The Ammonite Violin & Others (6 page)

“But I’m not looking for a chest,” she says, already disappointed, because clearly the man hasn’t understood. “A sealskin. I’m looking for a sealskin.”

But he shakes his head and tells her to be patient, then flips up the one remaining latch. There’s a dull
thap
of iron against hollow wood, and the hinges creak loudly as he lifts the lid. “This belonged to a cousin of mine, on my father’s sick,” he tells her. “He died a couple of years ago. AIDS, complications from AIDS. I’m not sure what they put on the death certificate. We were friends when I was a kid.”

“And this belonged to him?” she asks, and now she does stand up, though she still can’t see what’s inside the trunk because the open lid is obscuring her view.

“This and a whole lot of other useless crap. He was a trust-fund baby, and he was also a packrat, which always makes for an interesting combination.”

“I’m not looking for a chest,” she says again. “I have no
need
of a chest.”

“Yeah,” the man sighs, and he glances up at her. “I
know
that. But what was it you said just a moment ago? That people need to know the difference between the way things appear and the way things really are?” And then he raises one eyebrow and motions for her to walk around the table and see for herself.

“Truth be told,” he says, “I’ve almost thrown this thing out once or twice. Thought about taking the flute to a pawnshop, but figured I couldn’t get much for it. You’re fortunate that I’m the sentimental sort, and a bit of a packrat myself.”

And then she’s standing next to the man, gazing down at the chest and refusing to believe what she sees there. A velvety pelt, fur that’s all the gentle colors of storm clouds, darker and lighter shades of grey, shot through with small patches of pure black, a sealskin, rolled into a tight bundle and filling the bottom of the chest. And on top of the pelt, there’s a piccolo.

“It’s not a flute,” she says.

“Whatever. I’m not a musician. In the will, Garrison said he thought maybe I could get a few bucks for it. For the skin, I mean, because I’d loaned him money a couple times and he’d never paid me back. But I’m afraid it’s not in very good shape, and, like I said, I’m not a furrier. Supposedly, he picked it up somewhere in Scotland, back in the nineties, but I never knew if that part was true or not. He always liked to embellish, when it came to his odd bits of junk.”

“I’ve traveled
so far
,” she whispers, and then has to close her eyes, her head filled suddenly with the roar of wind rushing around the headlands and out across the sea, with the crash of breakers against the beach, the raucous cries of the guillemots and gulls soaring overhead. She can smell the sunshine and the salt and seaweed, and she can feel the cold water flowing all about her, taking her back, taking her down to her lost sisters and brothers, to submarine cannons of sand and silt and the broken masts of sunken ships. Behind her eyelids, there are darting seal shadows and the silver-scale flash of a school of herring moving quickly through gently swaying forests of kelp, and the thin woman gasps at the sweet and living taste of a codfish on her tongue.

“Are you okay?” the man asks, and he sounds concerned, but she doesn’t open her eyes. “Should I get the chair? You’re not about to go and faint on me, are you?”

“No, I’m fine,” she assures him, which is true. For the first time in ten years, for the first time since she heard the piccolo that brilliant morning at Veantro Bay and allowed the sound of it lure her from the water and even from her skin, she
is
fine.

“And you’re telling me this is what you were looking for?” the man asks, and she can hear the skepticism in his voice and that, finally, makes her open her eyes. “The heirloom? This nappy old sealskin belonged to your mother, and you’ve come all the way from Scotland just to find it?”

“Yes,” she says, and reaches into the chest, expecting the pelt to vanish before her fingers can reach it. But it doesn’t vanish, and she stands stroking the short, soft fur, only half believing that she isn’t still standing on the other side of Columbus Avenue, only imagining that shell ever find the courage to cross the street and open the green door beneath the black-and-white sign.

“Well,” the man says. “Then I guess the next question would be the price.”

“The price?” she asks, and presses her hand deeper into the folds of the pelt. “You’d ask me to pay you for what’s already rightfully mine?”

“What you
say
is already yours,” he replies. “I mean, nothing personal, right, but I’m running a business here, and this chest belonged to my cousin, who, I will remind you, is now deceased.”

