The Secrets of a Fire King Page 12

  As she spoke, a monkey slid over the fence into the garden, stole a mango, and stood on top of the cistern, waving angrily at Joyce. She jumped up and scooped a smooth stone from a bowl by the patio doors. Her aim was true; she hit the monkey in the arm. He screamed and leaped up onto the fence, but not before he took one large bite from the unripe mango and threw it back into the garden.

  Jamal came to investigate, and Joyce grew calmer as he collected the ruined fruit and threw it into the wasteland beyond the fence. Still, when she returned to her seat she was shaking, and she smoothed her skirt against her knees several times to regain her composure. “They’re in my garden all the time,” she explained to Marcella, who looked quite astonished. “I truly hate the creatures.”

  “Really?” Marcella said, finishing her tea. “I think they’re kind of charming. The sultan’s youngest daughter keeps one for a pet. It’s just a baby monkey, so I guess it’s harmless. She carries it around like a little doll.”

  “That seems completely irresponsible,” Joyce said, wondering, as she spoke, how Marcella had come to know this. “Even small monkeys can be quite dangerous.”

  Marcella pushed her dark curls back, looking thoughtful. “She’s never alone with it. They lock it up at night, and of course she always has a servant with her during the day.”

  Joyce glanced out the window. Jamal was working on the last tree, sunlight beating the back of his neck a dark bronze. “The local teachers are certainly full of stories, aren’t they?” she said.

  Marcella was silent for a long moment. “I’ve been tutoring the sultan’s children, actually,” she said at last. “The headmistress at the school asked if I’d be interested.”

  Joyce turned to stare at her young guest.

  “You hold special classes at the school?” she asked.

  “No, at the palace,” Marcella told her evenly, meeting her gaze. “I go three times a week.”

  “My dear girl,” Joyce said. Marcella Frank was obviously a lackey, a kind of servant to the royal family, but she was also the only other foreigner Joyce knew who’d ever been inside. “Come, my dear, you must tell me all of it, now that you’ve begun.”

  Marcella gave a modest shrug. “There’s nothing to tell, really. I teach them English in the afternoon and sometimes, after class, the sultan’s wife invites me in for tea. She’s already fluent, but she likes to learn American slang. It’s very casual. She tosses all these plump cushions on the floor, and then we sit and talk. She must be bored, don’t you think, just hanging around in the palace all day, nothing to do but play the piano or float around in the pool? After tea her sisters come by, and they do each other’s hair.” Marcella touched her own thick curls self-consciously, and laughed. “Last week they wove jasmine through mine, and piled it up on my head. I thought I’d never get the pins out!”

  Joyce, who had listened avidly, yet with disbelief, imagined white jasmine setting off the dark infusion of Marcella’s wild hair, perfume rubbing from the petals into the skin at the hollow of her throat. Joyce’s own hair was cut off in a stylish cap, and now her hand wandered to the nape of her neck, stroked the blunt hairline. She did not speak, puzzled by the intensity of feeling that passed through her at the thought of Marcella Frank with jasmine in her hair.

  “I thought,” Marcella went on, “that I might wear it that way for the sultan’s birthday, as well. What do you think, Mrs. Gentry? Would that be too ostentatious?”

  Joyce’s hand dropped to her collarbone. She felt the sharp line where the linen neckline met her flesh.

  “You’re going to the sultan’s party?” she asked.

  Marcella nodded. “The invitation arrived two days ago. I think,” she added, “that it was edged in real gold.”

  “Yes,” Joyce said slowly. “Yes, they use real gold.”

  She heard her voice speaking, but the words were almost obscured by the sound of high heels tapping against marble, which echoed in her head. She kept a tight smile on her face as she stood and went once again to the patio doors. Jamal, finished with the mango trees, was tending to the shelves of orchids in the shade of the house.

  “I’m feeling somewhat faint, I’m afraid,” Joyce said, being very careful of her voice. “It must be the heat.”

  Marcella, concerned, rose at once. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.

