THE SPIRIT LAMP (3)

"I'm prepared to write you a check for one hundred and twenty-five dollars," Arthur said. He stood behind his desk chair, his hands massaging the top of its backrest. "No let's make it one hundred and fifty."

Muriel looked up at him just as she was about to pick up the lamp for a closer look at its stained glass shade. Her hands hovered around the spiralled metal stem. "I should like to know..." she began, and hesitated. She could feel that Arthur did not want to explain why he was so keen to buy it. She brought her hands together at her cloth belt, standing straight and giving him quick inquisitive glances. "Should like to know why..."

"It's a charming Victorian piece. I've grown fond of it."

But his grey eyes told a different story, a secretive one. She picked up the lamp impulsively, said, "Excuse me," in an irritable tone and carried the lamp over to the window. The afternoon light shone directly on the variegated color of the shade. It reminded her of the light off the back porch at her mother's house. And there, exactly as before, were the shadowy but strangely distinct figures in the squares of glass. Were they moving? She couldn't be sure.

"Be careful," Arthur said tensely. "It's old and the silver caulking is brittle. Don't move it around too much or a pane of glass might fall out. It couldn't be replaced if it broke."

Muriel detected an odd fear in Arthur's voice.

"Why not?" she asked, intrigued. "Is there something special about--"

"It would lose value if a pane had to be replaced. Yes it's a special... a very unigue glass."

"What are these figures? Have you noticed them?"

Arthur smiled painfully. He patted the backrest. "Illusions caused by the texture of the glass," he said.

Muriel doubted this. "What, just a coincidence? Isn't it obvious that the texture was made to... to... invoke these images? And there's something very... interesting about the colors of the shade. The warmer colors have the male figures and the cooler colors have the female figures. I just now discovered this! And there's more. Look how the male figures seem to be, to be, I don't know, to be in an agony, in some... distress. But the females look like they're dancing in awkward poses like... like they too are in pain, but of a different kind."

Arthur laughed without mirth. "How you do get a lot out of emulsifiers!"

Muriel lowered the lamp. She looked over at him quizzically. "Emulsifiers?" she said through a puzzled frown. "The chemicals that develop photographic negatives?"

Arthur opened his mouth to speak but seemed to have second thoughts. Muriel waited with as stern a look as she could manage, furious inside at the prospect of Arthur changing the subject. She could see he wanted to.

Again there was that resigned manner. He made light of his explanation, though, speaking cavalierly. "It's Victorian, an age when photographic plates were glass. I'm no expert on this subject, but... your father was. Those squares of glass were coated with... dark room chemicals, yes, for developing negatives."

Muriel gasped. "Do you mean that these figures are photographic negatives? Photos my father took?"

Arthur shrugged. "So he told me. A strange hobby of his. I'm not surprised that he never mentioned it to you, you being so young and all. You do see, don't you," he said with a sudden urgency, leaning toward her, gripping the backrest, "it's a very unigue thing, quite extraordinary really, and I'm offering you serious money for it because-- not just because it's an odd piece of artwork, but because it's a part of my... my friendship... with Rex. I've nothing of him left to me, except... that. Muriel? What are you thinking? Don't drop it. Better sit down."

In a sense she was already sitting down, on the upstairs landing of the house, peering down secretively at the living room where Arthur and a very tipsy redhead sat together on the sofa. It was at a right angle to the fireplace. There was just one light on, the standing lamp next to the lavender leather armchair where her mother sat. The firelight played on everyone's faces except her father's. He was pacing the room with one hand in his pocket, gesturing with the other as he spoke.

"I know where those girls have gone off to," he was saying in a light-hearted tone, "to the TV studios. That's where it's at these days. Television. Arthur, you're right about that. And we've got to meet the challenge. Look at Hugh Hefner. He started his Playboy magazine with photos of Marilyn Monroe. Well, there's not much shock value in that anymore. If we want to keep our market share we need to do what Hefner's done, and that's to expose more female flesh. Get more provocative in our articles and features. And so I've been thinking that the shoots should have more sexual content, more interplay between the models and the sort of men that our readers would love to emulate."

