Ensemble

her to say before he would tell her it was all right to leave, go home now, she was absolved.

  You, he said, are a pretty girl, a little thin, but I can tell you are strong. Good, good. I need someone to help me out here in the country, keep track of things. Can you cook? I need a wife who can cook. And sew. And look after me...

  As he spoke he seemed more and more like a woman, both soothing like Mrs. Moon and admonishing like her own mother. Mona wondered what she was doing here, standing in the shade of a big tree in the middle of the barren countryside, talking to this creature from another world who wanted her to be his wife, and she wondered why she was not more afraid, why she felt so calm. Perhaps I am under a spell, she thought, and suddenly felt a great urge to break away.

  I’ve got to go, she said, pressing a check into his soft palm. Take whatever you like, write in an amount, I promise never to do it again. He stared at her, deaf, expressionless, as she turned and hurried to her car. She had the feeling that if she spent one more minute with this witchdoctor she would never be able to leave for the rest of her life.

  Her parents met her in the drive of their suburban house. It was night, and they were pacing the front lawn, flashlights scanning the front of the house. We’ve been robbed, they told her. Thieves had entered the house while they were out at their country club, and taken the television and her mother’s jewelry box and her father’s golf clubs, and who knew what else. Her brothers and sisters were all spending the night at friends’ homes. If you’d only been here, her mother said, and where were you so long?

  Mona exhaled a deep breath. Instead of explaining anything, she lied about a date and left to take a bus into town to see if Naomi and Abigail were up to anything. She wanted to tell them about her strange experience, and how she’d almost liked being at the witchdoctor’s camp, almost liked being put nearly into a trance by his tired soothing voice, but when she reached their apartment she saw that it was a bad time to come. Abigail was alone, fuming, and she brandished the landlord’s eviction notice before Mona’s face as if to say it was all her fault. She’d have to get a smaller, uglier place she could afford on her own. If she had moved in with her fiancé when they were still together she wouldn’t be in this state now. Worse than that, Naomi was at the hospital, with her father, who was probably going to die any goddamn second. Naomi had warned Abigail that she didn’t want to see Mona. So what are you going to do about it? Abigail asked Mona, and Mona was so shaken she forgot to tell her about her visit to the witchdoctor before Abigail rushed out, saying she had to go see a boy she’d met at a dance-bar somewhere.

  Mona walked down the crowded midtown street, wondering what there was left to do. Maybe, she wondered, it hadn’t been enough to apologize with a blank check. Maybe she had insulted the witchdoctor further. Now it was late and she was hungry. She was tired. There was noise and traffic all around her, and she could think of nothing more to do than call Mrs. Moon again. Mona found a phone-booth and fished the number and coins out of her purse.

  This time Mrs. Moon did not seem so pleased to hear from her. She sounded as though she had been asleep, though Mona thought she heard classical music playing in the background.

  What do I do? Mona cried into the receiver.

  I said—there was a pause as Mrs. Moon’s voice faded away and the line crackled, before she came back more clearly—I said, you must absolutely do whatever he tells you to do.

  Whatever?

  I have to go, Mrs. Moon said. We’ll talk about this more some other time, dear. Then the line went dead, and it was hard to tell if it had been Mrs. Moon hanging up or just a bad connection. Mona walked past the closed shops a while longer, trying to think straight, and soon was on a bus headed back home.

  Her parents had finally gone to bed, leaving all the lights in the house on and a radio playing loud enough to hear from the sidewalk. Mona realized she still had the keys to their second car. She went back into the house, silently put a few things in order, ate in the kitchen, then left a short, evasive note. It was easy enough to pull out of the drive without being heard. She drove steadily for three hours, through a storm and then sudden clear weather, and arrived back at the witchdoctor’s camp well after midnight.

  A dim golden glow shone through the trailer’s paper blinds. Everything was very peaceful; there was just the sound of the wind through the trees and a few nightbirds in the rock garden, which was serene as a grotto in the moonlight. The enormous sky was filled with stars she’d never noticed before, and once more Mona was amazed that she wasn’t more frightened, that she felt so calm, almost relieved to be here.

