At the Edge of Waking (27 page)

“Come, lady. We are here.” The rainbird leaned forward on his perch, his hands between his knees, avid as a boy. “Give us your tale.”

“I have no stories in me,” I said sadly. “The only one I know these days is out there in the real world somewhere, unfinished, out of reach.”

He tossed his head and snapped his beak in annoyance. I thought I saw a bright fragment of a severed wing fall to the floor, but when I looked the floor was carpeted in a moss of jewels, beads of dew catching the light and colors of the busy street outside.

“Lady,” the rainbird said, “that story is not worthy of you. Are you not the hero, the villain, the mystery, the queen? In
that
story you barely figure. You have made yourself an afterthought, a figment, a shadow by the fireless hearth. As far as you are concerned,
that
story is no story at all.”

I sat in sullen silence. He was talking about Ryan’s story, Ryan’s captivity, Ryan’s peril. What he was talking about was no story at all. It was my life. Mine, and Ryan’s, for as long as Ryan lived.

“Listen, lady.” The rainbird was coaxing now. “Spin your own tale. Spin
our
tale, yours and mine. Come away with me, come back to your true place. Come home.”

While he spoke the elegant grasses moved around me, draping me in shining cobwebs, winding me a cloak of rain-gemmed strands. In every droplet there shone a story, as round and complete as a world, and in every story shone my face crowned in flames or petals or thorns.

My face, but not Ryan’s. However hard I looked, the only story he figured in was his own.

“Come home,” the rainbird said, and when I echoed him, “home,” I felt the shining strands drawn across my mouth and nose, not a cloak but a muffling shroud. “Am I supposed to bury myself in my dreams?”

“Not bury,” said the rainbird. “Live!”

But as I sat there, pen in hand, life was wearing chains many miles to the east.

“Even an empty hearth can make a story,” I said. I closed my notebook, paid my tab, and left without another word.

Morning again, still no news, and I climbed up to the attic to make another attempt at work. Once there, however, I discovered I had failed to save yesterday’s aborted beginning, and I had to open a new document. And then, of course, I had to go back downstairs to the living room for an envelope with this address on it, and then it occurred to me to wonder if I should be using this address on my manuscripts at all. Even if Ryan—

Even if Ryan comes back, this posting was only supposed to be for two years. Where will I be when it comes time to discuss the book with an editor? I needed to call my agent, there were so many things I should have discussed with her before I left. It all happened so quickly, and now here I am where morning is the middle of the night back home. Email, I thought, but the only connection is in Ryan’s office, and I just— How can I explain myself to you? It wasn’t the pain of missing him while sitting in his space, the space he hasn’t even had a chance to make his own. It was the outrageousness, the sheer humiliating cliché of being the woman who felt the pain, the woman who had been left behind. I can’t escape the pain, but surely I can escape the cliché? Suddenly my mother was the wisest person I knew. Waiting, after all, is still a kind of life.

So I went out for food. Shopping is surprisingly painless, even for someone who is effectively a deaf-mute. Everything has a price on it, or on its shelf, and for all the weirdnesses and seemingly perverse and willful oddities of this foreign land, the cash registers still show an electronic total and the bills are all numbered in their corners just as you would expect. I do prefer fresh food, however; not only for the usual reasons, but because this alien packaging can be deceptive. Ryan and I had been eating breakfast cereal for a week when he came home laughing from a reception to say he had been served our cereal with bits of sausage and mustard perched on the little squares. I had the dreadful sense that he had told our mistake to his fellow guests, who would have laughed and offered up dumb foreigner stories of their own. I should have laughed, too, but I was overcome by that wretched playground feeling of having innocently worn the wrong tights, the wrong backpack, the wrong brand of shoes to school. What’s got into you? Ryan asked me, but his voice was tender, tinged with a kind of wonder. To myself, having published a scant handful of books, I am barely a writer, but to Ryan I am an artist and therefore mysterious, even a little exalted. Where do you go? he asks me when he catches me dreaming. Where were you just now? I am too shy to answer honestly. My books are public, my airy castles open for daily tours, but my imagination is still as secret as a locked bedroom door. Read my next book, I say, and he promises me he will.

