The Puzzle King (9 page)

“You work? You don’t go to school?”

“No,” he said. “I left school many years ago. Now I work in the design business.”

“You’re an artist?”

“No, more an inventor than an artist. I design window and store displays. How did you get here?”

“My sister Seema brought me. I’m sure you saw her.”

“No, which one is she?”

She pointed to Seema. He barely gave her a glance.

There was something about his formality and the way his vowels curled slightly that made her realize he was an immigrant. Rather than ask too many questions, Flora told him her name and offered up information about herself.

“I’ve been in this country nearly four years, and I’ve never met an inventor.”

“Where are you from?” he asked. “Oh, and my name is Simon.”

“That’s a nice name. My name is Flora Grossman. I’m from Germany. A small town in Germany.”

“Did you come here with your parents?”

She told him how she had come over with Seema, leaving her mother and her younger sister, Margot, back in Kaiserslautern.

The band started to play a sentimental ballad.

Her cheek fell naturally against his collarbone; she could feel his heart beating.

“I drew a girl who looked like you when I did an advertisement for Ellis Stone Beauty Shoppe.”

His palms were dry, not sweaty like so many boys. He didn’t hum along to the music; instead he made a kind of soft inverted whistling sound. It could have been annoying, but coming from him it was endearing.

She could feel her breasts against his chest and it made her blush.

On the other side of the room, she saw Seema dancing with a blond boy. They held each other so closely they seemed like lovers rejoined after a war. Flora could see that the boy was handsome. He wore a three-button cutaway with a vest underneath that looked as if it were made of expensive fabric. She could tell by Seema’s smile and the way she searched the room with her eyes to make sure people saw her that she was pleased to be dancing with this handsome, fashionable man.

Flora didn’t want anyone to see her and her young man. The way his mouth was so close to her face when he talked that, now and again, his lips would brush against hers, and how he’d intertwined her fingers between his—it was just between them.

“What about your family back in Germany?” he asked.

She told him all there was to tell. “And what about yours?”

“I left Lithuania when I was nine. My mother and sisters and brothers are still there. I’m hoping they’ll come to America soon.”

Then he was quiet. Flora tried to think of something to say, but his step became awkward and he turned his head to the side, which made her feel as if she’d been intrusive and had assumed an intimacy that wasn’t there. When the music stopped, he dropped his hands to his side, bowed slightly, and thanked her for the dance. She went to the back of the room where all the girls were standing and he went to where the boys were.

She thought about asking Seema whether or not she should apologize to the boy for being too nosy. Seema would probably say something like,
Forget about him. There are more fish in the sea
. But Seema was so cozy with her new boy that Flora couldn’t
think of interrupting. So she sat on one of the folding chairs and watched the others.

After some minutes, she noticed the boy, the one with the fat neck, who had coaxed Simon toward her. She worried that he might ask her to dance. She didn’t feel like dancing with anybody right now. Then she saw that he had a folded up piece of paper in his hand. He seemed flustered as he stood before her. “Here,” he said, shoving the note at her. “He asked me to give you this.”

The way he rushed his words and vanished before she could thank him made her frightened to see what the message contained. She opened it slowly. There was no note, just a hastily drawn sketch of a bespectacled boy with his hand over his brow staring across what appeared to be an ocean. On the other side was a mother with six little boys and girls waving at him. Underneath were the words: “Me and my family.” It was signed, Simon.

On the back of the drawing, Flora wrote, “I’m not an artist but I am a chatterbug and I’m sorry if I was also a nosybody.”

She hoped she could find the fat boy and ask him to give the note back to Simon, but he was nowhere in sight, so she made her way through the crowd until she found him herself. Simon was heading toward the door, and she had to run to catch up with him before he left. She tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around she said, “Here,” and she handed him her note. He held the paper under his nose and scrutinized it as if it were the Constitution.

“A chatterbug is what?” he finally asked.

“Oh, you know, someone who talks too much. My uncle says I’d talk to anybody, even the ladybugs in the backyard.”

He smiled, and something happened to his face that Flora
hadn’t seen before. The sternness was gone, and for the first time, he looked more like a boy than a man.

