Lady Oracle Read online

  I went into the bathroom and dug the nail scissors out of my zippered makeup bag. They were too small, but it was a choice between that and one of Mr. Vitroni's dull paring knives. It took me quite a while to saw the hair off, strand by strand. I tried shaping what remained, but it got shorter and shorter, though no less uneven, until I saw that I'd cropped my head like a concentration camp inmate's. My face looked quite different, though: I could pass for a secretary on vacation.

  The hair lay in mounds and coils in the bathroom sink. I wanted to save it; I thought briefly of stowing it in a bureau drawer. But how could I explain if it were found? They'd start looking for the arms and legs and the rest of the body. I'd have to get rid of it. I considered flushing it down the toilet, but there was too much of it, and the septic tank had already begun to act up, burping swamp gas and shreds of decomposing toilet paper.

  I took it into the kitchen and lit one of the gas burners. Then, strand by strand, I began to sacrifice my hair. It shrivelled, blackened, writhed like a handful of pinworms, melted and finally burned, sputtering like a fuse. The smell of singed turkey was overpowering.

  Tears ran down my cheeks; I was a sentimentalist without doubt, of the sloppiest kind. The thing was: Arthur used to like brushing my hair for me, and that small image dissolved me; though he never learned not to pull at the tangles and it hurt like hell. Too late, too late.... I could never manage the right emotions at the right times, anger when I should have been angry, tears when I should have cried; everything was mismatched.

  When I was halfway through the pile of hair I heard footsteps coming down the gravel path. My heart clumped together, I stood frozen: the path led to nowhere but the house, there was no one in the house but me, the other two flats were empty. How could Arthur have found me so soon? Perhaps I had been right about him after all. Or it wasn't Arthur, it was one of the others.... The panic I hadn't allowed myself to feel for the past week rolled in an ice-gray wave back over my head, carrying with it the shapes of my fear, a dead animal, the telephone breathing menace, killer's notes cut from the Yellow Pages, a revolver, anger.... Faces formed and disintegrated in my head, I didn't know who to expect, what did they want? The question I could never answer. I felt like screaming, rushing into the bathroom, there was a high square window I might be able to squeeze through; then I could run up the hill and drive away in my car. Another fast getaway. I tried to remember where I'd put the keys.

  There was a knock at the door, a stolid confident knock. A voice called, "Hello? You are within?"

  I could breathe again. It was only Mr. Vitroni, Signor Vitroni, Reno Vitroni of the broad smile, inspecting his property. It was his sole piece of property, as far as I knew; nevertheless he was supposed to be one of the richest men in the town. What if he wanted to check the kitchen, what would he think of the sacrificial hair? I turned off the burner and stuffed the hair into the paper bag I used for garbage.

  "Coming," I called, "just a minute." I didn't want him walking in: my bed was unmade, my clothes and underwear were draped over chairbacks and strewn on the floor, there were dirty dishes on the table and in the sink. I hooded myself with one of the towels and snatched my dark glasses from the table as I went past.

  "I was just washing my hair," I said to him when I'd opened the door.

  He was puzzled by the dark glasses: a little, but not much. Foreign ladies, for all he knew, had strange beauty rituals. He beamed and held out his hand. I held out my own hand, he lifted it as though to kiss it, then shook it instead.

  "I am most pleasant to see you," he said, bringing his heels together in a curiously military bow. The colored felt pens were lined up across his chest like medals. He'd made his fortune in the war, somehow; no one questioned these things now that they were all over. At the same time he'd learned a bit of English, and scraps of several other languages as well. Why had he come to my flat in the early evening, surely not the right time for him to visit a young foreign woman, this respectable middle-aged man with the right kind of barrel-shaped wife and numerous grandchildren? He was carrying something under his arm. He looked past my shoulder as if he wanted to go in.

  "You are possibly cooking your meal?" he said. He'd picked up the smell of burning hair. God knew what these people ate, I could hear him thinking. "I wish I do not disturb?"

  "No, not at all," I said heartily. I stood squarely in the doorway.

  "Everything with you is fine? The light is going on again?"