I walked back from the shops with the handle of my string bag cutting into my fingers, and looked up outside the house to notice, almost simultaneously, the fresh post-rain light slipping under the hem of the clouds and the officious Mercedes parked illegally at the curb. The driver’s door was swinging open (perhaps the movement that had caught my eye) and Alain Bernard climbed out into the narrow street. Alain is fairly young and fairly important, and he had something to do with Ryan’s appointment to the envoy’s staff. I don’t know the details. They might be friends, but then again, they might not.

This, of course, was not what I thought when Alain climbed out of the car. You can guess what I did think. Or can you? I’m not sure you can call it thinking, it’s more like the floor of your mind giving way, like a sudden shove out of a mental window, so your heart takes flight and your stomach plummets. Alain took an urgent step toward me and I dropped my bag, loosing a single orange into the street. I wanted to fend him off, to go away, to pretend I hadn’t seen him, but even in that dreadful moment the writer in me was thinking how inadequate that single orange was. In the movie version of my life it would have been a dozen oranges cascading over the blackened bricks, leaping and rolling, caroming off the curb in an extravagant emotional collapse. But what does a woman living alone, a woman who can barely force herself to swallow past the loneliness and fear, want with a dozen oranges? I bought exactly two, and one was still peering out at me through the string bars of its cage.

Oh, God! No, don’t think it, it’s nothing like that, there’s no bad news! Alain, who read everything in that single wobbling orange, snatched up the fruit and then snatched up me, holding me tight against his double-breasted diplomatic wool while he cursed himself in both official languages, his feet awkwardly straddled across the fallen bag. This was very dramatic but I’m not really fond of drama outside of books. I stiffened like an offended cat and after a moment Alain let me go.

Jesus, he said, I’m such an asshole. I just came to see how you are.

I’m fine, I told him. I should have also told him he wasn’t an asshole, which he isn’t, but I did not. I bent and gathered my suddenly pitiful bag from between his polished black toes and held it mutely open like a beggar’s cup to receive the escaped orange. He dropped it in with a precise movement of finger and thumb, and that picture—his hand with its watch and starched cuff, my white, nail-bitten fingers, the orange—looked like another frame from the same movie, the kind of image that makes the instructor hit pause and say to her class, Now what is the director trying to say with this shot? To which I say, God knows. Me, I’ve always written for my characters and let theme take care of itself.

Alain followed me down the area stairs and in by the basement door. Thanks to my mother’s advice I wasn’t embarrassed by a dirty kitchen: no depressed sink full of dishes, no distractedly unswept floor. I put the groceries away and filled the kettle, but Alain said I looked like I needed a drink. Taking this to mean he wanted one, I led him upstairs to the living room where Ryan keeps a supply. I will drink for pleasure but not for comfort, and the afternoon whiskey tasted like medicine.

You haven’t called me, Alain said. Tell me how you’ve been.

I’ve been waiting, I said.

I look at this and think how cold I must have sounded to poor Alain, who after all has better things to do in this crisis than hold a hostage’s girlfriend’s hand—at least, I hope to God he has better things to do. Are we all just waiting, waiting, waiting? This is my faith: that somewhere, men and women who have known Ryan far longer than I, who have worked with him in situations exactly as crucial and frightening as this one, are talking, pleading, promising, blustering, threatening, using every psychological trick and political strategy to bring him and the others home. And yet here is Alain, drinking Ryan’s whiskey and looking at me with an intense, intimate, questioning pain in his eyes. Shall I tell you my secret thought? I am not vain. I swear I am not, I may never recover from the astonishment of Ryan’s declaration of love—for me! of all people!—and yet, fairly or not, I can’t help but question the source of Alain’s concern. He has always watched me too closely, with too much tension around his eyes. But how would I know? Maybe what I see there isn’t wanting but guilt. He was still calling himself names when he left. I locked the door behind him, went up all those stairs, and turned the computer on. To hell with the address. I typed the title, spaced down, and once again tapped out Chapter One.

