Moonlight and Vines

by Charles de Lint

  I pause to light a cigarette.

  I remember something another friend of mine said to me once. She told me she was attracted to lesbianism, but “It’s not because I have the hots for another woman or anything,” she confided. “What I’m attracted to is the kind of freedom the word implies. These women don’t seem to worry so much about what everybody else is thinking; they just do what they think is right.”

  And that makes me think of what Sarah said about lesbian sex. “It’s soft and slippery and it just never ends. There’s no hard-on to worry about and one orgasm leads to the next. Who wants a guy, if that’s what you get to do all day?”

  As I light my cigarette, I see yet another woman watching me with interest from across the street. She looks as straight as I am, but I can tell she’s getting ready to come over and chat. Before she crosses the street, I walk briskly on, trailing cigarette smoke.

  No, I decide. I like guys. That’s not going to change. I want my sexual partner to be tender, but I want him to have a hard-on, too. It’s just the way Peter treated me that’s got me all screwed up.

  So . . . live and let live.

  I catch a cab and have it drop me off in the Combat Zone. It’s only a half block to Chic Cheeks from where the cab lets me out. When I get to the strip club, I stand in front of it for a long moment, frowning at the advertising posters and thinking about what I’ve been told.

  What about my client? Is she a recruiter? I think of what the woman back at the club called her—a leatherdyke—and how she looked when she came into my office, and I don’t know which is the mask. And how about all this talk about Faerie and magic and shit?

  What was that all about?

  I turn down the alleyway that runs alongside the club.

  I’d pack it all in right now, except I’ve come this far and really, what else am I going to do? Go home and obsess about Peter? Or maybe go home and think too much about what I’ve seen tonight?

  I don’t have any trouble getting in through the side door—the bouncers are all out front. From the wings of the stage I watch a woman dressed like Alice in Wonderland go through her routine. She’s got blonde hair—same cut as mine—but I recognize her, even with the blonde wig. She looks enough like me from a distance that I’d be amused, if I didn’t feel a little sick. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” is blasting from the sound system. She’s playing the little girl, like she’s twelve years old, and the freaks in the audience are lapping it up.

  I find myself wishing I was back on Gracie Street. They’re selling sex as blatantly there, but they’re sure as hell not pandering to pedophiles.

  I watch a little longer. The dancer’s removed her blouse now. When she turns, I see the heartshaped pendant.

  I go have a smoke while she finishes her act.

  The dressing room’s about what you’d expect in a dive like this. There’s not even a door to allow the women some privacy. Anybody walking by backstage can stand in the doorway like I am and check things out. Some of the women are putting on costumes, or simply trying to relax. Some are smoking cigarettes, drinking. I can smell the joint that one of them’s lit up.

  My client’s girlfriend has removed her blonde wig. She’s dressed in street clothes now—jeans and a T-shirt—and is leaning close to a mirror adjusting her makeup.

  I’d be wanting to take a shower after doing a “show” like that.

  I wait until she’s leaving the room. As she comes up to me, I step aside to let her go by, then touch her arm.

  “Can I talk to you for a moment?” I ask.

  “Sure. What’s it about?”

  I thought we could go for a coffee, but she’s only got forty-five minutes until her next show so we sit on the steps of the alleyway entrance. We’ve both got cigarettes going. The alleyway’s dark, but a slice of light from the door behind us cuts through the darkness, illuminating litter, the brick wall of the building on the other side of the alleyway, the photo that I’ve passed over to the dancer.

  “You have to understand,” she says. “I was never really into her scene. I mean, I swing both ways, but I’m not into pain. Or maybe I should say, my relationships are always painful, but it’s not something I go looking for. It’s not what I want. It just seems to happen. But with her . . .”

  I nod encouragingly.

  She shrugs. “The whips and the piercings and all that shit, it was just too much.” She pauses for a beat, then adds, “Do you know anything about that kind of scene?”

  “Not really.”

  “You really are their slave,” she tells me. “You cook, you clean, you do the laundry—all for free. You don’t get beaten as a punishment—that’s how they reward you. You get to feeling that the worst thing that can happen is you’ll be ignored. You start to crave the bondage and the fisting and the whips.”

  I watch her as she talks. Her expression is that of one both attracted and repulsed by what she’s discussing.

  “See,” she goes on, “the thing is, pain brings on an endorphin high. You know it’s just a biochemical thing, you’re not attracted to being hurt, but after a while you can’t stop craving it. You’ll be a slave, if that’s what it takes.”

  She jerks a thumb back toward the door of the club. “What did you think of the scene in there?”

  “It made me feel a little sick,” I tell her.

  “Me, too. But at the same time it makes me feel strong. Because when I’m up there on the stage, I’m in control. I feel like they’re my slaves and I could make them do anything I want.”

  I give her a sad look. “But it’s not really true, is it?”

  “No,” she says with a humorless smile. “But it’s what made me strong enough to get out of her grip. Don’t get me wrong,” she adds. “I’m not saying the women in the S&M scene shouldn’t be doing what they want to do. It’s just not for me.”

