There’s something wrong with my face, she thought, taking up the tweezers with the gold tips, but the bathroom mirror was smoky, so the face reflected could have been anyone’s. She’d been born 30 years ago with a wine stain like a slap of paint on her neck, but she’d never worn a high collar or scarf. Children wanted to touch it, lovers would lick or bite. She’d been turned down for jobs, even though she could have covered it with a coat of foundation. It was the first thing people saw, so modeling jobs were out of the question, except for mail-order catalogs, where she was shot in her perfection in swimsuits and lingerie, looking over her shoulder, displaying a delicate curve from chin to brow. When the mark faded to a faint sunburn, she was left with an odd poise to her head—not from that catalog work, but from the effort of stretching her neck so that the stain unfolded to become a bird’s head with one eye open (mole) and one closed (premature line).
The shower she took that day was so hot that the mirror was streaming and dripping. It was still steamy, so she put the tweezers away.
You have a beautiful face, her mother always told her, and it was normal enough for her father, too, for she had the family face, except for the birthmark. All she’d asked as a child was how birth had caused it—was it blood and, if so, was it hers or her mother’s? She couldn’t believe that it’d come from inside herself and not from the struggle through the canal to reach the open air. It was always meant to be, was how they put it. But they had no more children, when the neighborhood average was four or five. She had corn-silk hair, and, even on a small salary, her father shelled out for one-of-a-kind dresses and coats, hats and perfect shoes from the best shops in Boston. Nothing she had was like anyone else’s, and when a new color was named to mark the advent of fall—plum, cranberry, midnight blue, blood orange—her skirts and sweaters, a fresh set for each day of the week before the uniform was enforced at school, were closely studied, and the other mothers were sent out to find the patterns and fabric, which were never quite a match.
She was always tall and thin, falling at the end of a line, and the quietest, although popular with boys and girls. The nuns resented the fancy clothes and beauty, and when they warned about the kind of sin that could stain the immortal soul, they looked through their rimless glasses at her. Her mother was a convert and reserved judgment on points of doctrine too severe for a child, so Emerald—and such a name she had as no saint had ever borne—was told to forget these mean chatterings, and to trust herself to a God whose devoted son had sacrificed his life out of love, not hate.
She was a slow reader, a poor sleeper, a picky eater, with a smile as rare on her beautiful face as words on her lips, and yet she was never bullied at school or scolded at home. If she didn’t care to help her mother scour the bathroom or to peel mounds of vegetables for a holiday dinner, or to do something as simple as turn off a light, nothing was said. Some days, though, she’d clean the whole house herself, pushing her mother out of the way, or wash all the windows inside and out, because looking—even if just at the big tree in front of the house—was her favorite thing to do.
Beyond the mark, she’d been born with a strong will, and it suited her, her mother thought.
Her father was stymied to have a girl this close to perfection, yet blighted. After the birth, he’d stopped going to church, settling into a lifelong depression, just strong enough to blunt family feeling while keeping him at his job, priming, fueling, and repairing coal furnaces. What does your father do? was a question Emerald liked to hear. He’s a coal man, she’d say, and his days are numbered. Her mother heard her once and slapped her, then apologized for the next week of days.
Why did you say that? she asked, when the crisis cooled, and Emerald was no longer threatening to leave home.
Why did I say what? she replied.
That his days are numbered.
Isn’t that true for all of us? the daughter said, closing the subject just as she liked to do.
Someone at school had said that years of breathing coal dust was the equivalent of a lifetime chain-smoking, and he was already smoking in a chain, one cigarette lit with another, all ending up standing in the ashtray like the tiny buildings of a gray and white city. Emerald liked to flood these cities, before wiping them clean, the only job she accepted as hers.
Emerald’s father’s name was Michael, her mother’s name was Marion, and she was meant to be Maureen, so the initial could be shared. But at the last minute, her father had insisted on giving his daughter E, his mother’s initial. Marion insisted on baptism, and the name chanted over the pool of water when the baby was one month old was Emera, an obscure medieval saint. Emerald—a misprint—was on the birth certificate.
When Emerald heard this story, she grasped at a reason for her self love: that she was denied, canonized, then named after a precious stone.
Her mother never dressed her in green.
Emerald left home at 18 to serve four years in college almost as a penal sentence. She received a weekly letter from her mother, which she answered, first taking out the enclosed check and walking it to the branch of the banking house for which she now served, several years after graduation, as assistant to the president. Her office was an annex of his, and they shared a kitchen, sitting room, and bathroom. There was an executive chef and a butler, and an art gallery in the hallway. Emerald’s responsibility was to think for Edward, when he was busy with other things. She also went everywhere with him, and it was her task to retain all identities, whether corporate, private, political, civic, or social. It was easy, because Emerald had a good memory, and her face drew the gaze of other faces and left her with time to lock in distinctive features and to record affiliations. It was a perfect job, for she was able to devote the rest of her time to hobbies. She applied her hand-drawn stencils to sheets and tea towels, she modeled, she dated the occasional banker or lawyer. She liked older men, because there was always something she could learn from them.
