Are You Jealous (part five)

Are You Jealous

(part five)

Her grandmother, two months dead, had been the wardrobe’s embodiment. Love was not her feeling for the clock. She had used it, pointed to it, opened the door, closed the door. While the clock, the splendid clock, the painted clock, the chiming clock, had impassioned the child Eva.

Gabriel had found his wife singing pop tunes, pulling down cookbooks, fixing odd dinners. She got on these jags when hatching a scheme that pleased her. He found Presby’s card, figures jotted on; and a note, Please do call with anything.

“Oh, he’s Kuaia’s. [Her client, Gabriel interpreted.] This is what he does, break down estates. He loves the wardrobe. I told him, McFadden, it weighs god knows, and it won’t fit through the door.”

Presby had measured it on the spot. Like a pioneer aviator extracting his chewing gum to fix a wing strut—

Gabriel left the fancy aside, and remarked: “Admirable, though, to carry a tool.”

Two eyebrows raised. Then more, about the bed, and the curtains she had decided to take for fabric, since the louvers could do alone…

He was reading the card by then, turning it front and back. Eva reached across the cooktop, arrested his hand.

“I’m expecting a package.”

He could not suppose the downslide had begun that day. An inheritance had not crazed the fragile egg of their married life.

He circled the square a second time. He had had a vague picture of Reiff’s shop looking like a cuckoo clock. The number plaque was fitted…cunningly, it might be said, to a brick exterior. The window was empty of shop details, slatted blinds admitting no inside view. On the door, on frosted beveled glass, EMIL REIFF was de-etched in clear, almost invisible lettering. Lettering like the typeface of a wartime dispatch.

A tone sounded as Gabriel opened the door, a discreet and unclassifiable note that was not a bell or electronic bleat, but resembled the chime of a Buddhist temple, its watery softness. The room itself reminded him of a meditation chamber. Everything approached white. He would describe the color as vanilla, but vanilla was a coffee-shop designation. The Reiff milieu wanted something industrial: gypsum, perhaps.

This was the next plane in post-Reductionist design, asking of the observer, why have more than one color, if color has nothing more to say? The walls had shelves, the shelves had drawers, the drawers had tone on tone lettering. Gabriel strained to read, from hundreds of uncapitalized and bracketed possibilities: [balance wheels], [counters], [impulse levers].

Pins…rollers…

“Pinion.”

5

Are You Jealous

Are You Jealous (part six)

(Stephanie Foster, 2016)