A City Dreaming (11 page)

“That seems clear.”

Anais laughed awkwardly.

They wandered up from the table and back down the length of stalls, past an Acadian in a beaver-skin hat hawking the furs of long-extinct mammals, past an old woman selling glass beads, past a plastic table with plastic crates of plastic records, mostly Bulgarian field music and Nu Disco. Ibis spent a moment trying to persuade himself that he needed to spend eighty American dollars (or forty-seven Hanseatic Thaler) on a David Bowie 45 that had been released by an underground GDR label swiftly shut down by the Stasi but proved ultimately unsuccessful. They skirted the boutique of a Javanese puppeteer, rows of parti-colored humanoids hanging limply, hardwood faces just within the boundaries of the uncanny valley. Anais stopped at a large Dutch oven manned by a chubby hob with green skin and cherry cheeks, and bought a hot cross bun thick with sugar.

“Who wants a bite?”

Ibis obliged her, but as a rule M did not mix alcohol with desert, and Salome did not maintain her figure by indulging richly in sweets.

“I wouldn't have gotten it if I thought no one else would have any,” Anais said, swallowing the last bite and licking a smudged finger.

A very tall, very black, very thin man who did not seem to be selling anything smiled brightly at M. “Feel free to give one a try,” he suggested, waving at his nonexistent or at least invisible stock.

“Gorgeous,” M said. “But it would never fit in my apartment.”

The man smiled understandingly. Past a stall selling home-knit woolen beer cozies and antique steins, they came to a forest of larch and spruce and Siberian stone pine, thick trunks that had never known the bite of metal, boughs beneath which aurochs gamboled and rutted. A pebbled path led toward what looked like a brightly colored carriage, though it was hard to make out through the heavy snowfall.

“I've been just dying to pick up a new matryoshka.” Anais took Ibis's hand, pulling him swiftly into the copse.

“That Anais,” M remarked.

“She's certainly very . . .” Salome agreed.

Nothing else to do but continue past the fragment of an extinct arboretum and on to the next stand, the severed back half of a '73 bright magenta Caddy, an elf with a pompadour and a black leather coat presiding. The trunk was open to reveal stacks of browned newsprint, faded fashion periodicals, and outdated pamphlets, thick tomes with yellowed pages bound in skin that was not bovine. M flipped through a copy of
Life
magazine with a cover of JFK and his happy family on the day of their fourth inauguration. “The woman of 1972 prefers a rose tint to her spacesuit,” he informed Salome.

“How interesting,” Salome said, staring away disinterestedly.

M handed the magazine back to the proprietor regretfully.

“Where do you live?”

“Crown Heights.”

“I don't get out there much.”

“Where do you live?”

“The Upper West Side. Near the Museum of Natural History.”

M did the subway math, came away with a commute long enough to make him happy that he and Salome had not hit it off with mad abandon. “That's a nice area.”

“I like it,” Salome said.

Anais and Ibis came back then, finally, and M could not help but note that, however much she had wanted a new matryoshka, she was not carrying one. Before he could comment on the lack, they were interrupted by six scuttling crab legs striking against stone, each the size of M's forearm, a living or at least ambulatory platform for a wooden pony keg that had been cinched into its flesh by a line of leather straps. A leash was attached to the thing's midpoint, where carapace met oak, and at the other end of it was a friendly-looking troll. “Fresh butter ale?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” M said. The proprietor filled and distributed four shots into four hollowed-out, oversize, uncapped acorns. It tasted of strong cinnamon and spring.

“You know Celise and M are old friends,” Anais announced.

“Really?” Salome asked, suddenly interested.

For a number of reasons M would have preferred this information, which
he would have argued was essentially erroneous, to never have become public knowledge.

“Oh, yes,” Anais agreed, smiling through M's evident discomfort. “Don't be fooled by M's excessive humbleness—he walks in the very highest circles of society, a figure beloved on both sides of the river.”

“Tolerated, at best,” M corrected.

“She never mentions you,” Salome observed.