  I nod. “But you didn’t know what you were getting into until it was too late. That’s not right, either. Don’t you think it should be consensual?”

  Her expression when she replies is unreadable, distant. “The only thing I didn’t know when I got into that scene was that I’d fall in love with her as hard as I did. But I should have known. I always do. I always fall in love with the ones that’ll hurt me the most.”

  We sit there and smoke in silence for a few moments.

  “So what does she want from me?” she asks finally. “Why did she send you out to look for me?”

  “She just wants the pendant back.”

  The dancer reaches up and closes her hand around it.

  “I figured as much,” she says. “That’s why I took it. It’s like it was the only thing she really seemed to care about. If I couldn’t get her to care for me, then at least I’d have something that she does care about.”

  She opens her hand and looks down at the pendant.

  “If I give it back to her,” she says, “I’ll have nothing.”

  I nod. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

  She closes her hand around the pendant again and gives it a sharp tug. The chain breaks. Standing up, she drops the pendant into my hand and goes back inside. She doesn’t say anything. Not even goodbye.

  I sit there for a while longer, looking down at the pendant with its broken chain where it lies in the palm of my hand.

  I don’t know what to say either.

  3

  Friday night.

  I’m sitting in my office, looking out the window. It’s raining, turning the streets slick with wet reflections. I’m waiting for my client, but she doesn’t show. On my desk is the pack of cigarettes she left here last night. Beside it is the photo she gave me, the pendant lying on top of the photo with its broken chain.

  I have no reason to worry about her, but I’m uneasy.

  I keep going over what she told me about this business with the pendant. How it was given to her by this Faerie prince. How it doesn’t work for everybody, but when it does it can give the person wearing it seco
nd sight. How it protects the person wearing it from the dark side of Faerie—the ghouls and the goblins and the things that go bump in the night.

  Not that I believe any of it. Not for a moment.

  My gaze leaves the pendant and goes back to the window. It’s still raining.

  But all day long, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that somebody’s watching me. There’s no one thing I can point to with certainty. It’s just a prickling sensation that I feel on the nape of my neck. A sense of movement caught out of the corner of my eye. A kind of intuition . . .

  I light one of the last two cigarettes.

  Or second sight?

  I stand up, picking up the pendant. I can’t wait for her any longer. I’m getting the willies sitting in here on my own. There’s no one in the building except me. And whatever might be watching me . . . .

  I leave the office and cross the street to the bar, holding my trench coat closed with my hand. I’ve got to be around some people. I hate being alone. I think that’s why my relationships always fall apart. I’ve got too much need. I am too intense—just like Peter said. But that’s because when I’m alone, I think too much. My imagination gets carried away with itself. I imagine the worst. I start to believe there really is a burglar lurking about. Some crazed fanatic. A rapist . . . .

  Nasty creatures from fairy tales is a new one for me.

  It’s pretty empty inside. A neighborhood bar with a few serious drinkers, a couple at a table near the back, oblivious to their surroundings, and me. I take a seat at a table by the window. The glass is fogged and streaked with rain, but I’ve cleared a portion of the pane with my hand so that I can look out. There are three beer bottles on my table, all empty. My glass is half full. The pack of cigarettes that I got from my client is beside it, also empty, plus a new fresh pack that has a couple of cigarettes missing. One of them’s burning in the ashtray amidst the butts. My left hand is closed in a fist on the table.

  I give the window another swipe to clear the fog again. I don’t know what I’m looking for. My client? Or the things she’s got me half-believing are out there, invisible to normal sight?

  I open my hand to look at the pendant lying there in the middle of my palm.

  Except maybe I don’t have normal sight anymore. Maybe the pendant’s working for me like it did for her.

  I sigh and have another sip of beer.

  I wish she’d just show up and take this stupid thing away with her.

  All I see in the window is a reflection of my own face, raindrops streaking across the glass.

  I wish I had someone to go home to.

  4

  A week later.

  I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, reconsidering the idea of getting up and facing the day. I’m hung over and my bedroom feels claustrophobic. The room’s small and the view’s not exactly expansive. When I look past the fire escape, all I can see is the brick wall of the building next to mine—about the width of an alley away. My room’s a mess. Clothes on the floor, the bedclothes rumpled, dresser covered with makeup, more clothes, magazines, and books. Ditto, my night table.

  I’m a mess.

  The cops found my business card in her purse, but no identification. That’s why they had me come in to ID her. They didn’t have anybody else and I didn’t bother to mention my client’s ex-girlfriend—not after viewing the body.

  Ari—at least that’s her stage name—took it hard when I went by the club to tell her the next night. I guess she was holding on to broken hopes, pretending that she and the woman she knew as Elise would get back together again—the same way I’ve been pretending Peter will come back.

  I know that, for all our physical frailties, we humans are capable of inflicting incredible amounts of damage on each other, but there’s no way Ari could have killed Elise, so why get her involved?

  Nothing human killed her. The cops are saying she got torn apart by a dog, but I’m not so sure. I keep remembering the way she looked when she was telling me about how the pendant protected her from these creatures she described to me—the ones with knives for fingers and mouths full of barracuda teeth in the middle of their palms.

