R. MacAvoy - Tea with the Black Dragon

The dark face drew back. The long hands flattened on the table. “I admit I have intruded into affairs which are not my business, my dear… Martha. But you’ve convinced me there’s an element of danger in this.”

Her head bobbed forcefully. The gray braid threatened to slide. “Yes. That’s exactly why I want you out of it.”

His expression went blank—as blank as it had been when she teased him about the word “Oolong.” Then Mayland Long laughed, a low rumble which ran along the walls of the room, echoed in corners and tangled among the legs of the wooden chairs. The cashier in the corner raised her head. When the laughter subsided, a wide smile remained.

“You are concerned about me? About my respectability perhaps? My personal safety?”

Martha Macnamara’s nostrils flared. She thumped her bag heavily. “Why not? Are you superman? Do you know everything?”

The smile faded. “No. I am not. I do not. I am only Mayland Long, and as I have said before you must tell me what I am to do, and how I am to live my life properly.”

She looked sideways at him, waiting for the punchline.

“Shall I go back to my rooms in the James Herald Hotel and sit there with the pot and the kettle, many books and a bronze dragon, stepping out only to visit Barnes and Noble, and to dine on white linen in the Crystal Room?”

She opened her mouth but did not speak.

“I’ll tell you plainly, Martha, I came to San Francisco waiting for something to happen. Something that was— predicted—for me years ago in Taipei. A sign. An awakening. It is rank superstition on my part to believe in this, perhaps, but as a result of this prophecy I have changed my living, my language, my…” His words died away and his fingers drummed the table top. “I have changed in many ways.” His eyes met hers briefly, then slid away. “It is hard to change when one is old. It’s almost easier to give up and die. Almost.”

“Do you know how to give up?” asked Martha quietly.

“No.” He smiled ruefully and his eyebrows rose like wings. “Is that something I must learn?”

He gave her no time to reply. “But you mustn’t expect me to behave like a Westerner, Martha, just because I speak the language. Nor like a… man of the present.”

Martha leaned forward, peering left and right in conspiratorial fashion, wearing a small, round, Buddha smile. “My dear Mr. Long,” she whispered, “I expect everything and nothing of you. And I wouldn’t be surprised if you rose from this table and flew off among the hanging geraniums. I would assume you had a reason.

“And I assume you had a reason to come to San Francisco, and a reason to park yourself at the James Herald. If you came on the strength of a prophecy, well then, you’re working with clearer goals than most people.”

She drew back an inch, but her gaze didn’t waver. “What are you seeking?”

Mayland Long lifted his head and as he spoke the light struck his face, turning his eyes oak yellow. “Among other things—truth.”

“Among other things!” Martha folded her hands. “What else is there?”

He mimicked her gesture, laughing. “Don’t ask me such a question! I have never been good with paradox. Isn’t it enough for you that I’ve revealed the core of superstition that lies at the heart of this man in a business suit? But I will share with you a thing I have learned—that I am learning even now. I discover that waiting may be accomplished in divers ways. And stillness has many… appearances, as does warmth. Your own sort of stillness, for instance, Martha, can be full of movement, like a tree full of birds. Yet I see it as stillness. And your warmth… Well, that is marvelous, like the color of your eyes.”

She exclaimed involuntarily. “My eyes? Marvelous?”

“Certainly. Blue is a cold color, yet the brighter the sun shines, the more blue is the sky.” He paused, regarding her blue eyes, her blushing face.

“Martha, I am through sitting passive. Realization is not a dove to be coaxed to the hand. It will find one or it will not.

“Besides—what if my chance for understanding has come and gone, unrecognized? What if signs and events of all colors and meaning: joys, sorrows, wonderments— have passed by and are lost because I have been too busy looking for a box with the label ‘truth’ on it? I want to help you find Elizabeth—not because I am altruistic, but because I am curious and alone. I like puzzles and I enjoy your company I think I can be useful, if you will allow me to be.”

She put her hands to the sides of her round head. “I don’t understand half what you’re saying. And what can I answer? You’re using my own arguments against me!”

He shrugged, and the fabric of his suit jacket rustled dryly. It was silk. “You can agree to a collaboration. Together we will find your daughter.”

She touched his hand.

Martha parked in a lot a quarter mile away from the hotel, where the parking was cheaper. They began walking.

San Francisco was ten degrees cooler than the peninsula, though the same dry, Italianate sun shone. A large gull flew past them along Van Ness, strafing the cars. Having just crossed Turk Street, Mayland Long spied something on the sidewalk and bent to pick it up.

It was a red rose bud, its petals disarranged, the stem half torn through where a pin had pulled out. He grunted and smoothed it out as though it were wrinkled cloth. “The rose,” he announced. “Loveliest and most formidable of flowers. Arms of York and Lancaster. In medieval times, symbol of Jesus. Always, it has meant, beauty, love, peace…”

He presented the bud to Martha Macnamara. It lay resting on his long fingers until she scooped it up. She sniffed it and held it up in the light.

“Symbol? What’s a symbol? This is a rose.” She smiled and walked on.

The moment rang for Mayland Long—rang as though the entire sky had become a gong and Martha Macnamara had struck it. He stood still, while the gray stone city reeled about him.

The four words echoed in his head. “This is a rose.” The simple, dumb truth of them announced the universe.

And he stood there for an endless moment—perhaps two or three seconds by the clock—a thin man in a dark suit, rather old, rather elegant, rather frail, rubbing his thumb along the length of his hand and feeling the memory of a rose.

Then he moved quickly, his eye fixed on the receding blue dress. She knew who he was. She had shown him his own face, reflected in all creation. But did she know who she was? Standing alone and perfect, or standing by him—did she know what she was to him? He snaked forward along the crowded street, burning with a desire to tell her.

Martha Macnamara reached the corner just as the walk sign lit. She did not seem to realize she had left her companion behind, nor that she had redeemed his life. She stepped into the street. A bus pulled into the crosswalk behind her, concealing her from Mayland Longs sight. A black Lincoln stopped at the corner parallel to her path, then turned right into the crosswalk.

The light changed as Mr. Long reached the corner. He raised his eyes over the roofs of the cars, seeking the blue dress along the next block.

She was not there. Martha Macnamara was nowhere along the street between Mayland Long and the James Herald Hotel. Nor was she in the lobby.

Nor in her room.

She was gone.

The early sun pried silently into the window. It counted the books in Mayland Longs sitting room. The black statue against the side wall drank in the sun’s light, reflecting it only through the eyes.

One of the two armchairs in the room had been turned toward the bare window; the chair was dull gold. So was the skin of the man asleep in that chair, his head resting in the angle of the wing-back. The dark silk suit-jacket he had worn the day before was thrown across the chair arm; one empty sleeve dragged upon the wooden floor.