In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied. No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.
Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.
“They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman.” She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn’t want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I’d lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.
Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn’t sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn’t garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat. She didn’t stake the flowers, and now they bloomed ragged, the second-year glads tilting to one side, Mexican evening primroses annexing the unmowed lawn.
Ron was away again, twice in one month, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead. Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him home.
Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to me, her spine threaded like jade.
She reached back for my hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child’s, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. I took her hand. She brought my hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. I rested my face on her shoulder, her back was like fire. “Ron’ll be back soon,” I tried to reassure her.
She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle. “It’s so hot already. What will I do when summer comes?”
She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.
“We should go to the beach,” I suggested.
She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. “It’s not that.”
I was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into my hip. I freed one of my hands and reached under myself, pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.
I handed her the ice-blue stone, the color of my mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too.”
Next door, Mrs. Kromach’s parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An icecream truck rolled down the street, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Claire lay down on her back so she could look at me, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.
“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.
I turned onto my stomach, sorted through the jewelry. I tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn’t fit over my hand. I thought of my suicides, the way I would run my death through my fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.”
She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”
“It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between my breasts, pooled in my navel.
“What religion is that?”
“I’m a survivalist.”
She wouldn’t allow that. I wasn’t playing. It was against the rules. “Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”
“I’d get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” I was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on my mother’s list of antisocial acts. I wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, the bone cancer boy’s plan, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. I was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. “You know how I’d do it?”
She was pulling me down that road and I wasn’t going to go there. “Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot, it’s making us crazy.”
She didn’t even hear me. Her eyes looked dreamy, like somene in love. “I’d gas myself. That’s the way. They say it’s just like going to sleep.”
She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She’d been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn’t as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. I understood. I used to dream that I was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in my bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.
I had to wake her up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. I told her about the Japanese sailor adrift for four days when he killed himself. “They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm.”
We heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. She sighed, filling out ribs sharp as the blades of the mower. “But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”
What answer could I give her? I’d been doing it for years. She was my life raft, my turtle. I lay down, put my head on her shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L’Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume. “Anything can happen,” I said.
She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.
She dropped back onto the pillow, her arm over her eyes. I raised up on one elbow. I didn’t know what to say. “I feel so unreal,” she said. She turned over, her back to me, her garnet heart pendant stuck to the back of her shoulder. Her dirty hair was heavy as a bunch of black grapes, and her waist and hip curved like a pale guitar. She picked up the strand of pearls and lowered it in a spiral on the bedspread, but when she moved it slid in toward her body, spoiling the design. She picked it up, tried again, like a girl picking petals off daisies, trying to get the right answer.