  She rapped twice on the screen-door and sat down next to her suitcase, waiting for a response. A bird or bat swooped by. The star-scattered sky had never looked so big and yet so welcoming. Nothing, she said to herself without quite knowing why, will ever be the same again, will it?

  After Ovid

  for Joseph Battell, 1839–1915

  Vermont farmer, philanthropist, & philosophizer

  I. The Maiden

  At first he would be an orchid, seduce her with opulence and elegance. The variety known as “lady’s slipper,” cypripedium reginae to the academy, would be appropriate for this clime: a decorous but virile blossom poised like an ephebe’s delectable pink scrotum on a slender purplish shaft. It would be a tight squeeze and a difficult trick, but he’d been practicing already with much homelier flowers such as the native hawkweed and bachelor’s button. As she wandered through the sacred cow-pasture she would be completely unable to resist the charms of his ornately veined petals and his manly stamen (like that naughty Jack of the jack-in-the-pulpit); stooping to admire him, he would change her into some sort of lively insect—what species exactly he hadn’t decided yet, but something bright and quick would do. Perhaps a kind of hornet. Unaware she had been transformed, she would approach him with jittering antennae, cautiously step onto the lobed lip of his labellum, which would glisten like perspiring skin, and begin to explore the tunnel of his striated throat. She would have descended too far before she realized the liqueur she sought had already ensnared her feet and all his waxen, silken magnificence was enveloping her. How he anticipated the tingle of her waspish agitation, the tremble of her abdomen and thorax!

  However, he had neglected to remember that women, even simple vestal virgins, adore perfume more than almost anything, of which orchids have none… and she nearly trod upon him on her way to the sacred spring.

  Orchidaceae are not the only flowers. Scarcely daunted, he would impress her next with sheer size and a daring design. On an island on the backside of the earth he had once witnessed the rare blossoming of what collectors call titanum amorphophallus or titan arum, natively the bunga bangkai, with its inflorescent fan of thick fleshy leaves wide across as a millstone, crimson bract, and an erect spathe that towers tall as a tree. At its tip would burst forth a corona of dazzling red flowerets like sticky jewels—and its musk would be so heady thousands of birds and insects might swoon in flight. No oversized epiphyte or giant rafflesia could rival his masculine grandeur; she would surely strip herself naked and worship at his feet—that is, that efflorescence of mottled sepal leaves.

  What might smell delicious to a passing beetle, however, was nothing but the stench of rotten carrion to a passing maiden, and she ran from his sight as did Syrinx from Pan, or for that matter, like any number of nymphs from any number of anonymous divinities such as himself. (In other lands, this arum was known as the corpse flower, not without good reason.)

  Humiliated, his immensity now flaccid and wilting, his pollen scattered, he folded his leafy fan and retreated to a party on Parnassus in a deep funk, the odor still clinging to him.

  The other gods, even the most common household lares and penates, were laughing at him, he was convinced. At the celestial dining hall, sitting alone sipping his goblet of nectar, he felt shunned, while the more popular gods gathered at other tables, roaring with pleasur
e as they told their smug jokes about tricking dimwitted mortals. Obviously no one had forgotten how an angry Jove had not so long ago diminished his powers because of a case of mistaken identity: He had abducted one of the king of god’s favorite minions, mistaking the painted and girlish young thing for a real girl who had winked at him on the steps of a temple earlier that day. That vice he would leave to the Greeks; he had spanked the boy and sent him promptly back to Jove, where the petulant lad had fabricated all sorts of scandalous lies.

  Once he had had in his dominion thousands upon thousands of hectares of untouched northern forest—swamp maples, pines, oaks, silver birch—and endless hayfields, countless sugar bushes, innumerable dairy farms. Swift and diaphanous as damselflies, maidens would dart around the paddocks and though the high corn, and, swifter still himself, he had his pick of the fairest and youngest. He would boast to everyone on Olympus that half the population of his little kingdom were demigods sired by himself—and he would not be far wrong. That was an idyllic time, and his idylls were golden. Since that nasty episode with Jove’s boy-servant he had lost his lands and his wealth and the better part of his powers—Jove was so