Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

And anyway, I've nowhere else to go.

3

Given her way in the matter, Sophie would never attend one of her own openings. She was so organized and tidy that she never really thought that she looked like the typical image of what an artist should be, and she always felt awkward trying to make nice with the gallery's clients. It wasn't that she didn't like people, or even that she wasn't prone to involved conversations. She simply felt uncomfortable around strangers, especially when she was supposed to be promoting herself and her work. But she tried.

So this evening as The Green Man Gallery filled with the guests that Albina had invited to the opening, Sophie concentrated on fulfilling what she saw as her responsibility in making the evening a success. Instead of clustering in a corner with her scruffy friends, who were their best not to be too rowdy and only just succeeding, she made an effort to mingle, to be sociable, the approachable artist. Whenever she felt herself gravitating to where Jilly and Wendy and the others were standing, she'd focus on someone she didn't know, walk over and strike up a conversation.

An hour or so into the opening, she picked a man in his late twenties who had just stopped in front of Hearts Like Fire, Burning— a small oil painting of two golden figures holding hands in a blaze of color that she'd meant to represent the fire of their consummated love.

He was tall and slender, a pale, dark-haired Pre-Raphaelite presence dressed in somber clothes: black jeans, black T-shirt, black sportsjacket, even black Nike sneakers. What attracted her to him was how he moved like a shadow through the gallery crowd and seemed completely at odds with both them and the bright, sensual colors of the paintings that made up the show. And yet he seemed more in tune with the paintings than anyone else— perhaps, she thought wryly as she noticed the intensity of his interest in the work, herself included.

Hearts Like Fire, Burning, in particular, appeared to mesmerize him. He stood longest in front of it, transfixed, his features a curious mixture of deep sadness and joy. When she approached him, he looked slowly away from the painting and smiled at her. The expression turned bittersweet by the time it reached his eyes.

"So what do you think of this piece?" he asked.

Sophie blinked in surprise. "I should probably be asking you that question."

"How so?"

"I'm the artist."

He inclined his head slightly in greeting and put out his hand. "Max Hannon," he said, introducing himself.

"I'm Sophie Etoile," she said as she took his hand. Then she laughed. "I guess that was obvious."

He laughed with her, but his laugh, like his smile, held a deep sadness by the time it reached his eyes.

"I find it very peaceful," he said, turning back to the painting.

"Now that's a description I've never heard of my work."

"Oh?" He regarded her once more. "How's it usually described?"

"Those that like it call it lively, colorful, vibrant. Those that don't call it garish, overblown..." Sophie shrugged and let the words trail off.

"And how would you describe it?"

"With this piece, I agree with you. For all its flood of bright color, I find it very peaceful."

"It reminds me of my lover, Peter," Max said. "We were in Arizona a few months ago, staying with friends who have a place in the desert. We'd sit and hold hands at this table they had set up behind their house and simply let the light and the sky fill us. It felt just like this painting— full of gold and flames and the fire in our hearts, all mixed up together. When I look at this, it brings it all back."

"That's very sweet."

Max turned back to the painting. "He died a week or so after we got back."

"I'm so sorry, "Sophie said, laying a hand on his arm.

Max sighed. "It doesn't hurt to talk about him, but God do I miss him."

You can say it doesn't hurt, Sophie thought, but she could see how bright his eyes had become, only just holding back a film of tears. The openness with which he'd shared his feelings with her made her want to do something special in return.

"I want you to have this painting," she said. "You can come pick it up when the show's over."

Max shook his head. "I'd love to buy it;" he said, "but I don't have that kind of money."

"Who said anything about you having to pay for it?"

"I couldn't even think of..." he began.

But Sophie refused to listen. "Look," she said. "What would be the point of being an artist if you only did it for the money? I always feel weird about selling my work anyway. It's as though I'm selling off my children. I don't even know what kind of a home they're going to— there's no evaluation process beforehand. Someone could buy this painting just for the investment and for all I know it'll end up stuck in a closet somewhere and never be seen again. I can't tell you how good it would make me feel knowing that it was hanging in your home instead, where it would mean so much to you."

"No, I just couldn't accept it," Max told her.

"Then let me give it to Peter," Sophie said, "and you can keep it for him."

Max shook his head. "This is so strange. Things like this don't happen in the real world."

"Well, pick a world where if could happen," Sophie said, "and we'll pretend that we're there."

Max gave her a carious look. "Do you do this a lot?"

"What? Give away paintings?"

"No, pick another world to be in when you don't happen to like the way things are going in this one."

Now it was Sophie's turn to be intrigued. "Why, do you?"

"No. It's just... ever since you came over and started talking to me, I've felt as though we've met before. But not here. Not in this world. It's more like we met in a dream..."

This was too strange, Sophie thought. For a moment the gallery and crowd about them seemed to flicker, to grow hazy and two-dimensional, as though only she and Max were real.

Like we met in a dream...

Slowly she shook her head. "Don't get me started on dreams," she said.

4

"There are sleeping dreams and waking dreams," Christina Rossetti says in her poem "A Ballad of Boding," as though the difference between them is absolute. My dreams aren't so clearly divided, not from one another, and not from when I'm actually awake either. My sleeping dreams bleed into the real world; actually, the place where they take place seems like a real world, too— it's just not one that's as easily accessed by most people.

The experiences I have there aren't real, of course, or at least not real in the way people normally use the word. What happens when I fall asleep and step into my dreams can't be measured or weighed— it can only be known— but that doesn't stop these experiences from influencing my life and leaving me in a state of mild confusion so much of the time.

The confusion stems from the fact that every time I turn around, the rules seem to change. Or maybe it's that every time I think I have a better understanding of what the night side of my life means, the dreams open up like a Chinese puzzle box, and I find yet another riddle lying inside the one I've just figured out. The borders blur, retreating before me, deeper and deeper into the dreamscape, walls becoming doors, and doors opening out into mysteries that often obscure the original question. I don't even know the original question anymore. I can't even remember if there ever was one.

I do remember that I went looking for my mother once. I went to a place, marshy and bogled like an old English storybook fen, where I found that she might be a drowned moon, pinned underwater by quicks and other dark creatures until I freed her from her watery tomb. But I came back from that dreamscape without a clear answer as to who she was, or what exactly it was that I had done. What I do know is that I came back with a friend: Jeck Crow, a handsome devil of a man who, I seem to remember, once bore the physical appearance of the black-winged bird that's his namesake. Is it a true memory? I don t know, he won't say, and our relationship has progressed to the point where it doesn't really matter anymore.