Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 17 Read online

  "Personal project.” Armitage snapped his fingers, a failed, slippery sound. “Twy?"

  His assistant emerged from the side from behind the drape of a mis-shaped African continent. At the sight of Twy, Joan almost winced, but Patty had warned him about this too: It's not that it's too horrible to describe, Joan, it's like I'm physically incapable of describing it. It was true—something in her brain refused to engage with the creature, forcing her to turn away.

  Twy held up a vial of viscous, maroon liquid. When Joan didn't take it, Armitage intervened, putting the glass tube in her hands, closing her fingers around it. He explained what she had to do, and in spite of Patty's reassurances, Joan reluctantly accepted it.

  "What do you want for it?"

  Armitage stopped grinning but sniggered, an unnerving combination. “This one's on the house. We can talk terms with the next one."

  "Next one?"

  He started grinning again.

  After she was done, Joan crossed the market again, looking for her Barth. Pitched along the Mall, between the splinter of the Washington Monument and the bloom of the Capitol, the market was the city's last intersection. Joan remembered a time when the grassy stretch was bare enough for Senate interns to play football, back before it had been spiked by palm trees, but despite the changes, it was still the last place where everyone could gather and share what they'd found. Stalls covered the old lawn, and as Joan meandered between them, she paused to smell fresh star fruit and crystallized ginger, enjoy the ticking of old Victorian sea clocks, feel the silk of fairy-tale ballgowns, listen to people haggling over videos of unknown episodes of Saturday Night Live. All things that had surfaced in the past few weeks. A few months ago, Joan would have explored the market, hoping to come across something new and unexpected and extraordinary and discover sudden, uncharted vistas in her heart. But now she realized it would take months to hunt through the market, weaving in and out of the thousands of stalls, unstitching her path again as she circled round and round, finding that the stalls had changed again in the intervening time, and the thought of all that searching wearied her.

  Finally, she found the rare animal stall. Barth greeted her with the same bright face as he always did. “Joanie, can you believe it?"

  He held up a photo of a chicken with a cartoon head. “A dodo! An actual dodo!"

  Joan tried to express some sense of wonder for the thing, but the truth was she hadn't been so interested in tracking animals these last few weeks. But she couldn't tell Barth that.

  He was bargaining with the stall-owner. “So we have a deal?"

  "Depends. I'm very particular about what I want."

  "I know, you said last week. Hamburgers."

  "No, not plural. The most perfect hamburger in existence."

  "That's very subjective, you know."

  The stall-owner didn't say anything. Barth sighed, took out the Ziploc bag from his backpack and removed the paper napkin. The woman accepted the napkin like a communion wafer and inhaled deeply. For a moment, her face shivered, was beatified.

  "Yes. Yes, this is—yes. OK—where?"

  "Where did you see the dodo?"

  Both Barth and the woman nodded, yes, they had a deal, and each wrote down the location on the other's notepads. Either could be lying, but trust and reputation were important in the market. With so many fabulous things continuing to appear, borne out of the deepest longings of at least one person in the city, Joan sometimes wondered if mutual respect for other people's dreams was all that kept them from wandering off on their own.

  Barth had the excitement of a child realizing that there wasn't just a single jar of his favourite candy, but a huge shop full of it. Joan linked arms with him, happy to hook into the circuit of someone who could still feel these thrills. “We'll get the cameras and go out tomorrow, Joanie. Stock up on picnic supplies from Antonio's, a little dope off Phil, make it an expedition. We'll speak to the gang at the 9:30 Club tonight and—"

  "The show. Right. I'm not sure about that, Barth."

  "Not sure? Joanie?"

  "I don't know, I just feel—I don't know. Maybe a little tired."

  "But Joanie—it's Johnny Ace! First show in over fifty years! And you know how much trouble Patty went to for the tickets?"

  "I know, I know, it's just—"

  "'Pledging My Love', babe? You remember?"

