by Tim Powers
He found the page again, and saw the name Cheyenne Fleming scrawled below one of the sonnets; and beside it was a thumbprint in the same fountain-pen ink.
He paused.
If this was a genuine Fleming signature, the book was worth about two hundred dollars. He was familiar with her poetry, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her signature; certainly he didn’t have any signed Flemings at home to compare this against. But Christine would probably be able to say whether it was real or not – Christine Dunn was a book dealer he’d sometimes gone in with on substantial buys.
He’d risk the twenty dollars and call her when he got back to his apartment. And just for today he would walk straight north to Franklin, not west on Hollywood Boulevard. Not quite yet, not this evening.
His apartment building was on Franklin just west of Highland, a jacaranda-shaded old two-story horseshoe around an overgrown central courtyard, and supposedly Marlon Brando had stayed there before he’d become successful. Sydney’s apartment was upstairs, and he locked the door after he had let himself into the curtained, tobacco-scented living room.
He poured himself a glass of bourbon from the bottle on the top kitchen shelf, and pulled a Coors from the refrigerator to chase the warm liquor with, and then he took his shopping bag to the shabby brown-leather chair in the corner and switched on the lamp.
It was of course the Fleming that interested him. He flipped open the book to the page with Fleming’s name inked on it.
He recognized the sonnet from the first line – it was the rude sonnet to her sister … the sister who, he recalled, had become Fleming’s literary executor after Fleming’s suicide. Ironic.
He read the first eight lines of the sonnet, his gaze only bouncing over the lines since he had read it many times before:
To My Sister
Rebecca, if your mirror were to show
My face to you instead of yours, I wonder
If you would notice right away, or know
The vain pretense you’ve chosen to live under.
If ever phone or doorbell rang, and then
I heard your voice conversing, what you’d say
Would be what I have said, recalled again,
And I might sit in silence through the day.
Then he frowned and took a careful sip of the bourbon. The last six lines weren’t quite as he remembered them:
But when the Resurrection Man shall bring
The moon to free me from these yellowed pages,
The gift is mine, there won’t be anything
For you – and you can rest through all the ages
Under a stone that bears the cherished name
You thought should make the two of us the same.
He picked up the telephone and punched in Christine’s number.
After three rings he heard her say, briskly, “Dunn Books.”
“Christine,” he said, “George – uh – here.” It was the first time he had spoken since seeing the girl disappear, and his voice had cracked. He cleared his throat and took a deep breath and let it out.
“Drunk again,” said Christine.
“Again?” he said. “Still. Listen, I’ve got a first here of Fleming’s More Poems, no dust jacket but it’s got her name written below one of the poems. Do you have a signed Fleming I could compare it with?”
“You’re in luck, an eBay customer backed out of a deal. It’s a More Poems, too.”
“Have you got it right there?”
“Yeah, but what, you want me to describe her signature over the phone? We should meet at the Biltmore tomorrow, bring our copies.”
“Good idea, and if this is real I’ll buy lunch. But could you flip to the sonnet ‘To My Sister’?”
“One second.” A few moments later she was back on the phone. “Okay, what about it?”
“How does the sestet go?”
“It says, ‘But when the daylight of the future shows / The forms freed by erosion from their cages, / It will be mine that quickens, gladly grows, / And lives; and you can rest through all the ages / Under a stone that bears the cherished name / You thought should make the two of us the same.’ Bitter poem!”
Those were the familiar lines – the way the poem was supposed to go.
“Why,” asked Christine, “is yours missing the bottom of the page?”
“No – I’ve – my copy has a partly different sestet.” He read to her the last six lines on the page of the book he held. “Printed just like every other poem in the book, same typeface and all.”
“Wow. Otherwise a standard copy of the first edition?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I don’t know,” he said, quoting a treasured remark from a bookseller they both knew. He added, “We’ll know tomorrow.”
“Eleven, okay? And take care of it – it might be worth wholesaling to one of the big-ticket dealers.”
“I wasn’t going to use it for a coaster. See you at eleven.”
He hung up the phone, and before putting the book aside he touched the ink thumbprint beside the signature on the page. The paper wasn’t warm or cold, but he shivered – this was a touch across decades. When had Fleming killed herself?
He got up and crossed the old carpets to the computer and turned it on, and as the monitor screen showed the Hewlett Packard logo and then the Windows background, he couldn’t shake the mental image of trying to grab a woman to keep her from falling into some abyss and only managing to brush her outstretched hand with one finger.
He typed in the address for Google – sounds like a Chinaman trying to say something – and then typed “cheyenne fleming,” and when a list of sites appeared he clicked on the top one. He had a dial-up AOL connection, so the text appeared first, flanking a square where a picture would soon appear.
