I wear my notes and pictures like a shield.

“Someone must have hurt you very badly.”

“No.”

“Tell me your story.”

“I don’t have a story to tell.”

“Everyone has a story.”

I look away from him and stare at the ridge of traveler’s trees.

Nobody wrote about our little village before, this man told me once. Pilgrims just used it as a stopping-off place, to get to the place where they really wanted to go. Even pilgrims don’t even come here anymore. So I wrote about his little village, to try to bring back the pilgrims.

“It’s either disillusionment or bitterness,” he says. “And women carry them both very badly.”

I smile over at him, wanly, stretching only one corner of my lips. Inside, I am shrinking Catherine. Inside, I am a woman wearing a necklace of teeth.

“I thought they were the same thing anyway,” I say.

48

“No, not those chairs,” the hostess says. “They’re not to be sat on. They’re just to be looked at.”

I stand eating cheese from a small china plate.

“You look like Nefertiti,” the woman says, coming up to me. “My husband thinks so too.”

She moves away, shoos someone else. “Oh, not those chairs, dears; they’re only to be looked at.”

Lantis comes up to me. “How are you doing?”

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Are you the husband?” the hostess asks. “I’ll get you a drink.”

“No thanks.”

“Oh, you’re a teetotaler, how nice.” She glances around.

“No, not those, dears. They’re just to be looked at.” Back to us. “Your wife, your wife, she’s like a phantom. She read beautifully, but we can’t get her to talk. I’ll bet with you she talks and talks and talks, you can’t hush her up, ha ha . . . Not those, dears, they’re just to be looked at . . . She doesn’t like us. We think she’s beautiful, but she doesn’t like us at all.”

Lantis leaves us, comes back carrying my coat.

“Let’s go,” he says. He guides me to the door. Outside it’s windy. He buttons my coat.

“We should go back and be polite,” I say.

“Why? It’ll keep them wondering about you anyway,” he says. “It’ll keep them a little frightened, keep you a little mysterious. Either that or they’ll think you’re an arrogant stuck-up bitch. Either way, they won’t invite you back.”

I frown. The wind blows me against him.

“But what we say is to hell with them, right?” he says, taking my arm.

“Right,” I mumble.

He opens the car door for me and I climb inside.

49

There’s a man talking to me. He stands gulping down gin. A bird’s beak. A long chin. Hair as white as Hemingway’s at fifty.

“Are you a professor here?” I ask.

“No, I don’t do anything; I just like to go to parties.”

He dips a cracker into melted cheese, offers to feed it to me. I shake my head.

“You were quite good,” he says.