Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

It could be sweet, but it could be bitter, too. And dark. As dark as those clouds shadowing the sky above the lake. And the repercussions ...

If she closed her eyes, she would hear all the shouting and noise again, would see that first tiny burned body, would smell the sickly sweet odor of its charred flesh. And then her focus would widen to take in all the others.

She didn’t—wouldn’t—close her eyes. Instead she concentrated on Alan’s voice.

“I know your style is completely different now,” he was saying. “I don’t claim to understand all of your work, but I certainly respect it. I would never ask anyone to change their style as I’m doing now, but I know you’ve done this sort of work before. And like I said: this isn’t for our fame or fortune. It’s for Kathy. It’s to make her dream of the Art Court come true.”

Alan leaned forward. “At least give it a try, won’t you?”

Isabelle couldn’t look at him. Her gaze went out the window again. In the brief moment since she’d looked away, the storm clouds had rushed closer, across the water, piling up above the island. The first splatters of rain hit the window.

“If there’s anyone who’s going to be wondering where you are,” she said, “you’d better give them a call now before the phone lines go out.”

“What?”

She turned back to him. “I wasn’t paying attention to the weather,” she said.

As though the words were a cue, the rain suddenly erupted from the clouds overhead. It came down in sheets, falling so hard that it was impossible to see more than a few feet out the window.

“I can’t take you back to the mainland in this weather,” she explained. “And I often lose my phone and power in storms.”

“Oh.”

Isabelle turned and plucked her phone from where it sat on the sideboard behind her. It was a clunky old rotarydial, black, the plastic battered and scratched. She set it down in front of Alan, then rose from the table to give him some privacy.

“I don’t have anyone to call,” Alan said.

Isabelle paused. She stood a few feet away from him, her arms folded around herself to keep out a chill that had nothing to do with the coming storm. “You didn’t answer me,” Alan said.

Isabelle sighed. It was all too confusing. Kathy’s letter, the locker key, Alan’s reappearance in her life, this book that was so important to making Kathy’s dreams come true.

“Will you stay for dinner?” she asked, taking refuge in playing her role as Alan’s hostess.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

She looked at him with a different gaze than she had before, remembering instead what it was like to render the human face and form. Alan would be both easy and difficult to draw: dark-haired, square-shouldered, a sensitive face with kind eyes. His lines were all strong; it was the subtleties that would make or break the study. And if she painted him? Painted him not as other artists would, but as Rushkin had taught her? What would that painting call up from the before?

“Isabelle ... ?”

“I ... I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

“I didn’t agree to anything but that I’d think about it,” she warned him. “I know.”

Isabelle looked outside where the rain and clouds had changed the afternoon light to dusk.

“You’ll stay for dinner?” she asked again.

“I’d love to.”

He ended up staying the night.

III

Not long after dinner, Isabelle vanished into her studio to do some work and Alan didn’t see her again for the remainder of the evening.

Over the preparations for dinner and the meal itself, they seemed to have fallen back into their old relationship with only a few moments of awkwardness, and he had already berated himself any number of times for not contacting her sooner. But as soon as they’d finished washing up and putting the dishes away, she suddenly gave him a surprised look, as though she had only just become aware of his being here in her house and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. A moment later she’d muttered something about having to work and left him standing downstairs by himself before it really registered that she was gone.

Her abrupt departure left him feeling more than a little confused and completely at loose ends.

Returning to the kitchen table, he finished off the last swallow of cooled coffee in his cup, rinsed it out and set it in the dish drainer. That small task completed, he wandered aimlessly through the large open-concept room that made up most of the downstairs of the refurbished barn, pausing in front of the various pieces of her art that hung on the walls, or were set on shelves, to study them more closely than he’d had the time to do earlier in the evening.

The paintings were all starkly abstract—utterly at odds with the work he was trying to commission from her for Kathy’s book; at odds even with the titles Isabelle had given them. Heartbeat was a field of deep blue violet, an enormous painting some six by ten feet, the uniform hue placed on the canvas with thousands of tiny brush strokes. The width of the paintbrush couldn’t have been more than a half-inch, Alan judged when he took a closer look. Set just off center in the blue violet field were three small yellow-orange geometric shapes that disconcertingly appeared to pulse when he stepped back to take in the painting as a whole.

Her wood sculptures were rendered more realistically—human faces and torsos and limbs that reached out of the wood at curious angles. Many of these were painted in a style that resembled tattooing, or aboriginal clay body painting.

Though he wasn’t particularly taken with this style of art—either the oil paintings or the sculptures—there was certainly no ignoring it. He would look away, but find his gaze drawn back, time and again, to this set of child’s fingers reaching out of a square block of polished wood, that stark oil painting with its descending swirl of spinning triangles running from one corner of the canvas to the other.

Finally he let the storm outside soothe his gaze. He walked back into the kitchen area and stood at the window to look out at the rain that still came down so strongly. The flowers on the south side of the barn were bent almost in two and many of the cosmos had lost their petals. Beyond them, everything was pushed into a dark grey haze, swallowed by the night and the storm. He remained at the window for a long time, leaving only when he realized that he was now studying the art behind him by way of its reflection in the glass, which made many of the pieces appear more disconcerting still.

As soon as he became aware of what he was doing, he gave the stairs a hopeful look, but they were empty except for Rubens—Isabelle’s large orange tomcat, who was sleeping, lower body on one stair, front paws and head on the next riser up. Isabelle remained ensconced in her studio.

Alan hesitated a moment longer, then finally made his way to the guest room, at the back of the house, that Isabelle had showed him before dinner. A towel and face cloth were laid out on the bed. The room itself was a cheery relief compared to the rest of the downstairs; Isabelle had taken all of its warmth away with her when she went up into her studio, leaving behind only the troubling questions that her art seemed to demand of a viewer.

The guest room was painted in soft pastel colors and simply furnished: a chest of drawers, a bookcase, a throw rug on the floor and a pillowed window-seat with a light in a sconce by the windowsill to allow one to sit up in the bay window and read at night. The double bed was situated so that one could look out that same window when sitting up against the headboard.

He was amused to find a complete collection of East Street Press books sitting on the bookshelf and spent an idle few minutes sitting on the edge of the bed, paging through them. There was only one piece of art hanging in this room—a very simply rendered watercolor landscape, which proved to be signed in one corner by his hostess. By the date that followed her name, Alan realized she must have done it while she was still a teenager. He wondered how it had survived the fire.