The Devil's Wife, page 2
Then one rainy Saturday afternoon in July her life changed forever. Her grandfather drove them to the Loewe’s Paradise Theater where they still had Saturday matinees and played old movies like” Lassie Come Home”. He parked outside and slept in the car while waiting for the movie to end. They were seven and feeling very grown up to be in such a grand movie theater alone. Iris left her seat and bounced up the aisle to fetch them both some candy. Gummy bears for Iris. Rasinets for Maria.
Iris was never seen again.
Maria runs her hand over the crumpled note trying to iron out the wrinkles.
“You think maybe this is just a prank, an old guy having some fun at the expense of a hopelessly gullible young couple? He just left this on your windshield?”
“I think I impressed him…yes. I didn’t know he was” the” Perry Haverford- creator of the Dark Horrors TV soap. He just looked like some ordinary old guy out for a stroll. He saw me looking at the home adverts in front of Horton Realty and asked me if I had seen anything I liked. I said not yet but I was certain that today was my lucky day. And he asked what made me think that today would be so auspicious. I said it was the beginning of the Aztec Feast of the Lady of the Dead and I had already collected four mouse heads and one bird beak.”
“Oh come on. That's not true.”
“If you mean true” in fact”…no, but it’s something I was writing about this morning.”
“So you were bullshitting this old man.”
“That’s a bit over stated. I was simply engaging in a conversation. OK, so it was based on a piece of my fiction, but he took it further. He said -you still need two more cat skulls.”
“And I said, ‘They’re drying out in my apartment as we speak. ’”
Maria laughs.
“That's what he did, he laughed, and then asked me ‘so what’s your trick to getting souls out of Mictlan?’ Can you believe he knew about Mictlan? What’s the chance of meeting someone who knows that?”
“What’s Mictlan?”
“ Mictlan is the Aztec equivalent of hell. At the Feast of Our Lady of the Dead, altars were constructed by Mictlan priests. The altars were made according to an ancient design of various layers of bone. And if the Devil liked them the priests could select the souls they wanted to be released from hell. The trick to getting my altar approved, I told Mister Haverford, was cleaning the bones with my teeth.”
“ You didn’t tell him you were one of these Mictlan priest guys, did you?”
“Of course I told him I was one…a very well respected and revered one. That’s why I don’t receive too many party invitations.”
“And then what happened?”
“I turned and he was gone …poof.”
“You are so full of shit, Adam.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry, but when I got back to the car that piece of paper with those directions was under my windshield wipers. I almost threw it away.”
Maria reads from the paper,” this place might prove lucky”…and he signed it, Perry, how weird. How’d he know which car was yours? That’s even weirder isn’t it?”
The sunlight slants between large trees highlighting the feathery underbrush, and streaking the corduroyed rows of corn with gold.
Maria suddenly spots the green posts.
“ Oh, my god, there they are,” she says, truly shocked.
Adam cuts the Saab sharply, driving between the posts and down through a stand of beech and poplar. Branches snap along the car hood, leaves flatten against the windshield. Abruptly the road turns following a shady, swiftly flowing stream half hidden from view by the trees along its banks. Maria hears the percolation of the water as it flows over the rocks and it sounds to her like a little girl singing to herself.
Ahead of them the road turns again and leads onto a crossing. Half way up a hill, guarded at the back by a line of aging cedars, stands a small stone cottage, squat, slate roofed and slightly overgrown with vines. Battalions of flowers separate the house from the surrounding expanse of lawn. Additional rows have been planted in front forming a series of terraced steps that lead down to the stream.
The arch of an old stone bridge just wide enough for a single car spans the stream. The railings are aged timbers green with moss. As the Saab passes over the bridge the cottage in the distance looks like the kind of outpost meant to warn those further inland of an encroaching civilization, the flowers surrounding it like sleeping sentries ready to snap to attention.
“It's … beautiful.”
“ It is, isn't it,” Adam says as he gets out of the car.
Maria closes her eyes, resisting the temptation to get too carried away. She’s not like Adam. She doesn’t want to feel happy for one minute or think that this cottage might be a possibility only to be let down because it’s not really available, or its way out of their price range. She’s not a believer in – it is better to have leaped and lost then to never have leaped at all. Maybe it was better never to have leaped- at the very least it will spare you some broken bones.
She thinks about Queens. How they had totally run out of money there. The recession hit. In a blink, Adam’s feature film, the one he had hand crafted for five years, writing, directing and co-producing lost all it’s financing. Thirteen film canisters lined the hallway of their apartment waiting to be edited. Unemployed with nothing on the horizon, he made lists of hundreds of things he wanted to do. He painted the bathroom even though it had just been painted. He changed all the handles and hinges on the kitchen cabinets, replaced the bookshelves, rewrote several of his short stories. His life had become one long do over. He started taking Chinese lessons, spent hours perusing the Internet trying to guess precisely what marketing skills would be essential for the next economic up tick.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked over and over. And always he answered in his buoyant optimistic way.
