Free The Narrator by Michael Cisco Page A

normally sits there,” he says, indicating the spot to my right as though she were there now. The seat is draped with a rich silver fur lined in peach satin. With a surprisingly strong pang I recognize its perfume, and it now seems more intimate a smell, as if it were rising still warm from her body. It seems somehow very dear to me. I tenderly imagine a woman’s body, with skin like peach satin, like dunes glowing orange in the sun.
    “That’s her scent.”
    “Oh,” I blink. I feel as though I’d been caught pulling off my clothes in a trance.
    “Yes, she’s something of a fixture here in town. You may have heard of her?”—A guarded note entered in there.
    “No,” I say. It’s true. I suspect he is probing for signs of guile in me.
    “Well, then.” He sits back, pushing his shoulders into the cushions. He seems to have relaxed his suspicion, but his face has taken on a hardness I wouldn’t have expected of it. Cold twinges in my intestines from the tea, but it isn’t an entirely unwholesome sensation. I feel massive and solid, settled heavily in place like an anvil.
    “You seem to have attracted her interest,” he says. There’s no mistaking his meaning, or that he is her go-between in these matters.
    “‘Madame’ means she’s married, isn’t she?” My voice sounds more confused than it should. I think of the grave she visited. Orvar’s head lifts back, and some leavening shadow flits across his serious face.
    “A widow now ... You really haven’t heard anything? No, I wouldn’t suppose you had ... You’re from up north, aren’t you?”
    “I’m from the mountains.”
    “She was very attached to her husband and family.” He waves at all the black, the funereal trappings. “I don’t know how many years it’s been, but she’s still in mourning.”
    I blink and say nothing. This approach seems to work best.
    “It’s no secret. A story most people know something about, if not enough. Not their business, but—” he shrugs and purses his lips, then suddenly fixes me, points. “Now she’s taken an interest in you, it’s liable to become your business. That’s why I have to tell you. You understand—it’s something you should hear first from me, and not from some gossip or other.”
    I can still beg off, just barely—but her perfume wafts over me, holding me there like a giant, gently firm hand.
    “Her husband held an administrative position; I wasn’t associated with the family then, so I can’t say what it was exactly. Evidently he overdid it, worked himself too hard. A trip to Cadassis and back in the snow gave him brain fever and he died in her arms, up at the house.”
    He pauses and glances out the window. Someone seems to be strolling by.
    When the stroller is gone, Orvar says, tonelessly, “Her daughter was away at the time. She was alone in the house with her husband. She was very attached to him. She deeply loved him.”
    The sun goes below the horizon, and darkness closes around the carriage like the wings of a cape. Orvar is looking very dim there across from me.
    “I don’t think she could bear to lose him.”
    I measure with my eyes the distance between my hand and the door latch.
    “Mr. Collumn—her husband’s physician had passed word of his death to the embalmers, as a matter of course.”
    He inhales through his mouth.
    “And they went to the house within three days’ time of his death. They only found his bones, mostly, in the bed ... and her there with them ... and nothing else.”
    After long silence, Orvar coughs quietly and I hear the jostle of fluid in the bottle.
    “Well, there was a scandal, as you can imagine. You see, everyone knew she had lost a baby boy a few years before. Crib death. Happened when she was away. Evidently too much. Too much for her. Her husband was supposed to be looking after the boy when it happened; he fell asleep, it seems, and when he next checked on the child, it was already over. Boy was fine before. The child was