  I finally get up, have a shower, get dressed. When I wander into my small kitchen it feels just as claustrophobic as my bedroom. I ignore the mess and put the kettle on, but coffee and a cigarette don’t help my mouth taste any better. What I really want is another drink. I haven’t been sober for a week now, because this way I can just put it all down to the booze. I use it as a crutch—the same way I’ve been using cigarettes since that night Elise first came into my office. The cigarettes for Peter, the booze for what happened to Elise.

  I would’ve had nightmares all night, just thinking about what I saw there in the morgue, if I hadn’t had so much to drink before I finally dragged myself home. If I’m drunk, I can pretend she didn’t die the way I can so easily imagine she did, torn apart by some creatures from the dark side of the Brothers Grimm.

  I can pretend they’re not looking for me now.

  I put my coffee mug down on the counter with all the other unwashed dishes and get my jacket from where I tossed it last night. I have to get out of here before my imagination runs too wild.

  I mean, I know it’s crazy. Nasty goblins didn’t kill Elise. It couldn’t have gone down that way. It’s got to be like the cops said, she got attacked by some animal. A pack of feral dogs, ranging out of the Tombs, say.

  When I step outside my apartment building, the sun hurts my eyes. But there’s no one watching me except for the old guy down the street who stares at anybody who’s got breasts, doesn’t matter if they’re no bigger than buttons, or old and sagging and hanging down to your waist.

  But everything still feels different. There are undercurrents that I never sensed before the pendant came into my possession. I can’t begin to explain it. I just know now that there is more to what’s around us than what we can see. Things moving in our peripheral vision. Events. Possibilities. Omens and portents and the stuff of dreams. What I can’t swear to is that they’re necessarily malevolent.

  I think what we call to ourselves is what we expect to see. We’re still not seeing what’s really there—only our perceptions of what we expect could be there. If you were haunted by inner demons and into S&M the way Elise was, then maybe you’d see a faerie world that was beautiful and dangerous. And you’d call the darkness to you, in the same way Elise’s ex-girlfriend told me she was always attracted to those who would treat her the worst, allowing herself to keep falling into abusive relationships even when she knew better.

  Which isn’t to say that it’s Ari’s fault. If you’re beat on all of your life, how can you be expected to gain a sudden change of attitude all by yourself? Confidence and strength accrue in direct proportion to the breaks you get—the help and support that only someone else can give you.

  I guess I’m making it sound as though I’ve suddenly gained this huge boost of confidence myself, but in my own way, I’m just as bad as Ari. She’s still shaking her ass on stage at Chic Cheeks, untouched by her contact with the pendant. She still thinks that stripping gives her some kind of power over the freaks. She’s right on the edge of another bad relationship because she can’t break the cycle.

  And me? I still don’t want to be alone. The focus of my life is still eddying around the fact that Peter left me, that there’s something intrinsically wrong with me, or why would my relationships always fall apart?

  It can’t just be that I get too intense. Love’s supposed to be intense . . . isn’t it?

  And then there’s this business with the pendant.

  I still think something’s watching me. Or somethings. I don’t know if they’re stalking me, or simply curious.

  I end up on the subway, not aware of what I’m doing until it takes me downtown. I get off and head up to street level and the first thing I see is a flower cart. I buy a half-dozen roses from the old man who runs the cart and catch a bus that takes me to the Foxville Ce
metery. The gates loom up above me when I go inside and make my way to Elise’s grave. When I get there, I kneel down and lay the roses on the dirt in front of her marker. It’s just a small gravestone and cost a small fortune that I couldn’t really afford. I had to dig deep into my rainy-day account to pay for it, but I felt she needed something and there was no one else to pitch in. Ari wanted nothing to do with it. I don’t think she’s willing to accept the idea that Elise is even dead.

  My fingers rise to touch the pendant that I’ve taken to wearing. I don’t think it affected Ari at all, but I can’t say the same for myself.

  It’s funny how your whole life can change because of the smallest thing. Like someone walking in through the door of your office . . . . Everything still looks the same, but now I feel like the most common object has a secret history that most people can’t see. The difference between them and me is, they don’t even think about it.

  I’m certain this knowledge killed Elise, but somehow I can’t believe it’s dangerous, in and of itself. The real danger would be to ignore it. The real danger would be to see what your preconceptions have led you to expect, instead of striving to see what really is there.

  I’m not going to make Elise’s mistake.

  I won’t say I’m not nervous. The idea of all these . . . presences around me really creeps me out. But they don’t have to be malevolent, do they? Are hopes always broken?

  Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna. Maybe the world really is an ugly piece of work. But I don’t want to believe that. I want to think I’m breaking a cycle. I think I can look into this unseen world of Faerie the way that friend of mine looked into the lesbian scene. She took from it the image of a strong ideal, someone in control of her own destiny, and it made her stronger. She took the idea of it—the knowledge that it can be done—and that was what let her do it for herself.

  And that’s what I want to do. I want to look into Faerie and know that everything can be different. I want to break the cycle of my old patterns. I want to throw away my crutches and addictions. I want to step into a world where anything is possible—where I can be anything or anybody.