  "Yes, yes," I said, nodding more than was necessary. There was no electricity when I moved in, as the last tenant hadn't paid the bill. But Mr. Vitroni had pulled strings.

  "There is much of the sunshine, no?"

  "Very much," I said, trying not to show impatience. He was standing too close.

  "This is good." Now he got to the point. "I have something here for you. So you will find yourself more" - he lifted his free arm, palm up, expansive, welcoming, ushering me in - "so you will be at home with us."

  How embarrassing, I thought, he was giving me a housewarming present. Was this customary, what should I say? "That's terribly kind of you," I said, "but...."

  Mr. Vitroni dismissed my gratitude with a wave of the hand. From under his arm he produced his square bundle, set it on the plastic chair, and began to untie the strings. He paused at the last knot, for suspense, like a magician. Then the brown wrapping paper fell open, revealing five or six pictures, paintings, done - O lord! - on black velvet, with gilded plaster frames. He lifted them out and displayed them to me one by one. They were all of historical sites in Rome, each done in an overall color tone. The Colosseum was a feverish red, the Pantheon mauve, the Arch of Constantine a vaporous yellow, St. Peter's pink as a cake. I frowned at them like an adjudicator.

  "You like?" he asked commandingly. I was a foreigner, this was the sort of thing I was supposed to like and he'd brought them as a gift, to please me. Dutifully I was pleased; I couldn't bear to hurt his feelings.

  "Very nice," I said. I didn't mean the paintings but the gesture.

  "My, how you say," he said. "The son of my brother, he has a genius."

  We both looked silently at the pictures, lined up now on the window ledge and glowing like highway signs in the light of the low golden sun. As I stared at them they began to take on, or give off, a certain horrible energy, like the closed doors of furnaces or tombs.

  It wasn't going fast enough for him. "Who you like?" he said. "This one?"

  How could I choose without knowing what the choice would mean? The language was only one problem; there was also that other language, what is done and what isn't done. If I accepted a picture, would I have to become his mistress? Was the choice of picture significant, was it a test?

  "Well," I said tentatively, pointing to the neon Colosseum....

  "Two hundred fifty thousand lire," he said promptly. I was immediately relieved: simple cash transactions weren't mysterious, they were easy to handle. Of course the paintings hadn't been done by his nephew at all, I thought; he must've bought them in Rome, from a street vendor, and was reselling them at a profit.

  "Fine," I said. I couldn't afford it at all, but I'd never learned to haggle, and anyway I was afraid of insulting him. I didn't want my electricity to go off. I went to get my purse.

  When he'd folded and pocketed the money he began to gather up the paintings. "You have two, maybe? To send your family?"

  "No thank you," I said. "This one is just lovely."

  "Your husband will come soon also?"

  I smiled and nodded vaguely. This was the impression I'd given him when I rented the flat. I wanted it known in the town that I had a husband, I didn't want any trouble.

  "He will like these picture," he said, as if he knew.

  I began to wonder. Did he recognize me after all, despite the dark glasses, the towel and the different name? He was fairly rich; surely he didn't need to go around peddling cheap tourist pictures. The whole thing might have been an excuse, but for what? I had the feeling that
much more had happened in the conversation than I'd been able to understand, which wouldn't have been unusual. Arthur used to tell me I was obtuse.

  When Mr. Vitroni was safely off the balcony I took the picture inside and looked around for a place to hang it up. It had to be the right place: for years I'd needed to have the main objects in my room arranged in the proper relationship to each other, because of my mother, and whether I liked it or not this was going to be a main object. It was very red. I hung it finally on a nail to the left of the door; that way I could sit with my back to it. My habit of rearranging the furniture, suddenly and without warning, used to annoy Arthur. He never understood why I did it; he said you shouldn't care about your surroundings.

