Boris and I were seated immediately. The restaurant was not a haunt for fishermen, but rather—judging from accents—people from New Jersey. Our waitress wore a hat, as did the entire wait staff, that had two foam lobster claws sticking out at the sides. Boris studied the menu. “What’s the house specialty?” he asked.
The lobster-cracking paraphernalia delighted Boris. He looped the plastic bib around his neck and tied it in a firm knot. He clacked the crackers menacingly at his dinner—a ruby lobster at rest on a bed of lettuce. “This is what I love about Maine,” he said. He waved around the restaurant and I regarded all the things included in his embrace: portrait of moose, papier mâché anchor, “Lord Give Me Patience, and I Want It Now” framed in wooden blueberries. “Why aren’t you having the lobster?” he asked.
I regarded Boris’s dinner, which looked back at me, its black, stemmed eyes fixed in the final instant of the boiling pot. “I prefer eating closer to my species,” I replied. I had ordered the steak.
Boris went to work on the lobster with surgeonlike intensity, although his bib made him look like a baby. He lifted the creature in his two meaty hands and in one expert, juicy crack split the tail from the torso. “They say the best meat’s the tail, but I prefer these little morsels up in the body.”
I leaned to take a closer look and nodded politely. I felt one of my headaches coming on.
“Katherine, what’s wrong?” asked Boris.
“Migraine,” I said. “I’m going out for some air.”
I left the dining room and let the door slam behind me. Something about the lobster had set me off. Maybe I felt sorry for it, but that seemed unlikely. Even had it lived, its days of scraping about the ocean floor, occasionally raising a massive claw to menace a passing halibut, were not worth romanticizing. But I still felt sick. As I’d watched Boris and his generous jowls, the thought had occurred to me that Boris, like grilled fish, might offer the best eating in his cheek.
The day was closing. At five, the sun had sunk low and banks of purple cloud were stacked, one upon the other, on the thin, black line of the horizon. The air was heavy with fog and salt and quickly penetrated my wool sweater. There was no one around. I looked out at the waves. A stiff wind blew the water to a beaten metal sheet of regulated dimples and shallow depressions. It whistled through the riggings. The cold air had settled my head a little. I wasn’t really hungry. Boris was at work on his lobster, reading the newspaper that he had flat on the table beside him. I thought I should get some sinus medicine. Somewhere, in among the kite shops and hand-knit sweater stores, there had to be a drugstore.
I crossed a busy street and headed away from the water. Halfway up Exchange Street—where the majority of the quaint, tourist-oriented shops were located—a musician had set up with his violin. I always liked violin music and I stopped to watch him for a minute. The musician was tall and thin, and his hair stood in a fuzzy shock around his head. He had a long, lean face and he was smiling to himself, with his eyes closed. He smiled through the difficult parts. He was listening to the violin almost passively. I looked at the buildings, the long glass faces of the storefronts, the swinging wooden signs, the old-fashioned streetlights. All these things were painted over by the music and somehow made more beautiful.
The only others watching were an eager mother with her uninterested children—two boys—one overweight, the other thin. The mother smiled at me, then blinked her caulked lashes in rapid succession, batting them like butterfly wings.
“Lovely,” she said. Her fat son cowered; the thin one poked an expressive finger down his throat. She reached into her purse and produced a quarter, which she held up for me to see, then dropped the coin with a muffled clink into the violin case. She shook her head in delight and squeezed her soft, white hands together. Her fuchsia lipstick had adhered thickly to her two front teeth. She exuded an aura of perfume aged in wool.
One of Boris’s librettos was for Les Mohicans, a French opera loosely based on the Fenimore Cooper book. In the opera Indians kidnap the girl, her colonel father, her lover and—of all things—her dancing instructor, Jonathas. In the pivotal scene of the opera, Jonathas plays his violin and the Indians begin dancing, hypnotized by the music. It is thought that if the Indians were not dancing around they would be preparing to eat them all, and that once Jonathas stops playing, the Indians will indeed do just that. So Jonathas plays and plays, never taking a break, until English troops arrive and save them. This scene had seemed particularly silly to me when I read it, but now, in thrall to the music, it seemed possible. Even likely. I opened my purse and took out a hundred-dollar bill. I held it up for the mother and the gaping children, then placed it carefully in the case.
The music came to a close and I ducked into a doorway to view the musician. He stood holding the bill in his right hand, looking street end to street end for an explanation, the stilled violin held loosely in his left. He put the bill in his pocket and raised his bow again, but after the first whine of the strings, he changed his mind. He packed up his violin and left with his whistling of Massenet’s Meditation straining through the fog, impossibly close, lost in a screech of a car’s tires, and then gone.
I took my time getting back to the restaurant, even though my headache was long gone. Boris was going to be angry. I had the money only because he’d given it to me to buy lunch, decided to charge the meal, then forgotten about it. Boris had honored my request to have cigarette money by meting out exactly ten dollars at a time. I decided to tell Boris that the hundred dollars was lost—blown or stolen out of my purse. A gust of wind, a petty thief, it didn’t matter to Boris as long as his precious money hadn’t fallen victim to generosity. I rounded the end of the pier.
Boris was done with his lobster and nearly half my steak by the time I returned.
That night I couldn’t sleep. Boris was snoring away, but I got bored lying there, despite the comfort of the bed. I was hungry and didn’t know where I could get any food. I went downstairs to the living room of the bed-and-breakfast. The door to the kitchen was locked, but I remembered there being a crystal dish with peppermints in the living room. I entered the living room through a narrow door. The bustle and cheer was gone, replaced by silent gloom. The only sound was the ticking of the grandfather clock that stood guard in the corner. A pair of bookcases flanked the fireplace. The majority of the volumes were vellum bound and lettered in gold, and had, I suspected, been purchased by the yard.
I ate a peppermint. That done, there was no more to do in the living room than there had been in the bedroom, except now I wasn’t menaced by Boris’s snoring. What was there to do in Maine? The young violin player had been very attractive. I surprised myself with a little fantasy of him playing for me alone, and then for me naked. I wondered where he was. The moon was shining through the window and light pooled on the floor close to my chair. Out in the cold night, I heard a cat at first calling and then attacked. There was a distant crash of trash cans. A draft had worked its way into the room and a stack of pamphlets left on the mantel slid to the floor. The grandfather clock shuddered to the hour—midnight—and after a labored click let loose its cacophony of bongs. Then rain blew in with a patter and I felt the power of a dark patron moving over the city, as if the raindrops were fringe sewn to the edge of his cloak.
I wanted some fresh air. From the street I had noticed a small cupola at the top of the bed-and-breakfast, which must have been a widow’s walk in an older, saltier time. Boris and I had a room on the third floor. I had noticed a narrow door to the left of the bathroom. This had to open to a set of stairs and at the top of these, I thought, I would find the cupola.