“You’ll have time to polish up the Pettigrew drawings?” she said.
Surprised, Jean could only nod.
“Monday’s meeting is at one,” Bonnie said. “But don’t you worry too much about it. I can see from your desk you’ve made a good start on them.”
Jean understood: Bonnie meant to remind her that her visit had been supervisory, not social; she’d been foolish to think otherwise.
“And besides,” Bonnie said, “other things sometimes come first, in time if not in importance. Enjoy being with Steven.” She rapped on the door frame and left.
Jean covered up Steven’s name to keep others from noticing it, and listened to Bonnie’s footsteps grow fainter as she moved down the carpeted hall. They stopped shortly, and then Jean heard Bonnie whispering to one of the other art directors. About her, no doubt. She leaned forward and turned her ear to listen, but it was no use: she couldn’t distinguish Bonnie’s words, only the sound of her voice, rustling like a squirrel in leaves as she spoke.
Saturday, Jean went into the office and devoted herself to the Pettigrew drawings. They were not perfect when she was done, which annoyed her, but she had nearly succeeded in stripping the lettering to something elemental—the suggestion of letters rather than the letters themselves—which would be enough for Bonnie to play up and make a selling point. A hint, nothing obvious, that was Pettigrew’s signature look; Jean knew because she had created it.
Home, she cooked herself dinner, cleaned the apartment, and leafed through her copy of Plummerman’s Collecting Guide, and then at midnight called Claudia, but the phone rang unanswered for a full three minutes and after that she gave up and unplugged it. She slept with her windows open, as she always had, though she knew Mrs. Olsen, her elderly neighbor, disapproved. Two or three times a month she slipped notes and news clippings into Jean’s mailbox, the folded notes illegible and the news clippings detailing burglaries and robberies in the area—once a murder—and across the accompanying photographs she had crayoned COULD BE YOU! in big green block letters. But no one was going to climb five stories to get Jean; they’d have to go up the brick, since the apartment, alone of the ones in the building, didn’t have a fire escape.
An oversight, the landlord had told Jean when she first looked at the place, mistaking her surprise for fear. He had knocked his cigarette ash into his cupped palm as they walked from room to room and assured her that it would soon be fixed, but the code violation didn’t scare Jean, it was the reason she chose the apartment. She was not afraid of fire, and as the main entrance to the building was off an alley, not the street, she believed that here, at least, her privacy would be guaranteed. She would not awake to find that Pavel Hammond had climbed all that way to watch her sleep.
Sunday, Jean awoke in the dark to humid air and clinging sheets. She kicked them off and lay sweating on the bed, staring at the plaster ceiling until its cracks became visible and a Creamsicle orange rim of dawn began to show in the eastern sky. The phone was beside her and she was glad she’d unplugged it; if Steven hadn’t called by now, he wasn’t going to. A shower, some coffee and a roll, and then she was off, to Marblehead, her usual Sunday-morning routine.
In Marblehead, the air was salty, the wind onshore, and she slipped her sweater on, surprised by the chill. The water was different, she reminded herself, it changed things; that was a lesson she had to learn again and again. She had a few hundred dollars cash, her wallet, a checkbook in case anything at the flea market caught her fancy; she never lost hope that it might.
The steep harborside streets were still blue with morning shade, and as she traversed them she surveyed the flea market, its tables of junk and treasure, its vendors, its crowd. She’d arrived early, but others had come even earlier, and many were already leaving, some holding pictureless frames and others looking like refugees from a waterfront disaster as they passed her, clutching chairs or lamps or carrying the drawers from desks and bureaus under their arms or across their shoulders, and she had to reassure herself that she’d missed nothing. They were decorators, mostly, with their measuring tapes and their bottled water, and big items always went quickly, she knew; getting there after they’d gone made her task easier—less jostling, fewer fights over who saw something first. She was interested chiefly in pens.
Her first time through was just an inspection, as it was best not to show even a flicker of attraction. She was young or at least youngish, her hair was thick and glossy, she was nearly six feet tall, and she knew most of the vendors would remember her having passed—especially this early, when the crowds had not yet arrived. She noted a stall displaying some kind of handmade dogs and marked its location and half an hour later, walking uphill this time, came back. It was a little warmer; she could feel herself beginning to sweat, the sun was on her neck. A flowering crab in a corner yard had spread its bloom, the white blossoms giving off an overripe scent and scattering across the lawn like snow in a sudden breeze.
The dogs had been made from partially melted sugar cubes, awkwardly glued together and painted in fluorescent colors—green, yellow, orange—and, jumbled about, they resembled piles of gravel lining the bottom of fish tanks. Only a few dogs were able to stand, the rest lay on their sides, their misshapen feet mis-serving them, and she picked one up, blue and longish, with a black Magic Marker tip for a nose and long, hanging ears. The tail had a small Styrofoam ball stuck on its end; its stomach crumbled in her palm.
“That is a poodle,” the vendor said, enunciating each word. She was a middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair and an enormous, swollen-looking chest. Her blouse was too tight, pinching the skin on her arms, and for some reason she was holding a hammer.
“Standard poodle,” she said. “Built exactly to scale.”
“It’s unusual,” Jean said.
“Yes it is. It certainly is that.” The woman’s voice crackled as she spoke, as if she was breathing through cellophane. “I had to make it a she-dog. Trying to melt little wiener shapes is too hard.”
Putting it down, Jean was careful not to let it touch the others, afraid one of its legs might scrape off. “Did you make it?”
“Took three days. That smile is the real thing. You find yourself a standard poodle and tell me it isn’t. They’re smart dogs. On all the tests, they’re number two.”
At the next table, another vendor had placed an old cigar box; it was lying open, filled with pens. She had been right, then. Cloisonné, crystal, a few silver, and one gold, which gleamed beneath the others; she was mindful not to look. That was the cardinal rule of the market, not to display your interest, otherwise you spooked your prey—prices doubled or tripled, sometimes items suddenly weren’t for sale, artificial scarcities were created and bidding could start; she would not allow herself to be the one to set it off.
“They certainly are stunning,” she said of the dogs. “But I’m afraid I have nowhere to display them in my apartment.”
The woman’s face changed, as if Jean had insulted her, and she reached over the table with the hammer and pulled the poodle back toward the others with the claw.
“You shouldn’t handle them, then. I wouldn’t have let you if I’d known that was all you were about.”
She crossed her arms below her chest, as if to give her breasts something to rest on, and turned away. The vendor next to her, leaning against the tailgate of his truck, tall, wearing blue jeans and a blue-and-white striped shirt, was smiling. Jean saw his straight, even teeth from the corner of her eye and realized that touching the dog had been a miscalculation; now she would have to wait until after lunch to look at his pens.
The café had a few tables with umbrellas outside on a cobbled stretch of sidewalk bordered by a white picket fence, but Jean was the only one brave enough to sit out in the wind. She cupped her cold