I’m just not good with them.
I think it comes from being that odd bird when I was growing up. I was distanced from the concerns of my peers, I just couldn’t get into so many of things that they felt was important. The fault was partly the other kids—if you’re different, you’re fair game. You know how it can be. There are three kinds of kids: the ones that are the odd birds, the ones that pissed on them, and the ones that watched it happen.
It was partly my fault, too, because I ostracized them as much as they did me. I was always out of step; I didn’t real care about belonging to this gang or that clique. A few years earlier and I’d have been a beatnik, a few years later, a hippie. I got into drugs before they were cool; found out they were messing up my head and got out of them when everybody else starting dropping acid and MDA and who knows what all.
What it boiled down to was that I had a lot of acquaintances, but very few friends. And even with the friends I did have, I always felt one step removed from the relationship, like I was observing what was going on, taking notes, rather than just being there.
That didn’t change much when I got older.
How that—let’s call it aloofness, for lack of a better word—translated into this so-called gift for characterization in my fiction, I can’t tell you. Maybe I put so much into the stories, I had nothing left over for real life. Maybe it’s because each one of us, no matter how many or how close our connections to other people, remains in the end, irrevocably on his or her own, solitary islands separated by expanses of the world’s sea, and I’m just more aware of it than others. Maybe I’m just missing the necessary circuit in my brain.
Tally changed all of that.
* * *
I wouldn’t have thought it, the first time I saw her.
There’s a section of the Market in Lower Crowsea, where it backs onto the Kickaha River, that’s got a kind of Old World magic about it. The roads are too narrow for normal vehicular traffic, so most people go through on bicycles or by foot. The buildings lean close to each other over the cobblestoned streets that twist and wind in a confusion that not even the city’s mapmakers have been able to unravel to anyone’s satisfaction.
There are old shops back in there and some of them still have signage in Dutch dating back a hundred years. There are buildings tenanted by generations of the same families, little courtyards, secret gardens, any number of sly-eyed cats, old men playing dominoes and checkers, and their gossiping wives, small gales of shrieking children by day, mysterious eddies of silence by night. It’s a wonderful place, completely untouched by the yuppie renovation projects that took over the rest of the Market.
Right down by the river there’s a public courtyard surrounded on all sides by three-story brick and stone townhouses with mansard roofs and dormer windows. Late at night, the only manmade sound comes from the odd bit of traffic on McKennit Street Bridge a block or so south; the only light comes from the single streetlamp under which stands a bench made of cast iron and wooden slats. Not a light shines from the windows of the buildings that enclose it. When you sit on that bench, the river murmurs at your back and the streetlamp encloses you in a comforting embrace of warm yellow light.
It’s one of my favorite places to write. I’ll sit there with my notebook propped up on my lap and scribble away for hours, my only companion, more often than not, a tattered-eared tom sleeping on the bench beside me. I think he lives in one of the houses, though he could be a stray. He’s there most times I come—not waiting for me. I’ll sit down and start to work and after a half-hour or so he’ll come sauntering out of the shadows, stopping a half-dozen times to lick this shoulder, that hind leg, before finally settling down beside me like he’s been there all night.
He doesn’t much care to be patted, but I’m usually too busy to pay that much attention to him anyway. Still, I enjoy his company. I’d miss him if he stopped coming.
I’ve wonder about his name sometimes. You know that old story where they talk about a cat having three names? There’s the one we give them, the one they use among themselves and then the secret one that only they know.
I just call him Ben; I don’t know what he calls himself. He could be the King of the Cats, for all I know.
He was sleeping on the bench beside me the night she showed up. He saw her first. Or maybe he heard her.
It was early autumn, a brisk night that followed one of those perfect crisp autumn days—clear skies, the sunshine bright on the turning leaves, a smell in the air of a change coming, the wheel of the seasons turning. I was bundled up in a flannel jacket and wore half gloves to keep my hands from getting too cold as I wrote.
I looked up when Ben stirred beside me, fur bristling, slit-eyed gaze focused on the narrow mouth of an alleyway that cut like a tunnel through the townhouses on the north side of the courtyard. I followed his gaze in time to see her step from the shadows.
She reminded me of Geordie’s friend Jilly, the artist. She had the same slender frame and tangled hair, the same pixie face and wardrobe that made her look like she did all her clothes buying at a thrift shop. But she had a harder look than Jilly, a toughness that was reflected in the sharp lines that modified her features and in her gear: battered leather jacket, jeans stuffed into low-heeled black cowboy boots, hands in her pockets, a kind of leather carryall hanging by its strap from her shoulder.
She had a loose, confident gait as she crossed the courtyard, boot heels clicking on the cobblestones. The warm light from the streetlamp softened her features a little.
Beside me, Ben turned around a couple of times, a slow chase of his tail that had no enthusiasm to it, and settled back into sleep. She sat down on the bench, the cat between us, and dropped her carryall at her feet. Then she leaned back against the bench, legs stretched out in front of her, hands back in the pockets of her jeans, head turned to look at me.
