculaneum, where the fishermen had fled and died. Not even animal remains, save for the charred vertebrae of a single donkey. They had all known to leave. And when they did, their city was not abandoned in frantic haste or fear. All was orderly, the pithoi still sealed, no metal utensils or weapons strewn upon the floor, no bolts of silk or linen; no jewelry.

Only the paintings, and they were everywhere, so lovely and beautifully wrought that at first the excavators thought they had uncovered a temple complex.

But they weren’t temples: they were homes. Someone had paid an artist, or teams of artists, to paint frescoes on the walls of room after room after room. Sea daffodils, swallows; dolphins and pleasure boats, the boats themselves decorated with more dolphins and flying seabirds, golden nautilus on their prows. Wreaths of flowers. A shipwreck. Always you saw the same colors, ochre-yellow and ferrous red; a pigment made by grinding glaucophane, a vitreous mineral that produced a grey-blue shimmer; a bright pure French blue. But of course it wasn’t French blue but Egyptian blue—Pompeiian blue—one of the earliest pigments, used for thousands of years; you made it by combining a calcium compound with ground malachite and quartz, then heating it to extreme temperatures.

But no green. It was a blue and gold and red world. Not even the plants were green.

Otherwise, the paintings were so alive that, when she’d first seen them, she half-expected her finger would be wet if she touched them. The eyes of the boys who played at boxing were children’s eyes. The antelopes had the mad topaz glare of wild goats. The monkeys had blue fur and looked like dancing cats. There were people walking in the streets. You could see what their houses looked like, red brick and yellow shutters.

She turned towards the back of the book, to the section on Xeste 3. It was the most famous building at the site. It contained the most famous paintings—the woman known as the “Mistress of Animals.” “The Adorants,” who appeared to be striding down a fashion runway. “The Lustral Basin.”

The saffron gatherers.

She gazed at the image from the East Wall of Room Three, two women harvesting the stigma of the crocus blossoms. The flowers were like stylized yellow fireworks, growing from the rocks and also appearing in a repetitive motif on the wall above the figures, like the fleur-de-lis patterns on wallpaper. The fragments of painted plaster had been meticulously restored; there was no attempt to fill in what was missing, as had been done at Knossos under Sir Arthur Evans’ supervision to sometimes cartoonish effect.

None of that had been necessary here. The fresco was nearly intact
.
You could see how the older woman’s eyebrow was slightly raised, with annoyance or perhaps just impatience, and count the number of stigmata the younger acolyte held in her outstretched palm.

How long would it have taken for them to fill those baskets? The crocuses bloomed only in autumn, and each small blossom contained just three tiny crimson threads, the female stigmata. It might take 100,000 flowers to produce a half-pound of the spice.

And what did they use the spice for? Cooking; painting; a pigment they traded to the Egyptians for dyeing mummy bandages.

She closed the book. She could hear distant sirens, and a soft hum from the ceiling fan. Tomorrow they would look at houses.

—

For breakfast they went to the Embarcadero, the huge indoor market inside the restored ferry building that had been damaged over a century before, in the 1906 earthquake. There was a shop with nothing but olive oil and infused vinegars; another that sold only mushrooms, great woven panniers and baskets filled with tree-ears, portobellos, fungus that looked like orange coral; black morels and matsutake and golden chanterelles.

They stuck with coffee and sweet rolls, and ate outside on a bench looking over the bay. A man threw sticks into the water for a pair of black labs; another man swam along the embankment. The sunlight was strong and clear as gin, and nearly as potent: it made Suzanne feel lightheaded and slightly drowsy, even though she had just gotten up.

“Now,” said Randall. He took out the newspaper, opened it to the real estate section, and handed it to her. He had circled eight listings. “The first two are in Oakland; then we’ll hit Berkeley and Kensington. You ready?”

They drove in heavy traffic across the Oakland-Bay bridge. To either side, bronze water that looked as though it would be too hot to swim in; before them the Oakland Hills, where the houses were ranged in undulating lines like waves. Once in the city they began to climb in and out of pocket neighborhoods poised between the arid and the tropic. Bungalows nearly hidden beneath overhanging trees suddenly yielded to bright white stucco houses flanked by aloes and agaves. It looked at once wildly fanciful and comfortable, as though all urban planning had been left to Dr. Seuss.

“They do something here called ‘staging,’ said Randall as they pulled behind a line of parked cars on a hillside. A phalanx of realtors’ signs rose from a grassy mound beside them. “Homeowners pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a decorator to come in and tart up their houses with rented furniture and art and stuff. So, you know, it looks like it’s worth three million dollars.”