Each year since college, she’d spent her vacation weeks with her family. They rented a cottage by the sea, so that her father, with his advanced lung disease, could breathe. That’s all he wanted to do, besides smoke and drink the local beer—to breathe the clean salt air. Emerald and her mother sunbathed, took long walks in their straw hats, and practiced with their stencils. Their cutouts were of birds and animals, ornaments and pure shapes: paisleys and arabesques, cones and mandelas.
These vacations were exactly two weeks long. Sometimes the boyfriends from the city insisted on coming along, or, at least, on paying a visit, intending to extract Emerald for a day or two, and ferry her across the bay to the Grand Hotel and the sailing yachts. But if the boyfriends wanted to stay on or daytrip, they had to stay on this side of the bay, the side populated by the locals.
A lawyer had come two summers in a row, closer in age to Mike and Marion than to Emerald. And this year it was Edward’s turn. But then it happened: Edward got food poisoning from a bad clam. All of them had eaten from that same pot of steamers—Emerald’s father had even drunk the brine they were boiled in—with no ill effects suffered by anyone but Edward, who had to spend the night in the county hospital. He wasn’t strong enough in his legs, he told his assistant, to come back to the shore. He had booked a room at the Grand Hotel, for a night of recuperation. She felt that she owed him, at the very least, a date, after what he’d been through, to share in an innocent and entirely bland dinner.
After a night in the emergency room, Emerald spent the following day lying on the sand next to her mother. Her father was panting in his beach chair, looking straight out over the waves. The day was overcast, and the water the color of onyx. The beach was empty—the lifeguards had abandoned their chairs for the snack bar. The September air was dense with the grinding of crickets and the restless surf. Emerald had fallen asleep, with her face pressed to the blanket. Her parents were talking about the “greenhorn” who’d swallowed the bad clam. Anyone with eyes, said the father, between coughs and gasps, could see it was bad. It was black at the mouth, cracked in the shell, and loose at the joint. Yes, said the mother. She had touched the slimy, empty shell. After an intake of air, the father said the man was lucky to be alive.
They thought she was still asleep, but Emerald had woken up. Her eyes still closed, she had heard every word. It wasn’t as if she loved Edward, but before she’d even had time to ask herself if she did, they’d weighed in with an objection that stained her thoughts like ink. They’d only had one child, after all—they were saying—and this one was theirs. That’s what they always said. Were they so sure? Emerald wondered, lifting her head with its beard of sand, for the low-swirling wind had layered the blanket with ground granite, shell, and mica.
She decided to go on the date. She wouldn’t tell them now; they would find out later. When a wing of fog swelled from the croaking sea toward day’s end—but still early for them—they gathered chair, blanket, and towels and lurched over the damp sand. The parking lot was empty but for their car. Behind them, the fog had wiped out sight of the ocean and was now swallowing the dunes. Her father, coughing until his head dropped to the steering wheel, had to turn on the wipers along with fog lights.
This was Emerald’s favorite kind of weather, and nothing could keep her from ferrying to the other side, or—if the ferries were locked at anchor—driving across the bridge. She’d done it in snow and rain, racing through clouds to the vanishing point.
After their early supper of haddock and brown bread, Emerald went to her room to dress. Her father had settled in his chair with a beer and the paper. Her mother dragged two kitchen chairs to the card table, where that summer’s jigsaw puzzle had just begun to gel, the crucial moment for puzzlers.
In the mirror, whose silvering was pitted and curled at the edges, Emerald saw that the birthmark, in that light, was now all but invisible, with the substance of a blush. The bird was gone, although both eyes—mole and wrinkle—remained. The new problem was on the other side of her head, above the left eye: what looked like a knothole, faintly ringed. Focusing on it doubled one side of the face, transforming a serene oval into something metamorphic. Having a bird half-asleep on your neck was one thing; this was entirely different.
When Emerald colored the knot with a dab of liquid foundation, it faded, but if you looked hard, you could see it reforming.
Hair might cover it, but Emerald’s hair, so fine, was usually worn pulled back in a tail or bun. Had Edward noticed it? she wondered. Edward, it seemed, was changing, working his way outside of himself to a place where known met the unknown, and right there, on the rim, was Emerald. She felt his interest, his scrutiny, and the sense of ongoing calculation. He’d seen something.
Mike and Marion hadn’t yet seen it. She was too familiar to them, and she’d distracted them, as always, with looks that passed over her face like fruits in a slot machine, always re-sorting in new combinations. It was wise to pay attention, but not too much.
