Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Really? What did they eat?”

  “Air, I suppose. Thoughts. They were my hair, Harry; they weren’t meant to exist like ordinary creatures. Your hair feeds on you.”

  “I’ll make hers like treasure,” Harry said, studying the magnificent, haunting eyes again, the dangerous, irresistible mouth. “Gold, white gold, silver, buttercup, lemon. A shining, glittering swarm of colors. Tomorrow morning, I’ll go—”

  “She’s coming tomorrow.”

  “I’ll paint her in the morning then and visit the snakes in the afternoon.”

  “You could,” the Gorgon suggested, “take her with you. You might get a better perspective on the snakes as hair if you see them both together.”

  Harry grunted, struck. “Possibly . . .” Then he blinked. “No. What am I saying? I can’t possibly watch this devastatingly powerful creature wandering around looking at snakes in the zoological garden. Something would happen.”

  “Like what?”

  “She’d step in a puddle, get a paper stuck to her shoe, some such. She’d mispronounce the names of things, she’d want tea and a bun, or peanuts for the bears—”

  “I can’t see that frozen-eyed woman tossing peanuts to the bears. But what you’re saying, Harry, is that she would be in danger of turning human.”

  “Exactly,” Harry said adamantly. “I don’t want her human, I want her Gorgon—”

  “I bet she’d be a charming human.”

  Harry opened his mouth. As though one of the Medusa’s snakes had streaked down quick as thought and bit him, he glimpsed the potential charms in those eyes, warming in a smile, that hair, piled carelessly on her head, tendrils about her face playing in a breeze. He clenched his fists, pushed them in front of his eyes. “No,” he said fiercely. “No, no, and no. This is my masterwork, and nothing—” He lowered his hands as suddenly. “What on earth is that hubbub downstairs?”

  There seemed to be a good deal of shouting and thumping coming up the stairwell. Mrs. Grommet’s voice joined it and it resolved itself easily then, into any number of friends in every stage of revelry pushing their way upstairs to join Harry.

  He threw open the door, heard their chanting as they ascended. “Where is she, Harry? We must see her. We want to see your painting, foul as it may be. We have come to kneel at the feet of your Muse, Harry!”

  Harry had just enough time to remove the painting from the easel and slide it carefully into the cupboard. Where, he hoped fervently, it would not also acquire a voice. He opened his study door, stepped into the landing. Half a dozen friends, a couple of them painters, one planning a gallery, others budding poets or philosophers, or whatever was fashionable this week, reeled into one another at the sight of him. Then, they rushed the second flight of stairs. Harry glimpsed Mrs. Grommet below, flinging her hands in the air, turning hastily back to the kitchen.

  “Don’t you dare lock your door this time,” the honey-haired, sloe-eyed Tommy Buck called. “We’ll sit on your stairs and hold them hostage until you reveal her. We’ll—”

  “She’s not here,” Harry said, with great relief. “She left an hour ago.”

  “Then let’s see your painting.”

  “No. It’s too dreadful.” He turned adroitly as they reached the landing, and locked the door behind him. “You’ll laugh, and I’ll be forced to become a bricklayer.”

  “She’s in there.” Tommy Buck paused to hiccup loudly, then banged upon the door. “You’ve hidden her.”

  “I have not. She’s a shy, sensitive woman and you lot would cause her to turn into a deer and flee.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Prove what?”

  “Prove she’s not there.”

  “All right, I will. But I don’t want you all rummaging about my studio and tossing my bad paintings out the window. You can look in and see, Tommy. The rest of you go downstairs and wait.”

  “No,” said one of the poets, a burly young man who looked like he might have flung bricks around in an earlier life. “Open up, Harry boy. Show us all.”

  “No. I shall defend all with my life.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” Tommy asked, swaying as he squinted at it. Harry looked. “My ham sandwich.”

  “Ham. He has ham in there,” someone said wistfully. “I’m hungry.”

  “Here,” Harry said, tossing him the remains.

  “I saw it first,” Tommy said indignantly. “I’m hungrier.” He paused, still swaying lithely, like a reed in a breeze. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “He has an idea.”

  “I’d rather have a sandwich.”

  “Silence! I will speak! My idea is this. We all leave—” He waved his arms, fending off protests. “Listen. If we all go out to dinner, and Harry goes out to dinner with us, and then goes wherever we happen to go after that, it will prove that he hasn’t got a model locked up in his studio. Won’t it?”

  “He could get the Grommet to unlock her,” someone muttered.

  “I won’t speak to her,” Harry promised. “And—” he dangled it. “I have the only key.”

  Tommy made a snatch at it. Harry tucked it out of reach. “She really has gone home,” he told them. “And I think Tommy has an excellent idea. Maybe, if we hurry out, we’ll catch a glimpse of her on the street.”

  They were quiet, staring at him, faces motionless in the stair lights.

  Then, as one, they turned, clattered furiously back down the stairs. Harry followed more slowly, brushing crumbs off his shirt and rolling down his sleeves. He heard the street door fly open, voices flow down the hall and out. Someone called his name, then the sounds faded. He didn’t hear the door close. He wondered if Mrs. Grommet had taken refuge in a closet until the barbarian horde had gone.