  Joan did. Three weeks ago, the two of them, Patty and Arthur had been at the Mongolian restaurant on 18th Street where they hung out every Tuesday, and bizarrely, Paul Simon's ‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’ was playing through the sound system. They'd started riffing on the idea of what a Johnny Ace gig would have been like, so the next time they'd all got together in Arthur's Aladdin's Cave of a record shop, of course Arthur unearthed a Johnny Ace CD, because he had every CD and record that had ever been cut, and they got stoned and listened to the doomed ‘50s singer crooning ‘Pledging My Love’ in his weird, crying voice, and then Elvis Presley covering it, Aaron Neville, finally, all of them, the gang, fast friends since college, rolling verse after verse deep into the night in a pledge to each other, until they'd all fallen asleep, humming and dreaming.

  Joan gripped Barth tighter, making the excitement flow through her as well. “Yeah, you're probably right. I'm sure it'll be good."

  "It'll be fantastic, Joanie! We'll meet Patty and Arthur at Pickles and make it a night of nights."

  So they stopped at Antonio's and got supplies for the next day's expedition and returned to the zoo. New neighbours had moved into the lizard house, some weird goth couple from the music that was blaring out of there. Joan wondered how long they would last. She'd never liked the lizard house, for all her love of animals, but maybe the goths would appreciate the ultraviolet and the gloom.

  The lizard house had never compared with the panda house. Since she was four, Joan had always loved it best. It had even been Barth's idea when they first talked about moving in together, that day the two of them had photographed the hippo washing in Rock Creek. It seemed proof of a city that granted all of them their heart's desires, and her, a soul-mate.

  When they got back to the panda house in the late afternoon, Ling Ling had retreated behind the couch, and while Barth put the photo of the dodo up on the wall with all the other pictures, Joan tried to coax the panda out of her nest with stalks of bamboo. Barth opened a bottle of zinfandel, and halfway through it, Joan became convinced that Ling Ling would come out if they played ‘Pledging My Love.’ But Ling Ling wouldn't be persuaded.

  They met up with the gang at Pickles to swap stories about their latest discoveries. Barth told the others about the Siberian tiger they'd glimpsed prowling the ground floor of Garfinkel's, Arthur talked about the phantom radio stations he'd been picking up and Patty complained about her latest girlfriends. Joan tried to join in, but she still felt a little disconnected, that same feeling that had made her go to Armitage in the first place. All through the Johnny Ace concert, she found her attention wandering, and anyway, the singer's baritone wasn't as smooth on stage as it was on record. But Joan didn't want to hurt Patty's feelings, so she kept quiet.

  Don't be a spoilsport, Joan told herself as she and Barth stumbled back to the panda house. Barth lit some candles, and as they made love, she made herself remember how they'd met in the Natural History Museum which they used to haunt for years on their own. They'd bumped into each other under the huge blue whale that was suspended in the main hall, a spot that she'd first found after Patty and she had snuck away from the rest of the school trip. A personal talisman, the whale was like a promise to Joan that wonderful things would always remain out there for her. Tonight she imagined the blue whale swimming above the two of them, and the feeling of being so close to something so alive, something she wanted to embrace but was afraid to touch, almost made her cry. But with a single whip of its tail, the whale shot past and away from Barth and Joan, and they were left alone again in the aquamarine murk.

  That night Joan dreamt, the clearest sh
e'd dreamt for months. The animals in the pictures on the wall blinked, and peered forward, one at a time. At last a panda, or what looked like a man in a panda mask, drew out of the wall, and stood naked, looking down at her, before he took her hand and led her out of the zoo, along Connecticut Avenue where the flesh ghosts of dead Hollywood stars roamed, through somewhere else, streets she couldn't name. He took her across the city to a fine wooden door with a polished brass dragon knocker. He waited for her to come in. But Joan couldn't. It might be Georgetown, it might be across the Potomac in Old Alexandria. But she couldn't find the apartment, and Joan began to sob.

  "What, babe?"

  "Go back to sleep, Barth."

  "Babe. Babe."

  Barth's drowsy voice tapered into gentle breathing. Joan examined her old map of D.C., annotated with the faded colour of old Biros from a time when everyone thought a single plan could contain all the changes. Her own version of Armitage's map, she realized. On the desk by the lamp was a glass of what looked like tomato juice and the empty vial. She sipped from the glass, not sure if she liked the warm, salty taste. The warmth slipped down her throat, seemed to spread through her body, before it concentrated in an itchy hotness around her ankles.