“Well, if you’re a chatterbug, then I’m a blockhead for not knowing what that meant,” he said. “So I guess we’re even.”

“I guess we are,” said Flora, trying to think of something else to say but worried that again she would talk too much.

Simon took up the silence. “You don’t by any chance happen to like magic shows?”

“I don’t know,” said Flora raising her eyebrows with surprise. “I’ve never been to one.”

“How about you go with me to see the Great Mysterio?” he said. “Tomorrow, at the Fourteenth Street Theater. It starts at three o’clock and I could meet you there.”

“Okay, that would be fine,” said Flora.

Later that night, as they left the dance hall together, Flora was bursting to tell Seema about Simon and the magic show. But Seema beat her to it. “I saw the two of you,” she said. “He’s not particularly attractive. And what does that mean, he does window displays? Doesn’t sound very clever to me. Honestly, Flora, I don’t think he’s our type.”

Flora didn’t know she had a type. Nor did she know what it meant to do window displays. Maybe Seema was right. Maybe Simon wasn’t that clever. He seemed nice enough though, so what harm could it do to go to the magic show?

S
IMON LOOKED SMALLER
and crisper in daylight. The night before, she had thought his eyes were blue; in the sunlight, they were more of a steel gray. She also hadn’t noticed how large his ears were or the faded ink stains on his hands.

She’d chosen for this day a light green cotton chemise with a
scoop neck and tiny glass red buttons running down the front. She wore a matching red hat and shoes. “You’re certainly getting all dolled up for a magic show,” Seema had teased her that morning.

But when Simon saw her, he said, “You look so pretty,” immediately dispelling her worry that she had overdressed.

“Thank you, you look very nice, too.”

“Well, my clothes are nothing much,” he said, “but at least I’m clean.”

It was a bad joke, but it set them off into easy conversation as they found their way to their seats in the theater.

“This may be a bunch of hooey,” Simon whispered as the lights went out, “but I like to try and figure out how they do it.”

For the next two hours, they watched Mysterio turn rabbits into ducks, make dollar bills flutter onto the stage from nowhere, and use his telepathy to guess the birthdays and pocket contents of various audience members. He performed a dowsing trick, using a chicken wishbone to detect the Canadian nickel from a hatful of American nickels. And he finished with his famous vanishing-girl act, where he placed a beautiful woman inside a cabinet on the left-hand side of the stage then padlocked it shut. With a clap of his hand and a “presto,” he conjured up the same girl in a cabinet on the right side of the stage. The audience gasped when he unlocked the first cabinet and the woman was gone.

Flora sat forward in her seat, which meant that Simon could watch her at the same time as he scrutinized Mysterio’s every move. When it was over she cheered with the rest of the crowd and rose to her feet.

“It was something, wasn’t it?” he said as they headed toward the door.

“It was more than something,” said Flora. “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. How did he do those tricks?”

“Are you really curious?” asked Simon.

“Oh you smarty, do you really know?”

“I’m only guessing, but did you notice in the dowsing trick how he put on his leather gloves before he performed it? Canadian nickels are magnetic. I’ll bet he had a magnet in one of the glove fingers.”

Flora considered his words. “Okay, that makes sense. But the vanishing girl: Even you can’t figure that one out, can you?”

“Probably not.” Simon smiled. “But consider what can be done with trap doors and twins.”

H
E WALKED HER
all the way back to the Whites’ house on Sixty-first Street, where they stood by the tall iron gates in the quiet night air. “How can I get in touch with you?” he asked. She gave him Aunt Hannah and Uncle Paul’s address. “They have a telephone but I don’t know how to reach it.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find you.”

Flora thought that if Simon tried to kiss her, she wouldn’t mind. It might have happened right then if Lulu had not bounded toward them barking as if they were waving machetes.

“It’s only Lulu. She’s very friendly,” said Flora. “Actually, I don’t know if she’s friendly, but that’s what people always say about scary drooling dogs.”

