Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

“Yes,” the man said at last, and stowed the statue under his long left arm, and tipped an imaginary hat with his right hand, and was gone.

An hour later Ophelia found Rennie sitting on her stool, elbows on the counter, staring into space. A check lay on the glass. “Rennie, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Heavens, where’s Puck?”

“The man who admired him bought him.”

Ophelia sighed. “What a loss.”

“Actually, a profit.”

“I mean to me. I’ll miss him. I hope his new home is—”

Rennie took a ferocious breath and broke cardinal rule one. “The man is from Colorado. He’s staying at Devlin’s Hotel. He’s tall. He’s in his seventies. He has the soul of a gentleman.”

“Oh. Oh? Oh!” Ophelia now put her elbows on the glass case. They stood face to face, the check lying between them.

“Eyes like sapphires?” Ophelia inquired.

“Well, blue.”

“Hair like wheat?”

“Snow.”

“Politics is perhaps no longer so important,” Ophelia speculated.

Rennie said nothing.

“Lew has been gone for less than a year,” she whispered.

Rennie said nothing.

“But I am not in my first youth.”

Nothing.

Ophelia touched the check with two gentle fingers, rotated it until the signature faced her. “‘John Ipp…’ I can’t read this, Rennie.”

“Ippolito. He showed me his driver’s license.”

“My heart’s delight — his name was Horace Cannon.” She gave the check a quarter rotation so they could both look at the name. “Can we transform John Ippolito into Horace Cannon?”

“…I don’t think so.”

Ophelia retreated from the check, and from Rennie, who had broken cardinal rule one to no purpose. She sat down on the love seat. “Horace,” she mused. “How my heart leaps at the thought of him, him and Puck. I was ready to run to Devlin’s Hotel…burst into his room…fling myself onto his chest. ‘It is I, Ophelia!’”

“Mr. Ippolito would have been charmed,” Rennie said.

Ophelia, in a voice almost accusing, said: “You have kindled a desire in me—”

“I’m a terrible chatterbox.”

“—that will not be easily quieted.”

Rennie’s second cardinal rule leaped to the floor and smashed itself to bits. “Hunt him down,” she snapped. “Try the Internet. Call his college alumni office.” Advice spurted out of her mouth.

Some of Ophelia’s hair had come loose from its confining pins. Her earrings swung. Her blouse had worked its way out of her waistband. To Rennie’s acute eye Ophelia became in succession everything she was and had ever been, in reverse order: a colorful grandmother, a woman who had known a long and happy marriage, a girl in love for the first time.

“Hire a detective,” Rennie wound up. And she turned her back on Ophelia and climbed the little stool and put in Puck’s place a blue glass epergne she had bought yesterday — an ugly and misbegotten item; but it would probably be snapped up before closing time.

This Yefgin — what a rogue! Leather battle jacket, cascading R s, and a circlet of gray hair lying loose on his head just as if it were a wig, though whenever he bent his two-timing face to examine a piece of jewelry, Rennie saw that it was real hair springing from his pink scalp. Double deception! And then, that peculiar profession — in a brown third-floor office Yefgin cured people of addictions like tobacco and scratch tickets, using a combination of hypnosis and harangue. “Special concoction,” he said, with a wink. Many of his clients did quit their habits, though they often switched to new ones. When Yefgin addressed a woman he kissed her hand first, then twisted his face into a grin that suggested he’d just conceived a helpless passion for her even though they’d met only minutes ago, such things happened all the time in Turgenev. His discolored teeth inspired sympathy rather than revulsion. He was forever in debt. Rennie let his IOUs accumulate to a thousand dollars — then, until he paid up, she refused to sell him any of the dramatic prewar brooches and bracelets he bought for his mistress, and she wouldn’t sell him any delicate Victorian rings either, the ones he gave to his wife, Vera. Oh, the scamp.

From time to time Yefgin brought Vera into Forget Me Not to try on one of those rings. She was a large woman with dyed hair whose garnet eyes were settled comfortably in her fleshy face. Rings meant for the fourth finger had trouble wriggling past the knuckle of her pinkie. They had to be resized. Yefgin doted on his fat spouse. He doted on his mistress too, buying her an enamel cockatoo and a bracelet of gold panels connected by diamonds — and, today, right now, a bouquet of amethysts for her lapel.

“Don’t tell Vera,” Yefgin said, scribbling his IOU.

He needn’t have troubled to say anything: Rennie made it a point of honor to keep her customers’ business to herself. Yefgin kissed her hand and scooted away.

She liked the rascal. But then, she liked most people who came to her shop here in Godolphin, Massachusetts. She liked the people who fancied tiny Edwardian desks. Breathlessly they bounded up the three stairs at the rear of the store, and through the wide arch, and into the sunlit back room where the furniture stood waiting — they might have been meeting a lover. Rennie liked office girls who called themselves administrative assistants. They spent lunch hours trying on necklaces they couldn’t afford. Then, desperate to treat themselves to something, they bought stickpins they’d never wear. And the gossips who didn’t buy anything at all — they sat on the striped love seat opposite the waist-high jewelry case, chattering at Rennie, who stood behind it. And the braggart dealers who tried to unload mistakes. She even liked the helpless acquisitors, people who lived only to buy, who filled their lives with one expensive thing after another. But their addiction made her uneasy. Maybe she should run a side business in cures, like Yefgin, browbeating people out of their lust. Really, you don’t need these pewter candlesticks, she’d say with urgent sympathy. You’ve got those brass ones I sold you last month. But why defeat her own purposes. Enabling was her vocation.

Muffy and Stu Willis slid into the store at least twice a week. Like many long-married people they looked like siblings — both short, both with fine thin hair the color of Vaseline, both with a wardrobe of ancient tweeds and sand-colored cashmere sweaters. An inch of pale shirt showed at the neck of Stu’s sweater. Pearls adorned Muffy’s. The rims of their glasses were so thin that the spectacles seemed penciled onto their old and yet unwrinkled faces. Together they weighed less than two hundred pounds.

A quarter of a century ago, Stu’s public relations firm had done well enough. But it was an inheritance from Muffy’s father that allowed them to indulge her attachment to furnishings, rugs, jewelry, and dreary but costly clothing. Stu was quiet, Muffy quieter. Stu occasionally put in a word about the weather, but mostly he stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyeglasses watching while Rennie spread jewelry on the counter at Muffy’s soft request. And Muffy’s voice — there was nothing to it. It was as if she had once been almost smothered and then allowed to live only if she limited her vocabulary and breathed hardly at all.

When Rennie had spotted the diamond bracelet at an estate sale, she thought right away of Muffy. The bracelet was a four-strand cuff, each square-cut jewel exactly like the one beside it and behind it and in front of it, like a team of expensive mules. Rennie called Muffy the next morning, and within half an hour the couple was standing before her. How meager they were growing. The diamond cuff hung heavily on Muffy’s mournful wrist. “Oh,” she sighed.