Moonlight & Vines (44 page)

But what if. . . ?

In the end she found a phonebooth and gave Jilly a call.

“Is it too late to change my mind?” she asked.

“Not at all. Come on over.”

Mona leaned against the glass of the booth and watched the street all around her. Occasional cabs went by. She saw a couple at the far end of the block and followed them with her gaze until they turned a corner. So far as she could tell, there was no little man, grotty or otherwise, anywhere in view.

“Is it okay if I bring my invisible friend?” she said.

Jilly laughed. “Sure. I'll put the kettle on. Does your invisible friend drink coffee?”

“I haven't asked him.”

“Well,” Jilly said, “if either of you is feeling as woozy as I am, I'm sure you could use a mug.”

“I could use something.” Mona said after she'd hung up.

“M
Y
L
IFE
AS A B
IRD
”
M
ONA'S MONOLOGUE FROM CHAPTER EIGHT:

Sometimes I think of God as this little man sitting on a café patio somewhere, bewildered at how it's all gotten so out of his control. He had such good intentions, but everything he made had a mind of its own and, right from the first, he found himself unable to contain their conflicting impulses. He tried to create paradise, but he soon discovered that free will and paradise were incompatible because everybody has a different idea as to what paradise should be like.

But usually when I think of him, I think of a cat: a little mysterious, a little aloof, never coming when he's called. And in my mind, God's always a he. The bible makes it pretty clear that men are the doers; women can only be virgins or whores. In God's eyes, we can only exist somewhere in between the two Marys, the mother of Jesus and the Magdalene.

What kind of a religion is that? What kind of religion ignores the rights of half the world's population just because they're supposed to have envy instead of a penis? One run by men. The strong, the brave, the true. The old boys' club that wrote the book and made the laws.

I'd like to find him and ask him, ‘Is that it, God? Did we really get cloned from a rib and because we're hand-me-downs, you don't think we've got what it takes to be strong and brave and true?”

But that's only part of what's wrong with the world. You also have to ask, what's the rationale behind wars and sickness and suffering?

Or is there no point? Is God just as bewildered as the rest of us? Has he finally given up, spending his days now on that café patio, sipping strong espresso, and watching the world go by, none of it his concern anymore? Has he washed his hands of it all?

I've got a thousand questions for God, but he never answers any of them. Maybe he's still trying to figure out where
I fit on the scale between the two Marys and he can't reply until he does. Maybe he doesn't hear me, doesn't see me, doesn't think of me at all. Maybe in his version of what the world is, I don't even exist.

Or if he's a cat, then I'm a bird, and he's just waiting to pounce.

“You actually believe me, don't you?” Mona said.

The two of them were sitting in the windowseat of Jilly's studio loft, sipping coffee from fat china mugs, piano music playing softly in the background, courtesy of a recording by Mitsuko Uchida. The studio was tidier than Mona had ever seen it. All the canvases that weren't hanging up had been neatly stacked against one wall. Books were in their shelves, paintbrushes cleaned and lying out in rows on the worktable, tubes of paint organized by color in wooden and cardboard boxes. The drop cloth under the easel even looked as though it had recently gone through a wash.

“Spring clean-up and tidying,” Jilly had said by way of explanation.

“Hello? It's September.”

“So I'm late.”

The coffee had been waiting for Mona when she arrived, as had been a willing ear as she related her curious encounter after leaving the pub. Jilly, of course, was enchanted with the story. Mona didn't know why she was surprised.

“Let's say I don't disbelieve you,” Jilly said.

“I don't know if I believe me. It's easier to put it down to those two pitchers of beer we had.”

Jilly touched a hand to her head. “Don't remind me.”

“Besides,” Mona went on. “Why doesn't he show himself now?” She looked around Jilly's disconcertingly tidy studio. “Well?” she said, aiming her question at the room in general. “What's the big secret, Mr. Nacky Wilde?”

“Well, it stands to reason,” Jilly said. “He knows that I could just give him something as well, and then he'd indebted to me, too.”

“I don't
want
him indebted to me.”

“It's kind of late for that.”

“That's what he said.”

“He'd probably know.”

“Okay. I'll just get him to do my dishes for me or something.”

Jilly shook her head. “I doubt it works that way. It probably has to be something that no one else can do for you except him.”

“This is ridiculous. All I did was give him a couple of dollars. I didn't mean anything by it.”

“Money doesn't mean anything to you?”

“Jilly. It was only two dollars.”

“It doesn't matter. It's still money and no matter how much we'd like things to be different, the world revolves around our being able to pay the rent and buy art supplies and the like, so money's important in our lives. You freely gave him something that means something to you and now he has to return that in kind.”

“But anybody could have given him the money.”

Jilly nodded. “Anybody could have, but they didn't. You did.”

“How do I get myself into these things?”

“More to the point, how do you get yourself out?”

“You're the expert. You tell me.”

“Let me think about it.”

Nacky Wilde didn't show himself again until Mona got back to her own apartment the next morning. She had just enough time to realize that Pete had been back to collect his things—there were gaps in the bookshelves and the stack of CDs on top of the stereo was only half the size it had been the previous night—when the little man reappeared. He was slouched on her sofa, even more disreputable looking in the daylight, his glower softened by what could only be the pleasure he took from her gasp at his sudden appearance.

She sat down on the stuffed chair across the table from him. There used to be two, but Pete had obviously taken one.

“So,” she said. “I'm sober and you're here, so I guess you must be real.”

“Does it always take you this long to accept the obvious?”

“Grubby little men who can appear out of thin air and then disappear back into it again aren't exactly a part of my everyday life.”

“Ever been to Japan?” he asked.

“No. What's that got to—”

“But you believe it exists, don't you?”

