The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein Read online

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  “Because I was curious about the phrase ‘fancy free’ and looked it up. It came from a passage in Shakespeare—”

  “And you don’t want to talk about the dog because you won’t admit you’re stuck with him.”

  “I am not stuck with him.”

  “Of course you are. Let’s give him a name.”

  “He already has a name.”

  “What is it?”

  “He refuses to tell me, but he must have one. His owner must have named him.”

  “He doesn’t have an owner. He doesn’t have a collar and no one is looking for him because you’ve had him in the paper for a week and no one has answered your ad.”

  “Only six days,” I corrected.

  “So it’s your job to name him.”

  I threw up my hands in resignation. “O.K., Fearless.”

  “Fearless?”

  “What’s wrong with ‘Fearless’?”

  “Have you looked at him, Hubie? He should be named after one of the Muppets. Maybe Ernie.”

  We went around and around about a name and finally agreed on Geronimo. I liked it because that’s what parachuters yell as they jump out of the plane, and he had come down into my patio from out of the sky. She liked it because she said the dog looked like that sad picture of Geronimo after he was captured and looked subdued.

  I don’t know why we both had to agree on a name. After all, he’s my dog.

  18

  “Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took, and loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.”

  Old Will could certainly turn a phrase. That’s exactly how I felt when she walked into my shop. Cupid’s dart staggered me.

  Then she smiled at me and the room began to spin.

  “Come in,” I stammered.

  She was the sexiest woman I had ever seen. Not just in real life, but including all the movie stars and women you see on magazine covers. She was sexier than the women in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Of course, I’m not interested in sports, so I don’t read Sports Illustrated and don’t know what the women in the Swimsuit Edition look like.

  Except maybe I’ve seen one on the magazine rack at the grocery store.

  I might have even peeked inside out of idle curiosity. I don’t remember.

  But if I did, I’m sure nothing I saw was anywhere nearly as tantalizing as what was standing in my store smiling at me.

  And the weirdest part is, she wasn’t even good-looking according to the usual standards.

  Let’s start with her face, a good place to start, although frankly there were no bad places to start. Her face was crooked, her chin not precisely lined up under her nose. Not so out of line that you would call it a defect, but just enough that you noticed it. And her nose bent just slightly to the right, not more than probably a millimeter or two.

  Yet it was a face you couldn’t stop staring at. Which I was doing, and I thought at any moment she would frown or say something to me about it.

  But she didn’t. Maybe she was used to it. I think the misalignment of her features increased her allure.

  She was tall and thin, perhaps too thin to be a classic beauty. Her facial bones were prominent, high cheek bones, a strong brow, and a great jawbone. Who knew a jawbone could be sexy?

  Her skin had the color of cinnamon and the luster of polished mahogany. Her hair was black and long and straight and some of it hung down her back and a little of it hung in front of one shoulder and some on one side of her face as if she had forgotten to comb it, but what it really looked like was that some talented designer had worked with every strand to make it look exactly the way it looked.

  Her eyes were big and dark, the long lashes natural. Her mouth was wide and her lips supple. Her teeth revealed no sign of the orthodontist’s deceptive art. No piano keys here, but their whiteness against her dark skin was stunning.

  She had long legs and long arms, and she was wearing a sundress that revealed a great deal of those four lovely limbs.

  But what really made her beautiful was the way she moved, unrestrained, confident, comfortable in her skin.

  “I love this shop,” she said.

  “It’s yours,” I said like an idiot.

  I regretted my quip immediately, afraid she would think me a weirdo or pervert, but she laughed and said, “Great. I’ve always wanted to own a pottery shop.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, no. I’ve never even thought about pottery. Then I saw your wonderful logo and I looked through the window and saw the pots and nothing else… I think that’s what I like best, the minimalism.”

  All these years I’ve resisted every attempt on the part of wholesalers, jobbers, friends, and the Old Town Merchants Association to fill my shop up with other goods – post cards, leather goods, jewelry, key rings, and candies. I suppose I could have increased my revenue marginally, but I don’t want to be a department store or an upscale convenience store. So I stuck to my pots-only philosophy, and now it was paying off. It brought Her into my shop.

  She asked me to tell her about the pots, so I came out from behind the counter and did so. It went very well. It must have taken close to an hour, but she never seemed bored or anxious to leave. She had a clear strong voice, an exotic accent, and she asked a lot of good questions.

  But the best part was that as we moved from pot to pot, she stood very close to me, and she would touch my arm occasionally when she wanted to ask me something, and her hair brushed over me several times. None of this seemed flirtatious or even contrived. She was simply at ease, a natural, open, and happy person learning something new.

  She smelled of citrus and spices, and the scent lingered after she had gone. I had wanted to ask her about herself but couldn’t bring myself to do so.

  She had an air of royalty about her, what I think of as real royalty, meaning that she made you, the commoner, feel like you were the most interesting and important person in the world even though you both knew you were not.

