Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Paul’s, and saw only the Rushkin she knew. But something niggled at her memory when she looked down at the sketch in her hand. She knew herself. She wasn’t given to the exaggeration that this sketch represented, and familiarity, while it could make one overlook something such as a hunched back or dwarfish stature in one’s dayto-day dealings with a person, couldn’t physically take the fact of it away.

Yet the only other explanation seemed even more implausible: that Rushkin had looked like this when she’d met him and he had since changed.

No, Izzy thought, comparing the drawing to how Rushkin had looked when she’d left his studio today. Not changed. He would have to have been completely and utterly transformed.

She stared at the sketch for a long time, then finally stuffed it away. Rushkin hadn’t changed his appearance. She’d just had a bad day with her faculties of recall the day she’d drawn it. It wasn’t as though Rushkin had actually been in front of her when she’d done the second drawing. She’d just remembered him wrong. Lord knew Rushkin was an odd bird. It would be so easy to fall into caricaturing when trying to draw him from memory after only one brief and rather confusing encounter.

She had to smile then. Wasn’t that just the whole story of her relationship with Rushkin: an endless series of confusing encounters. But before she could take that line of thought any further, Kathy came in and asked about how it had gone at The Green Man that day and Izzy was able to set the whole confusing puzzle aside. Kathy’s infectious excitement about the good news made it impossible for Izzy not to get excited all over again herself, and this time the feeling didn’t go away.

But that night she had a dream that had come to her before. In it, she walked into the section of Rushkin’s studio where she did her work to find that all her paintings had been destroyed. Some of the canvases were slashed, others were burned, all of them were ruined beyond repair, even the unfinished piece that was still on her easel. She knew when she woke that it wasn’t true, that the dreams were just her subconscious mind’s way of dealing with those feelings of self-consciousness that plagued every person who ever tried their hand at a creative endeavor at one point or another in their career. Some people would dream that the world ridiculed their work, their peers laughing and pointing their fingers at what they had done; she dreamt that her work was destroyed—the ultimate act of censorship.

Somehow destruction seemed worse. More personal. More vindictive. And though it was only a recurring dream, and she knew it was no more than a dream, she wished her subconscious mind would find another way to deal with her feelings of inadequacy because when she was in the dream, it felt too real. She would wake up so upset that she’d skip breakfast and rush out to the studio, where she could be reassured that the paintings were, in fact, unharmed.

Rushkin never asked her why she arrived so early some mornings and immediately took stock of her paintings, and she never told him about the dreams. The one thing Rushkin didn’t lack was self-confidence, and she knew he simply wouldn’t understand. She didn’t think anyone would. Oh, they might be able to relate to her occasional bouts with a lack of self-confidence, but they wouldn’t understand why the dreams felt so real and why they upset her as much as they did, even when she knew they weren’t real.

She wouldn’t be able to explain it because she herself didn’t know why the dreams’ despair lingered so strongly when she woke, lying like a black cloud over her day until she could hold the paintings in her hands and be reassured that they were truly safe.

VI I

Newford, October 1974

Izzy found living on Waterhouse Street to be everything Kathy and Jilly had promised it would be.

While Crowsea itself had always been a popular home base for the city’s various artists, musicians, actors, writers and others of like persuasions, for two blocks on either side of Lee Street, Waterhouse was as pure a distillation of the same as one was likely to find west of Greenwich Village in its own heyday. Izzy quickly discovered her new neighborhood to be the perfect creative community: a regular bohemia of studios, lofts, rooming houses, apartments and practice spaces with the ground floors of the buildings offering cafes, small galleries, boutiques and music clubs. She met more kindred spirits in her first two weeks living there than she had in the whole nineteen years of her life up to that point.

“There’s a buzz in the air, day and night,” she told Rushkin a few weeks after she and Kathy got their small two-bedroom across the street from Alan’s apartment. “It’s so amazing. You can almost taste the creative energy as soon as you turn off Lee Street.”

Living on Waterhouse Street was the first time that Izzy really felt herself to be part of a community.

She’d got a taste of it living in Karizen Hall, but now she realized that what she’d experienced there wasn’t remotely the same. The main commonality shared in the dorm had been that they were all attending Butler U. Beyond school life, her fellow students’ interests and lives had branched down any number of different, and often conflicting, paths. The bohemian residents of Waterhouse Street, on the other hand, despite their strong sense of individuality, shared an unshakable belief in the worth of their various creative pursuits. They offered each other unquestioning support and that, Izzy thought, was the best part of it all. No one was made to feel as though they were wasting their time, as though their creative pursuits were frivolous trivialities that they would outgrow once they matured. It might be three o’clock in the morning, but you could invariably still find someone with whom you could share a front stoop and have a conversation that actually meant something, who would celebrate a success or raise you out of the inevitable case of the blues to which everyone involved in the arts was susceptible at one point or another. Perfect strangers offered advice, shared inspiration, and didn’t remain strangers for long.

And it wasn’t all seriousness. The residents of Waterhouse Street could party with the best of them, and there always seemed to be an open house in full swing on one block or another. Although she could appreciate their need to cut loose, Izzy wasn’t quite as uninhibited as some of her friends. Sometimes she thought a little too much drinking went on, too many psychedelics were ingested, too much hash and marijuana was smoked. She herself didn’t drink, and she was scared to death of drugs, but no one forced her to partake of one or the other, and if it sometimes seemed that everybody had slept with everybody else at some point or another, well, no one forced that upon her either.

The tolerance, the way they took care of each other, was what utterly charmed Izzy and let her forgive all the other excesses. That such strong-minded individuals could still be so open-minded to conflicting tastes and ways of life gave her hope for the world at large. If we can do it here, she would think, then someday it’ll be like this everywhere.

She loved the little apartment she shared with Kathy. Their furniture consisted of wooden orange crates and scattered pillows in place of sofas or chairs; bookcases made of salvaged brick and lumber; throw rugs, lamps and kitchen necessities bought at the Crowsea flea markets; on the walls, posters and various paintings by Izzy and their friends; in the bedrooms, mattresses on the floor; in the kitchen, a scratched and battered Formica kitchen table with mismatching chairs rescued from a curbside one night before garbage day. Izzy knew her mother would have been horrified at the way she was living, but she didn’t care. Her father would have been disgusted by the company she kept, but she didn’t care about that either.