Ivory and the Horn (30 page)

Remember all is but a poet’s dream,

The first he had in Phoebus’ holy bower,

 But not the last, unless the first displease.

—John Lyly, from
The Woman in the Moone

1

I’ve heard it said that there are always two sides to a story: There’s the official history, the version that’s set onto the page, then filed away in the archives where it waits for when the librarian comes to retrieve the facts to footnote some learned paper or discourse. Then there’s the way an individual remembers the event; that version sits like an old woman on a lonely porch, creaking back and forth in her wicker rocker as she waits for a visitor.

I think there’s a third version as well: that of the feral child, escaping from between the lines, from between how it’s said the story went and how it truly took place.

I’m like that child. I’m invariably on the edge of how it goes for everyone else. I hear them tell the story of some event that I took part in and I can scarcely recognize it. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m such a free spirit—the way Jilly is, always bouncing around from one moment to the next—but I know it’s not true. The reason I’m not part of the official story is because I’m usually far from civilization, lost in wildernesses of my own making, unaware of either the library or the porch.

I’m just not paying attention—or at least not paying attention to the right thing. It all depends on your perspective, I suppose.

2

September was upon us and I couldn’t have cared less, which is weird for me, because autumn’s usually my favorite time of year. But I was living through one of those low points in my life that I guess everyone has to put up with at one time or another. I went through the summer feeling increasingly tired and discouraged. I walked hand in hand with a constant sense of foreboding, and you know what that’s like: If you expect things to go wrong, they usually do.

I hadn’t met a guy I liked in ages—at least not anyone who was actually available. Every time I sat down to write, my verses came out as doggerel. I was getting cranky with my friends, but I hated being home by myself. About the only thing I was still good at was waitressing. I’ve always liked my job, but as a lifelong career choice? I don’t think so.

To cheer me up, Jilly and Sophie took me to the final performance of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Standish. The play was a traditional production—Lysander and Demetrius hadn’t been rewritten as bikers, say, and the actors had performed in costume, not in the nude. Being a poet myself, I lean toward less adventurous productions because they don’t get in the way of the words.

I’d been especially taken with the casting of the fairy court tonight. The director had acquired the services of the Newford Ballet for their parts, which lent the characters a wonderfully fey grace. They were so light on their feet, I could almost imagine that they were flying at times, flitting about the stage, rather than constrained by gravity to walking its boards. The scene at the end where the fairies sport through the Duke’s palace had been so beautifully choreographed that I was almost disappointed when the spotlight narrowed to capture Puck in his final speech, perched at the edge of the stage, fixing us in our seats with a half-mocking, half-feral gaze that seemed to belie his promise to “make amends.”

The actor playing Robin Goodfellow had been my favorite among a talented cast, his mobile features perfectly capturing the fey charm and menace that the idea of fairy has always held for me. Oberon was the more handsome, but Puck had been simply magic. I found myself wishing that the play was just beginning its run, rather than ending it, so that I could go back another night, for his performance alone.

Jilly and Sophie didn’t seem quite as taken with the production. They were walking a little ahead of me, arguing about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, rather than discussing the play we’d just seen.

“Oh, come on,” Sophie was saying. “Just look at the names of some of these people: John Thomas Looney. S. E. Silliman. George Battey. How can anyone possibly take their theories seriously?”

“I didn’t say they were necessarily right,” Jilly replied. “It’s just that when you consider the historical Shakespeare: a man whose father was illiterate, whose kids were illiterate, who didn’t even bother to keep copies of his own work in his house … It’s so obvious that whoever wrote the plays and sonnets, it wasn’t William Shakespeare.”

“I don’t really see how it matters anyway,” Sophie told her. “It’s the work that’s important, in the end. The fact that it’s endured so long that we can still enjoy it today, hundreds of years after he died.”

“But it’s an interesting puzzle.”

Sophie nodded in agreement. “I’ll give you that. Personally, I like the idea that Anne Whately wrote them.”

“But she was a
nun.
I can’t
possibly
imagine a nun having written some of the bawdier lines.”

“Maybe those are the ones old Will put in.”

“I suppose. But then…”

Trailing along behind them, I was barely paying attention and finally just shut them out. My own thoughts were circling mothlike around Titania’s final promise:

Hand in hand with fairy grace

Will we sing and bless this place.

That was what I needed. I needed a fairy court to bless my apartment,-to lift the cloud of gloom that had been thickening over me throughout the summer until it had gotten to the point where when I looked in the mirror, I expected to see a stranger’s face looking back at me. I felt that different.

I think the weather had something to do with it. It rained every weekend and day off I had this summer. It never got hot—not that I like or missed the heat. But I think we need a certain amount of sunshine just to stay sane, never mind the UV risk. Who ever heard of getting cabin fever in the middle of the summer? But that’s exactly the way I felt around the end of July—the way I usually feel in early March, when I don’t think I can take one more day of cold and snow.

And it’s just gotten worse for me as the summer’s dragged on.

The newspapers blame the weird weather on that volcano in the Philippines—Mount Pinatubo—and say that not only did the eruption mess up the weather this year, but its effects are going to be felt for a few years to come. If that’s true, I think I’ll just go quietly mad.

