You think you’re immortal, covering ground faster than anyone can walk, but you’re not all locked up inside some motorized box that’s spewing noxious fumes into the air. You feel as natural as a bird, or a deer, racing through your concrete forest. Maybe that’s where John got that feeling from, riding through town on his bike, free as the wind, when all the other street people are just sort of shuffling along, gaze to the ground.
I started a poem about it once, but I couldn’t get the words to fit the vision. That’s been happening to me all too often this summer. Oh, who’m I kidding? Wordless pretty well sums me up these days. I look at the work I’ve had published, and I can’t even imagine what it was like to write those verses, little say believe that it was me who did it.
Feeling sorry for myself is the one thing I have gotten good at lately. It’s not a feeling I like. I hate the way it leaves me with this overpowering sense of being ineffectual. Worthless.
When I start getting into that kind of mood, I usually get on my bike and just ride. Which is how I found myself in Fitzhenry Park a few hours after Sophie and Jilly left me at my apartment.
I laid my bike down under the young Tree of Tales and sprawled on the grass beside it. I could see a handful of stars, looking up through the tree’s boughs, but my mind was back in the Standish, listening to Puck warn Oberon of the coming dawn. I drifted off to the remembered sound of his voice.
5
Puck breaks off and looks at me. The play has faded, the hall is gone. It’s just the two of us, alone in some copsy wood, as far from the city as the word orange is from a true rhyme.
“And who are you?” he says.
I make no reply. I’m too fascinated by his transformation. Falling asleep, the voice I heard, the face I imagined, was that of the actor from the Standish whom I’d seen earlier in the night. But he’s gone along with the city and everything familiar. This Puck is more compelling still. I can’t take my gaze from him. He has a beauty that no actor could replicate, but he’s more inhuman, too. It’s hard to say where the man ends and the animal begins. I think of Pan; I think of fauns.
“Your hair,” he says, “is like moonlight, gracing your fair shoulders.”
Maybe I should be thinking of satyrs. Legendary being or not, this is a come-on if ever I heard one.
“It’s dyed,” I tell him.
“But it looks so full of life.”
“I mean, I color it. I’m not a natural blonde.”
“And your eyes?” he asks. “Is that tempest of dream-starved color dyed as well?”
I have to admit, he’s got a way about him. I don’t know if I should assume “dream-starved” to be a compliment exactly, but the sound of his voice makes me wish he’d just take me in his arms. Maybe this is what they mean by fairy enchantment. I’ve only known him for the better part of a couple of minutes, and already he’s got me feeling all warm and tingly inside. There’s a musky odor in the air and my heartbeat has found a new, quicker rhythm.
It’s a tough call, but I tell my libido to take five.
“What do you mean by ‘dream-starved?’ ” I ask him.
He sits back on his furry haunches and the sexual charge that’s built up between us eases somewhat.
“I see a storm in your soul,” he says, “held at bay by a grey cloud of uncomfortable reason.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
But I know. I know exactly what he’s talking about: how everything that ever made me happy seems to have been washed away. I smile, but there’s no light behind the smile. I laugh, but the sound is hollow. I don’t know how it happened, but it all went away. I do have a storm inside me, but it can’t seem to get out and I don’t know how to help it. All I do know is that I don’t want to feel like a robot anymore, like I took a walk-on bit as a zombie for some B-movie only to find that I can’t shake the part once my scene’s in the can.
“When was the last time you felt truly alive?” he asks.
I look back through my memories, but everything seems dismal and grey. It’s like walking into a room where all the furniture is covered with sheets, dust lies thick on the floor, all color has been sucked away.
“I… I can’t remember….”
“It was not always so.”
A statement, not a question, but I still nod my head in slow agreement.
“What bedevils you,” he says, “is that you have misplaced the ability to see—to truly see behind the shadow, into the heart of a thing—and so you no longer think to look. And the more you do not look, the less able you are to see. Wait long enough, and you’ll wander the world as one blind.”
“I already feel that way.”
“Then open your eyes and see.”
“See what?”
Puck shrugs. “It makes no difference. You can look upon the most common thing and see the whole of the cosmos reflected within.”
“Intellectually, I know what you’re talking about,” I tell him. “I understand—really I do. But in here—” I lay the palm of one hand between my breasts and cover it with the palm of the other “—it’s not so clear. My heart just feels too heavy to even think about sunshine and light, little say look for them in anything.”
“Then free your heart from your mind,” he says. “Embrace wonder for one moment without the need to consider how that wonder came to be, without the need to justify if it be real or not.”
“I… I don’t know how.”
His lips shape that puckish smile then. “If you would forget thought for a time, let me love you.”
He cups my chin with his hand and brings his lips close to mine. At the touch, being so close to those wild eyes of his, I can feel the warmth again, the fire in my loins that rises up into my belly.
“Let the storm loose,” he whispers.
I want to, I’m going to, I can’t seem to stop myself, yet I manage to pull back from him.
“I’ll try,” I say. “But first,” and I don’t know where this thought comes from, “first—tell me a story.”
“A… story.”
It’s all happening too fast for me. I need to slow down.
