The manager, a brute of a woman, said, “Don’t bother changing into uniform.” When he asked why, she answered, “Customer complaint from last night. You ignored a request so he had to ask twice. That’s once too often and one complaint to many.”
“I don’t remember there being another one,” he said.
She replied, “Precisely.” He started to argue, but the large blank-faced man who escorted unimportant guests out the door when they misbehaved did the same for Julian.
He walked home in a dull panic. Thinking about the night before, he could imagine only one incident that could have produced a complaint. Jack Reynard had snapped his fingers to get Julian’s attention away from Veronessa and Puss. The Fox had been irritated. He had gestured across the gym floor where a three-on-three basketball game was taking place. These were regular, staged events: shirts vs. skins. This time two of the skins were female one was male.
“One of my guests prefers the skins be all boys,” said Reynard.
It took Julian a few long moments to realize this was a command not an idle wish. Only then did he bow and go to find the maitre d’ with the Fox’s orders.
It had cost him his job. He was broke and alone.
Julian had been on the lookout for the next cutting-edge phenomenon since coming to the city. BIG, at the moment, was Crisis Fashion with its respirators built into collars and tops so silken it was impossible to believe they stopped bullets. But its hold was shaky.
Julian was an artist, but he had discovered he was no designer; he lacked both the instinct needed to tell him how far to go and the nerve to go an inch or two farther. Nor could he model clothes to any effect. “Buyers don’t really see you and they certainly don’t see what you’re wearing,” a very thin and bald agent once told him.
No Exit Comedy had been THE thing before Crisis Fashion. It took place in cellars with locked, guarded doors and standup comics with faces like vultures. Patrons, once they found they were not the evening’s entertainment, would laugh with glee and join the comics in lashing out at the ones fated to be the victims of savage ridicule.
Julian had tried to find a place there. But as a comic he wasn’t vicious enough to excite the crowd. And planted among the audience as a victim, he wasn’t strange or vulnerable enough to bring out the crowd’s bloodlust.
“If there’s something you won’t do for a laugh,” a four-hundred pound comedienne told him, “you got nothing to live for in this business.”
There were many things Julian would not do for a laugh. He decided to stick to his art.
The apartment was empty when he returned, which was the only good thing that had happened all day. Julian lay on his futon, put his hands over his eyes, and tried not to cry. He was a failure. His father and stepmother lived in a tiny apartment since they’d lost their house and wouldn’t be happy to see him. But there was nowhere and no one else for him to go back to.
At various times during the year he had shared this apartment, Julian had brief, separate affairs with both the waitress/composer and the pedicab driver/dancer. But the waitress didn’t really go for guys and the driver wasn’t all that gay. It turned out the tour guide/filmmaker could happily accommodate both of them. They formed an ensemble and tended to ignore Julian.
He was twenty-three with no present and no future. He wasn’t asleep, so it was in another of the daydream/visions that he saw a young guy about his age wearing knee pants and a wide, battered hat. He looked dumb and a bit confused. From a dimly remembered art history class, Julian guessed the historical period as maybe seventeenth century.
Then a voice right with him in the apartment said, “The young man who imagined himself to be my owner.” Julian focused his eyes and saw Puss before him, standing on his hind legs. The Cat wore—with considerable panache—ornate leather boots that came up to his hips, a sheathed sword, and a wide-brimmed cavalier hat with a white ostrich feather. Julian thought of the Three Musketeers. The Cat was now the height of a man.
Julian didn’t even ask how the Cat had gotten into the apartment. He was pretty sure that he’d gone crazy in a kind of baroque-circa-1700 manner.
“You will not mind my coming in uninvited when I’ve done for you what I intend. You are an artist, yes?” asked the Cat, “you have drawings, photos, examples of your work?”
Julian shrugged. He indicated the black portfolio case leaning on the wall next to the futon. Since he was crazed and doomed anyway, it was easiest to go along with his hallucinations.
“In your utter despair lies your complete acceptance of fate,” Puss murmured as he opened the case. “And in that acceptance you will find your triumph.” Julian watched impassively as the cat pulled out several sketches, some color collages: student work. He also found a headshot or two of the artist.
