Ivory and the Horn (43 page)

“That’s what I keep telling myself, but it doesn’t make it any easier.”

“Somewhere there is someone who’ll love you for who are, not what they think you should be.”

“And if there isn’t?” Sophie said. “If I never connect with that person?”

“Then you’ll be alone.”

“Alone.”

Sophie sighed. She was too familiar with what it meant to be alone.

“It’s hard to be alone, isn’t it?” Max said.

Sophie nodded.

“But better to be alone than to settle for less than what you need… less than what you deserve.”

“I suppose.”

“Here,” Max said. He reached down under his chair for the package he’d carried into the restaurant when he’d arrived. “Maybe this’ll cheer you up.”

He put the package on the table between them. Sophie looked at him.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Open it up and find out.”

Inside was one of Max’s sculptures—a new one. Sophie recognized herself in one small figurine that made up the tableau, only she was decked out in a leather cap from which sprang a deer’s antlers giving her a very mythic air. She stood in front of a saguaro on which was perched a tiny owl with a woman’s face. Lounging on a rock beside her was a familiar figure in jeans, shirt and vest, coyote features under the cowboy hat. On the ground between them lay a medicine flute.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking up at Max.

“It’s for you.”

“I just—”

“Don’t you even dare say you can’t accept it.”

“I just love it,” Sophie said.

“Like I said,” Max told her. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the desert lately.”

“Me, too.”

18

Sometimes when I’m in Mabon, walking its streets while my body’s sleeping a world away, I’ll get a whiff of smoke that smells like pifion and then somewhere in the crowd I’ll spot a lean man who I swear has coyote ears poking up out of his hair, but he’s always gone before I can get close enough to be sure.

Coyote was right about one thing: The journeys we take inside our heads never end.

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss him.

D
REAM
H
ARDER,
D
REAM
T
RUE

Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream

what you’re capable of. The harder you

dream it, the sooner it will come true.

—attributed to Akira Kurosawa

1

The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren’t afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn’t it the silence between the notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of the poem or story, the dialogue the actor doesn’t speak, the pauses between the dancer’s steps? The ^spaces can be just as important as what’s distinctly portrayed.

So it’s not important where the angel came from, or how she broke her wing. Only that she was there for Jean to find.

2

I’m not saying the city was perfect back then, but it was safer. There were still jobs to be had, and every neighborhood had its own sense of community. The streets and alleyways were swept clean on a regular basis, and it actually made a difference. There was crime, but its reporting was met with shock rather than a shrug. The state sanatoriums had yet to release the majority of their inmates and put them out onto the street—a seeding of homelessness that spread in the streets the way weeds will in an untended garden. Some might say it was a different world entirely through which Jean Etoile made his way home that autumn day.

Jean was a nondescript individual, neither short nor tall, neither ugly nor handsome; the sort of man you might pass on the street even now and never give a second glance: plain grey suit, white shirt and dark tie, briefcase in hand. Brown hair and eyes, with a pleasant smile, though he showed it rarely. When he passed the time of day with his neighbors, he spoke of the weather, of baseball scores and, yes, wasn’t it a pity about old Mrs. Rather down the street, may she rest in peace. Not at all the sort of person one would imagine might bring home a prostitute to live with him in his apartment.

To be fair, Jean didn’t know for certain that Candida was a prostitute. It was merely the assumption he’d made when he went to put out his garbage the night before and found her hiding by the back steps of his apartment building in Lower Foxville.

Jean had a secret addiction to mystery and pulp novels— stories by Mickey Spillane, Richard S. Prather, Lionel White and the like; stories about tough criminals and tougher cops, hard-boiled PIs and big-hearted hookers—so he felt he knew more than most about the dark side of the city, the side ruled by the night, with its wet streets and neon lights, deals going down in alleyways and pimps running their women, broad-shouldered men with guns under their sportsjackets. And in their hearts, the need to see justice served. When he saw such a beautiful woman in her tight, short dress and stiletto heels, eyelids dark with shadow, rouged cheeks and cherry-red lips, hiding there by his back steps, of all places, he knew she was on the run. Knew she needed help. And while he had neither broad shoulders nor a gun, he did carry in his heart a need to see justice done. It was why the books appealed to him in the first place.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said when she realized he had seen her. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I’m not frightened.”

Jean was too much the gentleman to point out that her hands were trembling so much that she had to make an effort to hold them still on her lap. Instead he asked, “What’s your name?”

“Candida.”

Jean nodded. Of course. An exotic given name—if it even was her own—and no surname. This was how the stories always started.

“Do you need some help?” he asked.

“I need a place to stay.”

Jean nodded again. He put his paper bag full of garbage into the bin beside the steps, then turned back to her. She was sitting on the steps now, back straight, hands still clasped together on her lap.

“I’ve got an extra bed,” he said. “You can use it for as long as you need.”

“Really? You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you need help. Isn’t that enough?”

Candida gave him a long considering look, then smiled and followed him up the steps to his apartment.