Morning. The same phone call, the same woman, the same lack of news. No news is good news, the koan of cynical times. For an instant after I hung up the telephone I wanted, I desired, I longed to be with Ryan, wherever he is. Let me wear the blindfold and the chains, let me sit in the dark, in the icy water of the flooded cell. Only let me be there instead of here, like this, thinking this, alone. But then I had to laugh, for Ryan was probably longing just as powerfully, and infinitely more sensibly, to be here with me. I toasted a piece of bread I knew I wouldn’t eat and sat with the plate between my elbows and my teacup pressed against my chin. Ryan and I usually share a pot of coffee in the morning, but these days the caffeine sends unbearable twitches down my nerves. I can’t tell you now all the things I thought sitting at the table this morning, but I know my mind circled a long, long way before it looped back to the city, the house, the novel waiting unwritten upstairs.

The kitchen only has windows looking out on the skinny garden in back. Gardens are important here. This one is very tasteful, with clean, patterned bricks and shade-loving plants, and right now all the beds are full of narcissus and crocus, their watercolor hues freshly painted by the rain. At home there is snow on the ground, but here we have flowers and new leaves on the trees. After a while I pulled my notebook out of the bag that had been sitting on the counter since yesterday, and just then I saw the first flicker of movement at the top of the garden wall. Just a pale flash at first, as if someone in the lane had tossed a bit of burning trash into the yard. But no: the paleness clung, and doubled itself, and became two paws. The rest of the intruder followed in swift installments, an elbow, a head and foreleg, a torso and a tail, until a cat entire dropped down into the bushes at the foot of the wall.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright. The rain striped his orange sides with sullen smoke. He shook himself, irritable with damp, and stood upright, a cat-man with flowing robes and a turban that was all fringe and flame. He fussed with the set of his coat as he stalked fastidiously through the shaggy grass of the lawn toward my door. His knock was an impatient tattoo. I opened cautiously, thinking of the varnished doorframe and the dark timbers of the ceiling.

“Madame.” He bowed himself inside, his clothes rustling like starched silk. He wore a scent like sandalwood and burning cedar. I don’t know what he smelled when he sniffed the air. “You have had a visitor.”

He spoke as if he had a right to be offended, which put my hackles up. “Alain. A friend.”

“If he were a friend he would know better than to interrupt you at your work.”

“I was not working.”

“Why not?”

I made an exasperated gesture, already fed up with his peremptory air. He changed his manner, bowed and rubbed his furry cheek against my hand.

“Madame. Don’t scold me, I beg you. I think only of you.”

Threads of smoke and steam rose about him, heady with the scent of dreams. The mutter of the rain outside blurred into the drowsy murmur of flames.

“I won’t scold,” I said, seduced by his warmth. “But—”

“Say me no buts. Only hear me out, I pray.” The firecat sat opposite me in Ryan’s chair, and smoke wove itself into braids and wreaths about the table and the room. “I ask for nothing, I have no needs and no desires. I do not ask for comfort, and I do not hunger for the food laid out for another man’s return. But lady, others do. Let me protect you. Let me hide you away—”

“From what?” I said. I made my tone sharp enough to cut through the insinuating strands of smoke that stroked my face.

The firecat smiled. “Why, lady, from these interruptions and intrusions, these visitors and telephone calls, these newspapers and—”

“And this real world?”

“Real? Is your absent lover more real than I?”

“Ryan is real.” If I had not been surprised I would not have felt such dismay. My voice was hoarse, my hands curled into fists. “Ryan is real.”

“More real than I? What is he but a memory, an invention, a dream? What do you have of him but an echo in your skull—and what, then, am I? Do you call me less than that?”

“He is real,” I said again, and as if I could make it true by saying it: “He is alive. He is more alive than you ever were.”

The firecat stood and loomed over me, his paws on the table, flames flickering up from the wood like tiny, incandescent wings. “I will show you what is real,” he purred. “I will show you what is real and what is not. I will show you just how real, and how unreal,
you
are, for a start.”

But before he could the silence of that tall, narrow, empty house was shattered by the telephone.

Don’t drop anything, Alain said, it’s only me.

He wanted to take me out to dinner. You need to get out, he said, as if he had found me huddled in a broom closet, soft as a mushroom, pale as a fish in a cave. The trouble is that as wrong as Alain was, he was also right. I am tender and sad. But he was winkling me out of my shell like a raccoon with a snail, and I could not summon the strength of will to say no, even though I knew how it would be. Alain trying to alleviate my loneliness, and me knowing it is impossible. My loneliness has too specific a cause, it requires too specific a cure.