Staying Fit
Illustration by by Nick Matej
Thirty-nine
The Salon of Second Chances
THE SALON OF Second Chances was held on the penultimate day of the twentieth century, from four to seven p.m. The normally somber town hall, with its sallow walls and fluorescent lights, was transformed by the garlands and evergreens left over from the primary school Christmas play, and by the colored lights that Anthony’s mother had strung around the room. Matthew and Benjamin had each carried over their family Christmas tree, one spruce, one pine, and the two stood, brightly decorated sentinels, on either side of the stage. The long buffet table was lined with candles. At one end was an urn with a battalion of mugs. A saucepan of Hal’s mulled wine simmered on a hot plate next to two trays of mince pies donated by the Co-op. Mr. MacLeod had brought fifty sausage rolls. There were cheeses and dips, Victoria sponges and treacle tarts. In the background a David Bowie CD was playing. The committee had asked for volunteers—all ages welcome—to come as the person or animal you would most like to be. Some people came as famous people, some as their younger selves, some as characters in books or films. A few people set up little scenes and waited to be visited but most wandered around, greeting friends and strangers. Everyone, disguised or undisguised, paid ten pounds; five for under-eighteens.
The manager of the Co-op, wearing a suit and a beret, carrying an unlit Gauloises, prowled the crowd as a member of the French Resistance. “I’d have been a wretched maquisard,” he confessed to Zoe. “I can’t kill a spider.” Eileen, one of Matthew’s fellow cashiers, came as a zebra. A girl from Duncan’s class was a mermaid, with silver fish fastened in her hair and a scaly tail trailing behind her. His friend Will came as the polar bear in His Dark Materials, walking upright in a white bear suit, wearing a pair of spectacles. Mr. MacLeod was Capability Brown, the great eighteenth-century garden designer. With the help of his son, he had made a miniature garden in one corner of the hall. The barman at the Green Man came as a famous Irish giant, walking waveringly on the stilts hidden beneath his extra-long trousers. Several small children—Hansel, Gretel, Thumbelina, and Little Red Riding Hood—followed him. In their wake, the barman’s wife, dressed as a wolf, preened her whiskers. Duncan had known instantly who he wanted to be. He wore his only suit and had brought his easel and five bottles, which he set up on a small table. It would be a kind of blasphemy to try to paint them, but a sketch, using pastels, seemed possible. He had brought a book of Morandi’s paintings—one of his Christmas presents—so that people could glimpse their evanescent beauty.
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Matthew also wore a suit. Feeling faintly disloyal to Hugh Price, he had come as Inspector Morse, carrying a bottle of Wychwood Hobgoblin and a copy of Ovid’s Amores. He could not help envying Benjamin, who, as d’Artagnan, the fourth musketeer, wore a dashing wide-brimmed hat and high boots.
Hal had come as Christiaan Barnard, the doctor who had achieved the first heart transplant; he wore a white coat with a stethoscope dangling from his neck. In one hand he carried an artificial heart. Zoe had not planned to dress up, but that morning she had asked to borrow the black robes her mother wore in court. Pinned to her chest was a red heart on which she had printed one of her favorite quotes from Spinoza: Desire is the essence of everyone. Like Matthew, she carried a book: a dictionary wrapped in brown paper, labeled Ethics. If he had gone to Paris for the ten days he’d intended, then he was back. If he was back, then he had got the leaflet about the Salon she had left at Holywell Manor. If he had got the leaflet, then ...
Betsy had spent two days shut away in her study, making her costume. “You’ll see,” she said when any of them asked. Both Zoe and Duncan noticed the arrival of a woman wearing a long blond wig. The lower half of her black leotard was covered with brown feathers that tapered into black leggings. Her arms too were covered in feathers; outstretched, they became wings. Only when she stopped beside Duncan’s easel did he and Zoe recognize their mother, the siren.
How perfect, Zoe thought. She saw her father, standing near the buffet, staring at the siren with an expression she could not decipher.
