by Paula Guran
He was a tiny wizened man with a shock of frizzy white hair and glasses who delighted in long conversations conducted over tea, or if the hour was appropriate, a good Irish whiskey. At least once every couple of weeks the two of us would sit in his study cozy study, he reading one of my stories while I read his latest article before it was sent off to some journal or other. When the third visit went by in which I didn’t have a manuscript in hand, he finally broached the subject.
“You seem happy these days, Christy.”
“I am.”
He’d smiled. “So is it true what they say—an artist must suffer to produce good work?”
I hadn’t quite caught on yet to what he was about.
“Neither of us believe that,” I said.
“Then you must be in love.”
“I . . . ”
I didn’t know what to say. An awful sinking feeling had settled in my stomach at his words. Lord knew, he was right, but for some reason, just as I knew I shouldn’t follow Tally when she left me after our midnight trysts, I had this superstitious dread that if the world discovered our secret, she would no longer be a part of my life.
“There’s nothing wrong with being in love,” he said, mistaking my hesitation for embarrassment.
“It’s not that,” I began, knowing I had nowhere to go except a lie and I couldn’t lie to the Professor.
“Never fear,” he said. “You’re allowed your privacy—and welcome to it, I might add. At my age, any relating of your escapades would simply make me jealous. But I worry about your writing.”
“I haven’t stopped,” I told him. And then I had it. “I’ve been thinking of writing a novel.”
That wasn’t a lie. I was always thinking of writing a novel; I just doubted that I ever would. My creative process could easily work within the perimeters of short fiction, even a connected series of stories such as The Red Crow had turned out to be, but a novel was too massive an undertaking for me to understand, little say attempt. I had to have the whole of it in my head and to do so with anything much longer than a short novella was far too daunting a process for me to begin. I had discovered, to my disappointment because I did actually want to make the attempt, that the longer a piece of mine was, the less . . . substance it came to have. It was as though the sheer volume of a novel’s wordage would somehow dissipate the strengths my work had to date.
My friends who did write novels told me I was just being a chickenshit; but then they had trouble with short fiction and avoided it like the plague. It was my firm belief that one should stick with what worked, though maybe that was just a way of rationalizing a failure.
“What sort of a novel?” the Professor asked, intrigued since he knew my feelings on the subject.
I gave what I hoped was a casual shrug.
“That’s what I’m still trying to decide,” I said, and then turned the conversation to other concerns.
But I was nervous leaving the Professor’s house, as though the little I had said was enough to turn the key in the door that led into the hidden room I shouldn’t enter. I sensed a weakening of the dam that kept the mystery of our trysts deep and safe. I feared for the floodgate opening and the rush of reality that would tear my ghostly lover away from me.
But as I’ve already said, she wasn’t a ghost. No, something far stranger hid behind her facade of pixie face and tousled hair.
I’ve wondered before, and still do, how much of what happens to us we bring upon ourselves. Did my odd superstition concerning Tally drive her away, or was she already leaving before I ever said as much as I did to the Professor? Or was it mere coincidence that she said goodbye that same night?
I think of the carry-all she’d had on her shoulder the first time we met and have wondered since if she wasn’t already on her way then. Perhaps I had only interrupted a journey already begun.
“You know, don’t you?” she said when I saw her that night.
Did synchronicity reach so far that we would part that night in that same courtyard by the river where we had first met?
“You know I have to go,” she added when I said nothing.
I nodded. I did. What I didn’t know was—
“Why?” I asked.
Her features seemed harder again—like they had been that first night. The softness that had grown as our relationship had was more memory than fact, her features seemed to be cut to the bone once more. Only her eyes still held a touch of warmth, as did her smile. A tough veneer masked the rest of her.
“It’s because of how the city is used,” she said. “It’s because of hatred and spite and bigotry; it’s because of homelessness and drugs and crime; it’s because the green quiet places are so few while the dark terrors multiply; it’s because what’s old and comfortable and rounded must make way for what’s new and sharp and brittle; it’s because a mean spirit grips its streets and that meanness cuts inside me like a knife.
