“How is she magic?” I want to know.
“It’s like . . . well, does she remind you of anyone? Not the way she looks, though that seems familiar, too, but the way she talks. The cadence of her voice.”
I shake my head.
“Well, she reminds me of Gran.”
I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this as I realize that after one brief meeting, Holly’s picked up on something that I should have seen from the start.
“Your grandmother,” I say.
“Mm-hmm.”
This time I’m the one who glances at the Wordwood menu on her computer screen. I turn back to Holly, but she won’t quite meet my gaze.
“What exactly are you saying?” I ask.
“Maybe you should ask her about the Wordwood,” Holly says.
That’s when I realize that Saskia does remind me of someone—not in what she’s saying, but in how she says it. She reminds me of Tally.
11
I feel like the person in the folk tale who calls the cat by its true name which makes it leave. Like the shoemaker putting out clothes for the brownies. Like the seventh bride with Bluebeard’s key in hand, approaching the forbidden door.
I can hear, in the joyful music that arcs between Saskia and myself, the first faint strains of sadness, a bittersweet whisper of strings, a foreshadowing of the lament to come. If this were a film, I’m at the point where I’d want to shout up at the screen, “Don’t screw it up! Leave well enough alone.” But I can’t stop myself. I have to know. Even understanding the price one must pay when unmasking faerie, I have to know.
So, heart in throat, I ask Saskia that night, where did she live before she moved to Newford, where is she from, expecting I’m not sure what, but not that a merry laugh would start in her eyes and spread across her face. Not that she’d put her hand tenderly against my cheek, look long into my eyes and then lean forward to kiss my mouth. I can taste the good humor on her lips.
“I thought you knew,” she says. “I lived in the forest.”
“The Wordwood.”
She nods. “A forest of words and names and stories. I love it there, but I had to know more. I had to experience firsthand what I could only read about in the forest. I knew what the sun was supposed to feel like. I knew about rain and how it must feel against your face. I could imagine what food tasted like and drink and music and love. But reading about something’s not the same as doing it, is it?”
I shake my head.
“So I chose a shape from a magazine picture that I thought would be pleasing and came across to be here.”
How? I want to ask, but I realize it’s irrelevant. Mysteries are what they are. If they could be explained, they would lose their resonance.
“Do you miss it at all?” I end up asking.
Saskia shakes her head. “No. I . . .” She hesitates, looking for a way to explain herself clearly. “Part of me’s still there,” she settles on. “That’s why I”—she laughs again—”seem to know so much. I just ‘look’ it up in the forest.”
“When I put it all together,” I tell her, “I didn’t know what to think. I guess I still don’t know.”
“You think I’m going to leave you,” she says. “You think I’m going back and when I do, I’ll leave you behind.”
I don’t trust myself to speak. All I can do is nod. I can feel a deep chord welling up in my chest, building, building, to a crescendo. A tsunami of swelling, thrumming sound.
The merriment flees her eyes and she leans close to me again, so close I’m breathing her breathing. She looks so serious. The deep sea blue of her eyes starts to swallow me.
“The only way I’ll leave you,” she says, “is if you send me away.”
The tsunami breaks over me as I hold her close.
12
Geordie doesn’t usually come over to where I live unless it’s to help me move, which I seem to do about once a year. So he gets to see the old place twice, the new place once, until I move again. The image he carries in his head of where I live must consist of empty apartments, bare walls and rugless floors, the furniture in odd arrangements, preparing to leave or having just arrived. And then there’re all the boxes of books and papers and what-have-yous. Sometimes I think I just live out of boxes.
But we’re in my study this evening and I’m not in the middle of a move, neither coming nor going, although there still are a half-dozen boxes of books in one corner, left over from the previous move. Geordie’s standing by my desk, reading a poem called “Arabesque” that’s taped to the wall beside my computer.
The artist closed her book,
returning it to the shelf
that stored the other
stories of her life.
When she looked up,
there were no riddles
in her gaze;
only knowing.Don’t make of us
more than what we are,
she said.
We hold no great secret
except this:
We know that
all endeavor is art
when rendered
with conviction.
The simple beauty
of the everyday
strikes chords
as stirring as
oil on canvas,
finger on string,
the bourée in
perfect demi-pointe.
The difference is
we consider it art.
The difference is
we consider
art.
When it consumes us,
what consumes us,
is art:
an invisible city
we visit with our dreams
Returning,
we are laden down with
the baggage of
our journeys,
and somewhere,
in a steamer trunk
or a carry-on,
we carry souvenirs:
signposts,
guidebooks,
messages from beyond.
Some are merely
more opaque
than others.
Geordie stands there, whiskey in hand, and reads it through a couple of times, before coming back to join me on the other side of the room. I have two club chairs there with a reading lamp and a table set between them. Geordie places his whiskey glass on the table and sits down.
