“Maybe you could ask them to give me an assignment back here,” Rebecca said.
I told her I was just a lighting technician, contracted, not even staff.
“But you know John,” she said. John was the head curator. “You two are friends.”
I thought she ought to ask Lou, a patron of the museum whose connections had likely procured her the internship in the first place. But I agreed to put in a word, if only to end the conversation: nothing good could come from associating with Hamlin kin — much less from upsetting one with a refusal. Yet it excited me too, the thought of Lou’s scowling displeasure were he to discover Rebecca and I chumming around at the museum. Displeasure was a euphemism; he’d put his wife’s garden shears through my skull.
Still, when she asked for a drink, I handed her the flask.
At sunset she was at my front door. I glanced toward Lou and Barb’s house. Rebecca told me not to worry, they’d gone to play bridge with friends.
“So,” she said, wandering into my living room, “do you have any first editions?”
“What?”
“Of Poe,” she said.
“Did your uncle tell you that too?”
Glancing into corners, trailing her fingers along window-sills, she smiled. “I was hoping that a Poe aficionado — who works in a museum, no less — would have an artifact lying around.”
“What,” I said, “just lying around like junk mail?”
“Don’t be nasty,” she said, then picked up a green glass ashtray. “Like this,” she said, holding it to the light. “It’d be great if you could say, ‘And this is Poe’s ashtray, recovered from his writing desk at his last residence at Fordham.'”
“That was my grandfather’s.”
She set it down. “Lou would like that. History buff.”
Yeah, I thought. He had a hard time letting go of it.
“All sorts of Civil War memorabilia everywhere. Ever been inside?”
This was beginning to feel like a game. “What do you think?”
“How should I know where you’ve been?”
I told her she’d better not let Lou see us together.
“Together?” she said, hiding a smile.
“You know what I mean.”
“Why, doesn’t he like you?”
Now I just sat back and looked at her
“Oh, I know,” she said, grinning. “He told me to stay away from you.”
Then she asked for a drink, even though, by the way she’d cringed earlier, I could tell she’d hated it. I was disappointed. She was only there with me for a little rebellion against the stuffy uncle and aunt.
So be it. I went to get the whiskey.
I spoke with John. I owed my job at the VHS — my very livelihood in this city — solely to him. By the end of the week Rebecca was putting in shifts assisting me in preparing the illumination of over 1,500 objects for the bicentennial exhibits. John and the staff unpacked items every day and created layout plans. It was my job to determine how best to light those books, paintings, and curios they wanted in cases, mounted upon walls, or perched on podiums. Rebecca was happy the hour or two a day she worked with me — rather, with the objects, to which her full attention was devoted. She was ecstatic watching the items emerge from their boxes, or gazing into the cases once the lighting was complete, all the pieces illuminated perfectly before they went back into their boxes for safekeeping. The lights from the displays would strike her face full on, or under her chin like a flashlight beam, or sidelong as in a Rembrandt painting. I wanted to pose her and arrange the light so as to expose every molecule of her simple beauty.
On my back, my head inside a case, I heard Rebecca gasp.
“Wow,” she called, “have you seen this?”
When I stood up Rebecca was crouched by a case that John and I’d worked on that morning and had yet to finalize. She moved aside and looked at me, leaving one finger pressed to the glass.
“The perfume?” I said.
It was a small red vial, chipped along the lip — like Rebecca, with that nick running the width of her own. The original cork stopper, disintegrated long ago, had been replaced by a plastic facsimile.
Rebecca read from the placard: “The essence of rose, believed given by Poe to Virginia the year of their marriage, 1836.” She looked to me again, this time with a lusty sort of gaze. “Can you open the case?”
Although I was technically disallowed, as I was not a member of staff, I did have a key. John gave it to me for the sake of convenience — and because he trusted me. But I couldn’t shake her eyes and thought, What the hell, the museum had better let her touch anything she wanted if they liked her uncle’s money. I opened the case, then cradled the vial in my palms.
“If this breaks,” I told her solemnly, “that’s it. The end of us both.”
I felt her warm fingers coax the vial free from my hold, and noted the light that shone from the case upon her thin nose and lean cheeks, a cool, sterile light that was all wrong. Then, with a move of her thumb, off came the stopper and my heart kicked like a horse.
“Rose,” she said ecstatically, the vial beneath her nose.
I took a whiff. “Yup — now be care—”
She flipped the vial over upon her finger, then dragged the scent across her neck desperately, back and forth. I paled, took the bottle as forcefully as I dared, replaced the stopper, and put it away. She was grinning, her fingers down her dress top.
“Jesus, Rebecca!”
“Emery,” she said softly, almost pityingly, “you knew I was going to do that.”
I heard her call me in the parking lot behind the Historical Society. I didn’t stop, but slowed. We walked together into a long, thin park of magnolia trees that bordered Sheppard Street. The humidity was palpable and a damp wind was gathering strength. I turned into an alley and Rebecca followed, eyeing the flask when I took it from my belt.
“You don’t even like it,” I snapped.
The evening light on her face reminded me of the light that shines upon generals or angels in classic paintings: the exultant yellows and oranges bleeding through churning clouds. I reminded her how quickly I’d be fired if anyone discovered what had happened, then plopped the flask into her hand.
To avoid being seen together, we stuck to the alleys, hopping over streets — Stuart, Patterson, Park — and cutting through the neighborhood diagonally. Below our feet the cobblestones were mashed together like crooked teeth, and on either side crowded slim garages, wooden fences, bushes and woody shrubs, and walls of ancient brick. Green plumes of foliage, heavy with flowers and fruit, alive with the frenetic song of mockingbirds, spilled over everything like lush curtains; and the ivy-draped limbs of mammoth tulip trees wound intricately overhead like the soft arms of giants. It awed me how wild and vivacious the wilderness could be on these nameless roads. It was hard to imagine that a city existed beyond the houses we walked behind.
“Here once, through an alley Titanic,” intoned Rebecca, “Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul — Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.”
She watched me for a reaction.
“That’s Poe,” she said, as if to a very slow child.
The trees were loud in the wind and I caught the distinct scent of rose.
“You’ve got to wash it off as soon as you get home.”
“No one’s going to know, Emery.”