Hart & Boot & Other Stories (16 page)

I growled, and I must have stopped thinking and let instinct take over totally, because I
jumped
down the six or seven stairs to the floor. I landed in a crouch, the knife in my hand. I want to say I was not myself then, that I was possessed, that some greater force was moving
through
me—but it’s not true.

I was me, all the way down, more myself than I’d ever been before.

Martin didn’t even notice me. He was too busy eating. I didn’t want to see that, to understand how it could be possible, how something his size—a little bigger than a lion—could devour a whole person, clothes and all.

The tail was a scorpion’s then, not the terribly self-aware snake, and so I approached almost without fear, my knife raised high, and plunged it into his back with a cry.

The tail smashed me aside, though I kept my grip on the knife, and I fell to the concrete, landing so hard on my shoulder that my right arm went totally numb. The monster turned his face toward me, eyes slitted in fury, blood pouring from the wound in his side. I could only lay there, staring. The monster’s head like a baby’s, smooth and round, fat-cheeked, but it was also clearly
Martin
’s face. He opened his mouth, revealing the triple rows of teeth, and music came out, flute and trumpet.

I rolled over onto my stomach, protecting my softest spot, and lifted the knife with my left hand.

“You
hurt
me,” he said, in that bass-treble blatting voice. “I didn’t think you had so much lion in you.”

I bared my teeth and struggled to my knees. His tail lifted, curling, and the spikes reappeared, sliding out like cat’s claws. The spikes were a foot long, poison, instant death, I
knew
it.

“I’m part lion,” the manticore said, all trumpet now, all blatting. “I
was
a lion, long ago, but my line... diverged.
Improved
. The pure lions still hate me for that. Even your bastard, half-imagined blood has some potency, enough to
sting
me, but that’s all.”

He wasn’t going to die from the stab wound. That was quite clear. I’d hurt him, sure, but not enough. I wondered if the old lion from the alley would come crashing through a basement window, jump on Martin’s back, tear him a new asshole.

I didn’t think so. I didn’t think it was a night for that kind of miracle.

“I’ll never know what Lily saw in you,” he said, and his tail twitched.

It was too much. Such a fucking prosaic old-boyfriend thing to say, and it was coming from this fucking inhuman thing, this shiny baby-headed monster with spikes on his tail.

I laughed. That was all I had left, right? He was going to kill me, but I laughed. And I still had the knife, after all. Maybe I could jump at him, stick it in his eye, get to his brain. What did I have to lose?

Martin scowled, and his tail uncurled, the spikes dripping venom. I looked him in the eyes. “I bet I’m better in bed than you are,” I said.

His tail drew back, and I tensed to jump, to laugh in his face and stab before his spikes nailed me.

Then his tail stopped, and began to change. At first I thought it was just another transformation, that his tail would become a snake and bite me, or that the spikes would sprout barbs. But that wasn’t it—the tail was turning gray, and then tiny cracks appeared in it, like stress fractures. The spikes fell away, shattering on the concrete floor. Martin looked back at his tail, his human face wearing an expression of total horror. The grayness crept up his tail, up his hindquarters, and his horrible too-human eyes widened as his legs turned to stone.

We both looked up the stairs. Lily was there, sitting on the steps. Her robe was open, and her front was all blood. She wept, her face shiny with tears, and her hair positively
writhed
, like a nest of angry snakes.

“Lily,” Martin said, his voice all trilling flute, as the petrification crept up his body. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t look at me, either, though.

Martin snapped his jaws. The gray slowly crawled up his neck, and then his head. He froze that way, his jaws open. He looked like a gruesome piece of cement lawn art—more cartoonish than monstrous in this fixed state, more comprehensible to human eyes.

I dropped the knife and ran toward the stairs, but by the time my foot touched the bottom step I couldn’t move any farther—it was like trying to walk through a solid stone wall. Lily looked past me, at Martin.

“You saved me,” I said. “You
chose
me.”

“You would both have died,” she said tonelessly. “Martin would have killed you, but you would have stabbed him before you died, and there is enough lion in you for that wound to be fatal. I know; my ancestors were oracles, and I can see enough of the future to know what would happen. I wanted to save one of you. I couldn’t turn
you
to stone, not entirely, you’re too human... but Martin is more susceptible to these old things, these old powers. A weakness to go with his strength.” She looked at me then, her eyes all pupil, all black, her hair twisting on her shoulders. “I hate both of you,” she said. “I hate both of you for making me choose.”