“Oh, please. It's not at all the same thing. Next thing you'll be wanting me to believe in alien abductions and little green men from Mars.”

He gave her a wicked grin. “They're not green and they don't come from—”

“I don't want to hear it,” she told him, blocking her ears. When she saw he wasn't going to continue, she went on, “So was Jilly right? I'm stuck with you?”

“It doesn't make me any happier than it does you.”

“Okay. Then we have to have some ground rules.”

“You're taking this rather well,” he said.

“I'm a practical person. Now listen up. No bothering me when I'm working. No sneaking around being invisible when I'm in the bathroom or having a shower. No watching me sleep—
or
getting into bed with me.”

He looked disgusted at the idea. Yeah, me too, Mona thought.

“And you clean up after yourself,” she finished. “Come to think of it, you could clean up yourself, too.”

He glared at her. “Fine. Now for my rules. First—”

Mona shook her head. “Uh-uh. This is my place. The only rules that get made here are by me.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“None of this is fair,” she shot back. “Remember, nobody asked you to tag along after me.”

“Nobody asked you to give me that money,” he said and promptly disappeared.

“I
hate
it when you do that.”

“Good,” a disembodied voice replied.

Mona stared thoughtfully at the now-empty sofa cushions and found herself wondering what it would be like to be invisible, which got her thinking about all the ways one could be nonintrusive and still observe the world. After a while, she got up and took down one of her old sketchbooks, flipping through it until she came to the notes she'd made when she'd first started planning her semi-autobiographical strip for
The Girl Zone
.

“M
Y
L
IFE AS A
B
IRD
”
N
OTES FOR CHAPTER ONE:

(Mona and Hazel are sitting at the kitchen table in Mona's apartment having tea and muffins. Mona is watching Jamaica, asleep on the windowsill, only the tip of her tail twitching.)

MONA: Being invisible would be the coolest, but the next best thing would be, like, if you could be a bird or a cat—something that no one pays any attention to.

HAZEL: What kind of bird?

MONA: I don't know. A crow, all blue-black wings and shadowy. Or, no. Maybe something even less noticeable, like a pigeon or a sparrow.

(She gets a happy look on her face.)

MONA: Because you can tell. They pay attention to everything, but no one pays attention to them.

HAZEL: And the cat would be black, too, I suppose?

MONA: Mmm. Lean and slinky like Jamaica. Very Egyptian. But a bird would be better—more mobility—though I guess it wouldn't matter, really. The important thing is how you'd just be there, another piece of the landscape, but you'd be watching everything. You wouldn't miss a thing.

HAZEL: Bit of a voyeur, are we?

MONA: No, nothing like that. I'm not even interested in high drama, just the things that go on every day in our lives—the stuff most people don't pay attention to. That's the real magic.

HAZEL: Sounds boring.

MONA: No, it would be very Zen. Almost like meditating.

HAZEL: You've been drawing that comic of yours for too long.

The phone rang that evening while Mona was inking a new page for “Jupiter Jewel.” The sudden sound startled her and a blob of ink fell from the end of her nib pen, right beside Cecil's head. At least it hadn't landed on his face.

I'll make that a shadow, she decided as she answered the phone.

“So do you still have an invisible friend?” Jilly asked.

Mona looked down the hall from the kitchen table where she was
working. What she could see of the apartment appeared empty, but she didn't trust her eyesight when it came to her uninvited houseguest.

“I can't see him,” she said, “but I have to assume he hasn't left.”

“Well, I don't have any useful news. I've checked with all the usual sources and no one quite knows what to make of him.”

“The usual sources being?”

“Christy. The professor. An old copy of
The Newford Examiner
with a special section on the fairy folk of Newford.”

“You're kidding.”

“I am,” Jilly admitted. “But I did go to the library and had a wonderful time looking through all sorts of interesting books, from K. M. Briggs to
When the Desert Dreams
by Anne Bourke, neither of whom writes about Newford, but I've always loved those fairy lore books Briggs compiled and Anne Bourke lived here, as I'm sure you knew, and I really liked the picture on the cover of her book. I know,” she added, before Mona could break in. “Get to the point already.”

“I'm serenely patient and would never have said such a thing,” Mona told her.

“Humble, too. Anyway, apparently there are all sorts of tricksy fairy folk, from hobs to brownies. Some relatively nice, some decidedly nasty, but none of them quite fit the Nacky Wilde profile.”

“You mean sarcastic, grubby and bad mannered, but potentially helpful?”

“In a nutshell.”

Mona sighed. “So I'm stuck with him.”

She realized that she'd been absently doodling on her art and set her pen aside before she completely ruined the page.

“It doesn't seem fair, does it?” she added. “I finally get the apartment to myself, but then some elfin squatter moves in.”

“How
are
you doing?” Jilly asked. “I mean, aside from your invisible squatter?”

“I don't feel closure,” Mona said. “I know how weird that sounds, considering what I told you yesterday. After all, Pete stomped out and then snuck back while I was with you last night to get his stuff—so I
know
it's over. And the more I think of it, I realize this had to work out the way it did. But I'm still stuck with this emotional baggage, like trying to figure out why things ended up the way they did, and how come I never noticed.”

“Would you take him back?”

“No.”

“But you miss him?”

“I do,” Mona said. “Weird, isn't it?”

“Perfectly normal, I'd say. Do you want someone to commiserate with?”

“No, I need to get some work done. But thanks.”

After she hung up, Mona stared down at the mess she'd made of the page she'd been working on. She supposed she could try to incorporate all the squiggles into the background, but it didn't seem worth the bother. Instead she picked up a bottle of white acrylic ink, gave it a shake and opened it. With a clean brush she began to paint over the doodles and the blob of ink she'd dropped by Cecil's head. It was obvious now that it wouldn't work as shadow, seeing how the light source was on the same side.