“Anyway, it’s all ancient history,” says Zenia conversationally. Charis is back in her own body, she’s in control of it, she’s moving it towards the door. Nothing has happened after all. Surely nothing has happened. She turns and looks at Zenia. Black lines are radiating out from her, like the filaments of a spider web. No. Black lines are converging on her, targeting her; soon she will be ensnarled. In the centre of them her soul flutters, a pale moth. She does have a soul after all.
Charis gathers up all her strength, all her inner light; she calls on it for what she has to do, because it will take a lot of effort. Whatever Zenia has done, however evil she has been, she needs help. She needs help from Charis, on the spiritual plane.
Charis’s mouth opens. “I forgive you,” is what she hears herself saying.
Zenia laughs angrily. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “Why should I give a flying fuck whether you forgive me or not? Stuff your forgiveness! Get a man! Get a life!”
Charis sees her life the way Zenia must see it: an empty cardboard box, overturned by the side of the road, with nobody in it. Nobody worth mentioning. This is somehow the most hurtful thing of all.
She invokes her amethyst geode, closes her eyes, sees crystal. “I have a life,” she says. She straightens her shoulders and turns the doorknob, holding back tears.
Not until she is walking unsteadily across the lobby towards the front door does it cross Charis’s mind that maybe Zenia was lying. Maybe she was lying about Billy, about the chickens, about everything. She has lied to Charis before, and just as convincingly. Why wouldn’t she be doing it now?
LIII
Roz leans sideways and gives Charis a one-armed hug. “Of course she was lying,” she says. “Billy wouldn’t say such a thing.” What does she know from Billy? Not a shred, she never met him, but she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because what does it cost, and anyway she wants to lighten things up. “Zenia’s just malicious. She says stuff like that just for the heck of it. She only wanted to bother you:”
“But why?” says Charis, on the verge of tears. “Why would she, why did she say that? She was so negative. It really hurt. Now I don’t know what to think.”
—V’rs okay, babe,” says Roz, giving Charis another squeeze. “The heck with her! We won’t invite her to our birthday parties; will we?”
“For heaven’s sake,” says Tony, because Roz always goes too far and Tony is finding this scene much too infantile for her taste. “This is critical!”
“Yes,” says Roz, getting a grip, “I know it is.”
“I do have a life,” says Charis, blinking wet eyes.
“You have a rich inner life,” says Tony firmly. “More than most:” She digs into her bag, finds a crumpled tissue, hands it to Charis. Charis blows her nose.
“Now, here’s me,” says Roz. “Ms. Mature Fuller Figure meets the Queen of the Night. On the enjoyment scale, it didn’t get ten out of ten.”
Roz is in her office, pacing, pacing. On her desk is a stack of files, project files and charitable-donation files both, the Livers, the Kidneys, the Lungs, and the Hearts all clamouring for attention, not to mention the Bag Ladies and the Battered Wives, but they will all have to wait, because in order to give you have to make, it doesn’t grow on trees. She’s supposed to be thinking about the Rubicon project, as presented by Lookmakers:° Lipsticks for the Nineties is the concept they’re proposing; which Boyce says translates as Oral Glues for Nonagenarians. But Roz can’t get her teeth into it, she’s too preoccupied. Preoccupied? Frenzied! Her body’s a hormone-fuelled swelter, the inside of her head’s like a car wash, all those brushes whirring around, suds flying, vision obscured. Zenia’s on the prowl, and God knows where! She might be climbing up the side of this building even now, with suckers attached to the bottoms of her feet like a fly.
Roz has eaten all the Mozart Balls, she’s smoked every single cigarette, and one of Boyce’s drawbacks, his only one really, is that he doesn’t smoke, so she can’t bum a fag off him, oops, pardon the pun; his lungs at any rate are pure as the driven. Maybe the new downstairs receptionist—Mitzi, Bambi?—might have a pack tucked away; she could call down, but how demeaning, Ms. Boss clawing the walls for a cig.
She doesn’t want to leave the building right now, because it’s about time for Harriet the detective to call. Roz has asked her to call every afternoon at three to fill her in on progress. “We’re narrowing it down,” was all Harriet said for the first few days. But yesterday she said, “There’s two possibilities. One’s at the King Eddie, the other one’s at the Arnold Garden. The people we’ve been able to—the people who have kindly agreed to identify the photo—each one of them is sure it’s got to be her.”
“What makes you think you have to choose?” said Roz. “Pardon?” said Harriet.
“Bet you anything she’s got rooms at both of those hotels,” said Roz. “It would be just like her! Two names, two rooms.” All foxes dig back doors. “What’re the room numbers?”
“Let us do a little more checking,” said Harriet cautiously. “I’ll let you know” She could evidently visualize an undesirable situation: Roz barging into some stranger’s room, hurling furniture and accusations and breathing fire, and Harriet getting hit with a lawsuit for having given her the wrong room number. ‘
So now Roz is on tenterhooks, whatever those are. Something her mother knew about, because it was her expression. She makes a mental note to ask Boyce about it, and shakes herself, and sits down at her desk, and opens up the Lipsticks for the Nineties file that Boyce has annotated for her. She likes the business plan, she likes the projections; but Boyce is right, the name itself is wrong, because they’ll want to expand the line beyond lipsticks: An eye shadow that would also shrink puffy hds would be a breakthrough, she’d buy that, and if she would buy a thing it’s a cinch that a lot of other women would, as well, if the price is right. For another thing, the Nineties has to go. The nineties have not been great news so far, even though there’s only been a year of them, so why underline the fact that everyone’s stuck in them?
No, Roz is agreed—reading Boyce’s tidy notes in the margins of the proposal, he has real talent, that boy—that they should opt for time travel, some history, the big H, via the river names tiein. Women always find it easier to visualize themselves as having a romantic fling of it in some other age, an age before flush toilets and jacuzzis and electric coffee grinders, an age in which a bunch of tubercular, prematurely wrinkled servants would have had to wash the men’s undershorts, if any, by hand, and empty the slop pots and heat up. the water in big cauldrons, in filthy ratinfested kitchens, and trample the coffee beans underfoot like grapes. Give Roz appliances any day. Appliances with warranties, and dependable household help that comes in twice a week.
As for the ads, she wants a lot of lace in them. Lace, and a wind machine, to blow the hair around for that burning-ofCharleston dramatic-crisis look. It will help to shoot the models on an angle, with the camera slanted up. Statuesque, monumental, as long as you can’t see up their nostrils, which is the problem Roz has always had with bronze heroes on horseback. She’s thought of another river name too, another colour: Athabasca. A sort of bronzed pink. Frostbite crossed with exposure. How you get in the North without sunblock.
The phone rings and Roz practically falls on it. “Harriet,” says Harriet. “It’s the Arnold Garden for sure, Room 1409. I went there myself and pretended to be a chambermaid with towels. No doubt about it.”
“Great,” says Roz, and jots down the room number. “There’s one other thing you ought to know,” says Harriet. “Before you rush in:”