“I seem to be.”
“And have you been to see her already?”
“You know I have.”
“How could I know that? Do you think I pay any attention to what that . . . that . . . painted old hag says, does, or thinks?”
“Well, I didn’t bring her up, now did I, Abilene?”
Abilene gave him a look that slightly shook the foundations of her home. “At times I forget why I like you.”
“I’m clever!” M was quick to remind her. “You think it’s cute.”
“Not always,” Abilene said, narrowing her eyes through the smoke.
For once in his life M recognized silence as the better portion of wisdom. He drank the rest of his chamomile tea but steadfastly avoided looking into it. This close to the yippie goddess of east Brooklyn, the leaves were sure to reveal some hint to his future, and he preferred that every day be a fresh one.
“So what are you planning on doing, now that you’re back in the city?” Abilene asked. She appeared pacified, but then people had said the same of Vesuvius.
M shrugged. He was pretty much already doing it, it being very little, as little as he could get away with. Running into old friends and trying to avoid getting into trouble he could not easily get himself out of. Inspecting the practically infinite corners of the city, seeing what had cropped up in his long absence. Drinking a lot. Checking out new restaurants. Trying to get laid. “The usual.”
Abilene gave the sort of smile that prefaces advice. It was mostly the only smile that Abilene offered, and it was not one of M’s favorites. “Aren’t you getting a little old for that?”
“You’re only as old as you feel.”
“Don’t you suppose it’s time that you assumed the responsibilities appropriate to a man of your stature?”
“I already told you: I don’t want a kitten.”
“I’m not talking about little . . . Garcia? What do you think of that as a name?”
“It’s a bit on the nose.”
“I’m talking about your obligations to the community at large.”
M did not like communities, which were usually filled with people, whom M liked even less. “Flattering, Abilene, but you overrate me. I’m barely more than an apprentice. Just bumbling about, not getting into anyone’s way.”
“Perhaps you’re foolish enough to believe that. You know that I’m not. If you stuck around long enough to put down roots, you’d be elite soon enough.”
M thought that this was a lot like saying if a bird decided to swim it would be a fish. “You’re too kind.”
“Of course, the thing about the major players is that they tend to tilt the balance.”
“I almost feel like this is leading to something.”
“Have you seen what she’s been doing to the place? The Village is nothing but tourists! You can’t find a crackhead from Five Points to the Guggenheim! And don’t even get me started on north Brooklyn!” In her excitement Abilene had ashed the joint onto her rug.
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Don’t pretend you like it. I know you’re more mine than hers.”
M liked to think he wasn’t really anyone’s, but again, one does not go disputing with the lion while resting in its den. “You know I’m on your team, Abilene. You can count on me if things ever go south. But I’m a gadfly, rowboating in a turbulent sea, and it’s the most I can do not to get swamped.” Some of this, chiefly the prepositions, weren’t even lies.
“Won’t you ever bother to live up to your potential?” Abilene asked.
“Maybe tomorrow,” M said, taking what was left of the joint.
9
* * *
Love and the Modern Fae
“What are you doing after this?” Anais asked, turning from a shared glance at Ibis, which would have concerned M had he seen it.
M hadn’t seen it. His attention was mostly occupied by their waitress, formed in the lovely-but-disinterested-brunette mold. “Nothing in particular.”
“Feel up for an excursion? We were going to go visit that goblin market off Classon.”
“I didn’t know there was a goblin market off Classon.”
“It’s only in existence every seventeen years,” Anais explained, “when the Earth Dragon mates with Cancer. I’ve heard they have some lovely holiday ornaments.”
“Should be a good time,” Ibis added, “if you’ve got the energy.”
There is a school of thought that says that given the paucity of daylight hours in December, a man would do well to rise early and enjoy them. M did not hold with that view, but, disdainful of the sun’s modest offering, chose rather as a rule to stay in bed until near evening. The point being that, so far as M’s circadian rhythms were concerned, they had just finished eating brunch. “I think I can probably keep it up till midnight,” he predicted boldly. “So long as you don’t expect me to tap dance or anything.”