“These will do and will do nicely,” he announced and tucked them into a boot.
“Stupid, useless stuff,” Julian looked away.
“Simple! Naïve!! Elegant in their lack of artifice!!!”
Puss strode to the door, turned and bowed. “All this I do in your service, monsieur.”
Julian heard the door click shut, sank back onto the futon, and fell into the vision-dream again. Except this time he saw it through his own eyes, felt it with his own skin.
He swam naked in a pond. The trees, the light looked like something out of a Watteau or Fragonard painting of a formal garden. It reminded him of nightmares he’d had as a kid of showing up at school bare-assed.
A carriage pulled up and liveried servants rushed forward, pulled him out of the water and dressed him in finery. Puss was in the dream too, cat-sized but wearing the hat and boots and looking very pleased. Julian remembered the story of the miller’s son and his magical cat he’d read in his childhood.
3.
Few people on earth, and no one in New York, knew more about the Politics of Lunch than Angelica Siddons. Some said she attended as many as four luncheons in a single day. That was just spiteful rumor. But it was she who decreed where each day’s significant lunch would be held and who would partake. A recent venue had been a pizza parlor in the Coney Island Safe Zone that had somehow stayed above water for a hundred years. “A darling little relic,” as a commentator noted.
Anywhere else on Earth, Angelica Siddons would have been a woman of considerable wealth and some influence. In the Big Apple/Arena she was a goddess and, like any goddess, she could bestow riches or ruin.
Daughter of billionaires, widow of the last really effective president of the United States, everyone felt safe in her presence. The bomb detection trucks and cars with armed guards outside whatever building she was in, the large people always alert and close at hand insured her protection and that of those around her.
The elite and the cameras had followed her to partly submerged Coney Island, not once or twice, but on half a dozen occasions. By the time the mobs caught on and followed, Angelica and entourage no longer found the locale exotic. Unpleasant incidents between visitors and natives followed. Suicide bombers took out the pizza parlor. When it was over Coney Island no longer had a safe zone.
By then Angelica Siddons had found other places to lunch. The most prominent was the radical new Artomat, a combination of automat and art gallery in Midtown on the West Side. The cuisine was Western Mediterranean and quite nice in its way.
But the cutting edge of the place was the rows and columns of glass windows on the walls. Each displayed an art object—a gold Scythian bracelet, an original Edward Hopper sketch, an exquisite illustrated eighteenth-century book of fairy tales.
The price of each item was displayed. One pressed an encoded palm against the window; money was deducted from one’s account. The window popped open and the object was yours.
Across from Angelica Siddons that day at the Artomat, sat longtime acquaintance Jack Reynard with his sharp eyes and pointed face. Beside her was Clemenso, New York’s current exemplar of the artist/sex object and acclaimed originator of Crisis Fashion.
&n
bsp; Around the table, several members of Siddons’ circle chattered on about a fan one of them had just found behind a glass window and bought, hoping to impress Angelica, at a rather healthy price. Open, the fan displayed an eighteenth century formal garden at dusk and a pair of lovers in court dress kissing. Closed, the fan was a sharp dagger.
It was something the Fox would love, and Reynard did seem amused. But Clemenso openly sneered at the purchase. Usually Angelica found his dark and sullen moods amusing as it would then please her to reassure him of his genius. But earlier that day she’d glanced briefly at Tales the Fairies Tell and found hints of things unamusing and even tiresome about Clemenso.
His exotic accent made little sense if it was true he came from New Jersey, and he’d be no genius if the source of his inspiration—in fact, the inventor of Crisis Fashion—was an unattractive boyfriend he kept carefully hidden (the article hinted at semi-imprisonment). Reynard the Fox noticed Angelica’s shift in attitude even if Clemenso didn’t.
At that moment neither gossip nor the conversation around her held Angelica’s attention. She had just become aware of a certain Cat.
Puss walked toward her on his hind legs, more intense and fascinating than the photos on Tales That Fairies Tell, in his red leather boots and cavalier hat with a great white feather.
