Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

His boots hammered the cobblestones as he chased her, seemingly unaware that as he labored to run the balloons were slipping from his hand and floating off.

She outdistanced him easily, her bare feet splashing through puddles, her hair flying. She passed a fire-eater who blew a flaming kiss in her direction, and a contortionist bent in a diving helmet that trailed cut lines, his voice echoing from inside: “You looks like a girlie needs a good hosing!”

The sea whumped the seawall with the reverberation of kettledrums.

She heard a tarantella before she saw the hurdy-gurdy man. His mascot—part monkey, part spider—danced, straining, at the end of a golden chain.

“Give a coin for Jocko’s cup, jailbait, or else a kiss you must give up,” the hurdy-gurdy man said. When she didn’t stop, he released the golden chain. And though Jocko on his eight muscular legs accelerated as the balloon man could not, she was older now, and faster, and he couldn’t run her down.

Waves whumped in from a horizon the gray of blue jays. A mica haze of atomized ocean hung above slick cobblestones. Rolling thunder roiled the whitecaps, the periscopes and shark fins and sounding flukes. When she came to a brimming horse trough, she stopped as if to drink, and doubled over, a stitch in her side.

A man with hound eyes, a hawk nose, a military mustache, tarnished hair, and a drooping gut smiled at her from the entrance to a shop whose doorposts were white plaster goddesses. He held a riding crop as one might a fly swatter. The goddesses were crisscrossed with bloody welts that presumably had been horseflies. Each time his hand rose to smooth his mustache, a goddess flinched.

“Do you train horses, sir?” she asked.

“Something better, young lady,” he said. “I’ve a unicorn prances on your palm. A ballerina balances on his horn. Wind him and a tune makes her spin. Come inside before the storm and hear my whimsical collection from olden times the wide world over—ballerinas, gypsies, odalisques, nymphs. One has your name on it, perhaps.”

“I’m afraid, sir, I don’t have so much as a coin.”

“Oh, it will be my gift to you.”

“Don’t go in,” an old man in dark glasses and a crushed green hat whispered, as he pushed his piled dray past.

“But a storm is near and this kind sir has offered to show me his collection of music boxes.”

“Years will pass and you won’t come back out of his shop still yourself.”

She glanced at the man in the doorway of his shop. He smiled and beckoned with his riding crop.

“Where did you get all those umbrellas?” she asked the man with the dray.

“I find them discarded, or maybe they find me—blown inside out, twisted, mildewed, lost, forgotten in pubs, left behind on beaches. Gamps, brollys, bumbershoots, parasols—some for rain, others for sun. I mend them.”

The weight of the first plip of rain on the surface of the trough made it brim into a waterfall that rilled along the gutters. Rats chirped from the swirling sewers and scurried toward the white wooden belfry that overlooked the docks. Its carillon pealed helter-skelter in gusts off the sea.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “a downpour is coming.”

“Each is beautiful in its own way,” the umbrella mender said. “Some are silk and some are canvas, but all are made of shadow. Don’t be afraid. Sit and I’ll push us along.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Why, on a day like this to the beach, of course.”

Lightning unspooled along the ocean, the gutters, the lenses of the umbrella mender’s glasses. A jagged bolt blistered the belfry. Bats sailed out, burning like heretics.

“This one’s my favorite,” he said, pausing to free a beach umbrella from the pile. “Found it washed ashore just yesterday. Who knows how long it’s been at sea or from where it drifted. Its faded stripes are lovely still. And look at the lettering: Ombra. Italian, maybe? If it can support the golden weight of summer, don’t worry about a thunderstorm. And when it opens, don’t let the clowns surprise you.”

“Clowns?” she asked.

“Or the jugglers or the acrobats. I think you’ll like the beautiful bareback rider. That trough back there is for her horse.”

“But how can all that be?”

“Why, my sweet girl, has no one ever told you, every umbrella is a big top?”

7

O look at the moon tonight. Look at the moon, Earth’s O in the sky.

O all the spirits of love that wander by. O presences.

O silver face of night, you saw me standing alone. O soft embalmer of the still midnight, O somber soul unsleeping, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. O shades of night—vast, veiled, inexpressible. O orb that broods above the troubled sea of mind. O mysterious priest! O wondrous singer! O soft self-wounding pelican. O well for the fisherman’s boy who rides the dolphin. O ethereal rhetoric, O hidden heart, O dark swells that rock a helpless soul. O wave god who broke through me. O I heard someone whisper please adore me. O Attic shape! O boat of stars, O black sail, O remember that my life is wind. This is thy hour O Soul, the free flight into the wordless …

Look at the moon tonight.

O look at the moon.

“What if I were to vanish?”

“Vanish? Under what circumstances?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You mean, like— poof! —suddenly you’re not there?”

“I’m not there.”

“But there’s always a reason, or at least a context. You suddenly moved away in the middle of the night? But why? Were you kidnapped? Abducted by aliens? An extraordinary rendition by the CIA? Did you fall down a rabbit hole? Was it amnesia? Vanishing cream? Did you meet someone else? Was there a note—maybe in invisible ink—an impersonal e-mail, a message on my answering machine saying, ‘Goodbye’s too good a word, babe, don’t worry, ciao ’? Should I show up at the Department of Missing Persons—is there really such a department? Or by ‘vanish’ do you mean that all trace of you would be wiped from my memory?”

“Say I met someone else.”

“Well, see, that’s a different question.”

“You don’t have to answer that one. I saw the answer in your eyes. They’re more honest than you are.”

“Where’d you come up with this?”

“I heard it in a movie.”

“What movie? Certainly not The Vanishing .”

“It was a western.”

“Clint Eastwood? Duke Wayne? Roy Rogers?”

“Kevin Costner.”

“Costner a cowboy? I hope it was better than Dances with Wolves when he went Native American. Pauline Kael said in her review that Kevin Costner had feathers not only in his hair but in his head.”

“It wasn’t Kevin Costner per se. It was Charley something, the character Kevin Costner plays, who gets asked the question—by Annette Bening.”

“No, it wasn’t Charley something. Characters in American movies are only poor excuses to watch movie stars. Can you remember the name of any of the characters Marilyn Monroe played? They’re all Marilyn Monroe. Charlton Heston isn’t Moses, Moses is Charlton Heston.”

“Answer the question.”

“First, you have to tell me if you want me to answer it as if we’re in some movie. I don’t know who’s starring as us or what cynical hack wrote our dialogue, and that would be important because if Ceil and Ned are in an Ingmar Bergman Swedish cowboy film, then Ned’s answer is going to be different than if, say, Quentin Tarantino is directing.”

“You’re stalling.”

“Because a question about vanishing is easy to answer in a movie where the good guys always win. If we’re in a western I reckon I’d say, ‘If you vanished, ma’am, I’d mount my horse and ride after you to the ends of the earth. I’d ride to the silver mountains of the moon and back, gunning down Injuns and other swarthy Third World desperadoes until I found you again and we galloped off into a Technicolor sunset.’”