She went up the stairs. I couldn’t follow—the air stayed thick for another half hour, and even then I had to fight my way up the stairs, one at a time.

I never saw Lily again.

***

The next day I helped Jade-Lynne move, and we talked about Steven, how we hoped he was okay, wherever he was. I didn’t tell her Steven was in the belly of a statue of a manticore in a basement across town. She wouldn’t have believed me. I carried boxes all day. Jade-Lynne flirted with me, even, and any other day it would have gone somewhere, but no way, not then.

This all happened a while ago, you know, months and months, but I still haven’t figured out how I feel about it. I still dream about being a lion, but I haven’t seen the old lion again. Maybe he died. I spend more time with my friends, but I haven’t been on a date in ages, haven’t had sex, either.

I went to Nick and Susie’s wedding last weekend. They held hands at the altar, like they couldn’t stop touching each other for even that long. I decided they were better off together, just the two of them, for now, for the moment, and that had to be enough, didn’t it? I cried at the ceremony, and even I’m not sure why. Everything hurts, more or less, every day.

You know what I wish, mostly?

I wish Lily had turned my heart to stone. Just my heart. That would have been enough, I think. To have a still, stony heart; something heavy, but not so heavy I couldn’t forget about the weight, light enough that I could forget, sometimes, why I was still carrying it around.

Living with the Harpy

Living with the harpy presented certain difficulties. Her feathers clogged the shower drain, and the smell of unsavory meats cooked over chemical fires drifted from her room. She screamed profanity sometimes, as if afflicted with Tourette’s, but with obvious glee. I occasionally found drowned mice in the coffeemaker.

Even so, I’d had worse roommates, during college when I shared a house with three boys who liked to try to catch me naked in the bathroom (though I wasn’t as beautiful back then as I eventually became). The harpy seemed content with our living situation, too. It is in the nature of her kind to roost, if not to nest.

Besides, I loved the harpy. I always loved the
fact
of her, and sometimes, when she was in her pleasanter moods, I even loved the particularity of her.

***

I met Jocelyn at a dyke bar in the city. She had clearly never been in such a place before, smiling awkwardly, dressed in glittery club-clothes that didn’t seem to fit quite right; I later learned that no clothes hung on her properly, that she always seemed ill-attired, that she only looked comfortable when she was naked.

I knew she would never approach me, or anyone else, not tonight. She was trying to get the lay of the land, not to get herself laid. I liked her right away, if only because she was so different from the other women in the bar—her hair was all crazy nut-colored curls, held in a clump on top with a clip, as if she’d given up hope of taming it, and despite her stylishly sequined black top and short skirt she carried a big purse, rainbow-striped, clearly homemade. I found the unself-consciousness of her fashion clash endearing, but it just drew sneers from the rest of the crowd.

I drifted through the bar, toward the pillar she leaned against. She was drinking a gin and tonic. Before the night was over, I planned to taste the gin on her lips.

We’d go to her place, if she was amenable, or else go no place at all. I couldn’t take her home. Because of the harpy.

***

I’m a voice actor. In the television commercial about the new yeast-infection treatment, I’m the soothing female narrator. Every few months I adopt a sultry tone and read erotica for a books-on-tape company run by a pair of oddly feminist lesbians who enjoy dressing in Victorian garb, corsets and all. They say I get the breathless sighs just right. Sometimes I get movie work, and though several directors have offered me access to their beds as a route to screen time of my own, I have always declined. I don’t like spotlight any more than the harpy does, I suppose. We’re a lot alike.

My voice used to be nothing special, dull, a bland Midwestern accent, but since I’ve been living with the harpy, it has grown mellifluous, polyhymnal. I worked for a sex phone line at first, before I got into more respectable voice work—that was an experience that put me off dating men for a long time, though I’ve always been attracted to both genders. The harpy likes my voice. When I sing in the shower, she doesn’t screech. She listens.

***

“So what’s this mystery roommate’s name?” Jocelyn asked.

“Harp,” I said.

“Harp? Like the beer?”

“I suppose,” I said, watching the movie. I had a part in the film, as the disembodied voice on the loudspeakers, warning of imminent core meltdown, just another threat for the hero to overcome.

Jocelyn giggled. “Harp? Like the type of seal?”