All conversation stopped. The bodyguards stepped forward. But the Cat halted, swept off his hat and bowed so low to Angelina Simmons that his head touched his extended leg.
Enchanted, she gestured him forward. Approaching, still bowing, Puss handed her a small sketch of a young woman under a tree with a cat beside her. “A gift from my master, the new artist Julian who goes by his own name.” A quick feline glance at Clemenso, who didn’t. “This reminds him of you and he wishes you to have it, my lady.”
“Why, it’s so . . . ” she glanced briefly at the sketch, then looked at the cat, grasped for the word.
“So honestly simple,” Puss suggested. “That is the way Julian describes his art. Perhaps ‘simplicity’ is something we should all embrace.”
Mrs. Siddons looked again at the sketch and asked, “Is the cat you?”
“Perhaps,” he replied, “and perhaps the young lady is you.”
A groan erupted from Clemenso. “This is rubbish,” he said in the unplaceable accent.
Puss caught Angelica Siddons’ expression and both smiled.
She had always known in some corner of her mind that Clemenso was a fraud. But she’d always assumed he was a more fascinating fraud.
“This is student work, visual scribbles,” Clemenso said. Puss shook his head and Mrs. Siddons did the same. Outright plagiarism and the financial misdeeds hinted at in TTFT article went without saying at that moment in this place. But failure to understand that one’s time was over was simply unforgiveable.
Jack Reynard had disappeared from the table without any human noticing before Angelica invited Puss to sit beside her.
4.
Julian tried not to worry about hallucinations and nervous breakdown or to panic about what he was going to do next. He’d avoided looking at his phone. But when he opened his palm and saw the number of messages, Julian sat up.
Many were from names he didn’t know. One of the first was the tour guide/filmmaker who hardly spoke to him in person.
“IS THIS YOU?” it began. Pasted in was a quote from a recent Tales That Fairies Tell update. “Simplicity is today’s meme. And Julian is the name.” With it was the drawing of the girl and the cat.
Other messages followed. One stood out: From Jack Reynard at Fox Productions. “Your name came up at lunch with Angelica Siddons,” it read. “Here’s a number if you’re not too busy.”
The Fox, producer of Macabre Dance, on his phone! Julian’s head spun. How wrong he must have been about Reynard getting him fired! He called and by chance Jack Reynard turned out to be in the vicinity. “Be by shortly. I assume you have your portfolio.”
As if drawn by scent or psychic power, Julian’s roommates, the waitress/composer, the pedicab driver/dancer, even the tour guide/filmmaker had found his or her way back to the apartment. They showed him online updates.
The Fairy Godmothers sidebar in TTFT indicated The artist called Julian, lucky boy, may just have acquired the wondrous Mrs. Siddons as Godmother and our own Puss as a Fairy Godfather!
As Julian tried to absorb all this, a buzzer sounded; a knock came at the door and the Fox entered, smiling and red haired. The light was on in the tour guide’s camera as she filmed the arrival. The pedicab driver and the waitress hurried to give him their seats, offered to take his coat. The tall woman, coiled like a whip, who came in with him, stood at the door and watched everyone.
Only the whimsy was on display that afternoon. The blade was hidden. Jack Reynard chuckled, “Reminds me of my very first apartment in the city.” He refused refreshments, only had time to glance at the images and portfolio.
He appraised, nodded, murmured, “Ah, I see what the Cat saw.” Julian suddenly remembered Puss. As if he understood that, Jack Reynard smiled and said, “I ran into him a couple of hours ago. Puss and I are old companions . . . old partners.”
He spread his palm, lifted it, and an image flashed on the wall. The waitress and the pedicab driver pulled the blinds down. Julian saw an eighteenth century park, avenues of graceful trees, summer light, figures in embroidered silk, and women seated on green grass in the background. It looked like a Watteau landscape, but it was a photograph.
In the foreground were two figures with elaborate wigs, clothes, and festive masks. At first glance they were human. But Puss and Reynard, Cat and Fox, were visible behind the masks if one looked closer. The glance they shared was predatory, like two pirates preparing to make everything they saw theirs.
