Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

Rubens was moping about in her studio when she went in to use the phone.

“You know what’s up, don’t you?” Isabelle said.

She punched in Jilly’s phone number. Cradling the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she hoisted the orange tom onto her lap and scratched the fur up and down his spine until he began to purr.

She was half expecting her call to go unanswered again, but after the third ring she heard the sound of the phone being picked up on the other end of the line, quickly followed by Jilly’s cheerful hello.

“Hello, yourself,” Isabelle said. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

“Were you? I was over at Amos & Cook’s picking up some paints and I kind of got distracted on the way home. I ended up down by the Pier, watching these kids showing off on their Rollerblades. You should have seen them. They were just amazing. I could’ve watched them all day.”

Isabelle smiled. A rarer occasion would be a time when Jilly wasn’t distracted by one thing or another.

“Tell me something new,” she said.

“Ah ... the Pope’s staying with me for the weekend?”

“Rats. And here I was hoping that I could hit you up for a place to stay.”

“You’re coming to town? When? How long are you staying?”

Rather than taking the questions on an individual basis, Isabelle backtracked, explaining how Alan had come out to the island with his proposal for the omnibus of Kathy’s stories that Isabelle had agreed to illustrate.

“You mean in your old style?” Jilly asked.

“That’s the plan.”

“How do you feel about it?”

Isabelle hesitated. “Excited, actually,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And what was it like seeing Alan again?” Jilly wanted to know.

“Sort of weird,” Isabelle said. “In some ways, it was like I’d only just seen him last week.”

“I’ve always liked him,” Jilly said. “There’s something intrinsically good about him—an inborn compassion that you don’t find in many people these days.”

“You could be talking about yourself,” Isabelle pointed out.

Jilly laughed. “Not a chance. I had to learn how to be a good person.”

Before Isabelle could add her own comment to that, Jilly steered the conversation back to Isabelle’s current concern. “You’re welcome to stay with me,” she said, “although it sounds like you’re going to be in town for a while, so it could get a little cramped.”

“I was hoping to stay just for a couple of nights while I find myself something.”

“Are you bringing Rubens?”

“I couldn’t leave him behind on his own.”

“Of course not,” Jilly said. “But having a pet’ll make it a little harder to find a place unless—hey, do you remember the old shoe factory on Church Street?”

“The one by the river?”

“That’s the place. Well, some people bought it at the beginning of the summer and have turned it into a kind of miniature version of Waterhouse Street.”

Isabelle remembered having read about it in the features section of one of the papers. The ground floor was taken up by boutiques, cafes and galleries, while the two upstairs floors consisted of small apartments, offices, studio spaces and rented rooms.

“They call the place Joli Coeur,” Jilly went on, “after that Rossetti painting. They’ve even got a reproduction of it—a giant mural in the central courtyard on the ground floor.”

“I saw a picture of it in the paper,” Isabelle said. “Have you been in at all?”

“A couple of times. Nora has a studio in there. She says it’s all sort of communey, with everybody running in and out of everybody else’s place, but I’m sure no one would bother you if you made it plain that you didn’t want to be disturbed.”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle said. “I think I could use a bit of chaotic bohemia about now—just to get me back into the mood of what it was like when Kathy was writing those stories.”

Jilly laughed. “Well, I’d call this place more baroque than boho, but I suppose there’s really not that much difference between the two. At least there never was in the Waterhouse Street days. Do you want me to give them a call to see if they have any studio spaces free?”

“Do you mind?”

“Of course not. I think you’ll like staying there. You wouldn’t believe the old faces I’ve run into. I even saw that old boyfriend of yours the other day—what was his name? John Sweetgrass.”

Everything went still inside Isabelle. A cold silence rose up inside her, tightening in her chest, and she found it hard to take a breath. In her mind’s eye, she saw a painting, consumed by flames.

“But that ... that’s—”

Impossible, she’d been about to say, but she caught herself in time. “That’s so ... odd,” she said instead. “I haven’t thought of him in years.” Until yesterday. Until Alan came with his proposal and woke up all the old ghosts inside her. John and the others had been on her mind ever since.

“He doesn’t go by the name John anymore,” Jilly went on. “He calls himself Mizaun Kinnikinnik now.”

Isabelle remembered a long-ago conversation in a Newford diner, John telling her about the Kickaha, about names. The tightness in her chest was easing, but the chill hadn’t gone away. How could Jilly have seen him? She looked out the window of her studio. The view was different from here, the fields choked with rosebushes, the woods looming dark behind them. It was easy to imagine hidden stories when she looked at their dark tangle.

“Are you still there, Isabelle?” Jilly asked.

Isabelle nodded, then realized that her friend couldn’t see the gesture. “How did he look?” she asked.

“Great. Like he hasn’t aged a year. But I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him. I was on my way out and he was on his way in and I haven’t seen him since. I did ask Nora about him and she says a friend of his runs the little boutique that sells Kickaha crafts and arts on the ground floor. You’ll have to look him up when you get to town.”

“Maybe I will,” Isabelle said.

As if she’d have a choice. As if he wouldn’t come to her first.

“I should finish my packing,” she told Jilly. “I’ll probably be leaving in another hour or so.”

“I’ll set an extra plate for dinner. And I should have some news about Joli Coeur by the time you get here.”

“Thanks, Jilly. You’re a real sweetheart.”

But Isabelle didn’t get back to her packing right away. She hung up the receiver and then sat there, stroking Rubens, trying to gain some measure of calm from the touch of his fur, his weight on her lap. But all she could think of was John, of the presences that she felt sometimes in the woods around her home—itinerant remnants of a lost time, cut adrift from their own pasts, but no longer a part of her present. And so they waited in the woods. For what, she’d never been quite sure. For her to take up that part of her art once more? To take a few pigments, some oil, a piece of canvas and an old brush and add others to their ranks?

She’d never been entirely sure if she’d made them real with her art, or if they were real first, if a part of her had recognized them from some mysterious else-where so that she was able to render their likenesses and bring them across. The only thing of which she was entirely certain was that she believed in them. For all these years she’d believed in them and in the part she’d played to bring them forth. But ifJohn was still alive, that changed everything. It created new riddles to unravel and made a lie of what Rushkin had taught her was real.

Rushkin, she thought. Considering all he’d done to her, why should she ever have believed anything he’d told her?