Bewitching Earth

Bewitching Earth

  Lorraine Ray

  Copyright 2012 Lorraine Ray

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. A review of the book would be greatly appreciated.

  Chapter One

  It’s funny about the doors. Funny about you and your antique, hand-carved doors, which I have to admit right from the start no longer impress me.

  “I’ve learned from my years of dealing with the wealthy,” you began that last afternoon in one of your fatigued voices, implying, disloyally, that for years your customers had plagued you, and that you, perched in a vast mansion at the boundary of a mountain bighorn preserve, were not in fact one of the wealthy yourself, “it’s the front door that matters to the rich. They all want a grand entrance. An elm gate. With brass rings and fittings. Taken from a small Shanxi palace.”

  You were talking to me, and ironically it amuses me now to clip your words and use them as your front door, your introduction to the world. Upon finishing this pronouncement, you tilted your glass of Chardonnay to your lips. Your glass was cut from the best Scottish crystal, part of a complete set you had owned for years, or so you had bragged when you poured yourself a glass that afternoon. While you were drinking, to distract myself from the awkward situation, and probably also to keep myself from crying–you have to admit it was a terrible situation for me--I was trying to remember whether it was you who told me that Scottish crystal was more collectable than Irish. Yes, I decided, it had to have been you, no one else I knew cared about crystal and you had made a big deal about the fact that the Irish didn't make the world’s best cut glass. It had been during one of those evenings when you warned me I would have to learn a lot about the best things in the world if I wanted to be considered really well educated. Anyway, suddenly, on that last afternoon, your green eyes twinkled and your mouth drew across in a tight line, rather obviously to hold in a giggle that threatened to bubble up. I wondered then in dismay, if you were laughing at me for coming there and discovering you with this lady, who, I was beginning to suspect, was the other involvement, the someone, you had been hiding from me.

  But you weren’t about to talk about that. The one thing you didn't deal in, in all your dealings, was the truth.

  “It sets up the whole effect of their wealth, the effect of their mansion in the mind of their visitor,” you continued with the door observation. “The guest mounts the steps to their porch, walking tentatively up.” Your hand with the wine glass climbed as you spoke. “And there they find. A proper kind of door. A fabulous door, carved from oak, from India or Peru, carefully polished, and sanded in a workshop for hours three hundred, no, six hundred years ago. It's an aged and wise door that the rich want, a door that is knowledgeable of how to be a door from years of being the entrance to the house of grand people. The guest presses the bell. After an appropriate interval, the magnificent door swings inward and a maid bids the guest to enter. The door impresses the guest wonderfully. It impresses the guest more than having the maid answer the door. She’s just a lackey. It’s all about the door. And,” you added, “I sell the door. At an inflated price, of course.”

  I remember I sat on my stool and stared gloomily around the room at the empty expanse of your ultra-modern kitchen. I didn’t feel as though any impressive doors were opening for me, and I was beginning to feel as though you were considerably less noble and a more trivial person than I could ever have imagined in my best attempt to get over you.

  I didn’t have much time to mull over my new unfavorable impressions because the lady with her elegant, severe black bun and an arm loaded with beaded Huichol bracelets clicked in black high heels around your kitchen island, and she smiled and sipped from the edge of her crystal goblet, one that matched yours. “Don’t you want a glass of wine, dear?” she asked me again suddenly, “I doesn’t matter to us if you’re under age.” I was amazed that she could drop these killer barbs at me so lightly and easily, seemingly with no compunction about the crushing effect. I don’t think she had more than five years on me, and I was only nineteen.

  “No, thank you,” I said. I watched as the winter light reflected off your pool, dancing over the surface of the porch beams. It reminded me of a summer monsoon storm or the shockwaves of alien killer beams in a B movie. I noticed with surprise that your pool was one of those weird infinite-edge things that I thought we had ridiculed once. Had it really been only a month earlier? And there, at the tasteful edge of the tasteful pool you had placed a valuable metate, the grinding stone of the poor Mexican, with its matching mano, the stone that fit in the worn center. This old workstation of the simple Mexicans lingered sadly at the edge of your gallons and gallons of chlorinated waste that gave the illusion of spilling onto the slopes of some faraway blue desert mountains. And I noticed another telling detail. The image of several saguaro cacti peeking up behind the pool surface were bent or tilted ever so slightly. I suddenly realized that the crooked image was caused by heat waves rising from the water; you were heating your pool in winter. I saw you look over the rim of your expensive crystal at me and you noticed me looking closely at the pool, the heated pool, the very thing you had recently condemned.

  “I sense,” you demanded of the lady, “that you’re not interested in my theory. You just walk around grinning and running my taps.”

  “I am interested,” she protested.

  “Well, are you?” you asked me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I think it’s rather symbolic, then, my door theory. Don’t you think so?” you asked.

  “Oh?” I said. “Of what?”

  “Oh?” you said, mocking me. “Of the ever opening door, symbolizing new opportunities. Fresh ones in the future. Opportunities for the young. Opportunities for the old. What’s behind the door? Another life or another death? That’s an old story, the lady and the tiger. Do you know it?”

  “Sure,” I said, working to feign a sort of unconvincing cheerfulness at anything you or she would say to me.

  “I can never remember,” asked the lady of you in a deadpan voice, “which one he ends up with. Is it the lady or the tiger? Do you know?”

  “Oh, that’s a simple answer. The lady IS the tiger,” you said. “That’s always been my answer. And life is like the lady and the tiger. Maybe there is life after death and God behind one door, and behind the other door, nothing. I don’t know yet about that part. The doors in my life keep leading to doors.”

  “You always try to make everything so deep,” said the lady. “He always tries that,” she said, appealing to me,” but it’s a defense mechanism. I have him psychoanalyzed in some notebooks of mine. I just have to find them.” She leaned against a counter and crossed her legs at her ankles. She drank her wine quickly.

  “Don’t read those,” you warned me taking a gulp from your wineglass without looking up.

  “But he makes a boring subject, don’t you think?” she asked me, coming up from the wine.

  I nodded happily though I felt tears welling in my eyes and a burning at the back of my throat. This lady, who supposedly was your shop lady and had pretended to have arrived there to pick up some keys, had a lover’s ease in your home. But I was your lover, and you had never invited me there. That thought made me shrink into myself, so I peered around my shoulder into a large, somber bookcase that leaned behind me.

  There shelves of pinched clay people met in a conference of oddities, your Nayarit figures, pinched clay men and women blowing pipes and beating drums. You noticed me looking at them. “These are lovely,” I said, “I supposed when the day is done and you're asleep they’ll pick the lock, scram
ble about, and carry on miniature rites on your kitchen counters.” It seemed funny to me; I could picture them doing that, could animate the strange, pink clay men and women over the spare modern surfaces of your home.

  I spun my head around in time to see a look pass between the two of you. Absolute ennui. Blasé irritation.

  Still I longed to sacrifice myself at the altar of your severe sophistication.