3

Needless to say, Jean had a good heart. If Candida hadn’t been beautiful, or even a woman, he would still have offered his help. And it was, as I said, a more innocent time. But his mystery novels about the seamier side of life were no more real than the protagonists after which he was now modeling his actions. Private detectives were rarely larger than life, and even more rarely solved murder investigations that had left the police baffled—it was as true then as it is now. Nor were real prostitutes the unblemished beauties that could be found on the covers of those same pulp novels. Walking the streets leaves scars, as many visible as hidden.

Jean’s secret passion was misled, as romantic as a fairy tale. By such token, Candida might well have been something more exotic still: A faerie, perhaps, strayed from some enchanted forest glen. Or a wounded angel, fallen from heaven. For she had wings. Hidden from ordinary sight, it’s true, but she did have them. When she rose to follow him up the apartment steps, they could be seen lifting from her shoulderblades, one a majestic sweep of feathers as imagined by da Vinci, or Manet; the other broken, hanging limp.

They could be seen, if you had more than ordinary sight. Or you might see only what you expected to see, what you wished to see. Jean saw a prostitute on the run, in trouble with the law, or with her pimp; perhaps both. Standing at her kitchen window, Hannah Silverstein looked up from her sinkful of dishes to see her neighbor befriend a pretty girl in a pink sweater and a modest skirt that hung just below her knees. The stranger had thick chestnut hair falling free to her shoulders, eyes that seemed as luminous as moonlight, and Hannah was happy for Jean because she had always thought of him as such a nice, pleasant man, but too old at twenty-seven to be living on his own. Too lonely. It was time he met himself a nice girl like this and settled down.

That was what Hannah saw, but then Hannah had her own preconceptions concerning what she expected to see in the world. She once met the great god Pan at the reception following Janet Carney’s wedding and thought him a quaint little man who had imbibed perhaps too much wedding cheer.

“Pan is dead,” he told her, lifting his glass to clink its rim against hers. “Long live Pan.”

But she thought he’d said, “What a spread—long live Jan.”

Perhaps it was his accent. Or perhaps, as many of us will, she used a similar filter to listen to him as the one through which she viewed the world.

4

Jean’s own perception of his houseguest changed as he came to know Candida. That first autumn day when he returned home from work, not even expecting her to be in his apartment anymore, she had already undergone a slight alteration from the woman he remembered meeting the previous night. She was still sexy, he could still picture her gracing the cover of an issue of
Spicy Detective Stories,
but she no longer seemed cheap, her sexiness was no longer so blatant. She must have gone out while he was at work, he thought, for while she hadn’t even been carrying a purse last night, today the tight dress and heels were gone, the makeup far more subdued. She wore, instead, a loose cotton dress with a flower print more suitable to summer than the fall.

“You look different,” he said.

“So do you.”

It was true. Last night he’d been wearing casual slacks and a short-sleeved polo shirt. But the difference seemed to run deeper in her—beyond a mere change in clothing.

“That’s not what I meant,” he began.

He was going to go on to tell her that he was dressed for work now, while last night he hadn’t been, that he had a chest of drawers and closet full of different clothes into which he could change, while she’d come into his apartment with only what she was wearing, nothing more. But then he smelled the air.

“You made dinner,” he said, unable to hide his delight. The last time he’d come home to dinner was when he was still living with his parents, years ago. He looked in the oven, his smile broadening. “Shepherd’s pie. It’s my favorite.”

“I know.”

And Jean forgot the anomaly of her wardrobe, never thought to ask how she might know his favorite dinner. It was as though someone had found the room in his mind that housed his curiosity and simply turned off the light and closed the door quietly behind them as they left. The riddles remained, but his questions were gone, just like that.

5

In older, more superstitious days, it might have been said that Candida had bewitched him, for theirs was a whirlwind romance—especially at that time, in that community. They met in September, but the odd circumstances of that meeting had been forgotten. They were married in January, a quiet civil ceremony, because neither had any other family. They had their first and only child late the next September and named her Sophie.

Jean didn’t read his detective novels and magazines anymore—he didn’t need other stories. At night when they lay in bed, Candida would tell him hers. She had an impossible storehouse of tales tucked away behind her eyes; like Scheherazade, she had so many, she never had to repeat one. In response, Jean felt an unfamiliar stirring in his own mind, a need to communicate his love for his wife and their child, a desire to share with them dreams that were his own, Instead of the fantasies he had borrowed from his books and magazines.

Once he had carried a secret life inside him, an ongoing adventure in which he was the tall man in the trenchcoat with the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes, who acted when others stood by helpless, to whom the hurt and lost were drawn that he might find them justice, to whom men looked with respect and women with desire. Now the hat and trenchcoat were put aside. Now he had a child who had offered him her unconditional love from the moment he first saw her in the hospital. Now he had a wife who was not only his partner and his lover, but also his best friend. His life was so complete that he had no need for that old secret life.