Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“No,” he said, and then began again. “I’m sorry, but no. I can’t. But I’d like to give you something.”

“For Tibor?” I asked.

Malory shuddered. “For yourself,” he said. “You’ve come a long way. I don’t want you to leave empty-handed.”

I looked around. It was a dining room — seven chairs set around a table. Unused but not undusted. And then I saw them. At first I thought they were alive, the people. And then I saw that they were as small as me, as comfortably small as Malory, and made of stone. A statue of a man — I thought for a moment it was Isaac Newton, although he looked much younger than the statue in Trinity College Chapel — and next to him, a woman.

“That,” I said to Malory.

“The whole sculpture?” Malory asked, even paler and smaller than before. “You want that?”

“Only the apple,” I said. I don’t know why I wasn’t more surprised that the apple was floating in mid-air. Without waiting for an answer from Malory, I walked over to the figures. And whether the man on the left and the woman on the right smiled their approval to me, I can’t be sure. But I reached out and took the apple, as easily as I might pick a McIntosh at the market.

“Thank you,” I said to Malory. It looked at first like pain, the movement of his mouth, perhaps because he hadn’t performed the action in over twenty years. But by the time Malory walked over to me and reached down to touch the marble apple in my hand, I knew he was smiling.

TTAVIA RETURNED FROM ROME IN TRIUMPH, AND FOR THE NEXT four days, as Tibor’s birthday approached, she was treated the way she imagined a daughter ought. Cristina installed her in the Yellow House down by the creek. With the antiqued brass of the four-poster and the angelic white of the sheets and mosquito netting, Ottavia was starring in Cristina’s idea of an Ibsen dollhouse, in the stately pleasure dome of TiborTina — the upstate kingdom that coupled Cristina’s name and Tibor’s to an approximation of the Roman island of Tiberina, so central to their beginnings in the western world. Ottavia’s yellow dollhouse by the creek sat below the white clapboard house of the Master and the Mistress, the red-sided barn for the Bomb Squad and the Nurses, and the host of guest cottages — the love children of Andrew Wyeth and David Hockney in bright pastels of magenta, chromium, and cobalt. All the color, all the light refracted through poplar and reflected off water and wrapped Ottavia in familial comfort and power.

She rose at dawn on Tibor’s birthday, as she had each of the preceding dawns. The morning was still cool. She crossed the bridge over the creek and strode up a tractor path through the meadow and past the vegetable patch to the pond. She swam for an hour, back and forth across the water, roughly following the minute hand clockwise. By the time she’d dried herself and climbed up the wooden terraces to the back deck of the White House, Cristina was waiting for her with grapefruit juice, café crème, and a basketful of fresh breakfast. Cristina met Ottavia in a fully engaged present, full of mutual marvel and wonder at the butter and marmalade and cut flowers of her Paradiso. Ottavia had grown at least an inch and a half since repatriating Tibor and convincing Malory to leave the Villa Septimania and fly to the United States. If Cristina was the president of TiborTina, Ottavia was anxious to prove herself a worthy secretary of state and see this diplomatic mission through to a world-changing conclusion.

Once she’d heard that Malory had agreed to come to Tibor’s party, Cristina stepped into high gear. Malory’s plane was due to land at Teterboro at noon. His driver would deposit him at the Blue House at two, giving him time to shower and rest. Drinks would be at five, dinner at six in deference to Malory’s jetlag. Simple. Cristina had initially wanted to invite surviving Nurses, mobile remnants of the Bomb Squad, a producer or two, and a number of local neighbors to celebrate. That was Plan A. But given the unpredictable state of Tibor’s storm front, Cristina had changed plans so many times she was well past the alphabet.

In the ten days since he had returned from London, Tibor had done little but sit on the deck in a wooden-slatted Adirondack chair, look down at the pine-ringed pond, and smoke himself into a fog. He wasn’t drinking — there wasn’t even a flip-top can of turpentine on the ten acres of TiborTina. Cristina wasn’t certain this silent alternative was more desirable. But although he sat apart in his Adirondack, the white of Tibor’s shirt and trousers and the gray of his hair and cigarette smoke mixed into a shade of solidity that anchored the women and convinced them that, as long as the cigarettes held out, there would be fifty more years in TiborTina of peace and hope.

Still, Cristina needed fruit and vegetables. More, she needed Tibor to show some signs of life.

“Darling,” she said to Ottavia. “Why don’t you drive Tibor down to the Farmers’ Market after lunch and pick up a few things for dinner?”

On that Monday afternoon, there were a dozen or so cars and SUVs at the round barn of the Farmers’ Market. Across River Road, two beat-up Chevy 10s stood in front of the Seven Veils Bar & Grill. An early-model BMW idled in front of Kolodney’s Fish Market.

“I’ll get the veg and fruit,” Ottavia said, pulling the Yukon onto the grass beside the Farmers’ Market. “Do you want to come with me?” she asked, turning off the ignition. “Or do you want to buy the vongole for dinner?” Tibor climbed down from the Yukon and headed across River Road to Kolodney’s. “Do you need money?” Ottavia called after him. Tibor lifted his wallet from his pocket and walked on.

Kolodney wouldn’t have known what a vongole was in any accent. But Tibor was able to point, pay, and walk out of the fish market with four pounds of netted clams in a plastic bag in under ninety seconds. The lunch crowd — there was a road crew painting yellow lines two miles up 9D — was long gone. But the Seven Veils still smelled of sauerkraut balls, marinating wieners, and bleach.

Tibor was oblivious to all, even the scent of stale beer that rose from the carpet on the stage. It had been well over a week since he’d had a drink, and that was in another country. Malory was coming. Malory was coming with the Pip. Malory was coming with the Pip. And although Tibor knew the hiding places of at least six bottles of vodka in the beams of TiborTina and even a stump or two around the pond, he was determined to keep his mouth as dry and receptive as possible. The Pip, the Pip that had saved him from plunging to the pavement of that drafty church the morning he’d awakened to the sound of Malory, the Pip would save him now. The Pip would save him. The Pip would cure him.

A skinny college girl Tibor had auditioned on an earlier visit to the Seven Veils, back when he and Cristina were scouting the back country of the eastern shore of the Hudson for property, was lying on the stage on a beach towel laid above the carpet in the interests of hygiene, crossing and uncrossing her educated legs.

“Hi, Tibor!” she called from the floor over the music, “Sweetest Taboo.” Sade. If he didn’t know the name of the girl, Tibor knew the singer, named after one of his favorite aristocrats, even if everyone pronounced her name wrong. He nodded. There was no need for more.

He was bored. Terminally bored. Neither the Indian Antigone — impossible to remember names — nor the countless other big-hipped, short-legged, long-waisted, laughing, weeping, lactating girls he had auditioned in London had managed to cure him of his boredom. They had tried, all of them — he couldn’t doubt their sincerity any more than he could make fun of Ottavia’s earnest pleas. They had walked him through the meat stalls of Smithfield, through the thornier copses of Hampstead Heath and the shadowy buttresses of the flyover on the backside of Westbourne Grove. They had mixed vodkas and whiskies and ragas and rap in an attempt to entertain this foreigner who wouldn’t be entertained. They did it for money. He knew that. But that had no effect on his inability to find either joy or purpose, aesthetic or reason. And Ottavia. It was only to give Ottavia something else to do besides worry over his leaky pores that he told her about Malory and the Pip. He wasn’t sure exactly why. But he had memories of each of them, images of tranquility before something began to piss him off, as it had done with Cristina — done so thoroughly that all former happiness was chased into some distant cell of his brain and bolted shut.