So it’s not important where the angel came from, or how she broke her wing. Only that she was there for Jean to find.
2
I’m not saying the city was perfect back then, but it was safer. There were still jobs to be had, and every neighborhood had its own sense of community. The streets and alleyways were swept clean on a regular basis, and it actually made a difference. There was crime, but its reporting was met with shock rather than a shrug. The state sanatoriums had yet to release the majority of their inmates and put them out onto the street—a seeding of homelessness that spread in the streets the way weeds will in an untended garden. Some might say it was a different world entirely through which Jean Etoile made his way home that autumn day.
Jean was a nondescript individual, neither short nor tall, neither ugly nor handsome; the sort of man you might pass on the street even now and never give a second glance: plain grey suit, white shirt and dark tie, briefcase in hand. Brown hair and eyes, with a pleasant smile, though he showed it rarely. When he passed the time of day with his neighbors, he spoke of the weather, of baseball scores and, yes, wasn’t it a pity about old Mrs. Rather down the street, may she rest in peace. Not at all the sort of person one would imagine might bring home a prostitute to live with him in his apartment.
To be fair, Jean didn’t know for certain that Candida was a prostitute. It was merely the assumption he’d made when he went to put out his garbage the night before and found her hiding by the back steps of his apartment building in Lower Foxville.
Jean had a secret addiction to mystery and pulp novels— stories by Mickey Spillane, Richard S. Prather, Lionel White and the like; stories about tough criminals and tougher cops, hard-boiled PIs and big-hearted hookers—so he felt he knew more than most about the dark side of the city, the side ruled by the night, with its wet streets and neon lights, deals going down in alleyways and pimps running their women, broad-shouldered men with guns under their sportsjackets. And in their hearts, the need to see justice served. When he saw such a beautiful woman in her tight, short dress and stiletto heels, eyelids dark with shadow, rouged cheeks and cherry-red lips, hiding there by his back steps, of all places, he knew she was on the run. Knew she needed help. And while he had neither broad shoulders nor a gun, he did carry in his heart a need to see justice done. It was why the books appealed to him in the first place.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said when she realized he had seen her. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I’m not frightened.”
Jean was too much the gentleman to point out that her hands were trembling so much that she had to make an effort to hold them still on her lap. Instead he asked, “What’s your name?”
“Candida.”
Jean nodded. Of course. An exotic given name—if it even was her own—and no surname. This was how the stories always started.
“Do you need some help?” he asked.
“I need a place to stay.”
Jean nodded again. He put his paper bag full of garbage into the bin beside the steps, then turned back to her. She was sitting on the steps now, back straight, hands still clasped together on her lap.
“I’ve got an extra bed,” he said. “You can use it for as long as you need.”
“Really? You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you need help. Isn’t that enough?”
Candida gave him a long considering look, then smiled and followed him up the steps to his apartment.
3
Needless to say, Jean had a good heart. If Candida hadn’t been beautiful, or even a woman, he would still have offered his help. And it was, as I said, a more innocent time. But his mystery novels about the seamier side of life were no more real than the protagonists after which he was now modeling his actions. Private detectives were rarely larger than life, and even more rarely solved murder investigations that had left the police baffled—it was as true then as it is now. Nor were real prostitutes the unblemished beauties that could be found on the covers of those same pulp novels. Walking the streets leaves scars, as many visible as hidden.
Jean’s secret passion was misled, as romantic as a fairy tale. By such token, Candida might well have been something more exotic still: A faerie, perhaps, strayed from some enchanted forest glen. Or a wounded angel, fallen from heaven. For she had wings. Hidden from ordinary sight, it’s true, but she did have them. When she rose to follow him up the apartment steps, they could be seen lifting from her shoulderblades, one a majestic sweep of feathers as imagined by da Vinci, or Manet; the other broken, hanging limp.
They could be seen, if you had more than ordinary sight. Or you might see only what you expected to see, what you wished to see. Jean saw a prostitute on the run, in trouble with the law, or with her pimp; perhaps both. Standing at her kitchen window, Hannah Silverstein looked up from her sinkful of dishes to see her neighbor befriend a pretty girl in a pink sweater and a modest skirt that hung just below her knees. The stranger had thick chestnut hair falling free to her shoulders, eyes that seemed as luminous as moonlight, and Hannah was happy for Jean because she had always thought of him as such a nice, pleasant man, but too old at twenty-seven to be living on his own. Too lonely. It was time he met himself a nice girl like this and settled down.
That was what Hannah saw, but then Hannah had her own preconceptions concerning what she expected to see in the world. She once met the great god Pan at the reception following Janet Carney’s wedding and thought him a quaint little man who had imbibed perhaps too much wedding cheer.
“Pan is dead,” he told her, lifting his glass to clink its rim against hers. “Long live Pan.”
But she thought he’d said, “What a spread—long live Jan.”