“She looks okay to me,” said Simon, rubbing the top of Lulu’s head. He told Flora how he used to hawk newspapers in the street. “It’s a surefire way to learn things about men and dogs,” he said. “To tell which ones mean you harm and which ones don’t.”

“And what do you take me for?” asked Flora, turning her chin toward him.

“I take you for a good dog,” he said. “A very good dog.”

Two weeks later, an envelope arrived for Flora. Inside was a carefully wrought sketch of a boy with a perfectly cubed head wearing a round pair of glasses. Compared with his head, his arms and legs were tiny and spindly, and he was looking up at a beautiful girl with yellow hair, a red hat, and red buttons on her dress. On top of the drawing, in a perfect script, was written: “Mr. Blockhead and the lovely Miss Chatterbug.” On a separate slip of paper was a note to Flora:

If I come to Mount Kisco, can we take a walk in a park where there are no dogs? Simon

Flora folded up the drawing and tucked it into her purse. Seema was wrong, she thought, smiling to herself. This was a very clever boy.

On this morning, the sun was hidden and the sky was the color of putty. Seema was awakened in an unfamiliar bed by the sound of bus brakes squealing and someone shouting obscenities.
Too early to be morning
, she thought, rolling over on her other side. As she was about to tuck the blanket under her chin, she opened one eye long enough to glimpse the clock that sat next to the bed. It was 7:25.

Just a few more winks. She shut her eye against the headache that tightened like a crown around her head. If she lay still for just a few more moments, she could slow the heaving in her stomach. But it was time. It was late. So she got up slowly, putting one foot after the other on the icy stone floor.
Scheisse
. Another day. No, not just another day. This was the day. The one she’d been planning and dreading for the last ten months. Seema parted the curtains and looked out. On the street, people walked fast, with their heads bowed and their eyes fixed on the ground. Move through it, that’s all you could do in this kind of cold. Seema
shivered and grabbed hold of the windowsill, steadying herself against the nausea that rode up inside her.

Scheisse
, she thought again. Leaning against the wall, she made her way back to bed, then she got under the covers and went back to sleep.

The next time she awoke, the light coming through the parted curtains made her squint. This day seemed more manageable than it had two hours earlier, and if there was one thing Seema had learned in the past couple of years, it was how to get through a day no matter how miserably it lay at her feet.

She turned on her side. The sheets were rumpled and the covers thrown back. She shut her eyes, waiting to remember who had slept in that bed with her, and putting together the pieces of the night before. He was a handsome boy. A college boy. He told her that the light in her eyes danced like the moon over the Riviera on a summer night, and it made her laugh.

“There’s a line I haven’t heard before.”

The way she said it, with her slight German accent and the boldness that comes from being beautiful, made the boy love her even more. He took her to a dance hall not far from where the Whites lived in the East Sixties. There they drank gin. He held her closer and ran his hands over her hips. When she made no protest, he moved his hands lower until they cupped her behind. He whispered into her ear that she was the kind of girl who was special and needed the kind of boy who knew how to take care of her. His voice was rough and husky and he danced her to the corner of the room.

“Another gin for the road,” he said. This would be her third or fourth—by now she’d lost count. She sat on a bar stool, crossed
her legs, and sipped her last drink of the night. The boy ran his hand up and down her calf and reached beneath the lace leg of her bloomers, making his way up to her thigh. He smiled as if he were stroking the chassis of an expensive automobile. She smiled, too, as she studied his square jaw and cornflower-blue eyes. He was a fine-looking boy. A gentile, of course.

Seema pulled the covers around her and sat up in the bed. It was after nine o’clock. No more time to waste. Uncle Paul and Aunt Hannah would have been up for hours. And Flora. God only knows but that Flora was probably driving them crazy by now what with all her jabbering about her hair and her dress. “You only have one wedding day in your life,” she’d said to Seema, “and that day ought to be perfect, don’t you agree?”

Flora was nineteen, still a girl. She looked up to Seema as an older woman, as a mother. At twenty-one, Seema was a woman many times over. But as she never tired of telling Flora, “I am not your mother. You have a mother. She’s my mother, too, and when the time is right she will come here.”