Muriel looked at her mother. Jane had turned her face away from her husband. Her eyes were round and staring at nothing. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips pinched together in a tight line of disapproval. Something Rex had said disturbed her. She was both worried and angry. Exasperated, annoyed, stressed, this is how Muriel saw her.

Arthur was nodding like one of those bobblehead dolls, his expression vacuous. The drunken redhead was ever on the verge of laughing. She held her wine glass like a crossing guard holding up a stop sign. She made a brief, slurred comment about the models who had deserted the adult magazine business to try their luck in Studio City. The conversation centered around the disappearance of these young women. Rex was making it seem that the solution to the mystery was the lure of television. Nothing more than that. But Jane's posture and the cold wrath churning in her staring eyes told Muriel that there was more to the disappearances than a simple change of profession.

"Two hundred even," Arthur said with blunt finality, like an auctioneer. "You won't do better than that, I'm sure," he added, coming around from behind his desk, his tongue lying exhausted on his lower lip.

"No I don't want to sell it," Muriel said, holding the lamp possessively, guardedly, against her bosom. "I'm taking it home with me."

"To the motel?" he asked in a rather sneering manner.

"No, to my apartment. I'll call you tomorrow." She wasn't sure why she said that about calling. She certainly had no intention of doing so. She gave him a smile that had no light in it. He looked solemn and depressed when she glanced at him over her shoulder. The door knob felt cold.

The fresh paint smell reminded her of her father's remark. She went straight to her bedroom and set the lamp on her dresser. On an impulse to called her boss and asked if she could have the day off. She worked the swing shift. He put her on hold. She stared at the lamp shade. Somehow it seemed almost empty, as if the photographic negatives had dimmed away and the figures were hiding, or resting somewhere secret. The boss came back on and said that Carol would cover for her. Carol. The new girl with the gimpy leg who compensated for it by swinging her hips like a hula dancer. Muriel thanked him and hung up.

She showered and put on her terrycloth bathrobe. Standing in front of the dresser mirror she tilted her head from side to side. Marilyn Monroe... Not so much, with her make-up down the drain and her golden hair damp and straggly. But still...

She untied the cloth belt and let the robe part, exposing her body to the soft afternoon light. She looked at the lampshade, feeling that it was gazing at her. This amused her at first. But the longer she stared at it the stronger the feeling became. She shook back her hair and examined her reflection in the mirror.

Just suppose it was treated with dark room chemicals? Would her image remain on the glass? She parted her lips in a smile that at once began to tremble. Yes, she looked very much like Marilyn Monroe. Hefner would approve. He would drive up and say, "Fill 'er up with regular. And check my tire pressure, will you, please?"

She would lean over as she cleaned his windshield. He would admire her cleavage. Instead of a credit card he would hand her his business card. "Come see me at my LA office." But her smile still faltered, her eyes dripped and with an almost vicious resolve she pulled the bathrobe from her body and threw it on the floor at her feet. She turned to the lamp.

She stared down at it until her back ached. She got down on her knees, crossed her arms on the dresser, and put her chin on the back of her left hand, staring up at the shade. The figures were all there now. And in the square of glass that bordered the edge of the shade nearest her she saw him. It surprised her only for a second. Then her heart swelled and she wept without a sound, until finally she could speak.

"I want to live with you," she said.

The manager knocked on the apartment door a week later. A key turned and the door opened. The manager, who was bent with age, stepped cautiously into the living room. Impatient, Arthur passed him and with darting glances at the plain furniture and bare walls he went into the bedroom.

The bed had not been slept in. Muriel's purse lay on one of the pillows. A terrycloth bathrobe was a small pile on the floor by the dresser. Arthur stared at the lamp.

"She's not here?" asked the manager from the bedroom doorway.

"No, but it's all right," Arthur said. "I know where she's gone to. I'll take this lamp, if that's alright with you. She'll want me to have it for safe-keeping."