“Did you write that?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No, it’s one of Saskia’s. I couldn’t write a piece of verse if my life depended on it.”
I’ve got a roast in the oven, with potatoes baking in a circle around it. Saskia was making a salad, but she ran out to the market to get some lemons just before Geordie arrived.
“I like it,” Geordie says. “Especially that bit about art being like an invisible city from which we bring things back. It reminds me of Sophie’s serial dreams.”
Saskia moved in a couple of months ago, setting up her own study in what was my spare bedroom. It’s a bright, airy room, with a thick Oriental carpet on the floor, tons of pillows, a shelf filled with knickknacks running along one wall and all sorts of artwork on the others. She writes at a small mahogany desk by the window that stands so short it won’t take a chair. She sits on one of the pillows when she writes at it. There aren’t any books in the room, but then she doesn’t need them. She’s got her own reference library in her head, or wherever it is that she connects with the Wordwood.
Now that I know, about that forest of words, how she grew up in the shelter of its storied trees, she doesn’t remind me of Tally anymore. I can’t remember how she ever did, though Holly still hears her Gran, and I suppose other people hear who they expect to hear. I don’t know how, exactly, she crossed over from the Wordwood in the first place, but the longer she stays here, in this world, the more she becomes a part of it and the less she rattles people. Which is a good thing since it means no more unwarranted frowns and catty remarks directed her way.
&nbs
p; “You guys seem pretty happy,” Geordie says.
I smile. “We are. Who’d have thought I’d ever settle down?”
Ever since Saskia moved in, we’ve had Geordie over for dinner at least once every couple of weeks. But this is the first time we’ve been alone in the apartment.
“You know,” I say, “there are things we never talk about. About back when.”
I don’t have to explain “back when” to him. Back when we lived at home. Back when Paddy was still alive. Back when we hid from each other as much as from our parents. Back when we shut each other out because that was the only way we knew how to deal with people, the only way we knew to relate to anybody. Stand back. Give me room.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Geordie tells me.
“But I do,” I say. “I want to explain something. You know how sometimes you want something so badly, all you can do is drive it away? You keep looking for the weak link so that you can point at it and say, there it is. I knew this couldn’t work out. I knew this was too good to be true.”
He looks a little confused. “You’re talking about what you went through with Saskia now, aren’t you?”
“I went through that with Saskia,” I agree. “But she was patient and waited me out instead of walking away.”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Geordie wants to know.
“I just want you to know that I’m not simply going through the motions here. That it’s not only Saskia who wants to see you. I want to see you, too. I should have been there for you when we were kids. I was your older brother. I shouldn’t have let you grow up alone the way I did.”
“But we were just kids.”
I nod. “But you had to resent me for not being the big brother you needed. I know I sure as hell resented Paddy. It’s taken me a long time to work through that, but now that I finally have, it’s way too late to tell him. I don’t want the same thing to lie there between us.”
“I never hated you,” Geordie says. “I just didn’t understand why things had to be the way they were.”
“I know. But we’ve had that lying between us for all these years, the knowing that we weren’t there for each other then and maybe we won’t be there for each other in the future, some time when it really matters. It’s the same self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t trust something to be true, so you push it to the point when it isn’t true.”
“That’ll never happen,” Geordie says, but I can see it’s something he wants to believe, not something he really believes.
“We can’t let it happen,” I say. “So that’s why I’m telling you now what Saskia said to me: The only way I’ll leave you, is if you send me away.”
13
I don’t envy the music others hear anymore; I’m too filled with my own now, the strains that connect me to Saskia and my brother and the other people I love in my life. I’m not saying my world’s suddenly become perfect. I’ve still got my ups and downs. You should see the review that The Daily Journal gave my last book—Aaran Block at his vitriolic worst. But whenever things get bad, all I do is slow down. I stop and listen to the music and then I can’t help but appreciate what I do have.
It’s funny what a difference a positive attitude can have. When you go out of your way to be nice to people, or do something positive for those who can’t always help themselves the way Saskia does with her editorial work on Street Times, it comes back to you. I don’t mean you gain something personally. It’s just that the world becomes a little bit of a better place, the music becomes a little more upbeat, and how can you not gain something from that?
See, when you get down to the basics of it, everything’s just molecules vibrating. Which is what music is, what sound is—vibrations in the air. So we’re all part of that music and the worthier it is, the more voices we can add to it, the better off we all are.
Sure beats the silence that’s threatening to swallow us otherwise.
14
“Tell me a story,” Saskia says that night after Geordie’s gone home.
I turn my face toward her and she snuggles close so that my mouth is right beside her ear.
“Once upon a time,” I say, “there was a boy who lost his ability to sing and the only person who could find it for him lived in a forest of words, but he didn’t meet her until he was much, much older . . . .”
In This Soul of a Woman
If I were a man, I can’t imagine it would have turned out this way. I will say no more except what I have in my mind and that is that you will find the spirit of Caesar in this soul of a woman.