  Joyce shook her head. She placed one hand on the cool stone wall. “I’ll be fine,” she said, the echo still ringing in her mind. She wanted to tell the girl to go, but she was aware that this would be too rude. “Let me get Jamal to see you out,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m suddenly in desperate need of a rest. He can give you a tour of the garden before you go.”

  “Are you sure I can’t get you something?” Marcella asked. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Joyce said. She waved sharply to Jamal, called his name.

  “He’s a nice man, isn’t he?” Marcella said after an awkward pause, reaching for her bag. “His daughter’s in my class. He’s so gentle with her. And so proud of her, too. You’ll really be all right?” she finished. “It was nice to meet you, then. Thank you for the tea.”

  Marcella stepped onto the patio, and Jamal looked up, pleasure breaking across his face. Together they strolled from tree to bush, chattering away in a language Joyce did not understand. She watched them, feeling stunned and full of shame, as if she had been in a terrible accident and had awakened to find strangers staring at her naked, damaged body. She thought of the mailman, of Jamal, both of whom had witnessed her eager vigil for the invitation.

  “Jamal,” she called, more sternly than she’d meant to. “Don’t forget to show the maze you are constructing.”

  Jamal turned toward the house and nodded, and for an instant his eyes met hers. She watched the laughter in them disappear, saw the flicker of pure contempt—of hatred almost—that surfaced in the brief seconds before he lowered his gaze. He turned away so quickly that she did not have time to react, but then her heart began to beat with a rapid intensity. How could he feel that way toward her, after all she had done? When she thought of that ruined house he lived in, all that chaos and filth from which she’d taken him. And she’d have done more, too, much more, if only she’d known he had a daughter. She watched Jamal and Marcella carry on an animated exchange, a twisted feeling moving through her. Yet if Jamal truly hated her, then why would he have built her such a lovely garden? Surely there was more than craft behind the well-tended bushes, the array of flowers?

  Joyce roused herself and began to gather up the tea things. The kitchen was spacious, lined with windows that overlooked the garden. Hibiscus bloomed, violent red and a blush of peach, all along the border. The veranda was lined with bougainvillea, and everything was neatly trimmed. It ought to have given Joyce some relief to see it, the color and the order, but today it only made her feel a deep unease. For a moment she stared at the bright flowers without really seeing them. Then a movement caught her eye.

  From each stake in the ground to each new mango tree, bridging the air over the circles of poison Jamal had put down just that morning, there was a dark, quivering line. Joyce blinked, and when the illusion didn’t go away, she opened the screen to look more closely. Lines of ants were walking through the air. But it was not air, she realized, it was the fishing line Jamal had used to stake the trees, so transparent that she would not have seen it except for the ants. They were the large red ants, so dense and steady they seemed more substantial than the fishing wire itself. Joyce held herself still, as if a single motion would shatter something fragile. She hardly breathed, watching the steady progress of the ants. They were working very hard, each one excavating, then carrying away, the very heart of her trees.

  Aristotle’s Lantern

  PHIL GAVE THE SIGNAL, HIS ARM A SWIFT BLUR IN THE HEATSHIMMERING air. Pragna, her head tilted to catch the sun, dark glasses hiding her expression, lowered her book to her belly; at seven months pregnant, she couldn’t dive.

>   “Go!” Phil called as his arm fell, and in the next instant Jonathan was over the edge, disappearing into that sea, so blue, so green, the water a liquid gem closing over him. Then Gunnar, lean and tan, plunged into the sea and disappeared. I sat on the edge of the boat, adjusting my mask. “Go, go!” Phil called, and I pushed off, sliding after Gunnar into that other world.

  It was so quiet. Falling, I noticed this first. Light fell in shafts and then diffused, the water turning dimmer and more opaque and suddenly cooler. A school of tiny silver fish scattered before us like sparks. Below, Jonathan’s limbs were luminous against the ocean floor. I felt the water shift as Phil dove in, and turned to see him silhouetted against the clear, wavering ceiling of the ocean, a wide stream of bubbles in his wake.