“It’s changing me, Christy, and I don’t want you to see what I will become. You wouldn’t recognize me and I wouldn’t want you to.
“That’s why I have to go.”
When she said go, I knew she meant she was leaving me, not the city.
“But—”
“You’ve helped me keep it all at bay, truly you have, but it’s not enough. Neither of us have enough strength to hold that mean spirit at bay forever. What we have, was stolen from the darkness. But it won’t let us steal any more.”
I started to speak, but she just laid her fingers across my lips. I saw that her sleeping bag was stuffed under the bench. She pulled it out and unrolled it on the cobblestones. I thought of the dark windows of the town houses looking into the courtyard. There could be a hundred gazes watching as she gently pulled me down onto the sleeping bag, but I didn’t care.
I tried to stay awake. I lay beside her, propped up on an elbow and stroked her shoulder, her hair. I marveled at the softness of her skin, the silkiness of her hair. In repose, the harsh lines were gone from her face again. I wished that there was some way I could just keep all her unhappiness at bay, that I could stay awake and protect her forever, but sleep snuck up on me all the same and took me away.
Just as I went under, I thought I heard her say, “You’ll know other lovers.”
But not like her. Never like her.
When I woke the next morning, I was alone on the sleeping bag, except for Ben who lay purring on the bag where she had lain.
It was early, too early for anyone to be awake in any of the houses, but I wouldn’t have cared. I stood naked in the frosty air and slowly got dressed. Ben protested when I shooed him off the sleeping bag and rolled it up.
The walk home, with the sleeping bag rolled up under my arm, was never so long.
No, Tally wasn’t a ghost, though she haunts the city’s streets at night—just as she haunts my mind.
I know her now. She’s like a rose bush grown old, gone wild; untrimmed, neglected for years, the thorns become sharper, more bitter; her foliage spreading, grown out of control, reaching high and wide, while the center chokes and dies. The blossoms that remain are just small now, hidden in the wild growth, memories of what they once were.
I know her now. She’s the spirit that connects the notes of a tune—the silences in between the sounds; the resonance that lies under the lines I put down on a page. Not a ghost, but a spirit all the same: the city’s heart and soul.
I don’t wonder about her origin. I don’t wonder whether she was here first, and the city grew around her, or if the city created her. She just is.
Tallulah. Tally. A reckoning of accounts.
I think of the old traveling hawkers who called at private houses in the old days and sold their wares on the tally system—part payment on account, the other part due when they called again. Tallymen.
The payments owed her were long overdue, but we no longer have the necessary coin to settle our accounts with her. So she changes; just as we change. I can remember a time when the city was a safer place,
how when I was young, we never locked our doors and we knew every neighbor on our block. Kids growing up today wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about; the people my own age have forgotten. The old folks remember, but who listens to them? Most of us wish that they didn’t exist; that they’d just take care of themselves so that we can get on with our own lives.
Not all change is for the good.
I still go out on my rambles, most every night. I hope for a secret tryst, but all I do is write stories again. As the new work fills my notebooks, I’ve come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.
I’m trying to change that now.
I look for her on my rambles. She’s all around me, of course, in every brick of every building, in every whisper of wind as it scurries down an empty street. She’s a cab’s lights at 3:00 a.m., a siren near dawn, a shuffling bag lady pushing a squeaky grocery cart, a dark-eyed cat sitting on a shadowed stoop.
She’s all around me, but I can’t find her. I’m sure I’d recognize her—
I don’t want you to see what I will become.
—but I can’t be sure. The city can be so many things. It’s a place where the familiar can become strange with just the blink of an eye. And if I saw her—
You wouldn’t recognize me and I wouldn’t want you to.
—what would I do? If she could, she’d come to me, but that mean spirit still grips the streets. I see it in people’s faces; I feel it in the coldness that’s settled in their hearts. I don’t think I would recognize her; I don’t think I’d want to. I have the gris-gris of her memory in my mind; I have an old sleeping bag rolled up in a corner of my hall closet; I’m here if she needs me.