“I don’t want the chest,” she says, not taking her eyes off the sealskin. “Or the piccolo.”

“Okay, then I’ll only
charge
you for the sealskin. And I’ll keep the rest. That works for me.”

“It doesn’t work for me,” she tells him, and reluctantly withdraws her hand from inside the chest. “I don’t have any money. I have never had any money.”

The man takes a deep breath and lets it out very slowly. He rubs at the scruff of his auburn beard and shakes his head. “Then we have a problem. I’m sorry, lady, but I can’t just
give
you this. I’ve got bills to pay.”

The woman rakes a step back from the edge of the table, and she wonders if she’s still strong enough to murder a human being, if she’s ever been that strong, and if it would count as murder if she killed this man, who makes his living selling things which should have been decently returned to the earth or sea or sky, or simply left there in the first place, this man who will never know and can never understand the theft of one’s true shape. There’s a small hammer lying on the table, between the chest and the scattered pieces of the fossil tortoise’s carapace. She imagines how it would feel in her hand.

“Nothing personal,” he says again.

She puts both her hands into her deep coat pockets, because it
would
be so easy to reach for the little hammer, because she’s still fast, and he doesn’t expect she would do such a thing, that the sealskin could possibly mean so much to her that she’d kill him for it. She worries with the shells and pebbles filling her pockets, limpets and mussels and polished granite, all her souvenirs, and they make their familiar, soothing, clacking noises between her fingers.

She can still hear the wind calling her home again, the voice of the sea speaking from the old chest.

“I could hold it for you,” he says. “I could hold onto it for, say, six months. That’s the best I can promise.”

And then her fingers brush something that isn’t shell or stone, something smooth and cold, and she remembers the old coin she’s carried all the way from Prince Edward Island. She found it one evening, half buried in the mud of a tidal flat, glinting faintly in the setting sun. She removes it from her coat pocket and lays it on the table in front of the man. “I have this,” she says. “It
is
money, isn’t it? It is gold.”

“Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” he says, and gives her a quick sidewise glance; she can see surprise and suspicion in his easy blue eyes. “Can I hold it? Do you mind?”

“I found it, along time ago. You can have it, for the chest,” “But you said you didn’t want—”

“It
is
gold,” she says again, raising her voice slightly.

He picks up the coin and rubs at it with his thumb, then holds it up to the light. “It’s Roman, I think,” he tells her. “But I don’t know much about coins, so I can’t say what it might be worth. I’d have to show it to someone. I know a numismatist over on—”

“It’s worth an old wooden chest and a piccolo,” she interrupts and licks her dry lips. “It’s worth a nappy, moth-eaten sealskin that you’re ashamed to put in your shop window. It’s worth
that
much, at least,” and then she turns and looks directly at him for the first time since the man opened the chest. And there’s a flash of something like fear in his eyes, something like awe or horror, and she thinks perhaps he’s glimpsed some dim sliver of the truth. Maybe he’s beginning to understand what manner of being she is, and what he’s let follow him alone into the back room of his shop.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice grown flat and cautious. “I expect it’s worth at least that much.”

“Then we have a deal?” she asks, though the words come out sounding less like a question than she’d meant them to sound.

“Jesus, you’re a weird one,” he says, and at first she thinks he means the old Roman coin, which he’s holding up the fluorescent light again. “Do you want a bill of sale for that? Should I sign somewhere in blood? At any rate, it’s yours now.”

“It was always mine,” she replies, and she takes the sealskin out of the chest, leaving it empty except for the piccolo. “But I should thank you, for keeping it safe until I found it again.”

“Well, then you’re very fucking welcome,” he says, squinting at the coin so he doesn’t have to look at her. “I’m thinking you can show yourself out. You’re a big girl.”

“I’m sorry about your cousin,” she tells him, even though it isn’t true. She’d always meant to kill the piper who stole her skin, and some part of her feels cheated that a disease has beaten her to it. She’s dreamt his death many times, how she might separate him from out
his
skin before the end.

“Don’t bother. He really was an asshole. It was always only a question of which would kill him first, his cock or his mouth or the liquor.”