Cheyenne Fleming, he read, had been born in Hollywood in 1934, and had lived there all her life with her younger sister Rebecca. Both had gone to UCLA, Cheyenne with more distinction than Rebecca, and both had published books of poetry, though Rebecca’s had always been compared unfavorably with Cheyenne’s. The sisters apparently both loved and resented each other, and the article quoted several lines from the “To My Sister” sonnet – the version Christine had read to him over the phone, not the version in his copy of More Poems. Cheyenne Fleming had shot herself in 1969, reportedly because Rebecca had stolen away her fiancée. Rebecca became her literary executor.
At last the picture appeared on the screen – it was black and white, but Sydney recognized the thin face with its narrow eyes and wide humorous mouth, and he knew that the disordered hair would be red in a color photograph.
The tip of his finger was numb where he had touched her thumbprint.
I’m Shy, she had said. He had thought she was evading giving him her name. Shy for Cheyenne, of course. Pronounced Shy-Ann.
He glanced fearfully at his front door – what if she was standing on the landing out there right now, in the dusk shadows? He realized, with a shudder that made him carry his glass back to the kitchen for a refill, that he would open the door if she was – yes, and invite her in, invite her across his threshold. I finally fall in love, he thought, and it’s with a dead woman. A suicide.
A line of black ants had found the coffee cup he’d left unwashed this morning, but he couldn’t kill them right now.
Once his glass was filled again, he went to the living room window instead of the door, and he pulled the curtains aside. A huge orange full moon hung in the darkening sky behind the old TV antennas on the opposite roof. He looked down, but didn’t see her among the shadowed trees and vines.
And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,
So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.
He closed the curtain and fetched the bottle and the twelve-pack of Coors to set beside his chair, then settled down to lose himself in one of the P. G. Wodehouse novels until he should be drunk enough to stumble to bed and fall instantly asleep.
As he trudged across Pershing Square from the parking
structure on Hill Street toward the three imposing brown brick towers of the Biltmore Hotel, Sydney’s squinting gaze kept being drawn in the direction of the new bright-yellow building on the south side of the square. His eyes were watering in the morning sun-glare anyway, and he wondered irritably why somebody would paint a new building in that idiotic kindergarten color.
He had awakened early, and his hangover seemed to be just a continuation of his disorientation from the day before. He had decided that he couldn’t sell the Fleming book. Even though he had met her two weeks before finding the book, he was certain that the book was somehow his link to her.
Christine would be disappointed – part of the fun of bookselling was writing catalogue copy for extraordinary items, and she would have wanted to collaborate in the description of this item – but he couldn’t help that.
His gaze was drawn again toward the yellow building, but now that he was closer to it he could see that it wasn’t the building that his eyes had been drawn toward, but a stairway and pool just this side of it. Two six-foot brown stone spheres were mounted on the pool coping.
And he saw her sitting down there, on the shady side of one of the giant stone balls.
He was smiling and stepping across the pavement in that direction even before he was sure it was her, and the memory, only momentarily delayed, of who she must be didn’t slow his pace.
She was wearing the jeans and sweatshirt again, and she stood up and waved at him when he was still a hundred feet away, and even at this distance he was sure he caught her pears-and-cumin scent.
He sprinted the last few yards, and her arms were wide so he hugged her when they met.
“George,” she said breathily in his ear. The fruit-and-spice smell was strong.
“Shy,” he said, and hugged her more tightly. He could feel her breastbone against his, and he wondered if she had been wearing a padded bra when he had first seen her. Then he held her by her shoulders at arm’s length and smiled into her squinting, elfin eyes. “I’ve got to make a call,” he said.
He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open and tapped in Christine’s well-remembered number. He was already ten minutes late for their meeting.
“Christine,” he said, “I’ve got to beg off … no, I’m not going to be home. I’m going to be in Orange County –”
Cheyenne mouthed Overnight.
“– overnight,” Sydney went on, “till tomorrow. No, I … I’ll explain it later, and I owe you a lunch. No, I haven’t sold it yet! I gotta run, I’m in traffic and I can’t drive and talk at the same time. Right, right – ‘bye!”
He folded it and tucked it back into his pocket.
Cheyenne nodded. “To avoid complications,” she said.
Sydney had stepped back from her, but he was holding her hand – possibly to keep her from disappearing again. “My New Year’s resolution,” he said with a rueful smile, “was not to tell any lies.”
“My attitude toward New Year’s resolutions is the same as Oscar Wilde’s,” she said, stepping around the pool coping and swinging his hand.
“What did he say about them?” asked Sydney, falling into step beside her.
“I don’t know if he ever said anything about them,” she said, “but if he did, I’m sure I agree with it.”
She looked back at him, then glanced past him and lost her smile.
“Don’t turn around,” she said quickly, so he just stared at her face, which seemed bony and starved between the wings of tangled red hair. “Now look around, but scan the whole square, like you’re calculating if they could land the Goodyear blimp here.”
Sydney let his gaze swivel from Hill Street, across the trees and broad pavement of the square, to the pillared arch of the Biltmore entrance. Up there toward the east end of the square he had seen a gray-haired woman in a loose blue dress; she seemed to be the same woman he had seen behind them on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday.
He let his eyes come back around to focus on Cheyenne’s face.