  But Mr. Vitroni was wrong: Arthur wouldn't have liked the picture. It wasn't the sort of thing he liked, though it was the sort of thing he believed I liked. Appropriate, he'd say, the Colosseum in blood-red on vulgar black velvet, with a gilt frame, noise and tumult, cheering crowds, death on the sands, wild animals growling, snarling, screams, and martyrs weeping in the wings, getting ready to be sacrificed; above all, emotion, fear, anger, laughter and tears, a performance on which the crowd feeds. This, I suspected, was his view of my inner life, though he never quite said so. And where was he in the midst of all the uproar? Sitting in the front row center, not moving, barely smiling, it took a lot to satisfy him; and, from time to time, making a slight gesture that would preserve or destroy: thumbs up or thumbs down. You'll have to run your own show now, I thought, have your own emotions. I'm through acting it out, the blood got too real.

  By now I was furious with him and there was nothing to throw except the plates, which were Mr. Vitroni's, and no one to throw them at except Mr. Vitroni himself, now plodding doubtlessly up the hill, puffing a little because of his short legs and pillowy belly. What would he think if I came raging up behind him, hurling plates? He'd call a policeman, they'd arrest me, they'd search the flat, they'd find a paper bag full of red hair, my suitcase....

  I was quickly practical again. The suitcase was under a big fake-baroque chest of drawers with peeling veneer and an inlaid seashell design. I pulled it out and opened it; inside were my wet clothes, in a green plastic Glad Bag. They smelled of my death, of Lake Ontario, spilled oil, dead gulls, tiny silver fish cast up on the beach and rotting. Jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt, my funerary costume, my former self, damp and collapsed, from which the many-colored souls had flown. I could never wear such clothes in Terremoto, even if they weren't evidence. I thought of putting them in the garbage, but I knew from before that the children went through the garbage cans, especially those of foreigners. There had been no place to discard them on the well-traveled road to Terremoto. I should have thrown them away at the Toronto airport or the one in Rome; however, clothes discarded in airports were suspicious.

  Though it was dusk, there was still enough light to see by. I decided to bury them. I scrunched the Glad Bag up and shoved it under my arm. The clothes were my own, I hadn't done anything wrong, but I still felt as though I was getting rid of a body, the corpse of someone I'd killed. I scrambled down the path beside the house, my leather-soled sandals skidding on the stones, till I was among the artichokes at the bottom. The ground was like flint and I had no shovel; there was no hope of digging a hole. Also the old man would notice if I disturbed his garden.

  I examined the foundation of the house. Luckily it was shoddily built and the cement was cracking in several places. I found a loose chunk and pried it out, using a flat rock. Behind the cement there was plain dirt: the house was built right into the hillside. I scraped out a cavity, wadded the Glad Bag up as small as I could, and shoved it in, wedging the piece of cement back on top of it. Perhaps, hundreds of years from now, someone would dig up my jeans and T-shirt and deduce a forgotten rite, a child murder or a protective burial. The idea pleased me. I scuffed the fallen earth around with my foot so it wouldn't be noticeable.

  I climbed back up to the balcony, feeling relieved. Once I'd dyed my hair, all the obvious evidence would be taken care of and I could start being another person, a different person entirely.

  I went into the kitchen and finished burning the hair. Then I got out the bottle of Cinzano which I'd hidden in the cupboard, behind the plates. I didn't want it known here that I was a secret drinker, and I wasn't, really, there just wasn't any place where I could do it in public. Here, women were not supposed to drink alone in bars. I poured myself a small glassful and toasted myself. "To life," I said. After that it began to bother me that I'd spoken out loud. I didn't want to begin talking to myself.

  The ants were into the spinach I'd bought the day before. They lived in the outside wall, spinach and meat were the only things they'd actively hunt, everything else they'd ignore as long as you put out a saucer of sugar and water for them. I'd already done this and they'd found it, they were marching back and forth between the saucer and their nest, thin on the way there, fat on the way back, filling themselves like miniature tankers. There was a circle of them around the edge of the water and a few had gone in too far and drowned.

  I poured myself another drink, then dipped my finger into the saucer and wrote my initials in sugar-water on the windowsill. I waited to see my name spelled out for me in ants: a living legend.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I woke up the next morning my euphoria was gone. I didn't exactly have a hangover, but I didn't feel like getting up too suddenly. The Cinzano bottle was standing on the table, empty; what I found ominous about this was that I couldn't remember finishing it. Arthur used to tell me not to drink so much. He wasn't a great drinker himself, but he had a habit of bringing a bottle home from time to time and leaving it out where I would see it. I suppose I was like a kid's chemistry set for him: secretly he liked mixing me up, he knew something exciting would happen. Though he was never sure what, or what he wanted; if I'd known that it would've been easier.