“Like the musical instrument,” I said, strangely offended.

“Do you ever call her Harpo?” Jocelyn said.

“Shh,” I said. “You’ll miss my line.” From the vast speakers, I counted down the moments to a fabricated destruction.

***

I’ve never seen the harpy’s face. The nearest thing was one day when I came home early from a recording session and caught the harpy in the living room. She rushed into her room straightaway, of course, but I saw her stained white housedress and the mass of dirty, pigeon-gray feathers on her head.

Mostly I see her in the bathroom. Our shower has pebbled glass doors, so everything viewed through them is distorted, transformed into blobs of color, angles rendered round, lines turned curvaceous. Sometimes when I shower, the harpy comes in, and sits on the toilet, and talks to me in her raucous, cawing voice, her head a gray blur through the glass, her body white. We talk about inconsequential things, usually: repairs that need to be done around the apartment, items I need to pick up at the store. Sometimes she talks about the history of her kind (or perhaps the history of herself; it is never clear), about forests of twisted trees in caverns underground, women who weep blood, men without eyes, the futility of suicide. Sometimes she speaks Greek, or guttural Latin, or the lost tongues of mountain hordes. The harpy speaks wistfully of flying, and eating fresh raw livers, but says she is too old for such pursuits now. These are generally monologues, and if I try to respond, she simply ignores me and talks on.

The day the harpy first moved in, when I was afraid of her, she came into the bathroom and told me how she would pay her rent. “The coin of a better life,” she called it. “Sucking the poison out,” she said. I’d never been really beautiful, really lucky, really brave. I knew right away I couldn’t reject the harpy’s offer. She’d known the same thing before she even asked.

***

Ellen Bass, the poet, has compared two women making love to armfuls of lilacs wet with rain, among other things, and that may be true, sometimes, but sex with Jocelyn is more like being in the briar patch. She is fierce, scratching with her nails, nipping with her teeth. I’ve never had such a rough lover, but I enjoy it, the way she holds on to me so tightly, the way she drags her fingernails along my skin, and I reciprocate, leaving suck marks on her breasts, scratches on her shoulders.

One afternoon, lying in bed at her place (always her place), after, she touched the unbroken skin of my back. “I can’t believe I didn’t leave a mark on you,” she said, a soft note of sadness in her voice.

“I’m thick-skinned,” I said, though the truth is more complicated. Since I’ve been living with the harpy, I don’t bruise, or scar, or burn. Nothing leaves a mark on me. It’s part of the rent. The harpy says if I live with her long enough I’ll become indestructible. Even suicide would cease to be an option, not that I’ve ever really considered it.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’ve left any mark on you at all,” Jocelyn said, and began to cry.

She let me hold her, but she wouldn’t talk about it, she wouldn’t explain what she meant.

* * *

When I told the harpy I wanted to invite Jocelyn over for dinner, the only response was the sound of shattering glass from her room, something heavy and fragile thrown against the wall.

“Is that okay?” I asked, leaning my forehead against her door. “If it’s not okay, say so, and I’ll tell her she can’t come.”

“Sing to me,” the harpy said.

So I sang “Frank Mills,” that song from
Hair
, because it’s one of the few songs I know by heart, and the harpy likes it. I hesitated over the line about loving someone, but being embarrassed to walk down the street with them. My voice might have broken, if it were capable of breaking anymore. I don’t think the harpy noticed.

When I finished singing, after a moment of silence, the harpy said, “Do whatever you like.” Her voice was like something gnawing itself in pain.

***

“You’re too perfect for me,” Jocelyn said.

“Oh, stop it,” I said. “You’ll embarrass me.”

“It wasn’t a compliment,” Jocelyn said. She sighed. “It was a statement of fact. You don’t need me. I don’t know what you need. Maybe nothing. Too perfect.”

“That’s a pretty strange thing to complain about,” I said.

“If you think so, then you don’t know me as well as I thought you did,” she said.

***

I’d been so hesitant to invite Jocelyn over, but I could tell it was a crucial step, that Jocelyn’s reservations about me—her sense that I keep secrets, her fear that I was using her somehow—were growing. I had to show willing. I had to let her in.

And the harpy was quiet. Jocelyn and I made dinner, drank wine, nuzzled on the couch. There were a few feathers here and there, but I told Jocelyn that my roommate Harp raised pigeons, that feathers got stuck to her clothes, and Jocelyn believed me. I should have felt guilty about lying to Jocelyn, but I didn’t—I felt guilty for lying
about
the harpy, as if I were ashamed of her, when really I was just keeping her identity a secret.