Which was just exactly what M wanted to hear. “There's that guy with the crab-keg again! You got anything bigger than that acorn?”

But the man did not, and so M had to settle for two of them. Salome did not seem enthused by M's enthusiasm, but at this point, M figured their union was a lost cause anyway. Barring some extraordinary change of circumstance, like, for instance, saving Salome from a roving gang of rapists, M did not think their first date would lead to a second. For his own part, M was having some trouble feeling his legs, which to M's mind was the zenith and limit of any good state of drunkenness.

They continued on through the market a while longer. Eventually Ibis and Salome split off to gather the next round, and Anais took M's arm warmly, nestling herself into the comfortable crook of his shoulder.

“I know that Salome isn't
exactly
the sort you go for—but I think if you gave her a shot you might grow to like her. She's got lots of good qualities,”

“I bet she's got an impressive collection of shoes.”

“She does have an impressive selection of shoes,” Anais said, “and you are a big prick.”

“And what sort of friend would that make you, trying to set Salome up with me?”

Anais stopped at a modest flower cart, neat plantings in wooden bowls, bright white
simbelmynë,
bitter green
raskovniks
, a slender cutting of
yggrdrasil
. The vendor had a wide smile and muttonchops not dissimilar to the tops of the bonsai bushes that he was selling. Anais rested her hand for a moment on a mood tulip, satiny flesh flaring brightly in hot pink and happy white.

“How do you all know each other, again?” M drew the attention of a snapdragon and shifted back as one mouth tendril shot forward impotently.

Anais's flower had wilted gray. “Ibis met her at some party in Manhattan.”

“And why did the two of you think the two of us would get along?”

“Couples love to create other couples.” Anais's tulip looked like a storm gathering on the horizon, clashing blends of midnight and stark yellow.

“Shall I wrap it up for the madame?” the owner asked.

“No,” Anais said. “Thank you.”

Back in the thoroughfare, M took her arm again quickly, smiling like a lure, pulling her back into the general direction of happiness.

“You're such a good guy, M,” Anais said. “You deserve to be with someone who makes you happy.”

“That's a lot of responsibility to put on Salome's slender shoulders.”

“Not really. It's no more than I've taken on with Ibis, or Ibis with me.”

“You're a lot stronger than I am, though.”

“I'm not sure that's true. The thought of being single seems so utterly exhausting.”

“Happy for both of us, then, that we've found ourselves in the conditions best suited to our inclinations.”

The next stall had mirrors of all kinds: cheval glass and compacts and thin baking sheets filled with mercury, beaten lengths of shiny metal, little pools of unnaturally still water offering the full cruelty of reflection. Anais spent a while staring into one of those common sorts of artifacts that improved the viewer's form the longer they looked. “Don't you get tired of it after a while? All those nights waiting round for someone to text who you know will never text, and going out to bars that you don't want to go to, and drinking overpriced drinks? The endless tumult? The chaos and the uncertainty?”

“That's life you're describing. And yes, I do get tired of it, but the alternative seems rather extreme.”

“I just don't know what I would do without Ibis,” Anais said, very much like she meant it.

The Anais in the mirror had hair that was just a shade more vibrant than her prototype had ever enjoyed. Her hips were narrower, her bust was wider and her smile bent sultry. “He makes me happy. Every day I wake up next to him I feel lucky. I know that whatever else happens, I can rely on him. We're a team, you know?”

“Sure,” M said, turning away. “Of course.” The collage of quicksilver distorted his slight frown, magnified and echoed it till it seemed to reflect back against him from every vantage point. Anais continued on a while longer, further paeans to the glories of monogamy. M remained unconvinced, but then again, M was not the target, and walking out she seemed happier than she had walking in.

“You get older, M, you start to like the idea of having someone around waiting for you.”

“But I'm a lot older than you are, and I don't feel that way at all.”

Ibis and Salome returned then, each carrying two fists of booze.

“And how are we doing here?”

“Lovely,” Anais said brightly. “Everything all right?”

