Lady Oracle Read Free

mismatched.
    When I was halfway through the pile of hair I heard footsteps coming down the gravel path. My heart clumped together, I stood frozen: the path led to nowhere but the house, there was no one in the house but me, the other two flats were empty. How could Arthur have found me so soon? Perhaps I had been right about him after all. Or it wasn’t Arthur, it was one of the others.… The panic I hadn’t allowed myself to feel for the past week rolled in an ice-gray wave back over my head, carrying with it the shapes of my fear, a dead animal, the telephone breathing menace, killer’s notes cut from the Yellow Pages, a revolver, anger.… Faces formed and disintegrated in my head, I didn’t know who to expect, what did they want? The question I could never answer. I felt like screaming, rushing into the bathroom, there was a high square window I might be able to squeeze through; then I could run up the hill and driveaway in my car. Another fast getaway. I tried to remember where I’d put the keys.
    There was a knock at the door, a stolid confident knock. A voice called, “Hello? You are within?”
    I could breathe again. It was only Mr. Vitroni, Signor Vitroni, Reno Vitroni of the broad smile, inspecting his property. It was his sole piece of property, as far as I knew; nevertheless he was supposed to be one of the richest men in the town. What if he wanted to check the kitchen, what would he think of the sacrificial hair? I turned off the burner and stuffed the hair into the paper bag I used for garbage.
    “Coming,” I called, “just a minute.” I didn’t want him walking in: my bed was unmade, my clothes and underwear were draped over chairbacks and strewn on the floor, there were dirty dishes on the table and in the sink. I hooded myself with one of the towels and snatched my dark glasses from the table as I went past.
    “I was just washing my hair,” I said to him when I’d opened the door.
    He was puzzled by the dark glasses: a little, but not much. Foreign ladies, for all he knew, had strange beauty rituals. He beamed and held out his hand. I held out my own hand, he lifted it as though to kiss it, then shook it instead.
    “I am most pleasant to see you,” he said, bringing his heels together in a curiously military bow. The colored felt pens were lined up across his chest like medals. He’d made his fortune in the war, somehow; no one questioned these things now that they were all over. At the same time he’d learned a bit of English, and scraps of several other languages as well. Why had he come to my flat in the early evening, surely not the right time for him to visit a young foreign woman, this respectable middle-aged man with the right kind of barrel-shaped wife and numerous grandchildren? He was carrying something under his arm. He looked past my shoulder as if he wanted to go in.
    “You are possibly cooking your meal?” he said. He’d picked up the smell of burning hair. God knew what these people ate, I could hear him thinking. “I wish I do not disturb?”
    “No, not at all,” I said heartily. I stood squarely in the doorway.
    “Everything with you is fine? The light is going on again?”
    “Yes, yes,” I said, nodding more than was necessary. There was no electricity when I moved in, as the last tenant hadn’t paid the bill. But Mr. Vitroni had pulled strings.
    “There is much of the sunshine, no?”
    “Very much,” I said, trying not to show impatience. He was standing too close.
    “This is good.” Now he got to the point. “I have something here for you. So you will find yourself more” – he lifted his free arm, palm up, expansive, welcoming, ushering me in – “so you will be at home with us.”
    How embarrassing, I thought, he was giving me a housewarming present. Was this customary, what should I say? “That’s terribly kind of you,” I said, “but.…”
    Mr. Vitroni dismissed my gratitude with a wave of the hand. From under his arm he produced his square