“I’ll get the veg and fruit,” Ottavia said, pulling the Yukon onto the grass beside the Farmers’ Market. “Do you want to come with me?” she asked, turning off the ignition. “Or do you want to buy the vongole for dinner?” Tibor climbed down from the Yukon and headed across River Road to Kolodney’s. “Do you need money?” Ottavia called after him. Tibor lifted his wallet from his pocket and walked on.
Kolodney wouldn’t have known what a vongole was in any accent. But Tibor was able to point, pay, and walk out of the fish market with four pounds of netted clams in a plastic bag in under ninety seconds. The lunch crowd — there was a road crew painting yellow lines two miles up 9D — was long gone. But the Seven Veils still smelled of sauerkraut balls, marinating wieners, and bleach.
Tibor was oblivious to all, even the scent of stale beer that rose from the carpet on the stage. It had been well over a week since he’d had a drink, and that was in another country. Malory was coming. Malory was coming with the Pip. Malory was coming with the Pip. And although Tibor knew the hiding places of at least six bottles of vodka in the beams of TiborTina and even a stump or two around the pond, he was determined to keep his mouth as dry and receptive as possible. The Pip, the Pip that had saved him from plunging to the pavement of that drafty church the morning he’d awakened to the sound of Malory, the Pip would save him now. The Pip would save him. The Pip would cure him.
A skinny college girl Tibor had auditioned on an earlier visit to the Seven Veils, back when he and Cristina were scouting the back country of the eastern shore of the Hudson for property, was lying on the stage on a beach towel laid above the carpet in the interests of hygiene, crossing and uncrossing her educated legs.
“Hi, Tibor!” she called from the floor over the music, “Sweetest Taboo.” Sade. If he didn’t know the name of the girl, Tibor knew the singer, named after one of his favorite aristocrats, even if everyone pronounced her name wrong. He nodded. There was no need for more.
He was bored. Terminally bored. Neither the Indian Antigone — impossible to remember names — nor the countless other big-hipped, short-legged, long-waisted, laughing, weeping, lactating girls he had auditioned in London had managed to cure him of his boredom. They had tried, all of them — he couldn’t doubt their sincerity any more than he could make fun of Ottavia’s earnest pleas. They had walked him through the meat stalls of Smithfield, through the thornier copses of Hampstead Heath and the shadowy buttresses of the flyover on the backside of Westbourne Grove. They had mixed vodkas and whiskies and ragas and rap in an attempt to entertain this foreigner who wouldn’t be entertained. They did it for money. He knew that. But that had no effect on his inability to find either joy or purpose, aesthetic or reason. And Ottavia. It was only to give Ottavia something else to do besides worry over his leaky pores that he told her about Malory and the Pip. He wasn’t sure exactly why. But he had memories of each of them, images of tranquility before something began to piss him off, as it had done with Cristina — done so thoroughly that all former happiness was chased into some distant cell of his brain and bolted shut.
In the week since his return from London, Tibor hadn’t spoken — not to Cristina, Ottavia, Nurse, Bomb Squadder, or anyone. It didn’t matter. No one really wanted to hear what he had to say. College Girl was no different. Tibor sat on a stool. The bartender, who was at some kind of college himself, studying communication, reached down into the well for the bottle of Absolut. Tibor waved him away with an index finger and pointed to the soda siphon and a lime. The bartender shrugged. Tibor set his plastic bag of clams down on the bar and lowered his mouth to the straw.
“Hey, Tibor,” College Girl called to him. Tibor looked up at the mirror in the bar, but the image of the bottom of the girl’s stilettos crisscrossing behind the bourbon was too vertiginous. He turned. “This guy’s a foreigner too. Where’d you say you were from?” Tibor looked over to his left. There was a man, the only other customer in the Seven Veils, sitting two stools away. He was sipping on a vodka and tonic and staring intently as the girl’s legs exposed then hid then exposed again, as if he was studying for a final exam.
“Jed-dah …” the man said.
“Jed-dah!” the girl repeated. “They got dollar bills in Jed-dah?”
The man didn’t understand. Tibor took out his wallet and handed him a five, making it clear with a thrust of the chin that he should carry the bill directly to the girl on the towel as Tibor had in years of defending his belief in the multiplicity of pleasure. The man hesitated. He had a bag on his lap. There was a bit of delicate negotiation before he could place the V&T and the bag on the bar and trot the bill over to the stage. He was compact — that was Tibor’s thought — Malory-sized, although his hair was cropped in short Arabian curls. Tibor had cast an Algerian in his first Dante production back in Rome — as the homosexual Brunetto Latini, if he remembered correctly. The Algerian was a Muslim, Tibor recalled that much. He’d come back to the Dacia once or twice, had a perfectly good time, Tibor thought, even without drinking the vodka or eating the prosciutto. Dora, or was it Brendushka, had taken pity on the guy — Tibor couldn’t remember the rest. The Seven Veils was a long way from Jeddah, so maybe College Girl would take pity on this poor schmuck.
“Wanna dance?” She’d raised herself up to a standing position on the stage and was lazily scratching an itch on her left shoulder blade with her rolled-up towel. On stage, in stilettos, she towered over the man from Jeddah, who held Tibor’s five in embarrassed supplication. “Whaddya doin in the Seven Veils if you don’t wanna dance?”
“Give him a dance, Rache,” the Bartender called out. “I saw his wallet. Full of Benjies.”
“Aha!” Rache — was that really a name? Tibor wondered — said. “A rich guy from Jed-dah! Where is that? Somewhere in Es-PA-ña?” She stepped off the stage and nudged the man with a practiced fingernail back onto his stool.
“Saudi,” Mr. Jeddah said, still wondering what to do with the five.
“Live around here?” She nudged his knees apart with both of hers.
“Boston,” the man said.
Tibor turned back to his water. He knew that in seven and a half minutes, College Girl would have the guy’s passport number and two, if not three of the hundred-dollar bills the Bartender had so expertly spied. Except for the Algerian, Tibor couldn’t remember knowing any other Arabs, any other Muslims. Rumania in the days of the Sheikh and Sheika Ceauşescu wasn’t comfortable with any show of obeisance except to the holy couple. There had been a few Iranian refugees in Rome before he and Cristina left, but then, they weren’t really Arabs, were they? He had been happy in Rome, hadn’t he? Cristina had been happy too, even with her mopping and dusting and burping babies that belonged to other people. And she had been happy again when he’d discovered Ottavia in the godforsaken icebox of Santa Sabina. There had been chances — even after he had run off to an organ loft to hide from a terror worse than any he’d felt searching for mines in the delta of the Danube. There had been chances, even after Fatebenefratelli, even after the red-bearded doctor lost their child and disappeared. Malory would bring another chance. After all this time, maybe Malory was right and he was wrong. Malory would bring the Pip. The Pip would show him the answer.
“We Muslims believe,” Mr. Jeddah said, with a muffled sound that told Tibor exactly where his mouth was. “We believe there is a body and there is a soul.”
“Really?” Rache said, and Tibor could hear her voice descend in pitch and placement. But the man continued.