After half an hour of long kisses, Jocelyn took my chin in her hand, met my eyes, and said, “Thank you for letting me come over. Can I stay the night?”

“Of course,” I said. I wondered if the harpy was listening.

***

When I came home the day after the first night Jocelyn slept over, I found coffee grounds dumped all over my pillow, and telltale feathers everywhere, and the glass cracked in my favorite oval hand-mirror with the tortoise-shell back.

I went to the harpy’s door (I was even thinking of her as “Harp” then, though she’d never needed a name in the days before I needed a lover), knocked gently, said, “We should talk.”

There was only silence. Not even the rustle of her feathers. Not even weeping.

***

“So why have I never met this Harp?” Jocelyn said. “I know she raises pigeons, and she’s shy, and I hear her thumping around back there, but why doesn’t she ever come out of her room?”

I shrugged. “She doesn’t like people.”

“There’s got to be more to it than that,” she said. “A... a pathology.”

“It’s not a pathology. Harp’s an albino.” I improvised wildly. “She has a port-wine stain on her forehead and across one cheek. She doesn’t like people to see her. Even I hardly ever see her.” I wondered if the explanation was too outlandish, and waited for Jocelyn to laugh, but she didn’t, so I assumed it was so absurd that Jocelyn assumed it must be true.

“Poor thing,” Jocelyn said.

***

One day when I came home I discovered that we had a fireplace, which we never did before. The hearth was made of rough gray stone, the bricks stained with the ash of a thousand fires. There were feathers scattered all around, and I pictured the harpy kneeling there for a long time. I knelt, too, and in the fireplace I saw shards of glazed pottery, scraps of thick paper, and bundles of dried flowers, all partially burned. I put out my hand, and the stones still radiated heat. I supposed the harpy must have been working a spell. I wondered what kind. Probably something to make Jocelyn leave me, which more and more seemed like the saddest of all possible outcomes, and which more and more seemed like something that would happen whether the harpy worked her dirty magics or not.

I hadn’t talked to the harpy in weeks, not since Jocelyn brought up the subject of moving in with me. That day I told the harpy what Jocelyn had suggested, and asked what would happen if she did come to live with me, with us. The harpy answered me in Greek. I couldn’t understand her. It sounded like she was choking on something as she spoke. I hadn’t tried to communicate with her since, had only seen the indirect evidence of her continued presence—the wads of bloodied tissue paper in the kitchen, the piles of white sand in the hall.

I knocked at her door, once, twice, thrice, and she said “Come in.”

I stared at the grain of the wood. She had never asked me to come in before. I had never seen the inside of the harpy’s room. Before she moved in, my apartment only had one bedroom, mine, but when the harpy came, she brought her own space with her.

“I just wanted to talk,” I said. “I don’t have to come in.” My legs were shaking. I could barely stand. I couldn’t imagine passing through that door, seeing the harpy’s face, seeing her nest, her home within our home.

“I’ll be here,” the harpy said, and her voice seemed smoother than usual, though perhaps she was only being quiet. “When you’re ready, come in, and we’ll talk. But not before.”

I went to my room. I called Jocelyn. I asked her to meet me for a drink.

***

The next time, I didn’t knock. I just turned the knob, and pushed open the harpy’s door.

Inside was a cave, I think, but it was so dark, I couldn’t really see—there was just the underground smell, the distant plink of water, the rustle of wings in the shadows, the sense of cavernous space. I stood in the doorway. “Harp,” I said, and winced, because that wasn’t her name. She didn’t have a name.

“Harpy,” she said, somewhere far back in the shadows. “I am here. You’ve come to tell me. To tell me what you’re giving up, and what you’re giving it up for. Me, for her.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said. “I just... I feel so isolated, like I can’t let anyone in, can’t let anyone get close. Before Jocelyn, I felt so alone, and now that I have her...”

“You have me.” Her voice was harsh, but it was always harsh, and I’d never been good at understanding her moods, her emotions, based on the sound of her voice.

“Yes,” I said simply, because there was no way to deny that, and no changing the fact that, even so, I always felt alone. “You know I love you,” I said, the beginning of something, some soothing sentiment, but the harpy interrupted.