They walked to the first house, a Craftsman bungalow tucked behind trees like prehistoric ferns. There was a fountain outside, filled with koi that stared up with engorged silvery eyes. Inside, exposed beams and dark hardwood floors so glossy they looked covered with maple syrup. There was a grand piano, and large framed posters from Parisian cafés—Suzanne was to note a lot of these as the afternoon wore on—and much heavy dark Mediterranean-style furniture, as well as a few early Mission pieces that might have been genuine. The kitchen floors were tiled. In the master bath, there were mosaics in the sink and sunken tub.

Randall barely glanced at these. He made a beeline for the deck. After wandering around for a few minutes, Suzanne followed him.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. Below, terraced gardens gave way to stepped hillsides, and then the city proper, and then the gilded expanse of San Francisco Bay, with sailboats like swans moving slowly beneath the bridge.

“For four million dollars, it better be,” said Randall.

She looked at him. His expression was avid, but it was also sad, his pale eyes melancholy in the brilliant sunlight. He drew her to him and gazed out above the treetops, then pointed across the blue water.

“That’s where we were. Your hotel, it’s right there, somewhere.” His voice grew soft. “At night it all looks like a fairy city. The lights, and the bridges . . . You can’t believe that anyone could have built it.”

He blinked, shading his eyes with his hand, then looked away. When he turned back his cheeks were damp.

“Come on,” he said. He bent to kiss her forehead. “Got to keep moving.”

They drove to the next house, and the next, and the one after that. The light and heat made her dizzy, and the scents of all the unfamiliar flowers, the play of water in fountains and a swimming pool like a great turquoise lozenge. She found herself wandering through expansive bedrooms with people she did not know, walking in and out of closets, bathrooms, a sauna. Every room seemed lavish, the air charged as though anticipating a wonderful party, tables set with beeswax candles and bottles of wine and crystal stemware. Countertops of hand-thrown Italian tiles; globular cobalt vases filled with sunflowers, another recurring motif.

But there was no sign of anyone who might actually live in one of these houses, only a series of well-dressed women with expensively restrained jewelry who would greet them, usually in the kitchen, and make sure they had a flyer listing the home’s attributes. There were plates of cookies, banana bread warm from the oven. Bottles of sparkling water and organic lemonade.

And, always, a view. They didn’t look at houses without views. To Suzanne, some were spectacular; others, merely glorious. All were more beautiful than anything she saw from her own windows or deck, where she looked out onto evergreens and grey rocks and, much of the year, snow.

It was all so dreamlike that it was nearly impossible for her to imagine real people living here. For her, a house had always meant a refuge from the world; the place where you hid from whatever catastrophe was breaking that morning.

But now she saw that it could be different. She began to understand that, for Randall at least, a house wasn’t a retreat. It was a way of engaging with the world; of opening himself to it. The view wasn’t yours. You belonged to it, you were a tiny part of it, like the sailboats and the seagulls and the flowers in the garden; like the sunflowers on the highly polished tables.

You were part of what made it real. She had always thought it was the other way around.

“You ready?” Randall came up behind her and put his hand on her neck. “This is it. We’re done. Let’s go have a drink.”

On the way out the door he stopped to talk to the agent.

“They’ll be taking bids tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll let you know on Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?” Suzanne said in amazement when they got back outside. “You can do all this in two days? Spend a million dollars on a house?”

“Four million,” said Randall. “This is how it works out here. The race is to the quick.”

She had assumed they would go to another restaurant for drinks and then dinner. Instead, to her surprise, he drove to his flat. He took a bottle of Pommery Louise from the refrigerator and opened it, and she wandered about examining his manuscripts as he made dinner. At the Embarcadero, without her knowing, he had bought chanterelles and morels, imported pasta colored like spring flowers, arugula and baby tatsoi. For dessert, orange-blossom custard. When they were finished, they remained out on the deck and looked at the bay, the rented view. Lights shimmered through the dusk. In a flowering quince in the garden, dozens of hummingbirds droned and darted like bees, attacking each other with needle beaks.

“So.” Randall’s face was slightly flushed. They had finished the champagne, and he had poured them each some cognac. “If this happens—if I get the house. Will you move out here?”

She stared down at the hummingbirds. Her heart was racing. The quince had no smell, none that she could detect, anyway; yet still they swarmed around it. Because it was so large, and its thousands of blossoms were so red. She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

He nodded and took a quick sip of cognac. “Why don’t you just stay, then? Till we find out on Tuesday? I have to go down to San Jose early tomorrow to interview this guy, you could come and we could go to that place for lunch.”

“I can’t.” She bit her lip, thinking. “No . . . I wish I could, but I have to finish that piece before I leave for Greece.”