“Tell me what happened when Titania found out that Oberon had taken her changeling into his court.”
He smiles. He rests his back against a tree and pulls me close so that my head’s on his shoulder. I need this breathing space. I need the quiet sound of his voice, the intimacy it builds between us. Without it, fairy enchantment or not, the act of making love with him would be no different than if I did it with one of those homeboys who pulled up beside the curb earlier in the evening.
He’s a good storyteller. I hope the Tree’s listening.
When the story’s done, he sits quietly beside me, as taken away by the story he’s let unfold between us as I am. I’m the one who has to unbutton my blouse, who reaches for his hand and puts it against my breast.
6
I woke with the morning sun in my eyes, stiff and chilled from having spent the night on the damp grass. I sat up and used my fingers as a comb to pull the grass and leaves from my hair. My dream was still vivid. Puck’s advice rang like a clarion bell inside my mind.
You can look upon the most common thing and see the whole of the cosmos reflected within.
But I couldn’t seem to do it. I could feel the storm inside me, yearning to be freed, but the veil was over my eyes again and everything seemed to be shrouded with the fine covering of its fabric.
Free your heart from your mind. Embrace wonder for one moment without the need to consider how that wonder came to be, without the need to justify… if… it…
Already the advice was fading. I found myself thinking, It was only a dream. There’s no more wisdom in a dream than in anything you might make up. It’s just shadows. Without substance.
I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t true. I might make up my poems, but when they work, when the line of communication runs true between my heart and whoever’s reading them, they touch a real truth
.
But the argument didn’t seem worth pursuing.
Above me, the sky was grey, overcast. The morning was cool and it probably wouldn’t get much warmer. So much for summer. So much for my life. But it seemed so unfair.
I remembered the dream. I remembered Puck—my Puck, not Shakespeare’s, not some actor, not somebody else’s interpretation of him. I remembered the magic in his voice. The gentleness in his touch. The wild enchantment in his eyes. Somehow I managed, if only in a dream, to pull aside the curtain that separates strangeness from the world we’ve all agreed on, and find a piece of wonder that I could bring back with me. But now that I’ve woken, I find that all I’ve brought back is more of what it seems I’ve always had.
Greyness. Boredom. No meaning in anything.
And that seemed the most unfair thing of all.
I lay back down on the grass and stared up into the Tree of Tales, my gaze veiled with tears. I could see the gloom that had spread throughout me during the summer, just deepening and deepening until it swallowed me whole. I was so sick of feeling sorry for myself, but I just couldn’t seem to stop myself.
And then a small bird landed on a branch above my head—I don’t even know what kind. A sparrow? A wren? It lifted up its head and warbled a few notes and for no good reason at all, I felt happy.
I didn’t see the singer as a small drab brown bird on an equally drab branch, but as a microcosm that reflected every living thing. I didn’t hear its song as a few warbled notes, quickly swallowed by the sounds of traffic beyond the confines of the park, but as an echo of all the music that was ever sung.
I sat up and looked around and nothing seemed the same. It was as though someone had just told me some unbelievably good news and simply by hearing it, my perspective on everything was changed.
7
Someone once described the theory of right and left brain to me and I read up on it myself later. Basically, it boils down to this: The left brain is the logical one, the rationalist, the scientist, the one that sees us through the everyday. It’s the one that lets us conduct normal business, walk safely across a busy street, that kind of thing. And it’s the one we know best.
The right brain belongs to the artist and its mostly a stranger because we don’t call on it very often. In the general course of our lives, we don’t need to. But fey though it is, this stranger inside us is the one that keeps us sane. It’s the one that imparts meaning to what we do, that allows us to see beyond the drone of the everyday.
It’s always trying to remind us of its existence. It’s the one that’s responsible for synchronicities and other small wonders, strange dreams or really seeing a small drab brown bird. It’ll do anything to shake us up. But mostly we don’t pay attention to it. And when we sink low enough, we don’t hear its voice at all.
And that’s such a shame, because that stranger is the Puck in the midden, the part of us that makes gold out of trash, poetry out of nonsense. It calls art forth from common sights and music from ordinary sound and without it, the world would be a very grey place indeed. Trust me, I know—from my own all-too-unpleasant experience with that world. But I’m working on never going through a summer like that again.
The stranger, that Puck in my midden, showed me how.
When I think of that Puck now, I’m always reminded of how he came to me—not just from out of a dream, but from a dream that was based on someone else’s dream, put to words, enacted on the stage, centuries after his death. And I believe now that Shakespeare did write the plays that bear his name.
I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. In this case, the historical version’s lost, while the stories everybody else has to tell contradict one another—as so often they do. But I’ll pick from between the lines and say it was old Will.
Because the dream also reminds me of the Tree of Tales, and I think maybe that’s what Shakespeare was: a kind of human Tree of Tales. He got told all these stories and then he reshaped them into his plays so that they wouldn’t be forgotten.
It doesn’t matter where he got those stories. What matters is that he was able to put them into the forms they have now so that they could and can live on: small sparks of wisdom and joy, drama and buffoonery, that touch the stranger inside us so that she’ll remind us what we’re all here for. Not just to plod through life, but to celebrate it.