“Excuse me, Mr. Spinoza,” said the giant, “can you tell me what to do about being so tall?”
“Enjoy the view?” she suggested. But he was already moving away on his stilts, calling apologies over his shoulder.
Now her father in his white coat was greeting a man and a woman both wearing ordinary clothes. The man had beautiful golden eyebrows. He could have come as a lion, Zoe thought, and the woman could have come as a lion tamer. She was imagining their costumes, a huge mane for him, a flared skirt for her, when she saw standing beside them, upright and unmistakable, the boy in the field. Her father was handing him the model heart, pointing to an artery. She made her way through the crowd.
“And may I present my daughter, Zoe,” her father said. “Better known as Baruch Spinoza.”
Mrs. Lustig came into focus, not as a lion tamer but as the woman who worked at the post office, selling stamps and giving out pensions. Frank Lustig said, “I’m glad to meet you. We learned about you in school. Which is more important: truth or beauty?”
“They’re not in competition,” she said firmly. “The important thing is to understand.” According to her library book, Spinoza believed passionately in understanding.
Karel, still holding the heart, stepped forward. “You are the third person I must thank for saving me.”
For a moment all she saw was his face and, cupped in one hand, the deep red heart. She fumbled for words, something about the field, the man. Whatever she said, his gaze grew instantly opaque, as if a second, secret eyelid had closed.
“That was the best Christmas present,” his mother said, “knowing he was behind bars.”
Her comment served to bring Karel back. Or most of the way back. Zoe watched his eyes follow a man in a stovepipe hat. I don’t have to talk to him now, she told herself. He lives nearby. But there was something about the Salon, full of people in disguise, and indeed her own black robes, that licensed a certain freedom.
“Come and meet my brother, Duncan,” she suggested. “He’s a famous painter.”
Karel handed the heart back to her father and followed. They passed a stout man dressed as a Jack Russell terrier and a boy wearing round glasses and carrying a goblet. “In the field,” she tried again, “I was sure you’d gone down to the underworld, that you would bring back a message.”
She stole a quick glance at Karel. He was studying the sign above the buffet: Welcome to the Salon of Second Chances. “All the stories I know about the underworld,” he said, “are about people trying to get their wives or their daughters to come back. No one ever asks the wife or daughter if she’d like to stay. Maybe she would? But I never got there. I was lying in a field with rabbits, and flies, and bales of straw. I could see the birds flying over me. I could hear the three of you talking.”
“So you weren’t unconscious.”
“I was in between. I knew where I was, and I went places inside my head where I felt safe: my bedroom, my father’s workroom, my parents’ village. I was walking along the river that runs through the village. On the other bank a family was picnicking— grandparents, babies, children, everyone talking and laughing. If I could cross the river, I would be with them, surrounded by happiness. But the current was very strong. I could see the water rippling as if it had muscles.”
Suddenly he was holding her arm, guiding her to another part of the hall. “There is a woman here I would prefer not to meet.”
“Which one?”
“Red jacket.”
Zoe spotted her: fair hair, broad smooth cheeks, the jacket much bolder than she was. “Who is she?”
“My brother’s former fiancée.”
“Let’s go and look at Capability Brown’s garden. Is your brother upset at being former?”
“Very. He blames me.”
They skirted an astronaut, holding her helmet in one gloved hand.
“My boyfriend broke up with me.” Even as she spoke, she scanned the room, hoping Rufus would arrive to contradict her. Karel gave the smallest nod.
“Do you remember,” she went on, “when we were in the field, you said ‘Cowrie’?”
“Your brother Matthew thinks I said ‘Coward.’ Your brother Duncan, ‘Cowslip.’ ”
Coward? Cowslip? She gazed at his pale lips. The three of them had never talked about what Karel had said that day. It had been so clear; there had been no need. She remembered the detective asking if she was sure about “Cowrie.” She had been. Now she wasn’t.
