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She and Georgia worked out the history of the Empire widow, and Georgia was added to the story as a grumpy, secretly Socialistic hired companion named Miss Amy Jukes. The widow’s name was Mrs. Allegra Forbes-Bellyea. Her husband had been Nigel Forbes-Bellyea. Sometimes Sir Nigel. Most of one rainy afternoon in the Moghul’s Court was spent in devising the horrors of the Forbes-Bellyea honeymoon, in a damp hotel in Wales.
The other place that Maya liked was a hippie restaurant on Blanshard Street, where you sat on dirty plush cushions tied to the tops of stumps and ate brown rice with slimy vegetables and drank cloudy cider. (At the Moghul’s Court, Maya and Georgia drank only gin.) When they lunched at the hippie restaurant, they wore long, cheap, pretty Indian cotton dresses and pretended to be refugees from a commune, where they had both been the attendants or concubines of a folk-singer named Bill Bones. They made up several songs for Bill Bones, all mild and tender blue-eyed songs that contrasted appallingly with his greedy and licentious ways. Bill Bones had very curious personal habits.
When they weren’t playing these games, they talked in a headlong fashion about their lives, childhoods, problems, husbands.
“That was a horrible place,” Maya said. “That school.”
Georgia agreed.
“They were poor boys at a rich kids’ school,” Maya said. “So they had to try hard. They had to be a credit to their families.”
Georgia would not have thought Ben’s family poor, but she knew that there were different ways of looking at such things.
Maya said that whenever they had people in for di
Georgia revealed that Ben wrote a letter every week to the great-aunt who had sent him to school.
“Is it a nice letter?” said Maya.
“Yes. Oh, yes. It’s very nice.”
They looked at each other bleakly, and laughed. Then they a
“But do you feel badly,” Georgia said, “talking like this?”
“Of course,” said Maya, gri
“I know,” said Georgia, who up until that moment hadn’t known, for sure.
“You’re very smart,” Maya said. “Or I’m very obvious. What do you think of him?”
“A lot of trouble,” Georgia said judiciously. She was pleased with that answer, which didn’t show how flattered she felt by the disclosure, or how heady she found this conversation.
“You aren’t just a-whistlin’ ‘Dixie,’” Maya said, and she told the story about the abortion. “I am going to break up with him,” she said. “Any day now.”
But she kept on seeing Harvey. She would relate, at lunch, some very disillusioning facts about him, then a
“Must scrub,” she said.
She had left Raymond once. Not for Harvey. She had run away with, or to, a musician. A pianist — Nordic and sleepy-looking but bad-tempered — from her society-lady, symphony-benefit days. She travelled with him for five weeks, and he deserted her in a hotel in Cinci
“That was it, for me,” Maya said. “That was your true and desperate love. Nevermore.”
What, then, was Harvey?
“Exercise,” said Maya.
GEORGIA GOT A part-time job in a bookstore, working several evenings a week. Ben went away on his yearly cruise. The summer turned out to be unusually hot and su
“You know what you’ve got?” she said to Georgia. “You’ve got a salon! Oh, I’d like to have a job like that! I’d even like an ordinary job in an ordinary store, where you fold things up and find things for people and make change and say thank you very much, and colder out today, will it rain?”
“You could get a job like that,” said Georgia.
“No, I couldn’t. I don’t have the discipline. I was too badly brought up. I can’t even keep house without Mrs. Ha
It was true. Maya had a lot of servants, for a modern woman, though they came at different times and did separate things and were nothing like an old-fashioned household staff. Even the food at her di
Usually, Maya was busy in the evenings. Georgia was just as glad, because she didn’t really want Maya coming into the store, asking for crazy titles that she had made up, making Georgia’s employment there a kind of joke. Georgia took the store seriously. She had a serious, secret liking for it that she could not explain. It was a long, narrow store with an old-fashioned fu
Sometimes she got up and put the books in stricter order. The fiction was shelved alphabetically, by author, which was sensible but not very interesting. The history books, however, and the philosophy and psychology and other science books were arranged according to certain intricate and delightful rules — having to do with chronology and content — that Georgia grasped immediately and even elaborated on. She did not need to read much of a book to know about it. She got a sense of it easily, almost at once, as if by smell.
At times the store was empty, and she felt an abundant calm. It was not even the books that mattered then. She sat on the stool and watched the street — patient, expectant, by herself, in a finely balanced and suspended state.