  I stared at her as she walked towards the door in long graceful strides, her hair eddying behind her.

  Then she turned at the door and said, “What’s your name?”

  “Hubert.”

  She smiled. “I’m Izuanita,” she said and walked away.

  Leaving me standing there grasping to that thread of hope.

  19

  Izuanita. An exotic name for an exotic woman, faintly tropical and Aztecan in sound, fragrant like her.

  I stood there staring at the door after she left. Perhaps I hoped she’d come back. “Hubie, you O.K.?”

  Susannah had materialized in my doorway. I stared at her, uncomprehending.

  “Hubert,” she repeated.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She strode quickly to me and took one of my hands in hers. “Are you O.K., Hubert?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “The most amazing woman was in here,” I said, looking again towards the door.

  “Are you expecting her back any moment? Is that why you keep looking at the door?”

  “No.”

  She smiled at me and tugged on my hand. “It’s five-thirty, Hubie. I was getting worried about you, and then when I saw you just standing here, I thought when you finally opened your mouth you’d have slurred speech and your left arm wouldn’t move.”

  “As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts,” I mouthed.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll explain it to you over a margarita.”

  Once we were seated in Dos Hermanas, I told her all about Izuanita.

  “Wow, Hubie! I’ve never seen you smitten like this.”

  She was right. I’ve had my share of romances, I suppose, though most of them have been short lived. And although I honestly believe all women are beautiful, each in her own way, I have to admit that a few of the women I’ve known have been more beautiful than most. But smitten? Not like this.

  I descri
bed her in detail to Susannah who took in every word. If there’s one thing she likes better than murder mysteries, it’s romances. Not the books, the real thing.

  “How old is she?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Somewhere between eighteen and forty-five.” I really had no idea; she seemed beyond such mundane characteristics as age.

  She laughed. “Did you introduce her to Geronimo?”

  “No.”

  “You should. Most women are suckers for dogs.”

  “How do they feel about anteaters?”

  “Now that’s the old Hubie we all know and love. I was worried there for a minute that your goddess had knocked your personality out of whack.”

  “Did I tell you I offered to give her my shop?”

  “Geez, I wish I had that effect on men. When you see her again, introduce us. Maybe I can get some pointers.”

  “I’ll probably never see her again. Average Joes like me don’t walk around with goddesses on their arms.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Hubie. Oops, bad choice of words.”

  We both laughed. “Now you’re also back to the personality I know and love. You were acting like Florence Nightingale there for a while.”

  “I was seriously worried about you. You’re never late for drinks and then I find you in a trance. I thought you’d had a stroke.”

  “No. Just a heart attack.”

  “Well, tell your heart not to worry. You’ll see her again.”

  “You really think so,” I said, a bit too anxiously.

  “Take it from me, Hubie. She didn’t give you her name just because she likes saying it.”

  As you have already figured out, seeing Izuanita again was my fondest hope, and I wanted Susannah to be right. And as you’ve also probably figured out, she was right. I wouldn’t have told you about Izuanita if I’d never seen her again. Or maybe I would have. Even that one meeting was a memory to treasure.

  Fondest hope? A memory to treasure? God, I’m getting corny.

  We finally got off the subject of Izuanita and on to the subject of Chris the handsome Italian with the fractured English.

  “And was he right,” I asked, “that La Hacienda is a ‘luminary for its fabrication of local repasts’?”

  She shook her head. “His strange English makes no difference, at least so far as women are concerned. The waitress was so charmed by Chris that she fawned over him all night.”

  “O.K., so we know the service was excellent—”

  “A little too excellent,” she inserted.

  “But how was the food?”

  “It wouldn’t be professional of me to say anything about the food since I work at their competitor, La Placita.”

  “In other words, you didn’t even notice.”

  “O.K., so I didn’t notice. How could I? I was too busy trying to make conversation. He asked me at one point why I was a fractional devotee of art history. I mean, how do you answer a question like that?”

  “Did you ever figure out what he meant by that?”

  “I did. And you would have been proud of my ingenuity. What I did was start answering all his questions with questions, and eventually I got enough info to sort of tell how I should respond. But I made sure the questions were actually compliments because I didn’t want him to think I was criticizing his English.”

  “For example?”

  “When he asked why I was a fractional devotee of art history, I told him I was impressed that he noticed. Then I asked what had led him to suspect that I might be. His answer mentioned my work as a waitress, and then I asked about that, and so on, and finally I realized he was asking me why I’m a part-time student.”

  “I’m impressed. But you can’t keep this up, Suze. You either have to help him or get someone else to.”

  “Suppose Izuanita spoke like Chris. Would you still want to see her?”

  She had me there. “One of her many charms is the way she asks questions, but if she babbled like a brook, I’d still want to see her.”

  “I thought so. But you make a good suggestion. I don’t want to be the one to correct Chris’ English. Teacher/student is not compatible with girlfriend/boyfriend. But maybe I could arrange for someone else to take on the task without Chris knowing I had anything to do with it.”