“Perfectly fine,” Ibis answered, smiling broadly and handing his girlfriend her drink.

The next tent sold band posters from this and other realities, and while perusing the stock, Salome and M discovered they both loathed Jefferson Airplane. As a bonding agent, shared enthusiasm has nothing on mutual antipathy, and from such small seeds have mighty oaks grown. Further conversation revealed that Salome had been to Belarus once, which M thought was pretty interesting, M being who he was. He would not have expected it of Salome, and he was happily surprised as well to find that she not only knew every member of the Kinks, but could name them, and though neither saw any particular reason to purchase the black velvet painting that depicted them and had inspired this line of discussion, still it proved more kindling for the fire. In fact, with his blood now something like one and a half percent alcohol, M could admit that perhaps he had been too quick to judge Salome. In her favor remained the happy jiggle of her jiggly parts, as well as the newfound knowledge that he had been too quick to assume that said voluptuousness corresponded to a dullness of wit. This was another reason that M had trouble agreeing with Anais—because people, who were terrible and selfish and banal and just, I mean just horrible, just absolutely, you get the idea, were somehow also fascinating and occasionally quite lovely and, broadly speaking, worth meeting. M had simply never quite managed to figure the math by which one person was better than many people.

Though neither Ibis nor Anais seemed to be having any trouble sorting it out, occupied at a nearby prize booth, ensconced in their own love. She tittered and blushed. He mugged broadly. On his third try, Ibis managed to sneak a ball through a net, and Anais laughed and clapped her hands and rewarded her knight with a firm kiss, as was just, right, and proper. As spoils he received a sad-looking teddy bear, and when he passed it back to Anais, she blew up with joy like a tick with blood. They were the very picture of monogamous bliss. They were the sort of happy that might have made M, long accustomed to solitude, wonder if perhaps he was using his time to its absolute best effect.

“How long have you been sleeping with Salome?” M asked Ibis a few minutes later, before Salome and Anais had returned from the bathroom, but after they had purchased and mostly consumed a tray of yucca-fried chicken slices.

Ibis coughed up some hot honey sauce. “I'm not sleeping with Salome.”

“I guess you'd best just find me a spot in bedlam, then, because I'm apparently going mad.”

“If I was sleeping with Salome, why would I have invited you to go on a double date together?”

“You didn't, Anais did, and you couldn't think of a way to get out of it.”

“And why would Salome agree?”

“To torment you, obviously. The same reason she's wearing that dress in this weather.”

“She has a marvelous ass,” Ibis agreed, rather sadly.

“You really aren't good enough for her.”

“Who?”

“Both, but I meant Anais.”

“No,” Ibis agreed, “but she doesn't realize it.”

“She really loves you, you know.”

“I love her!” Ibis observed, indignant. “That's nothing to do with it.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I just get . . . tense, you know? Anais is great and everything, but Salome is, Salome is—”

“Oh, I understand. It's not complicated. You'd prefer to have sex with more than one woman. There's no great mystery to it.”

“No.”

“I don't like you as much as I sometimes think.”

“You know you can't say anything,” Ibis added. “That's bro code.”

“I was never signatory to that pact,” M said. But he kept quiet after Salome and Anais had returned, offered them the rest of the food, which Anais munched happily.

“M just came back from traveling,” Ibis said, though by this point it was clear his heart wasn't really in playing matchmaker.

“Really? Where?”

“All around. I was in Paris a little while.”

“Did you ever go to that bar by Père Lachaise that serves housemade rum?”

“With the duck charcuterie?”

“Yes, and that voice in the bathroom that they say is the ghost of Jim Morrison.”

“I don't think it is.”

“No, me neither.”

M laughed. Anais smiled broadly. Ibis drank the rest of his drink. They headed back out into the market.

The next booth was not a booth at all, only a space between them, and in the center of that space was a banked fire and two chairs. On one of the chairs sat a wizened old woman wearing a mottled assemblage of rags. On the other chair sat no one, and then M.