A Stolen Summer. Allegra Huston

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СКАЧАТЬ Eve! Whoever you’re meeting, stand him up!”

      This is the Robert she knew: someone who embraced the world with such total disregard for the possibility of rejection that it couldn’t resist him. He was always on to the next thing, always excited, as forceful as a tornado. It fascinated and frightened her, the way the past just fell away behind him into a detritus of facts stripped of meaning. She used to wonder whether anything could really be precious to him.

      In memory of Bill, Eve says yes to lunch.

      “It’s an old Shaker name,” Micajah tells Eve as they walk, in response to her question. “My great-great-great-great-grandfather’s brother was an architect, the first Micajah Burnett. The first I know of, anyway.”

      “I visited a Shakertown in Kentucky once,” she says, “when I was driving my son to college. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.”

      She remembers the elegant symmetry: twin staircases, twinned rooms, to keep the men and the women apart. And the sense of tranquility, which she imagined had always reigned there, since there were no marriages, no children, no sex.

      Micajah has his father’s excellent manners; but, where Robert held chairs and doors the way a peacock holds his splayed tail, Micajah holds Eve’s chair for her in an offhand way, as if in casual rebellion against the carelessness of the world. Eve never agreed with the militant college feminists that such manners were insulting; she taught her own son to hold doors, though not just for women. Once she stood outside the door of the bank for several minutes as people went in and out, waiting for the eight-year-old Allan to realize she hadn’t followed his heedless rush toward the M&M dispenser inside.

      “Looks like you were scrubbing floors this morning.”

      She noticed Micajah registering the grubby hem of her dress and the smudges on her knees as she sat down. She’d tried to wipe them clean in the car, but the dirt had ground itself into her skin.

      “I was dragging something out from under a table, in a junk shop in the Bronx. I was on my way to the library to research it when your father waylaid me.”

      “That’s cool,” he says. “That you don’t care your knees are dirty.” The corners of his mouth turn down when he smiles, as if he’s keeping back some of his amusement for himself. “What was it?”

      “A musical instrument. I don’t know what you’d call it. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Eve isn’t sure if he’s teasing her. Luckily, the instrument makes a convenient conversational shield. “It’s like a violin—strings and a bow—but squarer, with a really long neck.”

      “Sounds like the kind of thing Mick plays,” says Robert. “Weird contraptions that don’t even have English names.”

      There’s a sudden edge in his voice: annoyance, or jealousy? Praising Micajah, he was feeding his own ego, Eve realizes, and she dislikes being his audience: for the showing off and the putting down. She’s starting to wish, for more than one reason, that she hadn’t agreed to join them for lunch.

      “My dad thinks I’m a terrorist,” Micajah says, unruffled. “Because I play music from places where the State Department doesn’t want you to go.”

      His vibe is somewhere between bohemian and outlaw.

      “Well, if it makes you millions, I won’t complain!” Robert’s laugh is a braying bark. Eve sees the couple at the nearest table stiffen and pretend to ignore him.

      “Yeah, all that money,” says Micajah quietly. “I’m planning to spend it on gold-leaf underwear. Not ostentatious. Just for that coddled feeling.”

      The corners of his mouth turn down. His eyes, mischievous, catch Eve’s. She feels a trickle of sweat run down her back, even though it’s cool inside the restaurant. The sports bra she chose for her hunting expedition feels like an implement of torture around her chest.

      “You’re going to move out of that roach motel,” Robert says. “Buy something that’s going to appreciate.”

      “I appreciate where I live now,” says Micajah. Then, to Eve: “Did you buy it?”

      “Yes.”

      “You’re a musician?”

      “No. But even if I was, it’s not playable. The back is smashed.”

      “So why did you buy it?”

      “It’s beautiful,” she says.

      “And you couldn’t just leave it there.”

      She feels transparent to his eyes.

      “If it wasn’t broken, I probably couldn’t have afforded it,” she says. “It has this incredible carving, vines, twining all over it. I’m pretty sure it’s jasmine. It made me think of the secret gardens in children’s books. Or The Arabian Nights.”

      “How the hell do you know it’s jasmine? It’s wood, for Chrissake.” That’s the spoiled-brat side of Robert: hating not being the center of Eve’s attention.

      She reaches into her purse for a business card, and gives it to him. “I’m a garden designer now. I use jasmine a lot. It’s resilient, it lasts all summer, and it smells delicious when you sit outside in the evenings.”

      Robert holds the card at arm’s length, as if he doesn’t believe what’s written on it. Eve had no particular interest in flowers back when he knew her. She gets the sense that he considers her change over the years as a kind of betrayal.

      Micajah is glancing from his father to Eve, clearly wondering if they were once lovers. They weren’t. Eve is a little shocked by how much she cares that Micajah should know that. As the little sister, she had a Don’t touch sign plastered to her forehead. When Bill died, she went to the funeral with the guilty thought that maybe the extremity of emotion might propel them into each other’s arms. She hated herself for this callous disloyalty to her brother, allowing her desire to contaminate what should have been the purity of her grief. She didn’t know, before she got to the church, that Robert was married with a baby son.

      The waiter arrives, a plate in each hand and the third balanced on his wrist. He gives Robert his steak, Eve her salad. Conscientiously, she ordered from the cheaper end of the menu.

      “Saltimbocca,” the waiter says, setting Micajah’s plate on the table, twisting it to its most advantageous angle. “Jumps into the mouth. That’s what it means.” He’s flirting, helpless as an iron filing in Micajah’s magnetic field. Earlier, when he took their orders, Eve registered his agitation. She feels a pang of sympathy for him. Women used to be like that around Robert. She’d seen girls chase him down the street and force their phone numbers on him. He gloried in it with the laziness of a lion.

      “Thanks, Josh,” Micajah says, remembering the waiter’s name from his spiel earlier, and meeting his eyes for a short moment before turning his attention back to Eve. Elegantly done, she thinks—a masculine gentleness his father never had.

      “At least it’s not roses,” Micajah says.

      What if the carved flowers had been roses? Would she have bought it? Maybe not. It was the jasmine—secretive, blooming in darkness—that seduced her.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