Ibis was the sort of friend about whom M rarely found himself thinking. Actually all of M’s friends pretty much fell into that category, though the rest tended to run into rooms demanding his assistance too often for M to forget them completely. That Ibis’s life was comparably infrequently in such a state of disarray as to need saving was, M thought, largely attributable to Anais, whom Ibis had been dating for almost as long as M had known him, an amount of time the specifics of are not worth questioning. Ibis was handsome-ish and bearded and close with Abilene. Anais was sweet smiling and plump and far closer.
Stepping out into the frigid evening, the three of them were bundled in a loose ram’s worth of wool, Anais and Ibis holding hands through three-inches of dyed fabric. On a temperate spring evening the walk to the goblin market would have been more than half a pleasure, but it wasn’t a temperate spring evening, and the peregrination was appropriately less than joyful. “I think our friend Salome is going to come,” Anais said offhandedly, her announcement half muffled by her handmade scarf.
Hearing the snick of the trap just too late, M looked around frantically for egress or escape, wondering if he would survive the ordeal or if it might prove safer to bite off his wrist in the interests of freedom. “Damn it, Ibis . . .”
“You’ll like her,” Ibis said after just too long of a second. “She’s nice.”
Which, to go by M’s romantic history, was just exactly the opposite of what he liked.
“She works in fashion,” Anais said.
“But she’s not obsessed with it,” Ibis added. “I mean, she’s not a fashion person. She has other interests.”
“She’s very interesting.”
“She does vinyasa yoga.”
“It’s not like the other sorts of yoga. It’s different, somehow.”
“It’s faster.”
“It’s more active.”
“Have we met before?” M asked, gesturing furiously, lamenting the cold and shoving his hands back into his pockets. “Are you suffering from collective amnesia?”
“Just give her a chance, M, for God’s sake.”
“Like you’re so busy.”
The goblin market was, this week, in this reality, contained within the basement of the Classon Avenue Episcopal Church just a few blocks from the G train. M remembered a time when the market’s employees would not have come within a half mile of a church, even an Episcopal one, fearing the ring of church bells as they did cold iron. But it seemed in this part of the world the fae took religion no more seriously than their mortal counterparts. It was a pretty enough building, slate steeple towering over the surrounding brownstones. They passed a wrought iron gate, down a gravel path through etiolated shrubbery, stopping in front of a narrow set of stairs in the shadow of the belfry, waiting quietly for M’s potential future wife.
She was twelve minutes late, which by New York standards was on time but was still twelve minutes longer than M wanted to be exposed to the frigid December elements. She hugged Anais and made an awkward attempt at kissing Ibis continental style. Anais looked at her brightly for
a moment, then at M, then back at Salome.
“M.”
“Salome.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“A distinct pleasure.”
It was not going to work, M thought sadly, holding open the entrance and ushering them all downstairs. It was not that Salome was not pretty—she was quite pretty. She might have been, all things considered, a bit too pretty for M: modestly sized but voluptuous, apple-cheeked and melon-breasted, wearing an outfit that was too nice for a blind first date and altogether inappropriate for the season. M himself was sort of wishing he had known about the setup in time to have put on a fresh shirt or at least done something with his hair, though watching Salome’s ass, he knew it would not make any difference. Only two people who had been together as long as Anais and Ibis, grown blind with love and contentment, couples cataracts in the corners of their eyes, would have supposed that Salome and M were people who needed to meet each other. She was not at all his sort, and he not hers.
