Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

From the first time he’d met her, he’d sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She seemed to have an inborn wisdom about her, but she’d stayed in a marriage that only made her miserable and had gone sour long before he’d met her. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people’s art and ideas—which is how Alan had met her in the first place. He’d placed an ad in The Crowsea Times for a part-time book designer and she’d been the first person to respond. After the interview, he hadn’t bothered to see anyone else, but simply gave her the job.

“Now, remember,” he’d warned her, “when I said part-time, it’s really quite part-time. I rarely do more than three or four books in a year.”

“That’s okay. I’m not doing it for the money, but because I want to be doing something. We were just transferred to the city and I feel completely at loose ends.”

“We?” Alan had found himself asking with a certain measure of disappointment.

“My husband George and I. He’s a financial consultant with Cogswell’s. It’s because of his work that we came here.”

It was a good year before Alan got any inkling that the marriage was in trouble, but by that time he’d managed to teach himself to think of her as a friend and coworker and nothing more; beyond that he drew a line that was admittedly hard not to cross at those times that Marisa got into one of her teasing moods. But even if he had known that her marriage was in trouble, Alan wouldn’t have let it change their relationship. He was far too old-fashioned to court a woman who was already married, if only in name, though that hadn’t stopped him from wishing that she’d simply walk out on George once and for all.

Alan sighed. And now she had, now she was here, and all he could do was think about Isabelle and feel guilty about his being attracted to Marisa, even though he doubted Isabelle would care in the least what he and Marisa might get up to. There was certainly nothing going on between Isabelle and himself, nothing even implied or possible, so far as he could see.

It was the story of his life, Alan thought. He was never in the right place at the right time.

He remained at his desk for a while longer, shuffling papers that he couldn’t concentrate on. Finally he arose and went into the bedroom so that he wouldn’t disturb Marisa with his call to New York.

IV

Isabelle didn’t even have time to finish parking before Jilly had come down from her Yoors Street studio and was out on the pavement to meet her. She was wearing her usual jeans and scuffed brown construction boots, but Isabelle didn’t recognize the oversized sweater. It was a deep yellowish-orange, which made Jilly’s blue eyes seem a more startling blue than normal. When Isabelle stepped out of the Jeep, Jilly bounced up to her and gave her a big hug.

“It’s so great to see you!”

“You, too,” Isabelle said, returning the hug.

Stepping back, Jilly surveyed the contents of Isabelle’s Jeep. The backseat and storage compartment was stuffed with a tall pile of boxes and suitcases and various sacks and bags, while on the passenger’s seat was a woven straw cat carrier from which Rubens watched the proceedings with a mournful expression. Jilly went around to the other side of the car and opened the passenger’s door.

“Poor fella,” she said, crouching by the front of the cage and poking her finger through the mesh to scratch his nose. Once Rubens looked a little more settled she stood up and surveyed the back of the Jeep again. “Boy, you really were serious about staying awhile.”

“You know me. I always bring too much.”

“I think it’s called being prepared,” Jilly said dubiously.

Isabelle laughed. “Or something.”

“So do you want to come up for some tea, or would you like to go check out your new studio?”

“They had room at Job Coeur?”

Jilly nodded. “Third floor, with a huge bay window overlooking the river.”

“Who’d you have to kill to get that?”

“Nothing so drastic. The renovating of the top floor was only just finished this week, so they hadn’t even started renting space yet. The ad’s not going into the paper until tomorrow.”

Knowing that she at least had a place of her own, a weight lifted inside Isabelle. She’d been nervous the whole drive in, not sure quite what was waiting for her in the city. She’d never been very good at depending on the kindness of others for a place to stay. But now, with a studio found, and buoyed by Jilly’s infectious enthusiasm, her own excitement finally began to grow.

“Let’s go see it,” Isabelle said. “We can always have tea in one of those cafes on the ground floor.”

Jilly grinned. “I thought you’d say that,” she said, “so I already locked up before I came down.” She picked up Rubens’s carrier and slipped into the seat, perching the case on her knee. “Ready when you are.”

Isabelle shook her head in amusement. She always forgot how spontaneous Jilly was. The small artist was a witch’s brew of energy and wide-ranging interests, bubbling away in a cauldron and constantly spilling over to splatter anyone standing in the nearby vicinity. When Jilly had you in tow, everything took on new meaning. The ordinary was transformed into the extraordinary, the odd or unusual became positively exotic.

“Do they have parking?” she asked as she slipped behind the wheel on the driver’s side.

“‘Fraid not. You’ll have to park on the street. But you can get a permit if you’ve got the patience to wade through an afternoon or so of City Hall bureaucracy.”

“What? You’re not on a first-name basis with whoever’s in charge?”

“Well,” Jilly said. “Now that you mention it, Sue’s got an office on the second floor. Maybe she could help us.”

“I was kidding,” Isabelle told her.

Jilly smiled. “I knew that. But you should still give Sue a call. Do you know how to get there?” she added as Isabelle pulled away from the curb. “It hasn’t been that long.”

Jilly shrugged and settled back into her seat to fuss with Rubens through the mesh of his carrying case while Isabelle maneuvered them through the thickening afternoon traffic.

“You’re going to love the big city, old fella,” Jilly told Rubens. “There must be hundreds of lady cats just waiting for a handsome tom like you to come courting.”

“Oh please.”

Jilly shot Isabelle a quick grin. “Well he’s got to have something to make up for being uprooted from house and home the way he has.”

“It’s only for a few months.”

“People months,” Jilly corrected. “But how long is that in cat months?”

“This is true,” Isabelle said.

V

The offices of the Newford Children’s Foundation were situated in a building not nearly so prepossessing as one might imagine from its name, taking up only the ground floor of an old Edwardian-style house in Lower Crowsea. The outside of the house bore little resemblance to the blueprint from which it had been constructed. The original architectural lines were blurred with the addition of various porches and skylights, a sunroom along one side wall, the wall on the other side half-covered in ivy. Inside, it was changed as well. The front foyer led into a waiting room that had once been a parlor, while the remaining rooms on the ground floor had been converted into offices. Only the original kitchen at the rear remained as it had been, still overlooking a postage stamp of a backyard.