  Outside it was drizzling, and I had no raincoat. I could've bought one in Rome, but I'd remembered the climate as unbroken sunshine and warm nights. I hadn't brought my own raincoat or my umbrella or many of my own things at all, since I hadn't wanted to leave any obvious signs of packing. Now I began to regret my closet, my red-and-gold sari, my embroidered caftan, my apricot velvet gown with the ripped hem. Though where could I have worn them, here? Nevertheless I lay in bed, longing for my fan made out of peacock feathers, only one feather missing, my evening bag with gas-blue beads, a real antique.

  Arthur had a strange relationship with my clothes. He didn't like me spending money on them because he thought we couldn't afford it, so at first he said they clashed with my hair or they made me look too fat. Later, when he took up Women's Liberation for flagellation purposes, he tried to tell me I shouldn't want to have clothes like that, I was playing into the hands of the exploiters. But it went beyond that; he found these clothes an affront of some kind, a personal insult. At the same time he was fascinated by them, as he was by all the things about me he disapproved of. I suspect he found them arousing and was irritated with himself because of it.

  At last he made me so self-conscious that I found it hard to wear my long dresses in public. Instead I would close the bedroom door, drape myself in silk or velvet, and get out all the dangly gold earrings and chains and bracelets I could find. I would dab myself with perfume, take off my shoes, and dance in front of the mirror, twirling slowly around, waltzing with an invisible partner. A tall man in evening dress, with an opera cloak and smoldering eyes. As he swept me in circles (bumping occasionally into the dressing table or the end of the bed) he would whisper, "Let me take you away. We will dance together, always." It was a great temptation, despite the fact that he wasn't real....

  Arthur would never dance with me, even in private. He said he had never learned.

  I lay in bed, watching it rain. From somewhere in the town I could hear a plaintive mooing sound, hoarse and metallic, like an iron cow. I felt sad, and there was nothing in the flat to cheer me up. Flat
was a good word for it. An advertisement in the back of a British newspaper would have called it a villa, but it was only two rooms and a cramped kitchen. The walls were covered with unpainted plaster, splotched and mottled from water seepage. Across the ceiling ran beams of naked wood - Mr. Vitroni must have thought they'd be rustic and picturesque - and these harbored centipedes, which dropped from them sometimes, usually at night. In the cracks between the walls and the floor and occasionally in the tiny bathtub there were medium-sized brown scorpions, which were not supposed to be deadly. Because of the rain outside it was dark and cold, it was dripping somewhere, and it seemed to echo like a cave, perhaps because the two flats above were still empty. Before, there had been a family of South Americans above us who played their guitars late into the evening, wailing and stamping their feet so that chips of plaster fell like hail. I wanted to go up and wail and stamp my feet too, but Arthur thought it would be pushy to introduce ourselves. He grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

  I rolled over, and the mattress got me in the spine. There was one prong that stuck up, right in the middle; but I knew that if I turned the mattress over there would be four prongs. It was the same mattress, with its chasms and pinnacles and treachery, unchanged by a year of others. We'd made love on it with an urgency reminiscent of motel rooms. Arthur was stimulated by the centipedes, which lent an aura of danger (a well-known aphrodisiac, witness the Black Death). Also he liked living out of suitcases. It must've made him feel like a political refugee, which was probably one of his fantasies, though he never said so.

  In addition he could think we were going somewhere, somewhere better; and in fact whenever we moved he did perceive the new place as better, for a while. After that he would perceive it as merely different, and after that as merely the same. But he valued the illusion of transience more highly than the illusion of permanence, and our entire marriage took place in a kind of spiritual train station. Perhaps it had to do with the way we met. Because we started out by saying goodbye, we became accustomed to it. Even when he was just going to the corner for a package of cigarettes, I would gaze at him as if I would never see him again. And now I would never see him again.