The basement of the Classon Avenue Episcopalian Church was the size of a basement, but the goblin market taking place inside it was much larger. A packed mass of scenesters and slumming Manhattanites walked past slowly, perusing the offered wares, a mob of natives speckled with the occasional tourist, three-eyed or six-legged or otherwise inhuman. All matter of treasures were on offer, mixed up so only the most discerning or lucky individual could determine which was which—matchless Babylonian artifacts sharing space with catchpenny handicrafts, tasteless woolen gloves, hats and sweatshirts and sweatpants and many other articles of clothing all with BROOKLYN written on them in block letters, just in case you needed reminding of the borough’s existence. It smelled of wet wool and mulling cinnamon and wood smoke. It was warm and toasty. It was not at all the worst place a person could be on a winter evening.
The liquor tent was a circle of wood surrounded by a square of colored canvas, with a handful of wooden tables at the perimeters. Ibis stood at the butt end of a line leading to an overworked bartender, four hands moving in unison, decanting a bottle of wine with one pair and ladling punch with the other. M grabbed some space for them at the distant end of a bench. Salome took the seat next to Anais and farthest from M, an arrangement which boded ill for hopes of future progeny.
But Anais was a classic lost-causer, tramping forward against all odds. “Salome’s in a book club,” she announced. “M isn’t much of a joiner, but he’s always giving me things to read.”
“Not anymore,” M muttered quietly.
“I love to read,” Salome admitted.
Though it was M’s experience that this was the sort of thing that only people who did not actually like to read were apt to say, and indeed when pressed, Salome admitted that her favorite book (which M had not read) had just been made into a movie (which M would not see), and the conversation died unmourned.
Ibis arrived as salvation a moment later, having barely managed to carry over their drinks. “Bottoms up.”
“What is this, exactly?” Salome asked, sniffing at the steam rising from her copper mug.
“Elixir of Cassonade,” Ibis said. “Specialty of the house.”
“It’s like being kicked in the head by an anthropomorphic caramel cream,” M explained, his smile hidden by thick foam. “But in a good way.”
“M, you’ve got something on your . . .”
“Thank you,” M said, smearing it off.
Salome looked at the froth on M’s forearm, then raised her cup gingerly. “It’s a bit creamy,” she said after having a taste.
“I don’t mind drinking the rest of yours, if you want something else.”
“That seems clear.”
Anais laughed awkwardly.
They wandered up from the table and back down the length of stalls, past an Acadian in a beaver-skin hat hawking the furs of long-extinct mammals, past an old woman selling glass beads, past a plastic table with plastic crates of plastic records, mostly Bulgarian field music and Nu Disco. Ibis spent a moment trying to persuade himself that he needed to spend eighty American dollars (or forty-seven Hanseatic Thaler) on a David Bowie 45 that had been released by an underground GDR label swiftly shut down by the Stasi but proved ultimately unsuccessful. They skirted the boutique of a Javanese puppeteer, rows of parti-colored humanoids hanging limply, hardwood faces just within the boundaries of the uncanny valley. Anais stopped at a large Dutch oven manned by a chubby hob with green skin and cherry cheeks, and bought a hot cross bun thick with sugar.
“Who wants a bite?”
Ibis obliged her, but as a rule M did not mix alcohol with desert, and Salome did not maintain her figure by indulging richly in sweets.
“I wouldn’t have gotten it if I thought no one else would have any,” Anais said, swallowing the last bite and licking a smudged finger.
A very tall, very black, very thin man who did not seem to be selling anything smiled brightly at M. “Feel free to give one a try,” he suggested, waving at his nonexistent or at least invisible stock.
“Gorgeous,” M said. “But it would never fit in my apartment.”
The man smiled understandingly. Past a stall selling home-knit woolen beer cozies and antique steins, they came to a forest of larch and spruce and Siberian stone pine, thick trunks that had never known the bite of metal, boughs beneath which aurochs gamboled and rutted. A pebbled path led toward what looked like a brightly colored carriage, though it was hard to make out through the heavy snowfall.
“I’ve been just dying to pick up a new matryoshka.” Anais took Ibis’s hand, pulling him swiftly into the copse.
“That Anais,” M remarked.
