Laird Hunt - Ray of the Star

“After the centaur sent me off on a goose chase they told me where to look,”

“For which bit of information I’m inclined to forgive them their insults, though I’m not as inclined, my boy, to forgive you for finding them so agreeably apropos,”

“You had just called me ‘imbecile,’ Madame,”

“And so of course I had, for which I apologize, but at any rate, time is almost up and I must see Harry tonight, no more delays,”

“I’ll speak to him first thing this morning,”

“Good, and Ireneo,”

“Yes, Madame,”

“Do I smell?”

“You do not, Madame,”

“I’m relieved, you will watch out for those shoes, they will have you running out in front of cars before long,”

“I will,”

“Then that’s excellent, I’ll expect you tonight,”

“Good-bye, Madame,” Ireneo said and left the house and immediately started running, but when his shoes began to speak — small recriminations and half-hearted defenses — Ireneo stopped and said, “I’m on to you,” whereupon the shoes fell silent, and Ireneo headed off at a trot to a stand in the market, which opened early and served passable coffee and stuffed pastries, over which, while the curiously invigorating smell of the arriving fish, fruit, and freshly butchered meat wafted past, he could linger until it was time to go and see Harry and put an end to this errand, which had, after all, gone on much longer than should have been necessary, sentiments that overlapped in substantive ways with those being experienced, at that very moment at another market stand that served passable coffee but exceptional pastries, by Alfonso, who was perched, somewhat less comfortably than he cared to be between the connoisseurs, who were much less the worse for wear than he was for having spent the night eating deep fried foods and slurping down chocolate malts at the gallery, where Alfonso had returned after leaving Harry and Solange, not because he had wished to round out his evening with further celebratory activity, but because, at the precise moment that Solange shivered in the Yellow Submarine, one of the connoisseurs had slipped him a note that read, “Come back and see us when you are finished,” and for Alfonso, who had been a grateful recipient of the connoisseurs’ largesse for longer than any other current statue on the boulevard, a request from them was as good as a command, but that they were interested in anything more than his presence on the dance floor as the party trundled on into the wee hours was left unclear until, not terribly long before daybreak, they had danced a moment on either side of and in front of him then taken him by the arms and led him in the direction, as they put it, of a place they could all chat — this stand in the market where the connoisseurs were habitués — about, as it occurred, Harry and, by extension, Solange,

“So, it’s working,” one of them said,

“And part of why we asked you to join us for breakfast is just to express the sentiment …”

“The conviction,”

“Yeah, the conviction that it couldn’t have been done without your help,”

“My help?” said Alfonso, the connoisseurs laughed, one of them gave out a short whistle, then another one clapped him on the shoulder and said,

“No need to be disingenuous,”

“It’s unappealing,”

“Unappetizing,”

“It’s like all that fried food at the party,”

“Gets to you,”

“Only with this you don’t want to keep eating,”

“You don’t want to start eating,” the connoisseurs each picked up the cream-filled pastry they had ordered, wrinkled their noses, and tossed it back onto the counter, while Alfonso, who had a large bite of a similar pastry in his mouth, swallowed slowly, thought of telling Harry the story, of giving him the use of the submarine and putting him into position opposite Solange, of helping him push it each morning, of offering to roll him and Solange through the warm streets, and tried to decide if he had known he was helping, that he was acting, in a sense, as an instrument, but found he couldn’t quite remember, not that it mattered so much, he was happy to help and said as much and the connoisseurs picked up their pastries again and took bites and one of them said,

“Sending that guy off last night was the best thing you did,”

“Stroke of genius,”

“Maybe not genius but it bought us some time,”

“Come on, this is Alfonso, our friend, let’s call it genius, we can call it genius,”

“For fuck’s sake, fine, it was a stroke of genius,”

“Gave Harry his night,”

“And what a night,”

“All it takes is one,”

“For love to come knocking,”

“Now it doesn’t matter,”

“They’re both hooked,”

“Hooked enough, Solange’ll get over it,”

“Teach her a little lesson, she’ll be fine,”

“Why would Solange, of all people, need to be taught a lesson?” Alfonso asked, prompting two of the connoisseurs to smack the other and say,

“He misspoke, he was thinking about something else,”

“Criminy, you’re right, I misspoke, I was thinking about something else, apologies, Jesus, of course, poor Solange,”

“This is about him,”

“Harry,”

“Don Quixote,”

“Ha, ha, ha,”

“Now it can start,”

“What can?” said Alfonso,

“Ah, the poor schmuck,” said one of the connoisseurs,

“Yeah, the poor schmuck,” the other said.