“You won’t see me again,” she says, and slips the bundle of sealskin beneath her grey coat, holding it there against bare flesh, and already it feels a part of her once more.

“All I got to say is this better not fucking go up in a great puff of pink smoke when you’re gone,” he says, and mutters something else under his breath and squints more intently at the coin. So she leaves him there with the trunk and the piccolo and all his other hoarded treasures, retracing her steps to the green curtain and down the shop’s narrow, death-haunted aisle. The green door jingles loudly, and then she’s across the threshold and out in the sun again, and there’s only the indifferent noise of the taxis and buses, only the busy city streets, between her and the sea and home.

I find her, always, sitting on the same park bench. She’s there, no matter whether I’m coming through the park late on a Thursday evening or early on a Monday evening or in the first grey moments of a Friday morning. I play piano in a martini bar at Columbus and 89th, or I play
at
the piano, mostly for tips and free drinks. And when I feel like the long walk or can’t bear the thought of the subway or can’t afford cab fare, whenever I should happen to pass that way alone in the darkness and the interruptions in the darkness made by the lampposts, she’s there. Always on that same bench, not far from the Ramble and the Bow Bridge, just across the lake. They call that part of the park Cherry Hill. The truth is that I haven’t lived in Manhattan long enough to know these things, and, anyway, I’m not the sort of man who memorizes the cartography of Central Park, but she
told
me it’s called Cherry Hill, because of all the cherry trees growing there. And when I looked at a map in a guidebook, it said the same thing.

You might mistake her for a runaway, sixteen or maybe seventeen; she dresses all in rags, or clothes so threadbare and dirty that they may as well be rags, and I’ve never seen her wearing shoes, no matter the season or the weather. I’ve seen her barefoot in snow.

I asked her about that once, if she would wear shoes if I brought her a pair, and she said no, thank you, but no, because shoes make her claustrophobic.

I find her sitting there alone on the park bench near the old fountain, and I always ask before I sit down next to her. And always she smiles and says of course, of course you can sit with me. You can always sit with me. Her shoulder-length hair has been dyed the color of pomegranates, and her skin is dark. I’ve never asked, but I think she may be Indian. India Indian, I mean. Not Native American. I once Awaited tables with a girl from Calcutta, and her skin was the same color, and she had the same dusky brown-black eyes. But if she is Indian, the girl on Cherry Hill, she has no trace of an accent when she talks to me about the fountain or her favorite paintings in the Met or the exhibits she likes best at the Museum of Natural History.

The first time she smiled...

“You’re a vampire?” I asked, as though it were the sort of thing you might ask any’ girl sitting on a park bench in the middle of the night.

“That’s an ugly word,” she said and scowled at me. “That’s a silly, ugly word.” And then she was silent a long moment, and I tried to think of anything but those long incisors, like the teeth of a rat filed
dawn
to points. It was a freezing night near the end of January, but I was sweating, nonetheless. And I had an erection. And I realized, then, that her breath didn’t fog in the cold air.

“I’m a daughter of Lilith,” she said.

Which is as close as she’s ever come to telling me her name, or where she’s from, or anything else of the sort.
I’m a daughter of Lilith
, and the
way
she said it, with not even a trace of affectation or humor or deceit, I knew that it was true. Even if I had no idea what she meant, I knew that she was telling me the truth.

That was also the first night that I let her kiss me. I sat with her on the bench, and she licked eagerly at the back of my neck. Her tongue was rough, like a cat’s tongue.

She smelled of fallen leaves, that dry and oddly spicy odor which I have always associated with late October and jack-o’-lanterns. Yes, she smelled of fallen leaves, and her own sweat and, more faintly, something which I took to be woodsmoke. Her breath was like frost against my skin, colder even than the long winter night. She licked at the nape of my neck until it was raw and bleeding, and she whispered soothing words in a language I could neither understand nor recognize.

“It was designed in 1860,” she said, some other night, meaning the fountain with its bluestone basin and eight frosted globes. “They built this place as a turnaround for the carriages. It was originally meant to be a drinking fountain for horses. A place for thirsty things.”