“You saw that woman?” she said to him. “The one that looks like … some kind of featherless monkey? Stay away from her, she’ll tell you lies about me.”
Looking at the Biltmore entrance had reminded him that Christine might have parked in the Hill Street lot too. “Let’s sit behind one of these balls,” he said. And when they had walked down the steps and sat on the cement coping, leaning back against the receding under-curve of the nearest stone sphere, he said, “I found your book. I hope you don’t mind that I know who you are.”
She was still holding his hand, and now she squeezed it. “Who am I, lover?”
“You’re Cheyenne Fleming. You – you’re –” “Yes. How did I die?”
He took a deep breath. “You killed yourself.”
“I did? Why?”
“Because your sister – I read – ran off with your fiancée.”
She closed her eyes and twined her fingers through his. “Urbane legends. Can I come over to your place tonight? I want to copy one of my poems in the book, write it out again in the blank space around the printed version, and I need you to hold my hand, guide my hand while I write it.”
“Okay,” he said. His heart was thudding in his chest. Inviting her over my threshold, he thought. “I’d like that,” he added with dizzy bravado.
“I’ve got the pen to use,” she went on. “It’s my special pen, they buried me with it.”
“Okay.” Buried her with it, he thought. Buried her with it. “I love you,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Do you love me? Tell me you love me.”
He was sitting down, but his head was spinning with vertigo as if an infinite black gulf yawned at his feet. This was her inviting him over her threshold.
“Under,” he said in a shaky voice, “normal circumstances, I’d certainly be in love with you.”
“Nobody falls in love under normal circumstances,” she said softly, rubbing his finger with her warm thumb. He restrained an impulse to look to see if there was still ink on it. “Love isn’t in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway.” She opened her eyes and waved her free hand behind them toward the square. “Normal people. I hate them.”
“Me too,” said Sydney.
“Actually,” she said, looking down at their linked hands, “I didn’t kill myself.” She paused for so long that he was about to ask her what had happened, when she went on quietly, “My sister Rebecca shot me, and made it look like a suicide. After that she apparently did go away with my fiancée. But she killed me because she had made herself into an imitation of me, and without me in the picture, she’d be the original.” Through her hand he felt her shiver. “I’ve been alone in the dark for a long time,” she said in a small voice.
Sydney freed his hand so that he could put his arm around her narrow shoulders, and he kissed her hair.
Cheyenne looked up with a grin that made slits of her eyes. “But I don’t think she’s prospered! Doesn’t she look terrible?”
Sydney resisted the impulse to look around again. “Was that –”
Cheyenne frowned. “I’ve got to go – I can’t stay here for very long at a time, not until we copy that poem.”
She kissed him, and their mouths opened, and for a moment his tongue touched hers. When their lips parted their foreheads were pressed together, and he whispered, “Let’s get that poem copied, then.”
She smiled, deepening the lines in her cheeks, and looked down. “Sit back now and look away from me,” she said. “And I’ll come to your place tonight.”
He pressed his palms against the surface of the cement coping and pushed himself away from her, and looked toward Hill Street.
After a moment, “Shy?” he said; and when he looked around she was gone. “I love you,” he said to the empty air.
“Everybody did,” came a raspy voice from behind and above him.
For a moment he went on staring at the place where Cheyenne had sat; then he sighed deeply and looked a
round.
The old woman in the blue dress was standing at the top of the stairs, and now began stepping carefully down them in boxy old-lady shoes.
Her eyes were pouchy above round cheeks and not much of a chin, and Sydney imagined she’d been cute decades ago.
“Are,” he said in a voice he made himself keep level, “you Rebecca?”
She stopped in front of him and nodded, frowning in the sun-glare. “Rebecca Fleming,” she said. “The cherished name.” The diesel-scented breeze was blowing her white hair around her face, and she pushed it back with one frail, spotted hand. “Did she say I killed her?”
After a moment’s hesitation, “Yes,” Sydney said.
She sat down, far enough away from him that he didn’t feel called on to move further away. Why hadn’t he brought a flask?
“True,” she said, exhaling as if she’d been holding her breath. “True, I did.” She looked across at him, and he reluctantly met her eyes. They were green, just like Cheyenne’s.
“I bet,” she said, “you bought a book of hers, signed.” She barked two syllables of a laugh. “And I bet she’s still got her fountain pen. We buried it with her.”
“I don’t think you and I have much to say to each other,” said Sydney stiffly. He started to get to his feet.
“It was self-defense, if you’re curious,” she said, not stirring.
He paused, bracing himself on his hands.
“She came into my room,” said Rebecca, “with a revolver. I woke up when she touched the cold muzzle to my forehead. This is thirty-seven years ago, but I remember it as if it were last night – we were in a crummy motel south of Santa Monica Boulevard, on one of her low-life tours. I sat up and pushed the gun away, but she kept trying to get it aimed at me – she was laughing, irritated, cajoling, I wasn’t playing along properly – and when I pushed it back toward her it went off. Under her chin. I wrote a suicide note for her.”