“I’m fine, really, fine.”
It had broken Maria’s heart to see him like that. He was fine, fine, fine. Bullshit.
She was interning at Juilliard at the time, a low paying prestigious gig she had hoped would energize her peripatetic violin career. One evening, as she took the 8th Ave. subway back to their apartment, she began to panic because she had been calling Adam all day on her cell but he wasn’t answering. Her heart started to pound as she watched the blur of city night rush by outside the subway windows and began to think the worst- that he had gotten hit by a taxi or was the victim of a mugging. When she turned the key to their apartment she was relieved to hear him singing in the shower, a slow, terribly off-key version of” I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”. She had never heard anything so sad and simultaneously so sweet.
Maria did what she usually did when the pain around her was too much to bear- she joined in. It was what she did with her sister Iris. They would play Tchaikovsky pieces- Iris on her cello, she on her violin, performing masterful riffs of notes so fast and dexterous that it seemed like magic. Years after Iris went missing she would play for hours at her window losing herself as the voice of her violin rose. The bow crashing down on the lower strings, the D, the G making that soulful agonizing throb that so expressed her own isolation. But this was no time for wallowing in grief. This was no time to get lost again in the past, when the love of her life was hurting so badly. She threw her violin down nearly cracking it against the radiator and before Adam even dried off she had called her friend Arlen Spence.
Arlen had lived his whole life in Louden, the town where she and Iris spent half their summers looking for the perfect penny candy. She cried and cried and told Arlen about how desperately she and Adam needed to move. Within three days Arlen found them an apartment over the Smoke Shop and jobs. She as a substitute teacher and Adam as a film editor.
Maria peers down at her Orthoheel leather sandals, bought half-price on line; simple, comfortable, nothing fancy. The narrow brick steps leading up to the cottage are covered with a thin patina of green moss. Perfect natural stair treads, easy on the toes. There is calm in the air- warm with sweet scents of wildflowers, perennials, and grasses. When she glances up she sees how perfectly proportioned the cottage is; its white walls basking lazily in the sun, the sweeping view of the valley and behind, the violet blue lines of a steep hillside.
Adam cups his hands against one of the leaded glass windows, and peers in. There is a large stone fireplace at one end of the room with musical notes painted on the stone mantel above- in front a sunken area with two brocade couches and a rocking chair. The floor is refurbished oak, the ceiling a white stucco. The Moroccan pile rugs, the carved teak tree-of-life panels flanking each window, the beaded chandelier; every inch dusted and cleaned as if it has been readied for a magazine shoot.
“See those musical notes over the mantel?” Adam points. “ Is it a song?”
“Moon River…the theme to Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
“Well, that’s. . . cheesy.”
Adam grabs Maria's hand, pulls her around the back where there’s a small screened in porch and opens the door.
"Maybe we shouldn't," Maria says.
"We most certainly should.”
He pulls her towards a door leading to the kitchen. They look through the glass in the top. Painterly lines of old enameled tin cups dangle over a cutting board; copper pans sparkle above an antique stove. The afternoon sun falls through rose colored stained glass at the top of a dormer, bathing the room in a soft glow of light.
“Ok. I’ve seen enough,” Maria says breathlessly while pushing open the door of the screened porch as if to escape the spell of the place.
She steps out onto the field, looks up at the sloping hill and the long grass blowing in the breeze. She notices something peculiar, something dark and black, slithering through the meadow, moving down towards the cottage. She’s certain it’s pulling something…dragging it.
“Adam!” She calls out.
The scaly rigid surface of its skin is perfectly designed for propelling itself over any kind of ground surface. In a fraction of a second it’s gone, disappearing under the cottage.
“Did you see that?” Her voice quivers as Adam steps beside her.
“It was just a snake.”
“Christ, I hate snakes.”
“What’s wrong with snakes?”
“They’re snakes…that’s what’s wrong with them.”
“ Let’s go see.” Adam moves between small pines to the foundation of the cottage. He kneels down, looks through the lattice work under the house.
“Adam you are freaking me out.”
“I can see him.”
“Then get away!”
“It's just a black snake.”
He crawls under the foundation, lingers for a moment then backs out with the snake in his hand. The snake is shiny black, about four feet long. He holds it with his right hand wrapped under its chin and his thumb pressing on its head- the rest of its body enfolds around his other arm. Adam looks as comfortable in handling this snake as he did holding his morning cup of coffee.
“Could you please put that thing down?”
“I just wanted you to see he’s absolutely harmless. They keep rodents away, spiders. This is one of the good guys.”
“One of the good guys?” She repeats incredulously. “ Adam it’s a reptile.”
Adam shoots her a look, a hurt expression that seems to say she’s not being at all a good sport about this.
“OK…bring him over here, but no touching, no petting.”
He turns the snake lovingly in his hands so Maria can appreciate how beautiful he is, the sun reflecting on the shimmering scales of its skin.