  Joan gasped, bending the Anglepoise lamp to illuminate her feet. On her left ankle, the veins stood out in a purple blueprint, irradiated like hot wires. She nearly cried out, but the heat was already fading, leaving a charcoal tattoo of criss-crossing lines and circles. With her thumb, she gingerly traced the markings, pressing down on the tiny bulls eye at the heart of the design. Then Joan understood, and she looked at her paper map and picked out the same lines.

  She found the bulls eye: Georgetown.

  When Joan was fifteen, Patty and she had gone on a Halloween dare to find the Georgetown house where The Exorcist had been filmed. As they stood on the stairs where the priest had thrown himself to his death to save Linda Blair, Patty had told her, It really happened, you know, but it wasn't this house, it was a few blocks away. After spending an hour wandering past the brownstones where rich lawyers lived, and the bars were filled with students, Patty finally presented the real place to Joan as a gift. She started telling true-life stories to scare Joan, but Joan wasn't listening. She was staring across the street, into a window flickering from the glow of a fireplace, imagining herself sitting with her husband on the rug, imagining herself going straight over and banging the dragon-headed knocker.

  It was the same house. Joan tucked the map into her duffel as the man opened the door. Unlike the dream, he didn't wear a panda mask. He had kind brown eyes and a tanned face crinkled with some terrible experience she wanted him to confess and an apologetic way of standing with his shoulders tilted that reminded her of her childhood crush, Montgomery Clift.

  "At last, dear."

  And his voice had none of the exclamation points that had come to irritate her about Barth. “I've got the fire lit. Come in."

  So Joan left Barth and the zoo behind. She was happy for a while with Derrick. But one morning early in the next spring, she woke up in the brass bed and gazed at the ceiling for hours.

  She found Armitage again in the market. “Still don't know what you want, ma'am?"

  She didn't reply. There was a price now, but it was so simple, Joan agreed without hesitation.

  * * * *

  Two years later, at Patty's insistence, the old gang got together one last time.

  While they waited for the navigator, people quickly got bored. Patty tried to nuzzle her neck. Sparked by a lingering feeling for their affair that February, Joan thought about letting her, and anyway, this high up, approaching sunset, she could feel a chill and appreciated the familiar warmth. But her current lover, Cam, was pouting and Joan still saw the sweetness left in him, so she reluctantly pushed Patty away.

  At last, Barth turned up—with his new woman, but without Arthur. This incensed Patty. “You went to the shop, right?"

  "Where the shop was—yeah.” Barth was more interested in knotting hands with the woman than explaining. “The shop isn't there, it's been replaced with something selling weird fish. Arthur's gone."

  So it had happened—one of them had finally strayed away. Joan wasn't surprised it was Arthur—he was always talking about tracking down that radio station whose signal only he ever seemed to pick up. But it was a shame. It had taken Patty months to organize this, weeks just to find where they'd all drifted to in the city. There was so much else to do now.

  The navigator signalled it was time to go. As the silent man with a face like cracking ceramic helped them into the huge gondola, Joan glanced up at the tall cathedral that was casting longer and longer shadows across them. Was it an original thing? She tried to remember it from when she was a kid. Hadn't the cathedral been finished just before she went to college? If so, it had been unmade in the years since, with bubbles of grimy gothic statuary rippling across the clean stonework like buboes and a newly-jewelled surface creeping up the towers, more hide than building as it pulsated softly in the weak light.

  The navigator stepped on last with the coiled end of the tether line. One of his men stoked the furnace, and the ropes and balloon fabric were pulled taut. The big-bellied balloon was the last of their shared dreams. The transparent material showed strips of sunset distorted by the hot air. Smaller goldfish inflatables rose up inside the balloon, and when they bunched against the inner surface at the top, Joan felt the balloon lurch upwards. She grabbed Cam's elbow, and despite his sulk, he steadied her as they climbed into the late summer afternoon.