  She smiled at me across the top of her saltless margarita glass.

  “Oh, no. Not me. I’d do almost anything for you Susannah, but not that. No, definitely not.”

  “Come on, Hubie. The guy hasn’t made a pass at me. He hasn’t even held my hand. And no wonder. I’m too busy trying to understand him to flirt with him.”

  The conversation continued for a while and the final upshot of it was that I agreed to meet Chris on Thursday afternoon.

  I sang under my breath as I walked across the Plaza on my way home. The song was Black Magic and the words were:

  Izuanita has me in her spell,

  That Aztec magic that she weaves so well

  Those icy fingers up and down my spine,

  The longing feeling when her eyes meet mine.

  O.K., so I modified the lyrics slightly. I also didn’t sound exactly like Frank Sinatra, but I wasn’t doing a public performance, so who cares? There was a spring in my step because Susannah convinced me that I would see Izuanita again.

  But what I saw instead was a white van coming down my street and then turning towards Central and disappearing out of sight. The words United Plumbing were in big black letters.

  20

  Someone in Old Town had their sink overflow while doing the dinner dishes, and the plumber they called to unclog their drains just happened to be the same one I’d seen three times on Titanium Trail where they were doing... what?

  Installing a new water heater?

  Maybe. Or maybe watching me watch Cantú’s condo?

  But why?

  I puzzled about it long into the night and all I got out of it was bags under my eyes the next day.

  I called Martin at the tribal store the next morning and left him a message. When he called an hour later, I asked how much he wanted for his uncle’s pot. He told me twenty-five hundred, and I told him I had the money to buy it because I’d finally made a sale, a small plate from Santo Domingo that brought three thousand dollars.

  He showed up around four that afternoon. There were three people in the store, a man and wife who were arguing about where to eat and their teenage daughter tuning them out in favor of something she was listening to via earphones.

  Martin looked at the couple and said, “I come here trade pot for wampum.”

  The arguing couple forgot their dispute, the husband grabbing his wife’s hand and leading her out. The teenage daughter remained. She took off the headphone and said, “Are you a real Native American?”

  He said he was and she said, “This is so cool.”

  “Would you like to buy the pot?” Martin asked her.

  “My dumb parents never give me any money,” she said.

  “Tiffany! Get out here immediately,” her mother called from out on the sidewalk.

  “Can I have your autograph,” Tiffany asked Martin.

  “Sure,” he said. “Where you want me to sign?”

  She pulled her right sleeve up and handed Martin a black marker pen. “Right here,” she said, indicating a place on her shoulder. “Try to make it as even and level as you can. I’m going to have a tattoo artist trace over it before I wash it off, so what you write will be permanent.”

  Martin hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and signed her shoulder while the parents looked on from outside in horror.

  Tiffany sidled up to one of my display cases and looked at her shoulder’s reflection in the glass. “This will be the coolest tattoo in history. Thanks, Mister Bull,” she said and ran out overjoyed.

  “Mr. Bull?” I said after she left.

  “I signed it ‘Sitting Bull’,” he said.

  I paid Martin the t
wenty-five hundred and placed the pot in one of the display cases with ‘five thousand dollars’ written on the discreet tented card in front of it. Like all the best restaurants, I write the prices out in words rather than numbers.

  It was almost five, so Martin and I walked over to Dos Hermanas to meet Susannah who was happy to see him.

  After Susannah and I had our margaritas and Martin his Tecate, he turned to me and asked, “You finish that book I gave you?”

  “You gave it to me? I thought you just loaned it to me.”

  “He’s on page five,” said Susannah.

  “Good thing I gave it to you. The rate you reading it, I’ll never see it again.”

  “I’m a potter, not a physicist.”

  “It’s not written for physicists. It’s written for what you white people call the educated layman.”

  “I’m white,” Susannah said, “and I’ve never called anybody that.”

  That brought a chuckle from Martin.

  “What did you get from the first five pages?” Martin asked me.

  “If you throw an electron, you never know which way it might go.”

  “You can’t throw electrons,” he replied.

  “That’s what I told him,” said Susannah.

  “What about those electron guns? They throw electrons.”

  Martin nodded. “Suppose you throw a baseball at a piece of plywood. The ball makes a little dent in the wood. If you could duplicate that throw exactly with a second throw, you’d expect the ball to hit right in that first dent.”

  “You haven’t seen him throw a ball,” Susannah interjected. “He couldn’t hit the plywood, much less the dent.”

  “O.K.,” said Martin, “I’ll let you throw it.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “So you throw two baseballs exactly the same way, and they hit the same spot. Now imagine that instead of baseballs, we throw electrons.”

  “Must be hard to get a two-seam grip on those puppies,” said Susannah. She and Martin had a fine laugh, and I took a sip of my margarita. I figured her remark was some sort of inside joke, but I wasn’t about to ask what it meant.