Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

The power went, just as he was washing up, and he fumbled his way back to the guest room to light the candle that Isabelle had left him against just such a contingency. Leaving it burning on the night table, he undressed by its flickering light and got into bed. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep, but once he blew the candle out, plunging the room into darkness, he found the rattle of the rain outside to be oddly soothing. Lying there, he let the sound relax him.

How strange to live in a place such as this, he thought, where you could be so easily cut off from the mainland by a storm. He wondered if he should have called Marisa before the phone lines went. He realized that she would have been trying to reach him at his apartment this evening and of course she’d worry when all she got was his answering machine. Thinking of Marisa woke a whole new set of confusions that he really didn’t want to get into, but happily he fell asleep before the tangle of that particular relationship gained too firm a hold.

IV

an wasn’t sure what woke him. He couldn’t have been sleeping for more than a few hours when he was suddenly staring up at the ceiling above him, eyes open wide, sleep fled.

He’d been dreaming of Isabelle. Of her asking him to pose for her and then somehow he kept losing pieces of clothing and she kept losing pieces of clothing and finally the two of them were lying on this sofa that he imagined was in one corner of her studio. He’d just put his hand on a perfect breast when he started out of his sleep with a quick gasp.

He lay there, blinking in the dark, trying to figure out what had woken him. It was when he sat up that he realized he wasn’t alone. Sharply delineated against the growing light outside the window was the profiled silhouette of a figure sitting in the window seat, legs drawn up against her chest, arms wrapped around her knees. Alan’s dream involving his hostess had made a tent out of the sheets between his legs and he quickly drew his own knees up to his chest to hide the fact.

“Isabelle?” he asked, pitching his voice low.

The figure turned toward him. She seemed to be wearing little more than a man’s white shirt, which hung oversized on her slender frame. But whoever his night visitor was, he realized she wasn’t Isabelle as soon as she spoke.

“You seem rather nice,” she said, “and you’ve certainly got her working. It’s almost time for the dawn chorus and she’s still up there, filling sheet after sheet with sketches.”

Her voice was huskier than Isabelle’s, for all its youthfulness, and touched with a faint mockery.

From her silhouette, he noted that she was smaller than Isabelle as well, and far more slender. Almost boyish.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The girl spoke over the question, ignoring him. “I’d suggest that you simply use monochrome studies to illustrate the book—that would certainly make it easier on Isabelle, you know—but I have to admit I’m too selfish and lonely. It’ll be so nice to see a few new faces around here.”

Alan wasn’t really listening to what she was saying.

“I thought Isabelle lived here by herself,” he said.

“She does. All on her own, just herself and her art.”

“Then who are you? What are you doing here in my room?”

His desire for Isabelle had fled. Now all he wanted to know was what an adolescent girl was doing in his room in the middle of the night. His visitor put an elbow on her knee, cupped her chin with her hand, and cocked her head. The pose rang in Alan’s memory, but he couldn’t place it.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why she had such an extreme change of style in her art?” the girl asked.

“All I’m wondering is who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“Oh, don’t be so tedious,” she told him, that trace of mockery caressing her words with silent laughter.

Naked under his covers, Alan felt trapped by the situation.

“Don’t you find Isabelle far more fascinating?” she added.

“Yes. That is ...”

“No need to be shy about it. You’re not the first to be taken by her charms, and you probably won’t be the last. But they all back away from the mystery of her.”

“Mystery,” Alan repeated.

Well, Isabelle was certainly mysterious—she always had been—though he would probably have chosen the word puzzling to describe her instead. Mystery seemed to better suit this half-naked girl who was in his bedroom. As the light grew stronger outside, he could see that indeed the man’s shirt was all she had on. And it wasn’t buttoned closed.

“If you’re at all serious, ask her about Rushkin,” the girl said.

“Serious about what?”

The girl swung her feet down and leaned forward, chin cupped by both palms now.

“I’m not a child,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend. I know you were dreaming about her tonight. I know all about what grows between a man’s legs and where he wants to put it.”

Alan flushed. “Who are you?” he demanded.

The girl stood up and pushed open the window behind her, which appeared to have been unlatched.

Alan hadn’t noticed that last night.

“Just remember,” she said. “What you don’t know or don’t understand—it doesn’t have to be bad.”

“All I want to understand is—”

“And it’s okay to be scared.”

Alan could feel his temper giving out on him, so he forbore answering for a moment. He took a steadying breath, then let it out. The air coming in from the window made his breath cloud briefly, but the girl didn’t appear to feel the cold at all.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” he asked.

The girl smiled. “Now that’s the first intelligent question you’ve asked all morning.”

Alan waited, but she didn’t go on.

“You’re not going to tell me?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Instead, you’re just going to stand there and catch your death of cold?”

“It’s not cold.”

She stepped down from the window onto the wet grass outside. Alan started to rise, but then remembered his nakedness again.

“Remember to ask her about Rushkin—you know who he was, don’t you?”

Alan nodded. Isabelle had named her studio “Adjani Farm” after him.

He tugged on the sheet until it came loose from the foot end of the bed and wrapped it around himself like a long trailing skirt as he swung his feet to the floor. But by the time he reached the window, the girl was already out on the lawn, dancing about in the wet grass with her bare feet, her loose white shirt flapping about her.

“But I don’t know who you are!” he called after her.

She turned and gave him a quick grin.

“Why, I’m Cosette,” she said. “Isabelle’s wild girl.”

And then she was off, racing across the lawn, legs flashing like those of a young colt, red hair tossed back and catching the first pink rays of the sun. In moments, all that remained was a trail of footprints in the grass.

“Cosette,” Alan repeated.

Now he remembered why that pose of hers had seemed so familiar. The girl could have been a twin for whoever had sat for Isabelle’s painting The Wild Girl, which hung in the Newford Children’s Foundation. Cosette would be too young to have been the model for it, of course, but the resemblance was so strong that she might easily be related to the original model—perhaps her daughter? That was a reasonable enough assumption, except it didn’t even begin to explain her presence this morning. It seemed such an elaborate charade to play on a stranger: making herself up like the model from the painting, all this mysterious talk about himself and Isabelle and Isabelle’s old mentor.