  It was the fifth dive of the week. For me, the last. Tomorrow I would leave these islands, this resort built so unobtrusively amid the white beaches and jungled mountains. Jonathan’s research on current-wave dynamics often took him to remote places. He always went, eagerly—it was the bane of his existence that he taught oceanography in Minnesota, a thousand miles from any ocean. He had discovered this resort while wandering around the archipelagos of the South China Sea on a grant. One morning I’d answered the phone in Minneapolis, heard static sweeping through the line like snow. Then Jonathan’s voice came, fading, clear, echoing itself.

  “Anna? Can you hear me?”

  “Kind of,” I said, sitting up.

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning and I’d been sleeping, a Minnesota winter sleep, the kind of sleep you sink into for a few weeks after a patient throws up on you and ten minutes later a doctor tells you off for a mistake that was his own, after you go downstairs and hear the receptionist arguing with a woman who’s maybe forty-five, maybe fifty, a woman who is clearly in great pain, and the receptionist is telling her that she can’t see a doctor if she can’t pay, but there’s an emergency room in a hospital across town that still takes the uninsured. I’m too sick to drive, the woman says, and she looks it. Pale, she’s leaning on the counter for support, like she might fall. She is well dressed, in a dark-red skirt and matching sweater, though her hair isn’t combed. Her hands are shaking, and she’s having a hard time catching her breath. Please, she says, and the receptionist looks grim and troubled; it’s not her fault that there’s nothing she can do, and you stand there in the doorway and hear yourself saying, Look, don’t worry, I’ll drive you there. Anna? the receptionist says, and the doctor, who moments ago was screaming that you were a bloody fucking idiot, totally inept because you didn’t notice the medication error he’d written on the chart, comes in and says, Anna? I need you upstairs right now. And everything slows down as you cross the room instead and take the woman’s elbow. She is puzzled but in too much pain to protest. There is a moment when your eyes connect, you see the fear in hers and you know it could be you standing there, your throat closing up, fear and pain making you light-headed, and that’s when you decide. You take her across the narrow swell of the Mississippi River to St. Paul and get her admitted to that hospital and then you don’t return to your job as a physician’s assistant. You go back home and fall asleep, waking at strange hours to eat cold cereal or watch TV, wondering what the next thing in your life will be.

  Jonathan, a world away, didn’t know any of that, of course.

  “How are you, Anna?” he asked. “You sound tired.”

  “It’s a long story,” I said, walking to the window. My breath clouded the frozen glass. Beyond, the suburban world was flat and white. Cars crawled along I-35W like bright-shelled bugs. Even here, in this clean midwestern city, traffic had multiplied; in the summertime, ozone alerts forced the very old and very young to stay inside. I’d treated them, the elderly gasping for breath, their heads arcing back to meet the plastic mask; the infants, limp and wheezing in my arms. That morning the cars were stalled, heat shimmering from their hoods into the snowy sky. I imagined the hospital, its regulated air and gleaming white walls and swarms of business managers in their cubicles, calculating and adjusting and maximizing the potential of every human resource. “What’s new with you?” I asked.

  “Look, cash in your vacation time, all right? Anna, I can’t explain any of it long distance, but please. Say you’ll come.”

  I didn’t answer right away. We’d been together for five years and had reached some sort of intersection: whether an ending or a turning we could not yet tell. But I heard something different, imperative and inexplicable, in Jonathan’s voice.

  “Anna?” My name traveled through dark space, echoed from satellites. Anna, na, na, like a song. “Are you still there? I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  “I’m here,” I said, and there was a pause as my words traveled back over the curve of the globe, over oceans.

  “Just come,” he said. “I’ve sent you a ticket.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I promised. But I already had—long beaches, deep seas, sun all over my skin. The minute I hung up, I started packing.