  He reached the hall and nearly bumped into his Medusa, coming quickly out of the kitchen with Mrs. Grommet at her heels.

  “Jo—” he exclaimed, startled.

  She pulled up sharply, staring at him, just as surprised.

  “Mr. Waterman,” she breathed. “I thought you had left with them.”

  He was silent, studying her. Something was awry with her face. It seemed streaked, flushed in odd places; her cold, magnificent eyes looked puffy and reddened, oddly vulnerable. He caught his breath, appalled.

  “What have you done?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Waterman,” she said tremulously, brushing at her eyes. “It’ll be gone by morning.”

  “But—” Something else was happening to her face as he stared. Lines shifted. Memory imposed itself, rearranging a curve here, a hollow there. He swallowed, feeling as though the world he knew had vanished for an eye blink, and then returned, subtly, irrevocably altered.

  “Jo,” he said, feeling his heart beat. “Jo Byrd.”

  She said simply, “Yes.”

  She returned the next morning as she promised, though not without misgivings. She looked for the same apprehension in the artist’s eyes, searching for his Medusa in her face while he arranged the black silk around her neck, to draw out her pallor as he said. She wasn’t certain about the pallor. The face in the tiny mirror above her washstand had been more colorful than usual. Nor was she at all certain what Mr. Waterman was thinking. He was very quiet, murmuring instructions now and then. She would have described his expression as peculiar, if he had asked. He looked like someone who had swallowed a butterfly, she thought: a mixed blessing, no matter how you turned it.

  She said finally, hesitantly, “Mr. Waterman. If you can’t see your Medusa now for seeing me, I’ll understand.”

  He gave his head a quick little shake, met her eyes. “As the Gor—as someone pointed out, I tell lies with my brush. Let’s see how well I can do it.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll give it a try,” he insisted calmly. “Shall we?”

  “If you say so, sir.” She subsided, prepared herself to sit as silently as usual. But, strangely, now he seemed in a mood to talk. “I am,” he said, touching white into the black around the Medusa’s
throat, “incredibly embarrassed that I didn’t recognize you.”

  “I’ve gotten older.”

  “By how much? A year? I’m a painter! I’ve been staring at you daily. Not to mention—” His lips tightened; whatever it was, he didn’t mention it.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked at her again, instead of the silk. “I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through. Or, rather, I can only try to imagine it. The child . . . it must have died?”

  Her voice caught, but she had no tears left for that, it seemed. “Yes. He was never strong.”

  “Where did you go, when you vanished in the middle of my painting?”

  “I went home to my mother’s, in the country.”

  “I looked for you.”

  “I know. Mrs. Grommet told me.”

  His mouth crooked ruefully. “So she recognized you.”

  “The way I see it,” Jo explained, “Mrs. Grommet was protecting your household. She has to know what she opens your door to. You remember what I looked like, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “She had to make decisions in her own mind about me. You were only seeing your painting. She was seeing a hungry, filthy wreck of a girl and trying to judge all in a moment whether I would steal the silver, eat with a fork or my fingers, go mad and break all the crockery. She was looking for reasons not to be afraid to let me through the door. You just saw your dream and let me walk right in.”

  He ran his hand through his hair, nearly tangling the brush in it. “Makes me sound like a fool.”

  She thought about that, shrugged. “I don’t know. How do you like your painting?”

  He looked at it, his eyes going depthless, still, like water reflecting an empty sky. They were, she realized suddenly, the exact blue of the dragonflies in the stream behind her parents’ cottage. She’d lie and watch them dart and light, little dancing arrows as blue as larkspur.

  Mr. Waterman blinked; so did she. They both drew back a little from what they’d been examining. She recognized that expression on his face; it was how he had been looking at her until now.

  “I think—” he said, still gazing at his painting, and stammering a little, “I think—I wasn’t a fool, after all. I think it’s at least better than anything I’ve done so far. Jo. . . .” He turned to her abruptly. “I have such amazing visions of your hair. Are you afraid of snakes?”

  “No more or less than anything else that might bite me. But, sir,” she amended warily, “surely you’re not going to put them in my hair? I don’t think I want to wear them.”

  “No, no.” His thoughts veered abruptly. “I have to fix that eye before I go on. Look at me. Don’t blink.” He added, after a moment or two, “You can talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything that won’t make you cry.” She felt her eyes flush at the thought; he looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Jo.”

  “It’s just—somehow I never got around to crying before.”

  “Tell me something, anything you remember, that once made you happy. If there was anything,” he added carefully.

  “Well.” The tide retreated; she gazed, dry-eyed, at her past. “When my father was alive, he kept a small flock of sheep for wool. I liked to look at them, all plump and white in their green field, watch the lambs leap for no reason except that they were alive. He’d shear them and we’d spin the wool into yarn to sell. Sometimes we’d look for madder root to dye it purple.”

  “We?” he asked, busy at the corner of her eye, from what she could see. “Sister?”

  “My mother. I didn’t have sisters. I had a little brother for a couple of years once, but he died.”

  “Oh. But you chose not to stay with your mother? To come back here instead?”

