The vines twine over the body of the instrument and up its neck, stretching out into the air. Though the delicacy of the carving is almost elfin, it has the strength of vines: blindly reaching, defying gravity. The tendrils are dotted with small flowers: jasmine, so accurately rendered that Eve identifies them instantly. A flap of velvet in the lid conceals a bow, held in place by ribbons. It, too, is twined with curling vines.
She wiggles her fingers into the gaps between the instrument and the velvet lining, prying it loose. A moth flies out into her face and disappears in the slanting shafts of light.
Holding it by the neck, she senses another shape. With spit and the hem of her dress, she cleans away the dust. There’s a pudgy, babyish face, the vines tightening their weave across its eyes. Cupid, blinded by love.
Eve pinches up dust from the floor to dirty the face again. She has learned not to improve the appearance of things until after the bargaining is done and the money has changed hands. Then she turns the instrument over.
The back is in splinters.
Eve touches her finger to the ragged shards of wood, longing to make this beautiful thing whole again. The damage must have been deliberate: an accident would have broken off the vines. What drove that person over the brink? Musician’s frustration? Rage at fate? Heartbreak? She can almost feel remnants of the emotion stuck to the gash, like specks of dried blood.
If she had it repaired, the cost would almost certainly be more than the instrument is worth. And even an expert might not be able to restore it completely. It could serve as a decorative item, but only if the gash stays hidden. Deborah won’t want it—she has a rule against broken things. Also, she feels more comfortable with things that have names, like bowls and vases and candlesticks. Passionless things that sit prettily in nice rooms. The history that this object bears on its back would freak her out.
Eve moves to return the instrument to its exile, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Now that she has touched it, she cannot push it back into the shadows.
It’s an extravagance, driving into Manhattan: the cost of parking; the idling crosstown traffic. But Eve needed her car for her expedition to the outer boroughs, and she is not ready to go home to New Jersey. She finds an expensive space in an elevator lot, and starts walking the eight blocks to the Public Library. She leaves the strange instrument, in its case, on the back seat beside a curly wrought-iron birdcage she picked up earlier.
“Eve? Eve Armanton?”
She looks around, unsure where this urgent voice is coming from. She has barely heard her maiden name since college.
“Eve! I can’t believe it!”
“Robert?”
Robert Burnett, her brother Bill’s best friend. And, beside him, a younger man who must be his son. The pair of them hit her like an optical illusion, a thirty-year warp in time: Robert now and Robert then, standing side by side on 34th Street. The son is, Eve realizes, even more beautiful than his father used to be, with thick black hair, a finely cut nose, and angled eyebrows over long, wide-set eyes. Age has dragged Robert’s once-fine jawline into jowls, and thinned his hair. The bright blue eyes that enthralled her when she was fifteen are murky, and there’s a sheen to his skin as if the cholesterol in his bloodstream is seeping through.
Back then, Robert reminded her of Tigger, with his bouncing energy and his recklessness. He and Bill were twenty-two: college roommates, party boys, the world at their feet. Everything seemed to come easily to Robert—but Bill saw shadows where Robert saw only the light. Robert’s wildness was pure exuberance; Bill, Eve sensed with a teenager’s unspeakable anxiety, was daring fate, as if hurrying up the tragedy he knew would surely come. Eve has barely thought of Robert since her brother’s funeral. After Bill’s death, she cut off all connection with the elements of his life, terrified that the darkness that drove him to suicide might invade her too.
Robert moves more slowly now, his boisterousness reined in by years of office-bred decorum, the crazy Hawaiian shirts he used to wear replaced by a well-cut suit, pink shirt, and brightly patterned tie. She knows what he wants to do, and she will let him do it, for old times’ sake: sweep her up in a hug and spin her round and round until they both get dizzy. Bill used to do that when he saw Eve after a gap of weeks, and the fact that Bill did it became Robert’s permission, a fond mastery over his friend’s little sister, whose adoration he accepted, without comment or attention, as his due.
Robert’s arms lifting her feel as strong as they always did. Cars, pedestrians, storefronts whirl past in a circular blur. Eve scrambles for a reference point, as she was taught in childhood ballet class, and there it is, like a hook catching her searching eyes: the younger man’s gaze, his eyes a startling green, strobing as Robert whirls her around.
Finally, she feels concrete under her feet again. Robert keeps hold of her arm to prevent them both from falling. Bill used to love it when she fell over: a big brother’s affectionate cruelty.
“How long has it been?” Robert’s face is alight with the pleasure of finding her.
“Twenty-nine years. Almost.”
“The funeral.”
Eve nods. It took place in November. Leaves stripped from the trees, naked branches that made her think of her brother’s dead bones.
“You remember, we had a baby with us? Well, here he is. Mick, meet Eve.”
“Micajah,” he says, gently correcting his father. A name she’s never heard before. Mic-KAY-jah. She likes the roll of it.
He holds out his hand. “Eve,” he says.
She’s reluctant to touch him, as if she might be touching an electrified fence. As his fingers close around her hand, her nerves register the calluses on his fingertips. She drops her eyes. He’s wearing jeans and a loose blue shirt, the sleeves partly rolled. His feet, in hiker’s flip-flops, are sinewy, with long toes. She feels suddenly that she shouldn’t be looking at them, these body parts naked to her gaze.
“Eve’s brother taught me everything I know about music,” says Robert. “Which, granted, compared to you, Mick, isn’t all that much. My son, I want you to know, Eve, is a rock star.”
“I play in a band.” His voice is low, almost hoarse—nothing like Robert’s. His words are no more than an explanation to tone down his father’s boast.
“Inked the last clauses of the deal this morning.” Robert pats his son’s shoulder. “We’re celebrating with lunch. Join us, 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