Emerald chose, that night, a black tube dress with red belt and silver beads that glowed with a pearly luster. She made up her eyes with a green powder.
“Where do you think you’re going?” was how they greeted her.
“I’ll be back later on,” she said. “Don’t wait up.”
Her father was scowling, and her mother looked stunned, still holding a piece of the puzzle. “You look nice,” she said.
“She always looks nice,” the father added, then gave himself over to the coughs stored up since the last convulsion.
Emerald gathered keys and a summer purse. “Edward’s staying on the other side,” she said. “He’s much better.”
Father nodded, his eyes bulging with pressure.
“Do you need some money?” the mother asked.
And with that, Emerald released herself into the smoky night. She saw a face at the window as she drove away and continued to drive, straight over the bridge—the struts and piers shrouded, arcs and pinnacles glittering. Hers was the last car to make its way over. The bridge closed after her at the Cook’s end. It sometimes happened like this, in that hour, that weather, this season.
Nut Island was already veiled behind her, and Cook’s, coming up ahead, was burning black and orange in the lamplight. The Grand Hotel stood watch over the harbor, as the car streamed into port like a fish. Emerald rolled down her window, but that did nothing to clear the view, or allow her to hear what the cops were saying to one another, their cars aligned like a barrier.
Emerald’s car nosed along the narrow streets and into the silty dazzle of the hotel parking lot, smoke rising, the rain hissing to the ground. When she stepped into the cool lobby, she was pocketed in condensation, a blur to the eyes of the desk clerk.
The hotel had only three stories, so as not to dwarf the now-so-valuable warehouses, made into a warren of shops and cafés owned by the yacht club, the legacy of privateers and triangle traders. Edward had chosen the third story, so he could see the simple plan of Nut Island with the help of the telescope fitted in each seaside room. But there’d been nothing to see for hours. Because he didn’t think she would, or could, come over, he’d opened the honor bar and started drinking champagne, to see how his inflamed gut would handle the simple fermentations. He’d moved on to rum and coke when the phone rang.
Edward was 50, but looked older. He had had his eye on Emerald from day one, four years ago. He was still married then, and started, from that hour, to drive Maude away, a hard thing, because they had been a love match with no children for distraction, and two sets of prosperous but deceased parents. But room had to be made in his life for this gem, and he would make it. His life was now in order, mortgages paid; and Maude, with an annuity, had found her way to a better life, taking their friends and adding some new ones. He missed her, but there was no turning back, then or now. He was reserving the girl for something better, “when she’s ready.”
The desk clerk, at the other end of the line, said that someone was on her way up. It was not the way things were done. All professionalism was, from that moment, set aside.
He opened the door, and there she was, enveloped in the sea cloud.
The weather didn’t clear, and the morning view was the same as before, only a white cloud replacing the night’s black one. For hours now, the two bodies had exchanged heat, as one cooled and the other recharged. Windows were locked shut, but the thermostat was reset by turns, heat and cool. The banker had bite marks on his upper arms, and scratches on his soft thighs and belly. He had no feeling in his feet, but the clam had stopped pulsing pain into his gut.
Emerald was asleep in the bed, and Edward sat in the armchair, wrapped in the bedspread. The hotel had no kitchen, so he was parched, famished, and nothing in the little refrigerator would answer to the urgency of his needs, not now, not ever.
Where had he been? And for how long? When would he go there again? A blade of light cut open the cloud; and, for a moment, the room was pure iridescence. The cloud body ate the blade, and a ripple of rain rattled the window.
He sat and waited; he watched. The bed’s funnel shape had rolled into a ball. The sun pushed through again, and soaked the room in dazzling light.
Edward was tidying the room when Emerald opened her eyes. He had collected their glasses, and was washing them in the bathroom sink. Their clothes were folded in separate piles on the dresser, with shoes lined up underneath. Sitting up in bed, Emerald could see Nut Island, with a section of bridge ringing with Sunday traffic. Seagulls were crisscrossing the bay.
When Edward entered the bedroom in his undershorts, and saw her awake, his face produced a boy’s pumpkin grin, and she laughed to see it, so bare and bright.
The laugh brought the spot into focus, and her face doubled. The bird’s eyes were just below the spot and the three points joined to make a plane, a flat surface on the round. It was less disfiguring, but more distracting. He stared, until she broke the plane, and rose from the bed with head down. Seeing was knowing, and he wanted to know. That made, to Emerald, all the difference. She closed the bathroom door and locked it. He was just behind that door, and she could hear him breathing.
She ran a hot bath until the pure-white room was solid cloud. Stepping in naked, she scalded her skin up to the breastbone, and tears of pain washed her face and neck clean. When the master key unlocked the door, and faces were there in the smoky light, she acknowledged those faces with a queenly smile, and a beautiful new coat of scars.