“Some night, isn’t it?” she said.
I was still trying to figure her out. I couldn’t place her age. One moment she looked young enough to be a runaway and I waited for the inevitable request for spare change or a place to crash, the next she seemed around my age—late twenties, early thirties—and I didn’t know what she might want. One thing people didn’t do in the city, even in this part of it, was befriend strangers. Not at night. Especially not if you were young and as pretty as she was.
My lack of a response didn’t seem to faze her in the least.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Christy Riddell,” I said. I hesitated for a moment, then reconciled myself to a conversation. “What’s yours?” I added as I closed my notebook, leaving my pen inside it to keep my place.
“Tallulah.”
Just that, the one name. Spoken with the brassy confidence of a Cher or a Madonna.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
Tallulah sounded like it should belong to a twenties flapper, not some punky street kid.
She gave me a smile that lit up her face, banishing the last trace of the harshness I’d seen in her features as she was walking up to the bench.
“No, really,” she said. “But you can call me Tally.”
The melody of the ridiculous refrain from that song by—was it Harry Belafonte?—came to mind, something about tallying bananas.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Writing.”
“I can see that. I meant, what kind of writing?”
“I write stories,” I told her.
I waited then for the inevitable questions: Have you ever been published? What name do you write under? Where do you get your ideas? Instead she turned away and looked up at the sky.
“I knew a poet once,” she said. “He wanted to capture his soul on a piece of paper—really capture it.” She looked back at me. “But of course, you can’t do that, can you? You can try, you can bleed honesty into your art until it feels like you’ve wrung your soul dry, but in the end, all you’ve created is a possible link between minds. An attempt at c
ommunication. If a soul can’t be measured, then how can it be captured?”
I revised my opinion of her age. She might look young, but she spoke with too much experience couched in her words.
“What happened to him?” I found myself asking. “Did he give up?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. He moved away.” Her gaze left mine and turned skyward once more. “When they move away, they leave my life because I can’t follow them.”
She mesmerized me—right from that first night. I sensed a portent in her casual appearance into my life, though a portent of what, I couldn’t say.
“Did you ever want to?” I asked her.
“Want to what?”
“Follow them.” I remember, even then, how the plurality bothered me. I was jealous and I didn’t even know of what.
She shook her head. “No. All I ever have is what they leave behind.”
Her voice seemed to diminish as she spoke. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder with my hand, to offer what comfort I could to ease the sudden malaise that appeared to have gripped her, but her moods, I came to learn, were mercurial. She sat up suddenly and stroked Ben until the motor of his purring filled the air with its resonance.
“Do you always write in places like this?” she asked.
I nodded. “I like the night; I like the city at night. It doesn’t seem to belong to anyone then. On a good night, it almost seems as if the stories write themselves. It’s as though coming out here plugs me directly into the dark heart of the city night and all of its secrets come spilling from my pen.”
I stopped, suddenly embarrassed by what I’d said. It seemed too personal a disclosure for such short acquaintance. But she just gave me a low-watt version of her earlier smile.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” she asked.
“Does what bother me?”
“That perhaps what you’re putting down on paper doesn’t belong to you.”
“Does it ever?” I replied. “Isn’t the very act of creation made up of setting a piece of yourself free?”
“What happens when there’s no more pieces left?”
“That’s what makes it special—I don’t think you ever run out of the creative spark. Just doing it replenishes the well. The more I work, the more ideas come to me. Whether they come from my subconscious or some outside source, isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is what I put into it.”
“Even when it seems to write itself?”
“Maybe especially so.”
I was struck—not then, but later, remembering—by the odd intensity of the conversation. It wasn’t a normal dialogue between strangers. We must have talked for three hours, never about ourselves, our histories, our pasts, but rather about what we were now, creating an intimacy that seemed surreal when I thought back on it the next day. Occasionally, there were lulls in the conversation, but they, too, seemed to add to the sense of bonding, like the comfortable silences that are only possible between good friends.
I could’ve kept right on talking, straight through the night until dawn, but she rose during one of those lulls.
“I have to go,” she said, swinging the strap of her carryall onto her shoulder.
I knew a moment’s panic. I didn’t know her address, nor her phone number. All I had was her first name.
“When can I see you again?” I asked.
“Have you ever been down to those old stone steps under the Kelly Street Bridge?”
I nodded. They dated back from when the river was used to haul goods from upland, down to the lake. The steps under the bridge were all that was left of an old dock that had serviced the Irish-owned inn called The Harp. The dock was long abandoned, but The Harp still stood. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city. Only the solid stone structures of the city’s Dutch founding fathers, like the ones that encircled us, were older.
“I’ll meet you there tomorrow night,” she said. She took a few steps, then paused, adding, “Why don’t you bring along one of your books?”
