T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

The shop bell made a prim, little-girl-peeing sort of sound, the sun blasted the back of my head, a smell of sweet herbs and the music of the spheres enveloped me, and I shut the door on a cool, leafy potter’s paradise. Outside, the streets were like furnaces, dust, glare, hot tires on hot pavement; here was the peace of a pine forest, soft-lit from the skylights above, suffused with the sweet scent of the sachets that clung to the beams like cocoons, viridescent with plants spilling from hanging pots, reaching for the ceiling from ceramic floor planters, sending tendrils out to embrace the weathered barn siding that silvered the walls. I stood there a moment, my back to the door, catching my breath like a man emerging from the sauna to plunge into a cold bath. Gentle breezes wafted, hidden speakers filled the room with a chorus of voices that rose and fell in passionate certitude — Bach, wasn’t it? Yes, J. S. Bach sending a glorious full-throated missive to a merciful and present God.

I looked around me and saw the colors of the earth. Muted browns, sienna, umber, the palest of yellows. I saw Boston fern, philodendron, wandering Jew, myrtle and jade. I saw pottery — vases, planters, tureens, amphorae, urns, earthenware cups, glasses, pitchers, plates, finger bowls. There were ceramic bells and windchimes, massive cookpots, diminutive snuffboxes. And all arranged with taste and discrimination, set out on shelves, sideboards, a huge walnut table with place settings for eight and a delicate faience vase of cut flowers as a centerpiece. I felt as if I’d stepped into a bower, a bedroom, a church. I pushed my hair back, wiped my sweating palms on the thighs of my pants and waited.

Nothing happened.

I listened to kyrie eleisons , examined this pot or that, discovered a fat orange cat and stroked its ears. Then I noticed a smaller bell, the familiar businesslike tinny sort of thing I’ve always associated with elementary school classrooms and hotel lobbies. I depressed the plunger— bing-bing, bing-bing —and was rewarded, a moment later, by the appearance of Petra.

She emerged from a door at the rear of the shop, dressed in a smock that flowed from her like a gown. She was barefoot, and a thin silver chain cut a V at her throat. I watched her official smile give way to a look of misplaced recognition. “Hi,” I said.

“Oh,” she murmured, stalling for time like a game-show contestant who’s just been shown, for the purpose of identification, the monumental color slide of a bearded president. “Hi.”

We smiled at one another.

“Fred?” she said.

“Felix,” I corrected.

“Felix,” she said.

I told her I’d dropped in to see how she was doing. She said she was doing fine and asked me how the fishing was. Her teeth were white, flawless, like something out of a toothpaste ad. “Fishing?” I repeated, puzzled, caught off guard, thinking of teeth and lips and the ache of enforced celibacy, until I remembered the lame story I’d concocted over the jack handle on that eventful evening a month back. “Lunkers,” I blurted, “we’ve been catching lunkers. Yellowtails, guppies and monkey-faced eels.”

To my relief, she laughed, and then turned to lift a ceramic teapot from a hot plate and offer me a cup of herb tea (rose hips or some such crap, which I detest and normally refuse, but managed somehow to accept gracefully). And then, stirring our tea, something magical happened — in a single leap we were able to extricate ourselves from the slough of trivia and small talk, and focus on the subject that bound us in intimacy: Jerpbak. Jerpbak, our mutual tormentor and bitterest enemy, our jailer, the agent that had brought us together, wed us, bound us flesh to flesh. I watched her eyes over the teacup and saw the back seat of Jerpbak’s cruiser. “Is he still bothering you?” I said.

She shook her head. We were sitting at the big walnut table holding ceramic cups, while cars rushed by the window and Bach marched steadily forward, taking little figures and swelling them to great ones. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Not since … well, not since I saw you last. I mean, when we met.” She coughed into her fist and colored a bit.

I waved my hand as if to say It’s no big deal, I’m glad I stopped, I’d do it again anytime, swim out to Alcatraz and do thirty years in the federal pen for a glance from you, babe , and told her — with all the flourishes — of my scrape with Jerpbak at the Eldorado County jail.

“God, that guy is nuts,” she said. “He’s not responsible for his actions. If they don’t do something with him he’s going to hurt somebody one of these days.” She took a short angry sip of her tea. “Do you think he recognized you?”

“Who cares?” I said, hot and reckless, the tough guy, and then tried to shrug the whole thing off by telling her I’d got hold of a lawyer (which was true) who had assured me I would get off on all counts (not true), as I really hadn’t done anything, when you came right down to it (also true).

“You were acting like a rational human being, that’s all,” she said, fixing me with the kind of look Joan of Arc must have taken into battle with her. “I’ll testify to that.”

We sat there a moment in silence, brooding over the wrongs done us, and then she observed that the whole thing was ironic in a way.

“Ironic?”

“Yes, well,” she said, lowering her eyes, “I was the cause of the whole mess, and I actually got off easier than you. A lot easier. Compared to what you went through, I was lucky.” The resisting arrest charge, it seemed, had merely been a threat, and Jerpbak had not followed through on it. She’d been booked and then released on the promise of returning in the morning with her license, and given forty-eight hours to correct the defects Jerpbak had ferreted out in the antique hulk of her VW Bug — from improperly displayed license plates to inoperable signal lights and eviscerated muffler — in lieu of paying the fines. It had cost her a hundred and twenty dollars in repair bills, she said, but at least she was free of it. And then her voice dropped to a whisper and she gave me the sort of look only martyrs nailed to the cross have a right to hope for: “I’m really sorry you had to get involved. If there’s anything I can do …”

There was plenty she could do, I thought, in terms of local anesthesia and release of tension, and to avoid leering at her — she was feeling sorry for me, feeling sorry and grateful, and I didn’t want to blow it by leaping at her like a sex maniac — I looked at my watch. It was one-thirty. Lunchtime. While I debated asking her to lunch (no doubt she’d already nibbled an alfalfa-sprout-and-feta-cheese sandwich while hunched over the potter’s wheel), I bought a vase I couldn’t afford, thinking I’d use it to enliven the déeAcor at the summer camp or else ship it to my ninety-year-old maiden aunt in Buffalo.

“You sure you want this?” Petra asked me.

I nodded vigorously, mumbling something banal about the quality of the craftsmanship and the intricacy of the design.

“Do you know what it is?”

“A vase,” I said.

She laughed — a short, toothy, ingenuous laugh — and then informed me that it was a funerary urn. “For ashes.”

“Okay,” I said, “you got me. I was going to put flowers in it.” I held up a qualifying finger. “Dead flowers.”

I was the soul of wit. We laughed together. She poured me a second cup of the wretched acidic tea (it tasted like a petroleum derivative) and asked if I’d like to see her workshop. “We’ll call it an educational tour,” she said, rising from the table.

I followed her into a brilliantly lit back room — cement floor, lath-and-plaster walls, high banks of gymnasium windows. It was hotter back here and the place smelled strongly of the clay that dominated it, coating everything in a fine thin layer, like volcanic ash or the residue of a dust storm. Petra took me round the room in a slow sweeping arc, pointing out the plastic bags of clay, the potter’s wheel, her kiln the size of a gingerbread house, the buckets of glazes and the greenware in the drier. I smelled the ferment of the earth, fingered the clay and marveled at its moistness and plasticity; I saw her in her smock and her bare feet and felt I knew her. When I thought I’d seen everything and was trying to wrest the flow of the conversation from ceramics and push it in the direction of lunch, she gave me an odd look — eyes half-lidded, lips curled in a serene inscrutable smile — and asked if I’d like to see her real work.