“You see here, look at the markings on the belly and the white flecks on his back. And here’s his best part.” He points under the snake’s chin. “ See the white beard?”
“Like he’s Confucius,” she says trying to get into the swing of things.
“Yes, he’s the wise one. And the wise one speaks.”
Adam takes a long step back and gives a theatrical gaze to the heavens.
“These signs shall follow that…”
Adam in his own estimation is an awful actor. He has a basic repertoire of three voices. He can do a cackling old crone pretty well, a booming good fellow, and a frightened young woman. But when he suddenly raises this black snake above his head another voice takes hold, a voice both sonorous and a bit terrifying even to him.
“Who so ever believes in my name they shall cast out the Devil…cast out the Demons. They shall take up serpents and they shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”
A slight breeze rustles his hair. His eyes are glazed and suddenly it’s as if the whole world has been silenced. Even the birds seem to be holding their breath. Then Adam smiles as if this is all a joke and the birds on cue resume their chirping. Maria remains rooted, motionless.
“Could you put the snake down now? I think he wants to go back to his family.”
Adam kneels, slowly releasing the snake. It slithers over the lawn, and under the cottage. Maria gently touches him on the arm. Adam looks at her hand like he has never seen it before, and then flicks his fingers as if trying to get rid of something sticky. He stares at her like she isn’t there, like she’s invisible, transparent. It sends a chill through her like it has in the past, the few times she has seen and felt this look from him. It scares her.
Adam is the most loving, the most loyal man in the world, but if she loses confidence in him, or he feels the slightest bit betrayed, he will turn his back on her in a second. She has wondered about his past, his family, the strange things he knows; from tracking a bear, to the precise call of a whiskered screech owl, to this handling of a snake and these Biblical sayings that sound so appropriate for the moment but entirely out of character from the man she knows. Trying to get at Adam’s past is like some personal contest with him she cannot win- a tacit game of impenetrability.
He leans over and kisses her- his blue eyes with the sugared eyelashes fluttering against hers.
“I love you, sweetness,” he says.
“I love you too”.
"I'm going to take a look at that out building," Adam says as he walks away towards a sturdy log structure.
Maria steps up to the porch and sits on an old wooden stool. Wisteria vines twist upward around a porch column near her face. She remembers her grandmother telling her that wisteria is special, although she cannot now remember why. There is a raw wind coming down off the hill. She leans into it indulging a sense of isolation. She’s grateful for her life here in Louden. As of yet there has been no big surprises which is the way she likes it.
All is silent. She has become part of a still life painting. The trees, the flowers, the birds – suspended- dead quiet, unmoving. She stands up and closes her eyes. Someone is near her- has stepped up right beside her.
A little hand slowly slips into hers. It grips her fingers, the tiny thumb wrapping around Maria’s own larger one. The hand is warm, pulsing; a faint beat like a bird’s heart throb. Maria stills; she is motionless, waiting. A little girl she cannot see but knows is there, leans against her and places her small cheek tenderly on Maria’s hip.
Chapter Three
A sudden shaft of light falls across Maria’s face as she holds tightly onto a branch of the Wisteria. She tries to dismiss the strange incident on the porch. Her thoughts focus on her sister Iris and how her imagination was always too willing to leap into service. Had she seen her on the school bus, was she swinging in the playground, was that Iris looking at her through a shop window?
At the beginning her parents tried to treat them lightly calling them Iris Sightings. But by the age of twelve these dazes and trances began to occur more frequently and it became difficult for Maria to discern between what was real and not. Years of therapy helped to quell some of this. But it wasn’t until Adam came into her life that the Iris sightings ended and her craziness was gone.
Adam looks over to Maria, her face distant and tense. He regretscoming to the cottage, understanding now it was not good for her. Why did he have to get their hopes up on an impossible dream?He turns the car onto the Grand Road wishing they could instantly be home above the Smoke Shop.
“I guess Perry Haverford must have assumed I was some kind of trust fund baby.”
"Is that guy waving to us?" Maria says seeing an elderly man with long silver hair standing in the middle of the road.
Adam pulls up beside him and rolls down his window.
"Mr. Haverford, I could have hit you.”
“ Mr. Crocker, so nice to see you again.”
"Yes, you too. This is my wife, Maria.”
Perry Haverford bends down and peers past Adam to Maria who is bending her head as well in order to address him.
“ Hello. Nice to meet you.”
"Likewise, my dear.” He looks back at Adam. “ Did you get to see the cottage?"
"We're just coming from there. It's a nice place.”
"I'm afraid it's not exactly for us, though," Maria says quickly.
Perry Haverford stares at Maria for a long moment. Embarrassed, she slides her eyes away from his.
"I'm so sorry to have ruined your Saturday afternoon. I'm sure you had better-"
"Oh no, not at all! That didn't come out-"
Haverford puts up his hand stopping Maria in mid-sentence.
"Let me make it up to you two.” He brings his hand down on Adam's shoulder. “ You must allow me to make amends. I have in my car over there…”