I started wondering then about how the weather affects fairies, though if they did exist, I guess it might be the other way around. Instead of a volcano causing all of this trouble, it’d be another rift in the fairy court. As Titania put it to Oberon:

… the spring, the summer,

The chiding autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world

By their increase now knows not which is which.

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension,

 We are their parents and original.

It certainly fits the way our weather’s messed up. I heard it even snowed up in Alberta a couple of weeks ago—and not just a few flurries. The skies dumped some ten inches. In
August.

“The seasons alter,” indeed.

If there were fairy courts, if they
were
having an argument, I wished they’d just kiss and make up. Though not the way they did in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ahead of me, Sophie and Jilly came to a stop and I walked right into them.

“How’s our dreamwalker?” Jilly asked.

She spoke the words lightly, but the streetlights showed the concern in her eyes. Jilly worries about people—seriously, not just for show. It’s nice to know that someone cares, but sometimes that kind of concern can be as much of a burden as what you’re going through, however well meant it might be.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “Honestly.”

“So who gets
your
vote as the author of Shakespeare’s works?” Sophie asked.

I thought Francis Bacon looked good for it. After all, he was known as the most erudite man of his time. The author of the plays showed through his writing that he’d had a wide knowledge of medicine and law, botany and mythology, foreign life and court manners. Where would a glove maker’s son from Stratford have gotten that kind of experience? But the argument bored me.

“I’d say it was his sister,” I said.

“His
sister?”

“Did he even have a sister?” Jilly asked.

A black Cadillac pulled up to the curb beside us before I could answer. There were three Hispanic boys in it, and for a moment I thought it was LaDonna’s brother Pipo and a couple of his pals. But then the driver leaned out the window to give Jilly a leer and I realized I didn’t recognize any of them.

“Hey,
puta,”
he said. “Looking for a little of that kickin‘ action?”

Homeboys in a hot car, out for a joy ride. The oldest wasn’t even fourteen. Jilly didn’t hesitate. She cocked back her foot and kicked the Cadillac’s door hard enough to make a dent.

“In your dreams,” she told him.

If it had been anybody else, those homies would’ve been out of the car and all over us. We’re all small women; Jilly’s about my height, and I’m just topping five feet. We don’t exactly look formidable. ut this was Jilly, and the homie at the wheel saw something in her face that made him put the pedal to the floor and peel off.

The incident depressed all three of us. When we got to my apartment, I asked them in, but they just wanted to go home. I didn’t blame them. I watched them go on off down the street, but sat down on the porch instead of going inside.

I knew I wasn’t going to sleep because I started thinking about what a raw deal women always seem to get, and that always keeps me up. Even Titania in the play—sure, she and Oberon made up, but it was on
his
terms. Titania never even realized the crap he had put her through before their “reconciliation.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
definitely hadn’t been written by a woman.

3

A funny thing happened to me a few years ago. I caught a glimpse of the strange world that lies on the other side of the curtain we’ve all agreed is reality. Or at least I think I did.

The historical version of what happened is pretty straightforward: I met a street person—the old man on the bicycle that everybody calls the Conjure Man—and he got me to take an acorn from the big old tree that used to grow behind the library at Butler U. He had me nurture it over the winter, then plant it in Fitzhenry Park near the statue of the poet, Joshua Stanhold.

The version he tells is that he’s this immortal who diminishes as the years go by, which is why he’s only our height now. He was supposed to leave our world when its magic went away, but he got left behind. The tree that came down behind the library was a Tree of Tales, a repository of stories without which wonder is diminished in our world. The one I grew from an acorn and planted in the Silenus Gardens is supposed to be its replacement.

My version… I don’t really know what my version is. There was something strange about the whole affair, I’ll grant you that. And that little sapling I planted—it’s already the size of a ten-year-old oak. Jilly told me she was talking to a botanist who was quite amazed at its appearance there. Seems that kind of oak isn’t native to North America, and he was surprised to find it growing in the middle of the park that way.

“The only other one I’ve ever seen in the city,” he told Jilly, “used to grow behind the Smithers Library, but they cut it down.”

I haven’t seen John—that’s the Conjure Man’s real name, John Windle. I haven’t seen him for a while now. I like to think that he’s finally made it home to wherever home is. Behind the curtain, I suppose. But I still go out to the tree and tell it stories—all kinds of stories. Happy ones, sad ones. Gossip. News. Just whatever comes to mind.

I’m not even sure why; I just do.

4

I’m not as brave—or maybe as foolish—as Jilly is. She doesn’t seem to know the meaning of fear. She’ll go anywhere, at any time of the day or night, and she never seems to get hurt. Like what happened earlier tonight. If I’d been on my own, or just with Sophie, when that car pulled up, who knows how it would have ended up? Not pleasant, that’s for sure.

So I’m not nearly so bold—except when I’m on my bike. It’s sort of like a talisman for me. It’s nothing special, just an old ten-speed, but it gets me around. Sometimes I think I should become one of those messengers that wheel through the traffic on their mountain bikes, whistle between their lips, ready to let out a shrill blast if anybody gets in their way.