Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

But when they returned to the coach house, nothing went quite the way Izzy had planned. The painting was still there, looking even better than Izzy had remembered it, and its numena had finally crossed over and come to the studio, but instead of the bold-as-brass gamine Izzy remembered from Kathy’s story, the wild girl lay on the floor in a corner of the studio, curled up into a fetal position and moaning softly.

“Oh, no!” Izzy cried. “Something went wrong.”

Horrible visions raced through her mind. Cosette must have been hurt as she crossed over. Or she was somehow incomplete—there was enough of whatever it was that animated the numena present to allow her to make the crossing, but not enough that she could survive here. It must have been because of how the painting was done, Izzy realized, berating herself for not sticking to her tried-and-true method of painting.

She dashed across the studio to where Cosette lay.

“There’s a blanket under the recamier,” she called to Rosalind, but when she turned to see if Rosalind was getting it, she found the other woman merely standing by the door, shaking her head, a smile on her lips.

“Rosalind!” Izzy cried.

“She’s not sick,” Rosalind said. “She’s drunk.”

“Drunk?”

Rosalind pointed to what Izzy hadn’t noticed before: an empty wine botde lay on its side a few feet from where Cosette lay. It had been a present from Alan that Izzy had been planning to bring home. A full bottle of red wine. All gone now.

“But you don’t drink or eat,” Izzy said.

Rosalind shook her head. “No, it’s that we don’t have to. But it appears that our young friend arrived very thirsty indeed.”

She crossed the room and knelt down beside Cosette, lifting the girl’s head onto her lap. With a corner of her mantle, she wiped Cosette’s brow. Cosette looked up at her.

“Hello,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Izzy ran to get a pail, but she was too late.

They cleaned Cosette up and laid her out on the recamier, where she complained that the room wouldn’t stop moving. After they scrubbed the floor and washed out Rosalind’s mantle, they each pulled a chair over to where Cosette lay.

“I take it that this is the surprise,” Rosalind said.

Izzy gave a glum nod. “I guess I blew it. It’s just that you said you were looking for someone and I remembered Kathy telling me once how you and Cosette would be so good for each other. So I thought I’d bring her across to surprise you, because I was sure she was who you were looking for. Kathy said you two had a story that you’d be in together, but that she couldn’t tell it. You’d have to tell it yourselves

....”

Izzy’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.

Rosalind shook her head. “Don’t be. I was looking for her—I simply didn’t realize it until you brought her across.”

“But ...” Izzy waved a vague hand around the studio, which was meant to include the empty wine bottle, Cosette getting so drunk, her getting sick on Rosalind’s lap.

“We are who we are,” Rosalind said, smiling. “And I think Cosette and I are going to get along just fine.”

They both returned their attention to the occupant of the recamier. Cosette nodded her head slightly in agreement. She sat up a little and tried to smile, but then had to put her hand to her mouth, her eyes going wide. Izzy ran to get the pail again.

XI

September 1977

By the time Alan published Kathy’s first collection he already had two books under his belt and had worked out most of the kinks involved to make a successful promotion for a book. He sent out a mass of review copies, not just to the regional papers, but to selected reviewers across the country. For the launch, he booked Feeney’s Kitchen, one of the folk clubs that they all used to hang out at when they were going to Butler U., and hired Amy Scallan’s band Marrow-bones to handle the musical honors. By the time Izzy arrived, the little club was full of Kathy’s friends, the press and all sorts of various hangers-on who’d managed to get in. Marrowbones was playing a rollicking set of Irish reels and the free bar was doing a booming business.

Izzy paused in the doorway of the club, a little taken aback at the bombardment of sound and people. Finishing up the last few pieces for a new show that was due to be hung in a couple of weeks, she’d been spending sixteen-hour days at the studio, even sleeping there a couple of nights. The noise and bustle had her blinking like a mole, and she almost left. But then she spotted Kathy looking oddly wistful at the far end of the long room and slowly made her way through the crowd.

“You’re supposed to be happy,” she told Kathy when she finally had her to herself for a moment.

“I know. But I can’t help but feel as though I’ve lost my innocence now. Every time I sat down to write up to this point, I wrote for me. It was me telling stories to myself on paper and publication was secondary. But now ... now I can’t help but feel that whenever I start to write I’ll have this invisible audience in my mind, hanging on to my every word. Weighing them, judging them, looking for hidden meanings.”

“Welcome to the world of criticism.”

“That’s not it,” Kathy said. “I’m used to being criticized. It’s not like I haven’t had stories appear in magazines and anthologies and been the brunt of one or two attacks by someone who’s not even interested in my work—they just have an axe to grind. But this is going to be different. It’s the scale of it that freaks me.

Izzy smiled. “I don’t mean to bring you down, Kathy, but Alan’s only published three thousand copies of the book.”

“You know what I mean.”

Izzy thought about her own shows and slowly nodded. Success, even on the small scale that she was having, had already made her more self-conscious when she approached her easel. She tried to ignore it, and she certainly didn’t work for that invisible audience, but she was still aware of its existence. She still knew that, so long as she kept doing shows, her paintings didn’t only belong to her anymore—they also belonged to whoever happened to come to the show. Whoever saw a reproduction of one. Whoever bought an original.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I do.”

“Alan told me tonight that there’s all this interest in the paperback rights for the book,” Kathy went on. “And we’re not talking chicken feed, ma belle Izzy. These people are offering serious money—like six-figure-advances kind of money.”

Izzy’s eyes went wide. “Wow. But that’s good, isn’t it?”

“I suppose. I know just what I’d do with the money, too.”

Kathy didn’t have to explain. They’d had any number of late-night conversations about Kathy’s dream to found an organization devoted to troubled kids—a place that didn’t feed them religion in exchange for its help, or try to force the kids back into the same awful family situations that had driven them out onto the street in the first place. “We should be able to choose our families,” Kathy often said,

“the same way we choose our friends. The round peg is never going to fit in the square hole—it doesn’t matter how much you try to force it.”

“You’re just going to have to teach yourself to ignore that invisible audience,” Izzy said. “Just remember this: it doesn’t matter how big it gets, they still don’t get to see what you’re working on until you’re ready to show it to them.”

“But I’m afraid that I’ll start to try to second-guess them,” Kathy said. “That I’ll tell the kind of stories that I think they want to hear, instead of what I want to tell.”