Reynard had chosen a selection of Julian’s work.
“Don’t worry. He’ll expect me to take over as your agent/advisor.” The Fox made a sign, indicated Julian’s phone. A contract was on the screen. “A simple agreement. Believe me, the Cat will understand.” His smile was infectious.
Julian had never signed a contract before. In a daze he okayed it. The figure at the door said a single word and not in English. Suddenly Reynard was out of the room and in the hall. The roommates asked if they could send their resumes. But, apparently, he didn’t hear.
5.
For a few minutes afterwards his roommates barraged Julian with questions. “What are your plans for tonight, for tomorrow, for your life? Are you getting a personal assistant, talking to the media, doing a show? Is it possible you’ll need to hire a private pedicab, a tour guide, companion? Couldn’t his art tie in with music, dance, film?”
As they talked, Julian became aware of another presence. He closed his eyes and saw a huge figure that smelled of rotted meat. An ogre in clothes of fine velvet, stained with food and drink, sporting an elaborate beard and immense hairy eyebrows, stared down at him.
“When I consume a cow I have a gentle, calm disposition,” it said. “When I dine on a child, I become innocent. When I eat a king (preferably simmered in a robust wine sauce from a traditional family recipe), I am majestic. You look at me and you don’t believe it. Well think again, my friend! When I devour you I will be a witless young man.” Julian began to scramble to his feet.
But the ogre turned into Puss. When Julian opened his eyes, it was just Puss and him in the apartment. The Cat had bribed the roommates to go away.
“One great difference between ogres and cats is that cats never talk about themselves,” Puss said. “But others talk about us. You must know the story of how I dealt with the ogre.
Julian saw through cat eyes Puss challenging the monster to turn into a lion, an elephant, and finally a mouse; watched the cat kill and eat the mouse.
“Just as the ogre changed with what he ate, when I devoured him, I inherited his ability to change shapes and came into my dominion.”
Right in front of Julian the cat turned first into a hawk, then a bear, and aga
in into a fat, hairy ogre. Julian was terrified. He thought of the contract he’d signed with Reynard.
“Never fear me.” Puss was once again a smiling cat. “You’ve met my old . . . acquaintance.”
“He said . . . ”
“ . . . many things.” The cat shook his head, “Young men are so foolish.” But he seemed charmed by that fact.
The apartment door opened. “Movers,” said Puss. “Ones you can trust. Show them what has to be taken from here. I’m placing you in more suitable quarters.” The movers set to work and Puss disappeared.
Later that evening, Veronessa and Julian sat in the back seat of a car carrying them through Central Park to her townhouse in the East 70s. He stared, fascinated and shocked, at her vivid, barbaric vest of red fox fur.
She noticed this and gave a nod and a smile. “Jack Reynard will not be back. At least not in this incarnation,” she said, patting the fur.
Julian wondered if having your dreams and ambitions realized always left you as tense and confused as he felt. “I hope my staying at your place is okay . . . with you . . . ” he began.
She smiled, reached over and stroked the back of his neck like a pet. His nerves were so relaxed at her touch that it felt like he was sinking into the cushions. “Richelieu’s’ kittens,” she said, “were treasured by those to whom the Cardinal gave them.”
“If they knew what was good for them,” Julian remarked and was surprised at himself.
“Ah,” Veronessa said with a small frown. “It is not wise to be wise so soon.”
Puss was there when they arrived. His hat bore a red fur tail with a white tip in place of the white plume. “The Fox has the strengths of the trickster: misdirection, a quick eye, and a fast tongue. But . . . ” He shrugged. “Cat and Fox: when we meet it always ends like this.”
He looked at Julian. “You’re still confused by what’s happened. You wonder about my motives.” He showed Julian the goofy young man who was Puss’s first owner swimming bare assed in a pond while Puss called out that the Marquis of Carabas had been robbed of his clothes and a king and his lovely daughter stopped their carriage. Because of a cat’s schemes the young man married far above his station. He came close to ruining his life a dozen times thereafter. On each occasion Puss was delighted to step in.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 11