But knowing all of that, believing in it as I do, the mystery of authorship still remains for most people, I suppose. The scholars and historians. But that’s their problem; I’ve solved it to my own satisfaction. There’s only one thing I’d ask old Will if I ever ran into him. I’d love to know who told him about Puck.
I’ll bet she had a tempest in her eyes.
SAXOPHONE JOE AND THE WOMAN IN BLACK
A cat has nine lives. For three he
plays, for three he strays, and for
the last three he stays.
—American folklore
I love this city.
Even now, with things getting worse the way they do: Too many people hungry, or cold, or got nowhere to sleep, and here’s winter creeping up on us, earlier each year, and staying later. The warm grate doesn’t do much when the sleet’s coming down, giving everything the picture-perfect prettiness of a fairy tale—just saying you’ve got the wherewithal to admire a thing like that, instead of always worrying how the ends are going to meet.
But you’ve got to take the time, once in a while, or what’ve you got? Don’t be waiting for the lotto to come in when you can’t even afford the price of a ticket.
It’s like all those stories that quilt the streets, untidy little threads of yarn that get pulled together into gossiping skeins, one from here, one from there, until what you’ve got in your hand isn’t a book, maybe, doesn’t have a real beginning or end, but it tells you something. You can read the big splashes that make their way onto the front page, headlines standing out one inch tall, just screaming for your attention. Sure, they’re interesting, but what interests me more is the little stories. Nothing so exciting, maybe, about losing a job, or looking for one. Falling in or out of love. New baby coming. Old grandad passed away. Unless the story belongs to you. Then it fills your world, and you don’t have time even to glance at those headlines.
What gets me is how everybody’s looking to make sense of things. Sometimes you don’t want sense. Sometimes, the last thing in the world you need is sense. Work a thing through till it makes sense and you lose all the possibilities.
That’s what runs this city. All those possibilities. It’s like the heart of the city is this old coal furnace, just smoking away under the streets, stoked with all those might-yet-bes and who’d-a-thoughts. The rich man waking up broke and he never saw it coming. The girl who figures she’s so ugly she won’t look in a mirror, and she finds she’s got two-boys fighting over her. The father who surprises himself when he finds he likes his son better, now that he knows the boy’s gay.
And the thing is, the account doesn’t end there. One possibility just leads straight up to the next, with handfuls of story lying in between. Stoking the furnace. Keeping the city interesting.
You just got to know where to look. You just got to know how to look.
Got no time?
Maybe the measurement’s different from me to you to that girl who gives you your ticket at the bus depot, but the one thing we’ve all got is time. You can use it or lose it, your choice. That’s how come we’ve got that old saying about how it’s not having a thing that’s important, but how we went about getting it. Our time’s the most precious thing we’ve got to offer folks, and the worst thing a body can do is to take it away from us.
So don’t you go wasting it.
But I was talking about possibilities and little stories, things that maybe don’t even make it into the paper. Like what happened to Saxophone Joe.
I guess everybody knows how a cat’s got nine fives, and I’m thinking a few more of you know how those lives are divided up: three to play, three to stray,
and the last three to stay. Maybe that’s a likeness for our own lives, a what-do-you-call-it, metaphor. I don’t know.
But grannies used to tell their children’s children how if a cat came to live with you of its own accord during one of its straying lives, why you couldn’t ask for better luck in that household. And that cat’d stay, too, unless you called it by name. Not the name you gave it, or maybe the one it gave you—it comes wandering in off the fire escape with its little white paws, so you call it Boots, or maybe it’s that deep orange like you’d spread on your toast, so you call it Marmalade.
I’m talking about its secret name, the one only it knows.
Anyway, Joe’s playing six nights a week with a combo in the Rhatigan, a little jazz club over on Palm Street; him on sax, Tommy Morrison on skins, Rex Small bellied up to that big double bass, and Johnny Fingers tickling the ivories. The Rhatigan doesn’t look like much, but it’s the kind of place you never know who’s going to be sitting in with the band, playing that long cool music.
Used to be people said jazz was the soul of the city, the rhythm that made it tick. A music made up of slick streets and neon lights, smoky clubs and lips that taste like whiskey. Now we’ve got hip hop and rap and thrash, and I hear people saying it’s not music at all, but they’re plain wrong. All these sounds are still true to the soul of the city; it’s just changed to suit the times is all.
One night Joe’s up there on the Rhatigan’s stage, half-sitting on his stool, one long leg bent up, foot supported on a rung, the other pointing straight out across the stage to where Johnny’s hunched over his piano, fingers dancing on the keyboard as they trade off riffs. There’s something in the air that night, and they’re seriously connected to it.
Joe takes a breath, head cocked as he listens to what Johnny’s playing. Then, just as he tightens his lips around the reeds, he sees the woman sitting there off in a dark corner, alone at her table, black hair, black dress, skin the same midnight tone as Joe’s own so that she’s almost invisible, except for the whites of her eyes and her teeth, because she’s looking right at him and she’s smiling.
Ivory and the Horn Page 22