Charles De Lint: Memory and Dream

“The only person who might buy that line is yourself,” Marisa told him, “and frankly, if you do, then you’re dumber than I thought.”

Alan sighed. He looked across the room to where the night pushed up against the panes of his bay window. Beyond, in the darkness, he could sense ghosts haunting Waterhouse Street. Why was he the only one to remember how things once were? Or rather, why was he the only one who wanted to?

“Alan? Are you still there?”

“I don’t know if she’ll talk to me,” he said.

Now it was Marisa’s turn to hesitate.

“When was the last time you spoke to her?” she finally asked.

“At the funeral. No. One time after that. I tried calling her, but she hung up on me.”

He’d also written, but his letter had come back, Isabelle’s address scratched out and RETURN TO

SENDER scrawled across the front of the envelope.

“If you can’t talk to her,” Marisa began. “If she won’t talk to you ..” She gave up and started again:

“Alan, why’ve you made it seem all along as though she’d be doing the book?”

“Because without her, it wouldn’t come out right. It wouldn’t be ... com-plete.

“It was something Kathy always talked about before she died,” he went on. “How she’d give anything to have Isabelle illustrate one of her books. It never happened while she was still alive, so I wanted to do it now, with this book.”

“You made it sound as though Isabelle was completely behind the project.”

“I never lied to you about it, Marisa.”

“No, but when I said I didn’t think her style was right for Kathy’s work, you told me she’d be doing the kind of paintings she did before she got into her abstract period.”

“Because that’s what I was going to ask her to do,” Alan said. “When I finally did talk to her, that is.

If I ever talk to her.”

“Do you want me to call her?”

“No. It’s something I’ve got to do. If Isabelle’s going to work with me on the project, we’ve got to be able to communicate with one another. It doesn’t have to be like it was, but ... we just ..”

Alan’s voice trailed off and for a long moment there was only the hum of the empty line in his ear.

“It wasn’t just Kathy,” Marisa said then, somehow finding in his silence what he wasn’t putting into words. “You were in love with Isabelle, too, weren’t you? You were in love with them both.”

“I don’t know what I was anymore. Young. Stupid.”

“We were all young and stupid once.”

“I suppose.”

“God, don’t you sound morose. Do you want some company tonight?”

“What about George?”

“George is working late. It might do him good to come home and find me out for a change.”

The bitterness in her voice made Alan want to ask her why she didn’t just leave George, once and for all, but it was an old question and, like so many that he carried around himself, one for which there was no easy answer.

“Thanks,” he said. “But I think I’m just going to turn in. I’ll give Isabelle a call tomorrow morning and let you know how things work out.”

“Nothing’s permanent,” Marisa said.

Marisa could do that, just say something out of the blue, leaving whoever was with her scrambling for a connection. Alan wasn’t sure if she meant his melancholy, Isabelle’s refusal to speak with him, or her own relationship with George. Right now, he didn’t have the energy to find out.

“I know,” he said. “Thanks for calling, Marisa.”

“Talk to you tomorrow?”

“Promise.”

Cradling the receiver, Alan let himself sink into the sofa. He looked back up above the mantelpiece to where Marisa’s self-portrait hung. She’d managed to perfectly capture that half-smile of hers that so defined her in his mind. Her hair was quite a bit longer now than it was in the painting, but that didn’t matter. It was the smile that made it work, the smile that made it timeless. In forty years Marisa would still have that smile and this self-portrait would still be true no matter how much the rest of her changed—unless her husband finally succeeded in taking her ability to smile away.

Alan’s gaze traveled down to the row of his press’s first editions, then over to the right side of the mantelpiece where a five-by-seven color photograph stood in a dark wood frame. The picture was ten years old and showed three of the street’s ghosts: Kathy and Isabelle and himself, on the steps outside Isabelle and Kathy’s Waterhouse Street apartment, happy and so young, unencumbered by death or the messes their lives had become.

Nothing’s permanent.

He knew what he should do: put aside the past. Make his peace with Kathy’s ghost and the way Isabelle had cut him out of her life. Accept Marisa’s advances and take her away from a doomed relationship that she couldn’t seem to leave by herself.

Maybe publishing the book would help him do it. Maybe it would just make things worse.

Why did life always have to be so complicated?

III

July 12

Gracie Street Newford

Ma Belle Izzy,

I know you’ve outgrown that name, but I thought you’d let me use it one last time.

I started to write a story last night. This is how it began: There was a hollow space inside his mind, like an empty house, a haunted place that knew only echoes. His thoughts were few and pale, fluttering like moths through that empty expanse, and they made no difference to who he was.

Nothing he did or thought made any difference at all.

And then I stopped because I knew I was writing about me again, about the hollow places inside me, and I finally understood that stories could never fill them.

I get letters from people telling me how much they enjoy my stories, how much the stories have helped them, allowing them to see the hope that’s still out there in that big old world where most of us spend our days. They know there’s no such thing as magic, but they also know that the magic in the stories is just standing in for the magic people carry inside themselves.

I always want to write back and tell them that the stories are lies. There is no hope, there is no real happiness. At the end, nobody really lives happily ever after, because nobody lives forever and underneath the happiness there’s always pain.

I went out walking last night, down among all our old haunts. Old Market. Lower Crowsea.

Waterhouse Street. I stood for a while in front of our old building and pretended that you were inside, drawing at the kitchen table, and all I’d have to do was go up the stairs and step inside and there you’d be, blinking up at me from whatever you were working on, but then a bunch of college kids came down the street and went up the walk to the door and I couldn’t hang on to my make-believe any-more.

Across the street I could see a light on in Alan’s apartment, but I didn’t ring his bell. He’d know, you see, just like you would if you could see me, and now that I’ve finally gathered up the courage, I don’t want anybody to stop me. That’d just be so ... I don’t know. Pathetic, I suppose. So I just went home and went to bed instead.

I thought there’d be something sweet that I could still find out there in our old world, something to keep me strong, but it’s all ghosts now, isn’t it? You’re gone. I’m gone. Everybody except for Alan’s gone and without you, Alan’s not enough. He’s got too much darkness inside him—the same kind of darkness I have, I think. He just wears his differently. We always needed you, Izzy, like the shadows need a candle, or they can’t dance.

I had a strange dream when I fell asleep. I dreamt that after I died, you painted me and I could come back and this time all the darkness inside me was gone. I know that’s not quite the way your paintings worked, but I thought it was funny when I woke up, to find myself thinking about all of that again. Do you still think about it, or did Wren Island wash it all away? I always wanted to ask you, but I didn’t want to bring up those particular ghosts if you’d managed to put them to rest.