Side by side, she and Karel surveyed Capability Brown’s garden. Mr. MacLeod and his son had brought in a six-by-six frame and filled it with sandy soil covered with artificial grass. At one end rose a small hill with a bench on top, surrounded by birch trees. A silvery stream ran down the hill into a silvery lake. Beyond lay a formal garden and an avenue leading to an eighteenth-century manor house. Two peacocks were strolling down the avenue, followed by an elegantly dressed man and woman, all four heading toward the house.
“How is the boy on the scooter?” Karel said.
“All right, though he’s cross about being on crutches for four months.” “So he isn’t hurt in his mind?” If only they could be sitting on the bench on top of the hill, gazing out across the garden. “No. He thinks he’s partly to blame. He swerved to avoid a pothole.”
“That’s good. He’ll get better more quickly if he isn’t angry. I, too, am partly to blame. When the man opened his car door, I wanted to refuse, but I could see he was a person people often said no to.”
On the other side of the garden, Capability Brown was tending his lawn with a little rake. His son placed a tiny blue bird in one of the oak trees.
“Sometimes,” Karel said, “I think my English is at fault. I say ‘no,’ people hear ‘yes.’ I say ‘sparrow,’ people hear ‘cat.’ ”
“Your English is fine,” she said. But how was it that she and her brothers had each heard him so differently?
Across the garden, Mr. MacLeod looked up from his rake.
“You should dress like that for work. Do you like my garden? It’s modeled on one of my most famous gardens at Harewood in Yorkshire, with a few details stolen from Blenheim.”
“You must have a lovely view from the hill,” said Karel.
“You do, and walking down the avenue. My gardens are meant to make you feel the power of reason. You can see your destination, and you can get there by various routes. People didn’t travel much in those days, so they wanted a garden to have many vistas.”
Before either Karel or Zoe could respond, a woman wearing a white lab coat—Marie Curie? Rosalind Franklin?—had accosted him. Still eyeing the peacocks, Zoe said, “Do you have a girlfriend? Or”—she felt rude for not considering this sooner—“a boyfriend?”
“Not at present. There was a person I thought I liked. I was mistaken.” He paused as if looking down the avenue of that relationship. “Perhaps I want too much.”
“Spinoza,” she offered, “believed that our happiness is bound up with who we love. Did you have to identify the man?”
“Yes.”
She saw he had spoken his last word on the subject. Across the room Matthew, in his elegant suit, was making his way toward them. Quickly she said, “There’s something I need to ask you, but I can’t figure out what it is.”
“You can ask me any time. I only have one life. Thanks to you I’m here tonight.”
She started to tell him about Rufus, the things that were still true: how at the café she had felt as if they’d climbed onto a small, high ledge; the story they’d each read, he in America, she in England, about the town where the happiness of many depends on the misery of a few; Meresamun, the mummy at the Ashmolean, with her blue eyes, her jackals ...
Once again Karel put his hand on her arm. “You must not lose a person so dear to you,” he said, “if you can help it.”
***
SINCE HE SAW KAREL ARRIVE, Matthew had been trying to reach him. As Inspector Morse, he thought, he could ask crucial questions. What was it like seeing your assailant again? Are you glad he’s going to prison? Finally, he extricated himself from a girl dressed as an octopus and made his way to where Karel and Zoe stood beside the garden.
“Good evening,” he said, offering Karel his hand. How had he and Zoe become acquainted?
“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” said Karel.
“Inspector Morse, at your service. Perhaps you’ve seen me on television? Or read my books? You decided not to dress up.”
Karel acknowledged the obvious. “I am grateful to have a second chance at being myself,” he said. “But if I were dressing up,” he went on thoughtfully, “I might come as a sheep, safe in my woolly fleece, surrounded by many other sheep. If anyone tried to steal me, or hurt me, I would hide in the flock and you would catch the thief.”
Matthew made a serious face. “I’d sit at home, sipping scotch and listening to The Marriage of Figaro, and suddenly I’d remember the broken straw, lying in the doorway. It was the flautist from the traveling orchestra who’d tried to steal you. He wanted the straw as a mouthpiece for his flute, and his daughter wanted a pet sheep.”
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