  Jonathan met me in Singapore and then we traveled for two days more, by incrementally smaller planes and boats, until we reached this remote chain of islands. They emerged slowly from the horizon as we approached: the white lines of beach, the tree-dense hills. The low buildings were teak and thatch in the style of old sultans’ palaces, their tile roofs the same dark red as the earth. Chalets, barely visible, were situated only yards from the sea. The resort was elegant, yet also an ecologist’s dream: the toilets were self-composting in bathrooms of Italian glass tile, and the electricity came from windmills on the hillside and solar panels on the roofs. The airy rooms had high ceilings; windows and doors opened onto shady verandas. We slept to the sound of waves and waded each morning into water as clear as air.

  That sea: limpid around our ankles in the shallows, dense blue now as we dove. Gunnar, my diving partner, kicked his way down to a giant clam nestled in between two boulders. Gunnar was elusive, I’d noticed, prone to floating off in his own direction. Freedom first, he’d said one night over beers, after a dive, and Pragna had looked up, her eyes narrowing. Her dark hair was swept back in a clasp and long silver earrings brushed against her neck. She spoke intensely, her eyes flashing. Yes, but what frees a community must necessarily restrict the individual, she said. Gunnar waved his hand, dismissive. We will raise this child to be absolutely free, he insisted, and Pragna flushed, clearly angered by this old argument between them.

  Now, in the ocean winds, Jonathan and Phil drifted lower, examining anchor damage at the base of the reef, setting up the instruments that would measure tidal shifts and currents. I had done dozens of dives with Jonathan, in the weedy bottoms of the Minnesota lakes, to wrecks off the Florida coast, and in sinkholes in the Virgin Islands. I was struck, each time, by how happy he seemed in this world, isolated and self-contained, while I was always longing to erase the distance—to hear his voice, feel his touch. I ran my hand across the bottlebrush coral. The fronds, waving red and yellow and purple like exotic flowers, pulled inside and disappeared, leaving only a stony, pitted brain. A manta ray flashed, scattering a school of butterfly fish, silver and striped with dark gold, each moving like the pulse of a wing. Chains of clear eggs drifted near my face. The rush of air, and some faint, distant clicking, as if the coral were speaking, or the stones. I hung suspended for a moment in that blue silence, watching the others, isolated and yet bound to them, the water around us a living thing, embracing and sustaining.

  I touched Gunnar’s shoulder and gestured beyond the coral to the field of sea urchins, their black spines waving like dark wheat in the currents. He smiled and waved me off.

  I swam low over the field, spines just inches from my skin. All week I had been fascinated by these sea urchins. Each was the size of a baseball and had a dozen spots, blue and orange set in white, like bulbous eyes. Clustered on the ocean floor, they seemed to watch me with an infinite and wary gaze. I was searching for a skeleton. The inner shell of a sea urchin is a hollow globe, s
cored in five curved sections that taper at the ends into a small hole at the top and bottom. Echinodermata: Echinoidea, whose shell is known as Aristotle’s lantern. In the hushed lobby of the resort there was a sculpture, delicate, made of bronze: an Asian goddess with fifteen graceful hands, the shell of a sea urchin, white and cream and rust, balanced on each open palm. The dark spines of living sea urchins were quite poisonous—I’d seen a fellow tourist with an ankle like a grapefruit, downing Valium and gin to kill the pain. But this was my last day, and it seemed worth the risk: I wanted a souvenir.

  A glimpse of white. Mud bloomed from the ocean floor as I cupped the shell, a fragile sphere, in my hand.

  When I turned back, Jonathan and Phil had moved off into the gloamy distance, but Gunnar was still drifting by the bank of brain coral. A rush of guilt—I’d let him slip completely from my mind. And something was not right: Gunnar’s regulator trailed free. Air rushed in my ears; even from this distance I saw Gunnar’s pink lips, a wildness in his eyes. He waved, and then drew his finger swiftly, definitively, across his throat, the diver’s universal signal of distress.

  I swam to him, and he grabbed my arm with such force that the shell slipped from my hand, tumbling slowly back to the spiny field. The arrow on his oxygen gauge was in the red. His grip hurt. He was all desire, all desperate need, and yet I hesitated for an instant, taking one last, deep breath before I passed my regulator to him.