I have this fantasy that it’s still not too late; that we can still drive that mean spirit away and keep it at bay. The city would be a better place to live if we could and I think we owe it to her. I’m doing my part. I write about her—
They’re about me. They’re your stories, I can taste your presence in every word, but each of them’s a piece of me, too.
—about her strange wonder and her magic and all. I write about how she changed me, how she taught me that getting close can hurt, but not getting close is an even lonelier hurt. I don’t preach; I just tell the stories.
But I wish the ache would go away. Not the memories, not the gris-gris that keeps her real inside me, but the hurt. I could live without that hurt.
Sometimes I wish I’d never met her.
Maybe one day I’ll believe that lie, but I hope not.
Women were the world to him. In private he had worshipped them. In public he had triumphed with them. But something was missing in his life. Women were not the only beauties, not the only bodies begging to be wrapped in gossamer and adored.
Hymenoptera
Michael Blumlein
The wasp appeared in the salon that morning. It was early Spring and unusually cold. The windows were laced with ice, and there was frost on the ground outside. Linderstadt shifted uneasily on the sofa, fighting both chill and dream. He had quarreled the night before, first with Madame Broussard, his head seamstress and lifelong friend, and then with Camille, his favorite model, accusing her of petty treacheries for which she was blameless. After they left, he drank himself into a stupor, stumbling from one workshop to another, knocking down mannequins, pulling dresses from their hangers, sweeping hats to the floor. The Spring Show, the most important of the year, was scarcely a week away, and the Spring Collection was complete. Normally, this was a time of excitement in the salon. Normally, the Linderstadt creations were worthy of excitement. Just the month before, Linderstadt had been dubbed, for the umpteenth time, the Earl of Elegance, the King of Couture. He was a Genius. A Master. His attention to detail, to sleeve, waist and line were legendary. His transcendent gowns were slavishly copied and praised. He was at the peak of his powers, it was said, yet he felt, with this collection, just the opposite. It was bland, it was dull, it was uninspired. It reeked of old ideas and tired themes. It was the product of a man, not at the height of his creativity but at the nadir and possibly the end. He had lost his way with this new line. He had lost his touch. He felt stagnant, bankrupt, pinched of vision, and insecure. Had he been cinched up in one of his own breath-defying corsets, he couldn’t have felt more in need of fresh ideas and air.
Nothing had prepared him for this, and in his despair he came unglued, quarreling and drinking and cursing his empire of taffeta, satin, and silk. He raged against the poverty of his newest collection. He raged against himself and the poverty of his own spirit. It was a dark day in his life, and he drowned himself in the bottle, until, at last, he fell into a fitful sleep. There was a couch at one end of the room, where he lay in a disheveled, quasi-morbid state, halfdraped in the train of a bridal gown he had appropriated from one of the ateliers for warmth. With dawn, sunlight appeared along the edges of the heavily-curtained windows, penetrating the salon with a wan, peach-colored light.
The wasp was at the other end of the room, broadside to him and motionless. Its wings were folded back against its body, and its long belly was curled under itself like a comma. Its two antennae were curved delicately forward but otherwise as rigid as bamboo.
An hour passed and then another. When sleep became impossible, Linderstadt staggered off the couch to relieve himself. He returned to the salon with a pounding headache and a tall glass of water, at which point he noticed the wasp. From his father, who had been an amateur entomologist before dying of yellow fever, Linderstadt knew something of insects. This one he located somewhere in the family Sphecidae, which included wasps of primarily solitary habit. Most nested in burrows or natural cavities of hollow wood, and he was a little surprised to find the animal in his salon. Then again, he was surprised to have remembered anything at all about the creatures. He had scarcely thought of insects since his entry forty years before into the world of high fashion. He had scarcely thought of his father, preferring the memory of his mother Anna, his mother the caregiver, the seamstress, for whom he had named his first shop and his most famous dress. But his mother was not here, and the wasp most unmistakably was. Linderstadt downed his glass of water in a single gulp, wiped his lips and pulled the bridal train over his shoulders like a shawl. Then he crossed the room to take a closer look.