Perhaps it was his accent. Or perhaps, as many of us will, she used a similar filter to listen to him as the one through which she viewed the world.
4
Jean’s own perception of his houseguest changed as he came to know Candida. That first autumn day when he returned home from work, not even expecting her to be in his apartment anymore, she had already undergone a slight alteration from the woman he remembered meeting the previous night. She was still sexy, he could still picture her gracing the cover of an issue of Spicy Detective Stories, but she no longer seemed cheap, her sexiness was no longer so blatant. She must have gone out while he was at work, he thought, for while she hadn’t even been carrying a purse last night, today the tight dress and heels were gone, the makeup far more subdued. She wore, instead, a loose cotton dress with a flower print more suitable to summer than the fall.
“You look different,” he said.
“So do you.”
It was true. Last night he’d been wearing casual slacks and a short-sleeved polo shirt. But the difference seemed to run deeper in her—beyond a mere change in clothing.
“That’s not what I meant,” he began.
He was going to go on to tell her that he was dressed for work now, while last night he hadn’t been, that he had a chest of drawers and closet full of different clothes into which he could change, while she’d come into his apartment with only what she was wearing, nothing more. But then he smelled the air.
“You made dinner,” he said, unable to hide his delight. The last time he’d come home to dinner was when he was still living with his parents, years ago. He looked in the oven, his smile broadening. “Shepherd’s pie. It’s my favorite.”
“I know.”
And Jean forgot the anomaly of her wardrobe, never thought to ask how she might know his favorite dinner. It was as though someone had found the room in his mind that housed his curiosity and simply turned off the light and closed the door quietly behind them as they left. The riddles remained, but his questions were gone, just like that.
5
In older, more superstitious days, it might have been said that Candida had bewitched him, for theirs was a whirlwind romance—especially at that time, in that community. They met in September, but the odd circumstances
of that meeting had been forgotten. They were married in January, a quiet civil ceremony, because neither had any other family. They had their first and only child late the next September and named her Sophie.
Jean didn’t read his detective novels and magazines anymore—he didn’t need other stories. At night when they lay in bed, Candida would tell him hers. She had an impossible storehouse of tales tucked away behind her eyes; like Scheherazade, she had so many, she never had to repeat one. In response, Jean felt an unfamiliar stirring in his own mind, a need to communicate his love for his wife and their child, a desire to share with them dreams that were his own, Instead of the fantasies he had borrowed from his books and magazines.
Once he had carried a secret life inside him, an ongoing adventure in which he was the tall man in the trenchcoat with the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes, who acted when others stood by helpless, to whom the hurt and lost were drawn that he might find them justice, to whom men looked with respect and women with desire. Now the hat and trenchcoat were put aside. Now he had a child who had offered him her unconditional love from the moment he first saw her in the hospital. Now he had a wife who was not only his partner and his lover, but also his best friend. His life was so complete that he had no need for that old secret life.
6
But there was still something unusual about Candida, even if Jean could no longer see it. Though he wasn’t alone in that particular blindness, for no one did—not in their circle of friends, not in the neighborhood, though no one ever did remember her quite the same. To some she was tall, to others she was of medium height. To some she had a classical beauty, others thought her a little plain. Some, when they looked at her, marveled at how she retained an unaffected girlishness, belying her motherhood and maturity; others were reminded of their mothers, or their grandmothers.
She was a charming conversationalist, and an even better listener, but it was only to Jean that she told her stories; stories, and cryptic remarks to which Jean never gave much thought until much later.
Because he’d been bewitched, some would say.
7
“Where does she go when she sleeps?” Candida murmured one evening, leaning on the windowsill in their bedroom, looking out at the moon where it hung above the brown-stones of Upper Foxville. “Does she go into another world? Or does she only dream?”
She often watched the moon, noting its phases, her eyes not so much reflecting the light as absorbing it. But that night Jean wasn’t looking at her. He sat on the bed, giving Sophie her bottle, and thought Candida spoke of the baby.
“If she’s dreaming,” he said, “I hope they’re sweet dreams.”
“Oh yes,” Candida said, still looking at the moon. “We can only hope they’re so sweet as mine.”
Another time she told him, “If I should ever go, it won’t be for lack of loving you—not you, not Sophie. It will be because I am called away. It will be because I will have no choice.”
Jean thought she spoke of her death. He didn’t like to consider death, little say speak of it. He held her closer to him.
“Don’t even think about it,” he told her.
He felt her sigh.
“Sometimes I can think of nothing else.”
9
One time Jean asked her how she knew so many stories, and she replied that they came from her dreams.
“We have to believe in our dreams,” she said, “because without them we are nothing. Dreams are how we make sense of the world, but they’re also how we remember it. When your dreams are real—if only to you—when you believe in them and make them a part of the story that is your life, then anything is possible. You can go anywhere, be anyone, mend any hurt—even a broken wing.”
“A broken wing?” Jean replied, puzzled.
