Moonlight & Vines (3 page)

I've read
Mirrors
a half-dozen times since Sue drove me by Holly's to pick it up. I've got Holly doing book searches for the other two collections. I've been by Angel's walk-in on Grasso Street and gone through her back issues of
Street Times
. I've even got my own modem hooked up—the one the professor gave me that's been languishing unused in a drawer of my desk for the past few months—entering the Wordwood myself to see if I can find some trace of her that Holly might have missed. A bio. A review. Anything.

In short, I've become obsessed with Saskia Madding.

I couldn't meet her now if I wanted to because I've become too desperate and there's nothing quite so pathetic or off-putting as the scent of desperation. It clings to you like a second skin, a nimbus of melancholy and pathos that, contrary to the Romantics with their marble skin and pining eyes, adds nothing to your attractiveness. You might as well have “Avoid me, I'm so hopeless” stenciled on your brow.

“The problem,” Holly tells me the next time we're talking on the phone, “is that you're treating her no better than Aaran or Jenny do. No, hear me out,” she says when I try to protest. “They've got their misconceptions concerning her and you're blithely creating your own.”

“Not so blithely,” I say.

“But still.”

“But still what?”

“Don't you think it's time you stopped acting like some half-assed teenager, tripping over his own tongue, and just talked to her?”

“And say what?” I ask. “The last time I saw her was at that launch for Wendy's new book, but before I could think of something to say to her, Aaran showed up at my elbow and might as well have been surgically implanted he stayed so close to me. She probably thinks we're friends and I told you how he feels about her. I don't doubt that she knows, too, so what's she going to think of me?”

“You don't have to put up with him,” Holly says.

“I know. He was on about her half the night again until I finally told him to just shut up.”

“Good for you.”

“Yeah, Geordie'd be proud, too. Wait'll Aaran reviews my next book.”

“Does that bother you?” Holly asked.

“Not really. What bothers me is that I can't get her out of my head, but I can't even find the few ounces of courage I need to go up to her. Instead I just keep seeing her everywhere I go. I feel like I'm being haunted, except I'm the one playing the stalker and I'm not even doing it on purpose. She's probably seen me as often as I've seen her and thinks I'm seriously twisted.”

“A dozen pieces of advice come to mind,” Holly says, “but they'd all sound trite.”

“Try one on me anyway. I need all the help I can get.”

Sitting there in my apartment, receiver cradled against my ear, I can picture Holly at her desk in the bookshop. The image is so clear I can almost see her shrug.

“Just go up to her,” Holly tells me. “Ask her if she wants to go for a coffee or something. The worst she can do is say no.”

I love the poems in
Mirrors
. They're as simple as haiku and just as resonant. No easy task, I know. Every so often I turn from prose to verse, but under my direction the words stumble and flail about on the page and never really sing. I sit there and stare at them and I can't fix them. Give me a pageful of the crappiest prose and some time and I can whip it into shape, no problem. But I don't know where to begin with poetry. I know when it doesn't work. I even know what makes it work in someone else's lines. But I'm hopeless when it comes to trying to write it myself.

Saskia's poems are filled with love and sadness, explorations of social consciousness, profound declarations and simple lyric delights. The same small verse can make me smile and weep, all at the same time. But the one that haunts me the most, the one I return to, again and again, is “Puppet.”

The puppet thinks:
It's not so much
what they make me do
as their hands inside me
.

In what shadows did those words grow? And why wasn't I there to help her?

That makes me laugh. I can't even get up the nerve to approach her and I expect to protect her from the dangers of the world?

In the end it's my brother Geordie, of all people, who introduces her to me. We're sitting on the patio of The Rusty Lion on a Sunday afternoon, trying to do the familial thing that neither of us is much good at, but at least we try. Jilly always says the family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into; that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics. Well, blood ties aside, I'd still want Geordie as my brother, and I think he'd want me, but we've got so much weird history between us that our good intentions don't always play out the way we'd like them to. Every time we get together I tell myself I'm not going to rag him, I'm not going to be the know-it-all big brother, I'm not going to tell him how to live his life, or even suggest that I know better. Trouble is, we know each other too well, know exactly which buttons to push to get under each other's skin and we can't seem to stop doing so. Bad habits are the hardest to break.

We immediately start off on a bad foot when he orders a beer and I hear myself asking if he doesn't think a few minutes past noon is a little early for alcohol. So he orders a whiskey on the side, just to spite me, and says, “If you're going to have a cigarette, could you at least not blow the smoke in my face?” We're sitting there glowering at each other and that's when Saskia comes walking by, looking like she stepped out of an Alma-Tadema painting for all that she's wearing jeans and a baggy blue sweater that perfectly matches her eyes.

Geordie's face brightens. “Hey, Sass,” he says. “How's it going?”

I've had this mantra going through my head for weeks now—
Saskia
Madding, Saskia Madding
—and all of a sudden I have to readjust my thinking. Her friends call her “Sass”? And how'd Geordie become one of them?

She smiles back at my brother. “Taking the day off?” she asks.

I have to give Geordie this: He works hard. He may play in a half-dozen bands and meet his rent and utilities by busking on street corners, but lazy he's not. Suddenly I want to tell him how I blew Aaran off the other night and didn't care what it might mean about how I'd get reviewed in the
Journal
in the future. I want to know if he's ever talked to Saskia about me, and if he has, what he's said. I want to ask Saskia about “Puppet” and a half-dozen other poems from
Mirror
. Instead, I sit there like a lump with a foolish grin. Words are my stock and trade, but they've all been swallowed by the dust that fills my throat. I find myself wiping the back of my hand across my brow, trying to erase the “Avoid me” I know is written there. Meanwhile, Geordie's completely at his ease, joking with her, asking her if she wants to join us. I wonder what their relationship is and this insane feeling of jealousy rears up inside me. Then Saskia's on the patio, joining us. Geordie's introducing us. My throat's still full of dust and I wish I'd ordered a beer as well instead of my caffè latte.

