Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

John gave her an odd look.

“It’s okay. Honestly,” Izzy said. “I saw my paintings and they were all still there.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, don’t go all vague on me, John. I’m way too tired. If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”

He hesitated for a long moment, then took her hand in his. He traced the lines on her palm with a fingertip.

“You really thought what I brought you was a piece of your own painting, didn’t you?” he finally asked.

Izzy nodded. “I know my own style. God, I spent so long on parts of that painting I could redo it in my sleep.”

“And the works that were intact—they were yours?”

“Yes.” She started to get an uncomfortable feeling as she saw where this was heading. “Look,” she said. “Rushkin’s a genius. Of course he’d be able to duplicate my work.”

“Enough so that you couldn’t tell the difference?”

“Well, in some ways, that was the whole point of why he did it, wasn’t it? To do it exactly the way I did it. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to find this magic whatever-it-is that he’s looking for.”

John nodded. “So how do you know that the paintings he destroyed were the ones he did?”

For a long moment all Izzy could do was look at him.

“I ... I don’t,” she said in a small voice. “What are you saying? That he lied to me?”

“I’m just saying to be careful. Don’t be so trusting.”

Again that warning, Izzy thought. John warning her against Rushkin, Rushkin warning her against John. It made her head hurt, trying to work it all out.

“Why would he lie to me?” she asked. “What could he possibly stand to gain by lying to me?”

“Maybe that’s the wrong question to ask,” John replied. “Maybe what you should be asking is, what does he stand to lose if you know the truth?”

“You’re presupposing that he is lying.”

“Doesn’t what he told you about copying your work seem more than a little odd to you?”

“When you come down to it, everything’s odd about him.”

“Just think about it, Isabelle.”

I don’t want to, she thought. But she knew she would. It was the kind of thing that, once someone brought it to your attention, you couldn’t help but think about. She hated carrying around suspicions. It was like today all over again, except it would put Rushkin in the seat of scrutiny instead of John.

She regarded him for a long moment. Suspicions concerning Rushkin, suspicion in general, made her mind travel a certain circuit. Without wanting them to, all her earlier uncertainties concerning John were back in her mind again, demanding that she deal with them.

“Did you kill those men?” she found herself asking.

“No,” John replied.

Believe him, Izzy told herself.

“I believe you,” she said, and by saying it aloud she knew it was true. She did believe.

My word’s the only currency I’ve got that’s of any real worth.

How could she not, and still love him?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That I had to ask, you know.”

“Friends don’t need to apologize.”

“When one of them’s wrong they do,” Izzy said. She paused, then gave him an uncomfortable look.

“I’ve got to know one more thing.”

John smiled. “And that is?”

“Are you real?”

He took her hand and laid it against his chest. She could feel the rise and fall of his breathing.

“Are you?” he asked.

And that was all she could get out of him that evening.

Paddyjack crouches by a dumpster in a shadowed alleyway. Light from a streetlight enters far enough from the roadway to play across his curious features: pointed chin, the wide spread of a thin-lipped mouth, nose like a goshawk’s beak, slanted deepset eyes the color of burnished gold and surrounded by shadows, long ears tapering back into fine points. In place of hair he has a tangle of leafy vines and twigs standing out every which way from under a battered three-cornered hat the color of an oak trunk.

His limbs are as thin as broomsticks, shoulders narrow, chest flat, hips almost nonexistent. His raggedy clothes hang from him as from a scarecrow, a crazy-quilt patchwork of mottled forest colors: sepias and Van Dyck’s brown, ochers, burnt sienna and a dozen shades of green. The rendering of his trousers, shirt and hat is festooned with mere daubs of paint that still manage to convey the notion of shells and buttons, thorny seeds and burrs, all patterned in a bewildering array.

The first impression is that he has the look of an animal, caught in the headlights of an automobile, or the sudden glare of a back porch light turned on at an unfamiliar sound. One thinks of a cat or, with those dark rings of shadow around his eyes, a raccoon. But upon closer scrutiny, the viewer can find no fear. He carries, instead, an air of both sly amusement and mental simplicity, an old-world humor utterly at odds with the urban decay of his more contemporary surroundings. And while he has the basic prerequisites of a human being in his appearance—one head, two limbs for walking, opposable thumbs, clothing—it quickly becomes obvious that he has originated from somewhere other than the world of his surroundings, from the pages of the Brothers Grimm, perhaps, by way of Arthur Rackham or Jean de Bosschere.

Paddyjack, 1974, oil on canvas, 10 X 14 inches. Private collection.

I

Wren Island, September 1992

It would be winter soon, Isabelle thought. She’d paused in her packing to sit in the wing-backed chair by the bedroom window. She could see the island’s autumned fields from her vantage point, running off to the cliffs before they dropped into the lake. In the aftermath of last night’s storm, the sky was a perfect blue, untouched by cloud. She watched a crow glide across that cerulean expanse, then swoop down toward the fields. When it was lost to sight, her gaze moved back toward the house, where the forest encroached a little closer every year. The rich cloak of leaves was already beginning to thin, the colors losing their vibrancy. Movement caught her gaze again and she saw that the raggedy stand of mountain ash by one of the nearer outbuildings was filled with cedar waxwings, the sleek yellow-and-brown birds gorging on this year’s crop of the trees’ orange berries. Putting her face closer to the glass, she could hear their thin lisping cries of tsee, tsee.

Autumn was her favorite time of year. It bared the landscape, it was true, heralding the lonely desolation of the long months of winter to come, but it made her heart sing all the same with a joy not so dissimilar to what she felt when she saw the first crocuses in the spring. It was easy to forget—when the trees were bare, the fields turned brown and the north winds brought the first snows—that the world went on, that it wasn’t coming to an end. She agreed with what Andrew Wyeth was supposed to have said about the season: something did wait, underneath the drab masquerade that autumn eventually came to wear. The whole story didn’t show. But that was the way it was with everything. There were always other stories going on under what you could see—in people as much as landscapes.

Isabelle smiled at herself and rose from her chair. She knew what she was doing. Procrastinating.

She was going to miss the island—that was a given. Especially now. This was when she normally laid in a few months’ worth of supplies against that time when the channel between the island and the mainland became impassable. For anywhere from two to six weeks she would be cut off from all contact with the outside world, except by phone. She savored that forced hermitage. It was a time when she collected herself after the summer and its inevitable influx of visitors, and often got her best work done. As things were going now, she probably wouldn’t be able to return to the island until the channel froze over in early December. But it was too late to go back on the promise she’d made to Alan. Whether she liked it or not, she would be living in the city for at least a few months. Which reminded her: she should give Jilly another try.