Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

Just then the door to the club opened behind Lucia and a gust of cool air caught the smoke from Lucia’s cigarette, giving it a slow dervishing whirl. On the heels of the wind, Amy saw Matt and the girl walk in. The seemed to be in the middle of an animated discussion—or at least Matt was, so they had to be talking about music.

Amy felt the same slight twinge of jealousy watching him with the dancer as she did in the first few moments of every one of the short relationships that came about from some girl basically flinging herself at him halfway through a gig. Though perhaps “relationship” was too strong a word, since any sense of responsibility to a partner was inevitably onesided.

The girl laughed at what he was saying—but it was a silent laugh. Her mouth was open, her eyes sparkled with a humored appreciation, but there was no sound. She began to move her hands in an intricate pattern that, Amy realized, was the American Sign Language used by deafmutes.

“Her problem right then,” Lucia was saying, “was finding something to wear so that she could get into town. Luckily I was wearing my duster—you know, from when I was into my Sergio Leone phase—so she could cover herself up.”

“She took off everything while she was in the water?” Amy asked, her gaze returning to her friend.

“Even her underwear?”

“I guess. Unless she wasn’t wearing any in the first place.”

“Weird.”

“I don’t see you wearing a bra.”

“You know what I meant,” Amy said with a laugh.

Lucia nodded. “So anyway, she came on the ferry with me—I paid her fare—and then I brought her back to my place because it turned out she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Doesn’t know a soul in town. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure she spoke English at first.”

Amy looked over Lucia’s shoulder to where Matt was answering whatever it was that the girl’s hands had told him. Where had he learned sign language? she wondered. He’d never said anything about it before, but then she realized that for all the years she’d known him, she really didn’t know much about him at all except that he was a brilliant musician and good in bed, related actions, perhaps, since she didn’t doubt that they both were something he’d regard as a performance.

Meow, she thought.

“She’s deafmute, isn’t she?” she added aloud.

Lucia looked surprised. “Mute, but not deaf. How you’d know?”

“I’m watching her talk to Matt with her hands right now.”

“She couldn’t even do that when I first met her,” Lucia said. Amy returned her attention to Lucia once more. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I know sign language—I learned it when I worked at the Institute for the Deaf up on Gracie Street when I first got out of college—so when I realized she was mute, it was the first thing I tried. But she’s not deaf—she just can’t talk. She didn’t even try to communicate at first. I thought she was in shock. She just sat beside me, looking out over the water, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as we approached the docks.

“When we caught a bus back to my place, it was like she’d never been in a city before. She just sat beside me all wideeyed and then took my hand—not like she was scared, it was more like she just wanted to share the wonder of it all with me. It wasn’t until we got back to my place that she asked for pen and paper.” Lucia mimed the action as she spoke.

“It’s all kind of mysterious, isn’t it?” Amy said.

“I’ll say. Anyway, her name’s Katrina Ludvigsen and she’s from one of those little towns on the Islands further down the lake—the ones just past the mouth of the Dulfer River, you know?”

Amy nodded.

“Her family came over from Norway originally,” Lucia went on. “They were Lapps—as in Lapland—except she doesn’t like to be called that. Her people call themselves Sami.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Amy said. “Referring to them as Lapps is a kind of insult.”

“Exactly.” Lucia took a final drag from her cigarette and butted it out in the ashtray. “Once she introduced herself, she asked me to teach her sign language. Would you believe she picked it up in two days?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Is that fast?”

“Try fantastique, ma cherie.”

“So what’s she doing here?”

Lucia shrugged. “She told me she was looking for a man—like, aren’t we all, ha ha—only she didn’t know his name, just that he lived in Newford. She just about had a fit when she spotted the picture of Matt in the poster for this gig.”

“So she knows him from before.”

“You tell me,” Lucia said.

Amy shook her head. “Only Matt knows whatever it is that Matt knows.”

“Katrina says she’s twentytwo,” Lucia went on, “but if you ask me, I think she’s a lot younger. I’ll bet she ran away from home—maybe even stowed away on some tourist’s powerboat and jumped ship just outside the harbor because they were about to catch her and maybe take her back home.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Not a damn thing. She’s a nice kid and besides,” she added as Katrina and Matt walked by their table, heading for the bar, “I’ve got the feeling she’s not even going to be my responsibility for much longer.”

“Don’t count on it,” Amy said. “She’ll be lucky if she lasts the night.”

Although maybe not. Katrina was pretty, and she certainly could dance, so there was the musical connection, just as there had been with her.

Amy sighed. She didn’t know why she got to feeling the way she did at times like this. She wouldn’t even want to make a go at it with Matt again.

Lucia reached across the table and put her hand on Amy’s, giving it a squeeze. “How’re you handling this, Amy? I remember you were pretty messed up about him at one point.”

“I can deal with it.”

“Well—what’s that line of yours? More power to your elbow then if you can, though I still can’t figure out how you got past it enough to still be able to play with him.”

Amy looked over to the bar where Matt was getting the girl a cup of tea. She wished the twinge of not so much jealousy, as hurt, would go away.

Patience, she told herself. She’d seen Matt with who knew how many women over the years, all of them crazy over him. The twinge only lasted for a little while—a reminder of a bad time, not the bad time itself. She was past that now.

Well, mostly.

“You just change your way of thinking about a person,” she said after a few moments, trying to convince herself as much as Lucia. “You change what you need from them, your expectations. That’s all.”

“You make it sound easy.”

Amy turned back to her friend. “It’s not,” she said in a quiet voice.

Lucia gave her hand a squeeze.

The girl was drunk on Matt, Amy realized. There was no other explanation for the way she was carrying on.

For the rest of the night, Amy could see Katrina sitting with Lucia at the back of the club, chin cupped in her hands as she listened to Matt sing. No, not just listening. She drank in the songs, swallowed them whole. And with every dance set they played, she was up on her feet at the front of the stage, the sinuous grace of her movement, the swirl and the lift and the rapid fire steps of her small feet capturing each tune to perfection.

Matt was obviously complimented by her attention—or at least whatever it was that he’d feel that would be close to flattered—and why not? Next to Lucia, she was the best looking woman in the club, and Lucia wasn’t exactly sending out “available” signals, not dressed the way she was.

Matt and the girl talked between each set, filling up the twenty minutes or so of canned music and patron conversation with a forest of words, his spoken, hers signed, each of them oblivious to their surroundings, to everything except for each other.