The wasp stood chest high and close to eight feet long. Linderstadt recognized the short hairs on its legs that used to remind him of the stubble on his father’s chin, and he remembered, too, the forward palps by which the insect centered its jaws to tear off food. Its waist was pencil-thin, its wings translucent. Its exoskeleton, what Linderstadt thought of as its coat, was blacker than his blackest faille, blacker than coal. It seemed to absorb light, creating a small pocket of cold night right where it stood. Nigricans. He remembered the wasp’s name. Ammophila nigricans. He was tempted to touch it, and instinctively, his eyes drifted down its belly to the pointed stinger that extruded like a rapier from its rear. He recalled that this was a actually a hollow tube through which the female deposited eggs into her prey, where they would hatch into larvae and eat their way out. Males possessed the same tube but did not sting. As a boy he had always had trouble telling the sexes apart, and examining the creature now in the pale light, he wondered which it was. He felt a little feverish, which he attributed to the after-effects of the alcohol. His mouth was parched, but he was reluctant to leave the salon for more water for fear the wasp would be gone when he returned. So he stayed, shivering and thirsty.
An hour passed. The temperature hovered near freezing. The wasp did not move. It was stiller than Martine, his stillest and most patient model. Stiller in the windless salon than the jewelencrusted chandelier and the heavy damask curtains that hung like pillars and led to the dressing rooms. Linderstadt himself was the only moving thing in that cold, cold room. He paced to stay warm. He swallowed his own saliva to slake
his thirst, but ultimately the need for water drove him out. He returned as quickly as possible, wearing shoes and sweater, carrying pencils, a pad of paper and a large pitcher of water. The wasp was exactly as he had left it, statuesque and immobile, as though carved in stone.
He began to draw, quickly, deftly, using broad, determined strokes. He worked from different angles, sketching the wasp’s neck, its shoulders and waist. He imagined the creature in flight, its wings stiff and finely veined. He drew it feeding, resting, poised to sting. He clothed it in a variety of garments, experimenting with different designs, some stately and elegant, others pure whimsy. He found that he had already assumed the wasp was female. His subjects had never been anything but. He remembered Anouk, his very first model, the scoliotic girl his mother had brought home to test her adolescent son’s fledgling talent. He felt as supple as he had then, his mind unlocked, as inventive and free-spirited as ever.
He worked all day and into the night, hardly daring to stop, resting only for a few brief hours in the early morning. He was woken at first light by the sound of church bells. It was Sunday, and near and far the call went out for prayer. In his youth he had been devout, and religious allusions were common in his early collections. But piety had given way to secularity. It had been years since he’d set foot in a church, and he felt both pleasure and guilt at the sound of the bells.
The morning brought no visitors, and he had the salon to himself. It was as cold as the day before, and the wasp remained inert. When the temperature hadn’t climbed by noon, Linderstadt felt secure in leaving. His drawings were done, and his next task was to locate a suitable form on which to realize them. This was how gowns and dresses were made, and he owned hundreds of mannequins and torsos, of every conceivable shape, some bearing the name of a specific patron, others simply marked with an identifying number. He had other shapes as well, baskets, cylinders, mushrooms, triangles, all of which had found their way at one time or another into a collection. As long as an object had dimension, Linderstadt could imagine it on a woman. Or rather, he could imagine a woman in the object, in residence, giving it her own distinctive form and substance, imbuing each tangent and intersect with female spirit, joie de vivre, and soul. He was wide-ranging and broad-minded in his tastes, and he expected to have no trouble in finding something suitable to the wasp, to serve as a model. Yet nothing caught his eye, not a single object or geometric form in his vast collection seemed remotely appropriate to the creature. It was odd but tantalizing. No simulation would do. He would have to work directly on the animal itself.