  “She died, too.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, but without tears. “So was I. So I came back here. And you rescued me.”

  He looked at her, oddly surprised. “I did?”

  “You did,” she said huskily. “I couldn’t find work, I was exhausted, I had two coppers to my name. I found my way to your street just muddling around in the dark, and then I remembered you. I slept under a tree, that night before I came to your door. I didn’t have any hope, but I didn’t have anything left to do. I even—I even tried to get myself arrested for breaking a streetlamp, to have a place to sleep.”

  He was watching her, brush suspended. “When you do that—”

  “What, sir?”

  “Even when you only think about smiling, you change the shape of your eye. Medusa does not smile.” He stopped abruptly, cast an odd glance above her head, and amended, “At least we have no recorded evidence that she smiled.”

  “You asked me to think about something happy.”

  “You didn’t smile, then. It was irony, not happiness, that made you smile.”

  She mulled that over. “You mean trying to get into jail for a bed?”

  “Yes. What happened? Did you miss the streetlamp?”

  “No. I hit it dead on. But a dozen others stepped up on the spot and swore it was them that threw the stone. Someone else got my bed. So I wandered on—”

  “And,” he said softly, his brush moving again, “you found me.”

  “You found me,” she whispered.

  “No tears. Medusa does not cry.”

  She composed her face again, summoned the icy, gorgeous monster to look out of her eyes. “She does not cry.”

  “But,” he said after a while, “she might perhaps like to come with me this afternoon to look at snakes. No blinking.”

  “No blinking.”

  “But snakes?”

  “Looking at snakes,” she said, suddenly aware of his own fair, tidy hair, on a nicely rounded head, his young face with its sweet, determined expression, “would make Medusa happy.”

  Harry stood on the ladder in his studio, detaching the Gorgon from her nail. He had gotten in late. After spending a few hours among the reptiles and other assorted creatures, he had walked Jo to her lodging house on Carvery Street. Then he had wandered aimlessly, oddly light-headed, dropping in at studios here and there to let his friends tease him about his imaginary model, his hopeless daub of a painting so dreadful he was forced to keep it hidden behind locked doors. He laughed with them; his thoughts kept straying back to his studio, sometimes to the reptiles, none of which had done justice to his Medusa’s hair.

  But my brush can lie, he told himself. He had insisted on buying Jo peanuts in the zoological garden. But instead of throwing them to the animals, she had simply given them to a wiry, dirty-faced boy who had somehow wriggled his way in and was begging near the lions’ den.

  His elbow hit a book on top of the shelves as he maneuvered the painting down and under his arm. The book dropped with a thud that probably woke the house. He breathed a curse, trying to be as quiet as possible. The ladder rungs creaked ominously.

  The Gorgon, who had been blessedly silent until then, said sharply, her mouth somewhere under his armpit, “Harry, you’re not putting me back into the cupboard.”

  “Shh—”

  “Don’t shush me. Just because you don’t need me anymore.”

  “What do you mean I don’t need you?”

  “I saw the way you looked at her.”

  “I was not aware that I looked at her in any particular way.”

  “Ha!”

  “Shhh,” Harry pleaded. “Mrs. Grommet will think I’m up here entertaining lewd company.”

  “Thank you,” the Gorgon said frostily. But once started, she could never be silent for long, Harry knew. He felt the floor beneath his foot at last, and her curiosity got the better. “Then what are you going to do with me?”

  “I just want to look at you.”

  He positioned a wooden chair beside the easel, propped the painting on it. Then he drew the black silk off the new Medusa. Side by side, Jo past and Jo present, he studied them: the young, terrified girl; the haunted, desperate woman. A year in t
he life. . . . “What a life,” he breathed, moved at the thought of it.

  The Gorgon spoke, startling him again. “What are you looking for?”

  “I wanted to see why it was I didn’t recognize her. I understand a little better now. That hair—I should have known it anywhere. But the expressions are completely different. And the skin tone. . . . She was at least being fed when she came to me the first time.” His voice trailed away as he studied them: Persephone who had innocently eaten a few seeds and transformed herself into the doomed Medusa. He asked, suddenly curious himself, “Where do you live? I mean, where were you before you took up residence in my painting?”

  “Oh, here and there,” she answered vaguely.

  “No, really.”

  “Why? Are you thinking of ways to get rid of your noisy, uncouth Gorgon?”

  He thought about that, touched the Medusa on the easel. “Who inspired this out of me? No. Stay as long as you like. Stay forever. I’ll introduce you to my friends. None of them have paintings that speak. They’ll all be jealous of me.”

  “You invited me,” she reminded him.

  “I did.”

  “I go where I’m invited. Where I am invoked. When I hear my name in someone’s heart, or in a painting or a poem, I exist there. The young thug Perseus cut my head off. But he didn’t rid the world of me. I’ve stayed alive these thousands of years because I haven’t been forgotten. Every time my name is invoked and my power is remembered anew, then I live again, I am empowered.”

  “Yes,” Harry said softly, watching those full, alluring lips move, take their varying shapes on canvas in ways that he could never seem to move them in life. “I understand.”