The smile she gave me before she turned away again was intoxicating. I watched her walk back across the courtyard, disappearing into the narrow mouth of the alleyway from which she’d first come. Her footsteps lingered on, an echoing tap-tap on the cobblestones, but then that too faded.
I think it was at that moment that I decided she was a ghost.
* * *
I didn’t get much writing done over the next few weeks. She wouldn’t—she said she couldn’t—see me during the day, but she wouldn’t say why. I’ve got such a head filled with fictions that I honestly thought it was because she was a ghost, or maybe a succubus or a vampire. The sexual attraction was certainly there. If she’d sprouted fangs one night, I’d probably just have bared my neck and let her feed. But she didn’t, of course. Given a multiple-choice quiz, in the end I realized the correct answer was none of the above.
I was also sure that she was at least my own age, if not older. She was widely read and, like myself, had eclectic tastes that ranged from genre fiction to the classics. We talked for hours every night, progressed to walking hand in hand through our favorite parts of the benighted city and finally made love one night in a large, cozy sleeping bag in Fitzhenry Park.
She took me there on one of what we called our rambles and didn’t say a word, just stripped down in the moonlight and then drew me down into the sweet harbour of her arms. Above us, I heard geese heading south as, later, I drifted into sleep. I remember thinking it was odd to hear them so late at night, but then what wasn’t in the hours I spent with Tally?
I woke alone in the morning, the subject of some curiosity by a couple of old winos who casually watched me get dressed inside the bag as though they saw this kind of thing every morning.
Our times together blur in my mind now. It’s hard for me to remember one night from another. But I have little fetish bundles of memory that stay whole and complete in my mind, the gris-gris that collected around her name in my mind, like my nervousness that second night under the Kelly Street Bridge, worried that she wouldn’t show, and three nights later when, after not saying a word about the book of my stories I’d given her when we parted on the old stone steps under the bridge, she told me how much she’d liked them.
“These are my stories,” she said as she handed the book back to me that night.
I’d run into possessive readers before, fans who laid claim to my work as their own private domain, who treated the characters in the stories as real people, or thought that I carried all sorts of hidden and secret knowledge in my head, just because of the magic and mystery that appeared in the tales I told. But I’d never had a reaction like Tally’s before.
“They’re about me,” she said. “They’re your stories, I can taste your presence in every word, but each of them’s a piece of me, too.”
I told her she could keep the book and the next night I brought her copies of my other three collections, plus photocopies of the stories that had only appeared in magazines to date. I won’t say it’s because she liked the stories so much that I came to love her; that would have happened anyway. But her pleasure in them certainly didn’t make me think any the less of her.
Another night she took a photograph out of her carryall and showed it to me. It was a picture of her, but she looked different, softer, not so much younger as not so tough. She wore her hair differently and had a flower-print dress on; she was standing in sunlight.
“When…when was this taken?” I asked.
“In happier times.”
Call me small-minded that my disappointment should show so plainly, but it hurt that what were the happiest nights of my life weren’t the same for her.
She noticed my reaction—she was always quick with things like that—and laid a warm hand on mine.
“It’s not you,” she said. “I love our time together. It’s the rest of my life that’s not so happy.”
Then be with me all the time, I wanted to tell her, but I already knew from experience tha
t there was no talking about where she went when she left me, what she did, who she was. I was still thinking of ghosts, you see. I was afraid that some taboo lay upon her telling me—that if she spoke about it, if she told me where she was during the day, the spell would break and her spirit would be banished forever like in some hokey B-movie.
I wanted more than just the nights, I’ll admit freely to that, but not enough to risk losing what I had. I was like the wife in “Bluebeard,” except I refused to allow my curiosity to turn the key in the forbidden door. I could have followed her, but I didn’t. And not just because I was afraid of her vanishing on me. It was because she trusted me not to.
* * *
We made love three times, all told, every time in that old sleeping bag of hers, each time in a different place, each morning I woke alone. I’d bring back her sleeping bag when we met that night and she’d smile to see its bulk rolled under my arm.
The morning after the first time, I realized that I was changing; that she was changing me. It wasn’t by anything she said or did, or rather it wasn’t that she was making me change, but that our relationship was stealing away that sense of distancing I had carried with me through my life.
And she was changing, too. She still wore her jeans and leather jacket most of the time, but sometimes she appeared wearing a short dress under the jacket, warm leggings, small trim shoes instead of her boots. Her face kept its character, but the tension wasn’t so noticeable anymore, the toughness had softened.
I’d been open with her from the very first night, more open than I’d ever been with friends I’d known for years. And that remained. But now it was starting to spill over to my other relationships. I found my brother and my friends were more comfortable with me, and I with them. None of them knew about Tally; so far as they knew I was still prowling the nocturnal streets of the city in search of inspiration. They didn’t know that I wasn’t writing, though Professor Dapple guessed.