—from the letters of Artemisia Gentileschi
(1593–c.1652)
1
“Eddie wants to see you.”
“What’s he want?” Nita asked. “Another blow job?”
“Probably. I think he’s tired of the new girl.”
“Well, fuck Eddie. And fuck you, too.”
“Christ, Nita. You on the rag or what? I’m just passing along a message.”
Nita didn’t turn to look at Jennifer. She stared instead at her reflection in the mirror, trying to find even one familiar feature under the makeup. Even her eyes were wrong, surrounded by a thick crust of black eye shadow, the irises hidden behind tinted red contacts. From beyond the dressing room came the thumping bass line of whatever David Lee Roth song Candy used in her act. That meant she had ten minutes before she was up again. Lilith, Mistress of the Night. Black leather and lace over Gothic-pale skin, the only spots of color being the red of her eyes, her lips, and the lining of her cape. Nita’s gaze dropped from her reflection to the nine-foot-long whip that lay coiled like a snake on the table in front of her.
“Fuck this,” she said.
The dressing room smelled of cigarettes and beer and cheap perfume which just about summed up her life. She swept her arm across the top of the table and sent everything flying. Whip and makeup containers. A glass, half full of whiskey. Cigarettes, lighter, and the ashtray with butts spilling out of it. A small bottle filled with uppers. The crash of breaking glass was loud in the confined quarters of the dressing room.
Jennifer shook her head. “I’m not cleaning that shit up,” she said.
Nita looked up from the mess she’d made. The rush of utter freedom she’d felt clearing the table top had vanished almost as quickly as it had come.
“So who asked you to?” she asked.
Jennifer pulled a chair over from one of the other tables and sat down beside her. “You want to talk about it?”
Nita bit back a sharp retort. Jennifer wasn’t her friend—she didn’t have any friends—but unlike ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world, Jennifer had always treated her decently. Nita looked away, wishing she hadn’t sent her shot of whiskey flying off the table with everything else.
“Last time I was up, my ex’s old man was in the audience,” she said.
“So?”
“So the only way I could keep my visitation rights with Amanda was by promising I’d get a straight job.”
Jennifer nodded, understanding. “The old bad influence line.”
“Like she’s old enough to know or even care what her old lady does for a living.” Nita was really missing that drink now. “It’s so fucking unfair. I mean, it’s okay for this freak to come into a strip joint with his buddies and have himself a good time, but my working here’s the bad influence. Like we even want to be here.”
“I don’t mind that much,” Jennifer said. “It beats hooking.”
“You know what I mean. He’s going to run straight to a judge and have them pull my visiting rights.”
“That sucks,” Jennifer agreed. She leaned forward and gave Nita a quick hug. “But you gotta hang in there, Nita. At least we’ve got jobs.”
“I know.”
“And you’d better go see Eddie or maybe you won’t even have that.”
Nita shook her head. “I can’t do it. I can’t even go out on the stage again tonight.”
“But . . .”
Jennifer began, then she sighed. “Never mind. We’ll figure out a way to cover for you.”
“And Eddie?”
Jennifer stood up and tugged down on the hem of her miniskirt. “That’s one you’re going to owe me, girl.”
2
When Nita stepped out the back door of the Chic Cheeks in her street clothes all that remained of her stage persona was the shock of jet-black hair that fell halfway down her back in a cascade of natural curls. She was wearing faded blue jeans that were tucked into cowboy boots. The jeans had a hole in the left knee through which showed the black fabric of her body stocking. Overtop of it was a checked flannel shirt, buttoned halfway up, the tails hanging loose. Her purse was a small khaki knapsack that she’d picked up at the Army Surplus over on Yoors Street. Her stage makeup was washed off and all she wore now was a hint of eye shadow and a dab of lipstick.
She knew she looked about as different from Lilith in her leathers and lace as could be imagined, so Nita was surprised to be recognized when she stepped out into the alleyway behind the club.
“Lilith?”
Nita paused to light a cigarette, studying the woman through a wreath of blue-grey smoke. The stranger was dressed the way Nita knew the club’s customers imagined the dancers dressed offstage: short, spike-heeled boots; black stockings and miniskirt; a jean vest open enough to show more than a hint of a black lace bra. She wore less makeup than Nita had on at the moment, but then her fine-boned features didn’t need it. Her hair was so blonde it was almost white. It was cut punky and seemed to glow in the light cast from a nearby streetlamp.
“Who wants to know?” Nita finally asked.
“Does it matter?”
Nita shrugged and took another drag from her cigarette.
“I saw you dancing,” the woman went on. “You’re really something.”
Now she got it.
“Look,” Nita said. “I don’t date customers and—no offense—but I don’t swing your way. You should go back inside and ask for Candy. She’s always looking to make a little something on the side and I don’t think she much cares what you’ve got between your legs, just so long as you can pay.”