“We fly in our dreams. But if we break a wing, we have to work that much harder to keep them real, or they fade away.” She gave him a sad smile. “But the trouble is, sometimes we heal ourselves so well that we go away all the same.”
Jean shook his head. “You’re not making sense tonight.”
“Just promise me you’ll believe in your dreams. That you’ll teach Sophie to believe in hers.”
“But—”
“Promise me.”
For a moment Jean felt as though he didn’t know the woman lying in bed beside him. A sliver of moonlight came in through the window, casting strange shadows across Candida’s face, reshaping the familiar planes and contours into those of a stranger.
“It’s important, Jean. I need to be able to remember this.”
“I… promise,” he said slowly.
She moved out of the moonlight and the familiar features all fell back into place. The smile that touched her lips was warm and loving.
“When we look back on these days,” she said, “we’ll remember them as mythic times.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s as though we stand in the dark of the moon and anything is possible. We’re hidden from the sun’s light, from anything that might try to remind us that we only borrow these lives we live, we don’t own them.”
“If we don’t own our lives,” Jean asked, “then who does?”
“The people we might become if we stop believing in our dreams.”
10
Years later, Jean had trouble remembering all the stories Candida had told him. When he tried to tell them to Sophie, he got them mixed up, transposing this beginning to that ending, the characters of this story into that one, until finally he gave up and read her stories out of books the way other parents did. But he never forgot to remind her to believe in her dreams.
11
Candida went to the store to get some milk one evening, almost three years to the day that they had first met on the back steps of the brownstone, and she never came back, leaving Jean’s life as mysteriously as she’d first come into it. He remembered looking at her as she turned back from the doorway to ask if there was anything else she should pick up, and being astounded at the vision he beheld. For one long glorious moment he imagined he saw her bathed in a nimbus of radiant light that shone from her every pore, gold as honey, bright as flames. Wings rose up behind her, huge magnificent feathered wings, each with a span twice her height.
The vision held, one moment, another, and then it was gone, and it was Candida standing there in the doorway, the Candida he’d married and who was the mother of their child. But it was that vision of her that he remembered—as an angel, a faerie, a shaft of moonlight, a gift of wonder that had strayed into his world from some nevernever, drawn by his need, or perhaps her own, to weave the strands of her dreams with his, his with hers. Their time together was too short, far too short, but at least they had had that time together. That was what he reminded himself whenever despair threatened to overwhelm him. The memories…and Sophie… were all that enabled him to carry on.
He remembered Candida as others remember the myths of their ancestors, and he taught their daughter to believe in her dreams. Because in time he came to understand what Candida had meant when she told him that stories begin in dreams and without the stories that we dream, we five someone else’s life rather than our own. It wasn’t something he realized all at once; instead, he happened upon the fragments of the puzzle, one piece at a time, finding them in the spaces that lay between his memories and his dreams, until one day, when he was sitting alone on the back steps of his apartment building after having put Sophie to bed, the puzzle pieces all came together and he understood.
He smiled then, one of his rare smiles, as sad as it was sweet, but no one was there to see. There were only the stories, the tangled skein of the city’s stories, waiting to be shaped by our dreams.
THE POCHADE BOX
The essential thing in art
cannot be explained.
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1
—What’s it like when you’re dead?
—You still dream.
2
&nbs
p; One grey September day, Jilly Coppercorn decided to try to break herself of a bad habit she’d managed to acquire over the years. She’d been working on increasingly larger canvases, which was fine, she had no problem with that, but in the process she’d let herself get so finicky that the clarity of her work was getting bogged down with unnecessary detail. She stood back to look at the bewildering complexity of her latest work-in-progress and realized that, despite the near-perfect rendering of the individual sections, the painting as a whole made no sense whatsoever.
What was the point in developing an ideal composition, she thought, when the detailing eventually came to overwhelm the main point of interest to such an extent that it was subservient to all the fussy specifics around it? The viewer’s eye, it was plain, could only become confused as it traveled about the canvas trying to find a point of reference amidst the barrage of detail. All she was going to succeed in doing with work such as this was make the viewer look away and walk over to the next piece hanging on the gallery wall, for relief.
So that day she stopped working in the studio, where the temptation to use big canvases would remain a constant niggle in the back of her head. Instead she took to painting on the street, using her pochade box as a studio. It held everything she needed: six tubes of paint for her limited palette, rag, tissues, a turp can, and a couple of brushes with the handles cut down so that they’d fit into the box. Out on the street, she could hold the box with one hand as though it were a palette, the thumb of her left hand poking up through a small hole in the bottom of the box. When the box was open, the lid formed an easel for the small six-by-eight-inch panels she painted. She used the box’s tray for her palette, and, to make sure she didn’t get too precious, the smallest brush she took with her was a number 8 oxhair filbert. Her only other equipment was a small drying box to carry her panels and a camp stool that folded flat and could be hung on her shoulder by its strap.
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