Free I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck Page B

with the actual world while mathematicians choose their worlds.
    Downstairs, she hears a noise. The house settling or a piece of old furniture? The tall mahogany highboy in the dining room, she guesses. One of the drawers is filled with the Russian niello silver spoons that Philip collects.
    Collected.
    The spoons are carved with intricate patterns of flowers and leaves; some are even more intricate, with castles, hunting scenes, and—Philip’s favorite—a full-rigged sailing frigate. On special occasions—Christmas, New Year’s, a dinner party—Philip carefully places the spoons on top of the pristine white linen napkins Nina uses to set the table.
    For decoration only, he warns the guests. Niello is made from one part silver, two parts copper, and three parts lead. Should you use the spoon to eat your soup you will risk brain damage.
    Everyone but Nina laughs.
    In spite of herself, she glances at the clock. The luminous dial points to a few minutes past two.
    She does not feel tired.
    On his mother’s side, Philip’s grandfather was a well-known silversmith. The Revolution in 1917 put an abrupt stop to his work and he left Russia for America. He managed to take some silver with him—spoons, a snuff box, various items he had worked on. When his children got married, he gave them each a piece of silver. His mother, Philip says, got a spoon.
    What happened to it? Nina asks.
    She may have lost it. Or she sold it.
    Next time we visit, you should ask her.
    Philip shrugs. She may not remember.
    Nina will ask Alice.
    Better yet, she decides, she will bring Alice one of Philip’s spoons.
    Look, Alice, she will say, Philip found your old silver spoon. The one with the full-rigged sailing frigate carved on the back of the bowl.
    Nina’s parents died several years ago. She rarely thinks of them—not, she tells herself, because she did not love them. She did. Retired, they lived in Florida. Her father played a lot of golf; her mother played board games and bridge. They were self-sufficient and uncomplaining. Eventually, they moved to a retirement home where Nina, once or twice a year, dutifully visited them. On the last visit—by then, her father had died of complications from a stroke—she walked on the beach and played Scrabble with her mother. Despite a recent hip replacement, which caused her to tire more easily, her mother won the game handily with the seven-letter triple-word-score
xerosis.
Challenging her, Nina lost. Xerosis means abnormal dryness of the skin—a condition her mother suffered from.
    Downstairs, the noise again. Nina tenses. The front door is not locked. Anyone, she thinks, can walk in. How ironic—if that is the right word?—were a thief or, worse, a murderer to break in.Would he assume that Philip is asleep and shoot him? Kill him twice. As for her, the murderer would first demand money, jewelry, before tying her up and shooting her as well. In the head, quickly, she hopes.
    She does not want to think of the alternative.
    In town a few years ago, in the spring, a young vagrant knocked on an elderly woman’s door asking for yard work. After pruning her lilac bushes and trimming her hedge, he put the same sharp clippers to her throat and raped and sodomized her. Soon after, the elderly woman died. She never recovered from her torn cervix and rectum or from her shame.
    She listens for another sound, a door shutting, footsteps on the stairs, but hears nothing. Getting up and putting her hand against the wall for balance, she walks to the hall and looks over the banister. From where she stands, she can see the front door and, next to it, the large Italian ceramic pot that serves as an umbrella stand.
    The pot is from a shop in Pantelleria. Nina has kept the owner’s card. Piero? Pietro? she no longer remembers which. She remembers that he flirted with her a bit.
    Ah,
signora,
he says, holding her hand up to his lips, welcome to my shop.
    Are you English? he also asks.
    No, Americans, Philip tells