“She’s certainly very . . .” Salome agreed.
Nothing else to do but continue past the fragment of an extinct arboretum and on to the next stand, the severed back half of a ’73 bright magenta Caddy, an elf with a pompadour and a black leather coat presiding. The trunk was open to reveal stacks of browned newsprint, faded fashion periodicals, and outdated pamphlets, thick tomes with yellowed pages bound in skin that was not bovine. M flipped through a copy of Life magazine with a cover of JFK and his happy family on the day of their fourth inauguration. “The woman of 1972 prefers a rose tint to her spacesuit,” he informed Salome.
“How interesting,” Salome said, staring away disinterestedly.
M handed the magazine back to the proprietor regretfully.
“Where do you live?”
“Crown Heights.”
“I don’t get out there much.”
“Where do you live?”
“The Upper West Side. Near the Museum of Natural History.”
M did the subway math, came away with a commute long enough to make him happy that he and Salome had not hit it off with mad abandon. “That’s a nice area.”
“I like it,” Salome said.
Anais and Ibis came back then, finally, and M could not help but note that, however much she had wanted a new matryoshka, she was not carrying one. Before he could comment on the lack, they were interrupted by six scuttling crab legs striking against stone, each the size of M’s forearm, a living or at least ambulatory platform for a wooden pony keg that had been cinched into its flesh by a line of leather straps. A leash was attached to the thing’s midpoint, where carapace met oak, and at the other end of it was a friendly-looking troll. “Fresh butter ale?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” M said. The proprietor filled and distributed four shots into four hollowed-out, oversize, uncapped acorns. It tasted of strong cinnamon and spring.
“You know Celise and M are old friends,” Anais announced.
“Really?” Salome asked, suddenly interested.
For a number of reasons M would have preferred this information, which he would have argued was essentially erroneous, to never have become public knowledge.
“Oh, yes,” Anais agreed, smiling through M’s evident discomfort. “Don’t be fooled by M’s excessive humbleness—he walks in the very highest circles of society, a figure beloved on
both sides of the river.”
“Tolerated, at best,” M corrected.
“She never mentions you,” Salome observed.
Which was just exactly what M wanted to hear. “There’s that guy with the crab-keg again! You got anything bigger than that acorn?”
But the man did not, and so M had to settle for two of them. Salome did not seem enthused by M’s enthusiasm, but at this point, M figured their union was a lost cause anyway. Barring some extraordinary change of circumstance, like, for instance, saving Salome from a roving gang of rapists, M did not think their first date would lead to a second. For his own part, M was having some trouble feeling his legs, which to M’s mind was the zenith and limit of any good state of drunkenness.
They continued on through the market a while longer. Eventually Ibis and Salome split off to gather the next round, and Anais took M’s arm warmly, nestling herself into the comfortable crook of his shoulder.
“I know that Salome isn’t exactly the sort you go for—but I think if you gave her a shot you might grow to like her. She’s got lots of good qualities,”
“I bet she’s got an impressive collection of shoes.”
“She does have an impressive selection of shoes,” Anais said, “and you are a big prick.”
“And what sort of friend would that make you, trying to set Salome up with me?”
Anais stopped at a modest flower cart, neat plantings in wooden bowls, bright white simbelmynë, bitter green raskovniks, a slender cutting of yggrdrasil. The vendor had a wide smile and muttonchops not dissimilar to the tops of the bonsai bushes that he was selling. Anais rested her hand for a moment on a mood tulip, satiny flesh flaring brightly in hot pink and happy white.
“How do you all know each other, again?” M drew the attention of a snapdragon and shifted back as one mouth tendril shot forward impotently.
Anais’s flower had wilted gray. “Ibis met her at some party in Manhattan.”
“And why did the two of you think the two of us would get along?”
“Couples love to create other couples.” Anais’s tulip looked like a storm gathering on the horizon, clashing blends of midnight and stark yellow.
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