“So that's who you are,” Saskia says as she sits down in the chair between Geordie's and my own. “I keep seeing you around the neighborhood.”

“He's the original bad penny,” Geordie says.

A part of me feels as though I should be angry with him for saying that. I wonder does he really mean it, have we drifted that far apart? But another part of me feels this sudden absurd affection for him for being here to introduce Saskia and me to each other. Against the rhythm of my pulse, I hear the first strains of melody, and in that instant, everything is right with the world. The desperate feeling in my chest vanishes. My throat's still dry, but the dust is gone. My features feel a little stiff, but my smile is natural.

“I've seen you, too,” I find myself saying. “I've been wanting to meet you ever since I read
Mirrors
.”

Her eyebrows arch with curiosity. “You've actually read it?” she asks.

“A number of times. I've tried to find your other two collections, but so far I haven't had any luck.”

Saskia laughs. “I don't believe this. Newford's own Jan Harold Brunvand not only knows my work, but likes it, too?”

It never occurred to me that she might have read any of my books.

“Okay,” Geordie says. “Now that we've got the mutual admirations out of the way, let's just try to enjoy the afternoon without getting into a book-by-book rundown of everything the two of you have written.”

He seems as relaxed as I am, but I'm not surprised. We always do better in other people's company. It's not that we feel as though we have to put on good behavior. For some reason we simply don't pick at each other when anybody else is around. He also reads voraciously and loves to talk about books—that's probably the one thing we really have in common beyond the accident of our birth—so I know he's kidding us. I wish we could always be this comfortable with each other.

We both love books, only I'm the one that writes them. We both love music, only he's the musician. That makes us something of a rarity in our family. It wasn't that our parents didn't care for culture; it's just that they didn't have time for it. Didn't have time for us, either. I'm not sure why they had children in the first place and I really don't know why they had three of us. You'd think they'd have realized that they weren't cut out to be parents after our older brother Paddy was born.

The only thing they asked of us was that we be invisible which was like an invitation to get in trouble because we soon learned it was the only way we'd get any attention. None of us did well in school. We all had “attitude problems” which expanded into more serious run-ins with authority outside of school. The police were forever bringing us home for everything from shoplifting (Geordie) and spray-painting obscenities on an underpass (me) to the more serious trouble that Paddy got in which eventually resulted in him pulling ten-to-fifteen in a federal pen.

None of us talked to each other, so I don't know for sure why it was that Paddy hung himself in his cell after serving a couple of years hard time. But I can guess. It's hard to be alone, but that's all we ever knew how to be. Walled off from each other and anybody else who might come into our lives. Geordie and I made a real effort to straighten ourselves out after what happened to Paddy and tried to find the kind of connection with other people that we couldn't get at home. Geordie does better than I. He makes friends pretty easily, but I don't know how deep most of those friendships go. Sometimes I think it's just another kind wall. Not as old or tall as the one that stands between us, but it's there all the same.

Holly looks up in surprise when I walk into her shop the next day.

“What?” she asks. “Two visits in the same month? You sure you haven't gotten me mixed up with a certain blonde poet?”

“Who?” I reply innocently. “You mean Wendy?”

“You should be so lucky.”

She accepts the coffee and poppyseed muffin I picked up for her on my walk from the bus stop and graciously makes room for me on her visitor's chair by the simple expediency of sweeping all the books piled up on it into her arms and stacking them in a tottery pile beside the chair. Naturally they fall over as soon as I sit down.

“You know the rules,” she says. “If you can't treat the merchandise with respect—”

“I'm not buying them,” I tell her. “I don't care how damaged they are.”

Holly pops the lid from her coffee and takes an appreciative sip before starting in on the muffin. She no sooner unwraps it, than Snippet is on her lap, looking mournfully at every bite until I take a doggie bone out of my pocket and bribe her back onto the floor with it. I know enough to come prepared.

Holly doesn't ask what I'm doing here and for a long time I don't get into it. We finish our muffins, we drink our coffee. Snippet finishes her bone then returns to Holly's lap to look for muffin crumbs. Time goes by, a comfortable passage of minutes, silence that's filled with companionship, a quiet space of time untouched by a need to braid words into a conversation. We've done this before. There've been times we've spent the whole afternoon together and not needed to talk or even react to each other's presence. Sometimes just being with a friend is enough. I've never been able to tell Holly how much I appreciate her being a part of my life, but I think she knows all the same.

After a while I tell her about finally meeting Saskia yesterday, how Geordie introduced us, how I'm going to be seeing her tonight.

“So you're deliriously happy,” Holly says, “and you've come by to rub it in on a poor woman who hasn't had a date in two months.”

Holly smiles, but I don't need to be told she's teasing me.

“Something like that,” I say.

She nods. “So what's the real reason you're here?”

“I logged onto the Wordwood last night and something really weird happened to me,” I tell her. “I wasn't really thinking about what I was doing and started to type a question to myself—the way I do when I'm writing and I don't want to stop and check a fact—and the program answered me.”

Holly makes an encouraging noise in the back of her throat to let me know she's paying attention, but that's it. I can't believe she's being this blasé and figure she hasn't really understood me.

“Holly,” I say. “I didn't type something like ‘Go Emily Carr' and wait for the program to take me to whatever references it has on her. I entered a question—misspelled a couple of words, too—and before I had a chance to go on, the answer appeared on my screen.”