  Barth declared himself bartender and from behind the bar at the gondola's centre, began pouring drinks for everyone. His partner tried to help, but the absinthe bottle kept slipping as she tried to unscrew the cap with her paws, and everyone laughed.

  As Cam cranked the stereo up, the others started to dance. The light evening breeze chilled with the increasing height. Holding onto one of the safety ropes, Joan leaned over the edge and enjoyed the vertigo.

  Patty joined her. Joan smiled into her oldest friend's face, now Maori with the scarring of Armitage's services. “So what do you see?"

  "The city. That's all I can see."

  "Yeah, but which city. Do we see the same city?"

  Did anyone anymore? Joan wondered at what point it had stopped being the same city for everyone. One by one, like Arthur, people were roaming off, peeling away from the common world. Joan imagined private cities sparkling with Jesus’ tears or razed by Armageddon fantasies, breaking off like bubbles, getting smaller as they floated away.

  But Patty had never accepted that. So the two of them watched the city expand from the seed of the cathedral, into a spiralling vine of buildings, into street weeds that spread too fast for Joan to disentangle. Below the wind's faint keen, she heard a muezzin call and a blues guitar solo. Across the sun, flattening into the horizon in rolls of fat light, two large-winged things flew, probably condors, but Joan recalled the rumours of dragons and shuddered.

  "What do you see?"

  There was too much city to take in. What appeared to be a steel pyramid punctured the old zoo. The old ribbon of Rock Creek Park that used to divide the city had been healed by new scabs of moonscape. Strips of city were black with shared apocalyptic dreams. The Potomac looked like it had altered course again—the only thing Joan recognized there were the docked tall ships, waiting in vain for someone to leave the city. But no one would. Why should they? Everything they could possibly want was here.

  "There's too much to see."

  "Down there, Georgetown. Do you remember?"

  But Georgetown was fizzing with too much detail—new monuments, a fireworks show, sudden wonders. “I can't."

  "You must remember, Joan? Using our fake IDs in the bars? That Halloween? The Exorcist house?"

  For a few seconds, Joan could. The outlines of Wisconsin Avenue appeared like a sudden profile in a magic-eye picture, and following it down to the corner of 18th, she imagined the McDonalds they always us
ed to eat in, and then lower down, the canal that ran parallel to the river there.

  "The college tower. The spire of that church, you know, the one we slept in that one night.” Patty pointed out each of the landmarks and as she spoke them, the city resolved itself, the detail collapsed into a single place they shared.

  But then Joan saw the door with the strange knocker, and Derrick's sad face, sad when he took her in, just as sad when she slipped away four months later. She saw the cobbled streets, a long time later, when she and Harkness were betting on the white tigers that raced there, and some time after that, armed with rifles and hunting griffins, paired with a rag boy whose name she had deliberately never learned, and wallowing in a bloodlust she could never admit to before. And each time, she saw herself going back to Armitage, shivering at first, then tracing a new Georgetown on the map that spread across her skin.

  Wisconsin faded like an old scar. “I just can't see it."

  "I can.” Patty's partner had come up on the other side of her. “The tower. The church. I see it, Patty."

  "I know you do, hon, but I want to see if Joan—"

  Cam pulled Joan away from the other side. “Scratch me, I can't reach."

  "Please, Joan, just look—"

  Cam purred in that way Joan loved. “Maybe later, Patty.” She let him take her hands, sharp nails grazing the recent cuts on her knuckles. “Georgetown will always be—"

  Knotting together on one of the cushions, Cam led her hand to the itch at the base of his spine. She stroked the fur there, reached down to tweak the stub of the tail she'd amputated. Opposite them, Patty continued to stare at Joan while her partner kissed her neck and gathered up her hands. Finally Patty gave in. She began necking with the woman, who was Joan's exact double. Joan thought Patty might have been crying, but her head was too hazy with drink to be sure.

  The wind shifted, the gondola began to sway. For a while, the music got steadily louder until the wooden floor beneath Joan was twitching. Then suddenly the sound was cut off and everyone stopped dancing.