The poor schmuck was feeling like anything but as he stood in front of the mirror in his apartment — first smoothing down the slightly wrinkled jeans he had left too long in the pile of clean laundry without folding, then smoothing the short sleeves of his yellow T-shirt with its blue sea bass logo, then pulling on his brown jacket, which did surprisingly well in warm weather, then running his hands through his still-wet hair, which, he had a feeling, would fall wrong all day, despite the solid quantity of hair paste he had applied after washing it — in fact he was feeling almost what one could call excellent, even better than he had felt when he had still been feeling good on the evening he had first met Ireneo and seen Solange, and the prospect of the day about to unfurl before him was so appealing that once or twice as he was going about his ablutions and eating his sausage and bread covered in the extraordinary rose petal jam that Solange had insisted on running inside to get for him when he had dropped her off at her apartment just a few hours previously, he had burst into song, the submarine thing, yes, but also bits and pieces of others that he had not come up with in years, and indeed he was in the explosive middle of one of these bits when he stepped through the doors of his building a few minutes after leaving his mirror behind and ran into Señora Rubinski, who, beaming, said, “Ah, Harry, how perfect, perhaps you would like to join us, my sleepyhead is finally up off the couch, we’re off for a morning walk, no need to wait for evening, here he is,” upon which she indicated, with rather a flourish, an elderly gentleman, the spitting image of the picture Señora Rubinski carried with her, who smiled a little sheepishly, shrugged, and seemed not at all nonplussed by Harry’s rather stunned silence at being presented to a man he could see through, even if only a little — at the right shoulder and the left shin — nor did Señora Rubinski, who had a reputation for moderate prickliness, take poorly Harry’s silence, which went on for the entire time the three of them were standing there, although when after an awkward interval Harry’s hand went slowly up and out, as if in spite of Harry’s reluctance it had decided a proper greeting was in order, a tiny cloud of worry came and rained on the edges of her huge smile, and she bade Harry a hasty farewell and, not quite touching the small of Señor Rubinski’s back, ushered him away, leaving Harry standing there staring after them, at Señor Rubinski in particular, though not, as one might imagine, with his hand still theatrically stretched out before him — he had immediately pulled that back in, placed it in his pocket, and made a nice tight fist of it — thinking, O.K. … and then, probably because he had thought it the night before as he and Solange had stood up straight after climbing out of the submarine and saw both Venus and the moon reflected on the disturbingly shiny waters of the bay, which looked both like and unlike the endless, gentle waters they had seemed to swim through together earlier, It harrows me with fear and wonder, the overly poetic incongruity of which remark, not to mention the terrors to do with numbness and icy water it adumbrated, had kept him from voicing it then but didn’t stop him from murmuring it now as the Rubinskis turned a corner and vanished, and he began making his way to Alfonso’s to collect the submarine and head for the boulevard, with the result that Harry arrived at his now customary spot in a very different frame of mind indeed and the silence that surrounded him inside the submarine, which found itself amplified by Solange’s absence from her box across the boulevard, even though it was past the hour they had spoken of the night before, was for the first time an uncomfortable, almost an untenable silence, a silence harrowed, in short, by fear and wonder, in that uncomfortable order, and so when Ireneo jogged up to the grill of the submarine and cleared his throat, Harry threw open the hatch and stepped out and, without hesitation, vigorously pumped the very real Ireneo’s proffered hand, an operation that was only mildly complicated by Ireneo’s apparent reluctance to stop jogging in place as he delivered his message.