Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

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SEÑORA LUCY was a painter with eyes like daybreak. Like Montse, she wore a key on a chain around her neck, but unlike Montse she told people that she was fifty years old and gave them looks that dared them to say she was in good condition for her age. (Señora Lucy was actually thirty-five, only five years older than Montse. One of the housemaids had overheard a gallery curator begging her to stop telling people she was fifty. The Señora had replied that she’d recently attended the exhibitions of some of her colleagues and now wished to discover whether fifty-year-old men in her field were treated with reverence because they were fifty or for some other reason.) Aside from this the housemaids were somewhat disappointed with Señora Lucy. They expected their resident artist to lounge about in scarlet pajamas, drink cocktails for breakfast, and entertain dashing rascals and fragrant sirens. But Señora Lucy kept office hours. Merce, her maid of all work, tried to defend her by alleging that the Señora drank her morning coffee out of a vase, but nobody found this credible.

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MONTSE FOUND WAYS to be the one to return Señora Lucy’s laundry to her; this sometimes meant undertaking several other deliveries so that her boss Señora Gaeta didn’t become suspicious. There was a workroom in Señora Lucy’s apartment; she often began work there and then had the canvases transported to her real studio. Thirty seconds in Señora Lucy’s apartment was long enough for Montse to get a good stare at all those beginnings of paintings. The Señora soon saw that Montse was curious about her work, and she took to leaving her studio door open while she etched on canvas. She’d call Montse to come and judge how well the picture was progressing. “Look here,” she’d say, indicating a faint shape in the corner of the frame. “Look here—” Her fingertips glided over a darkening of color in the distance. She sketched with an effort that strained every limb. Montse saw that the Señora sometimes grew short of breath though she’d hardly stirred. A consequence of snatching images out of the air — the air took something back.

—

MONTSE ASKED SEÑORA about the key around her neck. It wasn’t a real question, she was just talking so that she could stay a moment longer. But the Señora said she wore it because she was waiting for someone; at this Montse forgot herself and blurted: “You too?”

The Señora was amused. “Yes, me too. I suppose we’re all waiting for someone.” And she told Montse all about it as she poured coffee into vases for them both. (It was true! It was true!)

—

“TWO MOSTLY PENNILESS WOMEN met at a self-congratulation ritual in Seville,” that was how Señora Lucy began. The event was the five-year reunion of a graduating class of the University of Seville — neither woman had attended this university, but they blended in, and every other person they met claimed to remember them, and there was much exclamation on the theme of it being wonderful to see former classmates looking so well. The imposters had done their research and knew what to say, and what questions to ask. Their names were Safiye and Lucy, and you wouldn’t have guessed that either one was a pauper, since they’d spent most of the preceding afternoon liberating various items of priceless finery from their keepers.

These two penniless girls knew every trick in the book, and their not being able to identify each other was one of the downsides of being an efficient fraud. Both women moved from town to town under an assortment of aliases, and both believed that collaboration was for weaklings. Lucy and Safiye hadn’t come to that gathering looking for friendship or love; they were there to make contacts. Back when they had toiled at honest work — Lucy at a bakery and Safiye at an abattoir — they’d wondered if it could be true that there were people who were given money simply because they looked as if they were used to having lots of it. Being blessed with forgettable faces and the gift of brazen fabrication, they’d each gone forth to test this theory and had found it functional. Safiye loved to look at paintings and needed money to build her collection. Lucy was an artist in constant need of paint, brushes, turpentine, peaceful light, and enough canvas to make compelling errors on. For a time Lucy had been married to a rare sort of clown, the sort that children aren’t afraid of: After all, he is one of us, you can see it in his eyes, they reasoned. How funny that he’s so strangely tall. Lucy and her husband had not much liked being married to each other, the bond proving much heavier than their lighthearted courtship had led them to expect, but they agreed that it had been worth a try, and while waiting for their divorce to come through Lucy’s husband had taught her the sleight of hand she eventually used to pick her neighbor’s pocket down to the very last thread. The night she met Safiye she stole her earrings right out of her earlobes and, having retired to a quiet corner of the mansion to inspect them, found that the gems were paste. Then she discovered that her base metal bangle was missing and quickly realized that she could only have lost it to the person she was stealing from; she’d been distracted by the baubles and the appeal of those delicate earlobes. Cornered by a banker whose false memory of having been in love with her since matriculation day might prove profitable, Lucy wavered between a sensible decision and a foolhardy one. Ever did foolhardiness hold the upper hand with Lucy; she found Safiye leaning against an oil lantern out in the garden and saw for herself that she wasn’t the only foolish woman in the world, or even at that party, for Safiye had Lucy’s highly polished bangle in her hand and was turning it this way and that in order to catch fireflies in the billowing, transparent left sleeve of her gown. All this at the risk of being set alight, but then from where Lucy stood Safiye looked as if she was formed of fire herself, particles of flame dancing the flesh of her arm into existence. That or she was returning to fire.

They left the reunion early and in a hurry, along with a small group of attendees who’d found themselves unable to sustain the pretense of total success. Having fallen into Lucy’s bed, they didn’t get out again for days. How could they, when Lucy held all Safiye’s satisfactions in her very fingertips, and each teasing stroke of Safiye’s tongue summoned Lucy to the brink of delirium? They fell asleep, each making secret plans to slip away in the middle of the night. After all, their passion placed them entirely at each other’s command, and they were bound to find that fearsome. So they planned escape but woke up intertwined. It was at Lucy’s bidding that Safiye would stay or go. And who knew what Safiye might suddenly and successfully demand of Lucy? Stop breathing. Give up tea. The situation improved once it occurred to them that they should also talk; as they came to understand each other they learned that what they’d been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love. At times it was necessary to spend months apart, coaxing valuable goods out of people using methods they avoided discussing in detail. Lucy sent Safiye paintings and orange blossoms, and Safiye directed a steady flow of potential portrait subjects Lucy’s way. The lovers fought about this; it seemed to Lucy that Safiye was trying to trick her into making a “respectable” living. Lucy had promised herself that she’d only paint faces she found compelling and it was a bother to have to keep inventing excuses for not taking on portraits.

“It’s all right, you’re just not good at gifts,” Lucy said, with a smile intended to pacify. Gifts didn’t matter when they were together, and gifts didn’t have to matter when they were apart either. But Safiye was outraged.