Ivory and the Horn (35 page)

“You know what I like best about the city?” she asked as we waited for the light to change where Yoors crosses Bunnett.

I shook my head.

“Looking up. There’s a whole other world living up there.”

I followed her gaze and at first I didn’t know what she was on about. I looked through breaks in the gusts of snow that billowed around us, but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. I saw only rooftops and chimneys, multicolored Christmas decorations and the black strands of cable that ran in sagging geometric lines from the power poles to the buildings.

“What’re you talking about?” I asked.

“The ‘goyles,” Gina said.

I gave her a blank look, no closer to understanding what she was talking about than I’d been before.

“The gargoyles, Sue,” she repeated patiently. “Almost every building in this part of the city has got them, perched up there by the rooflines, looking down on us.”

Once she’d pointed them out to me, I found it hard to believe that I’d never noticed them before. On that corner alone there were at least a half-dozen grotesque examples. I saw one in the archway keystone of the Annaheim Building directly across the street—a leering monstrous face, part lion, part bat, part man. Higher up, and all around, other nightmare faces peered down at us, from the corners of buildings, hidden in the frieze and cornice designs, cunningly nestled in corner brackets and the stone roof cresting. Every building had them.
Every
building.

Their presence shocked me. It’s not that I was unaware of their existence—after all, I was planning on architecture as a major in college; it’s just that if someone had mentioned gargoyles to me before that day, I would have automatically thought of the cathedrals and castles of Europe—not ordinary office buildings in Newford.

“I can’t believe I never noticed them before,” I told her.

“There are people who live their whole lives here and never see them,” Gina said.

“How’s that possible?”

Gina smiled. “It’s because of where they are—looking down at us from just above our normal sightline. People in the city hardly ever look up.”

“But still…”

“I know. It’s something, isn’t it? It really is a whole different world. Imagine being able to live your entire life in the middle of the city and never be noticed by anybody.”

“Like a baglady,” I said.

Gina nodded. “Sort of. Except people wouldn’t ignore you because you’re some pathetic street person that they want to avoid. They’d ignore you because they simply couldn’t
see
you.”

That thought gave me a creepy feeling, and I couldn’t suppress a shiver, but I could tell that Gina was intrigued with the idea. She was staring at that one gargoyle, above the entrance to the Annaheim Building.

“You really like those things, don’t you?” I said.

Gina turned to look at me, an expression I couldn’t read sitting at the back of her eyes.

“I wish I lived in their world,” she told me.

She held my gaze with that strange look in her eyes for a long heartbeat. Then the light changed and she laughed, breaking the mood. Slipping her arm in mine, she started us off across the street to finish her Christmas shopping.

When we stood on the pavement in front of the Annaheim Building, she stopped and looked up at the gargoyle. I craned my neck and tried to give it a good look myself, but it was hard to see because of all the blowing snow.

Gina laughed suddenly. “It knows we were talking about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It just winked at us.”

I hadn’t seen anything, but then I always seemed to be looking exactly the wrong way, or perhaps
in
the wrong way, whenever Gina tried to point out some magical thing to me. She was so serious about it.

“Did you see?” Gina asked.

“I’m not sure,” I told her. “I think I saw something____”

Falling snow. The side of a building. And stone statuary that was pretty amazing in and of itself without the need to be animated as well. I looked up at the gargoyle again, trying to see what Gina had seen.

I wish I lived in their world

It wasn’t until years later that I finally understood what she’d meant by that.

3

Christmas wasn’t the same for me as for most people—not even when I was a kid: My dad was born on Christmas day; Granny Ashworth, his mother, died on Christmas day when I was nine; and my own birthday was December 27. It made for a strange brew come the holiday season, part celebration, part mourning, liberally mixed with all the paraphernalia that means Christmas: eggnog and glittering lights, caroling, ornaments and, of course, presents.

Christmas wasn’t centered around presents for me. Easy to say, I suppose, seeing how I grew up in the Beaches, wanting for nothing, but it’s true. What enamored me the most about the season, once I got beyond the confusion of birthdays and mourning, was the idea of what it was supposed to be: peace and goodwill to all. The traditions. The idea of the miracle birth the way it was told in the Bible and more secular legends like the one telling how, for one hour after midnight on Christmas Eve, animals were given human voices so that they could praise the baby Jesus.

I remember staying up late the year I turned eleven, sitting in bed with my cat on my lap and watching the clock, determined to hear Chelsea speak, except I fell asleep sometime after eleven and never did find out if she could or not.

By the time Christmas came around the next year I was too old to believe in that sort of thing anymore.

Gina never got too old. I remember years later when she got her dog Fritzie, she told me, “You know what I like the best about him? The stories he tells me.”

“Your dog tells you stories,” I said slowly.

“Everything’s got a voice,” Gina told me. “You just have to learn how to hear it.”

4

The best present I ever got was the Christmas that Gina decided to be my friend. I’d been going to a private school and hated it. Everything about it was so stiff and proper. Even though we were only children, it was still all about money and social standing and it drove me mad. I’d see the public school kids, and they seemed so free compared to all the boundaries I perceived to be compartmentalizing my own life.

I pestered my mother for the entire summer I was nine until she finally relented and let me take the public transport into Ferryside where I attended Cairnmount Public School. By noon of my first day, I realized that I hated public school even more.

There’s nothing worse than being the new kid—especially when you were busing in from the Beaches. Nobody wanted anything to do with the slumming rich kid and her airs. I didn’t have airs; I was just too scared. But first impressions are everything, and I ended up feeling more left out and alone than I’d ever been at my old school. I couldn’t even talk about it at home—my pride wouldn’t let me. After the way I’d carried on about it all summer, I couldn’t find the courage to admit that I’d been wrong.

So I did the best I could. At recess, I’d stand miserably on the sidelines, trying to look as though I was a part of the linked fence, or whatever I was standing beside at the time, because I soon learned it was better to be ignored than to be noticed and ridiculed. I stuck it out until just before Christmas break. I don’t know if I would have been able to force myself to return after the holidays, but that day a bunch of boys were teasing me and my eyes were already welling with tears when Gina walked up out of nowhere and chased them off.

“Why don’t you ever play with anybody?” she asked me.

“Nobody wants me to play with them,” I said.

“Well, I do,” she said and then she smiled at me, a smile so bright that it dried up all my tears.

After that, we were best friends forever.

5

Gina was the most outrageous, talented, wonderful person I had ever met. I was the sort of child who usually reacted to stimuli; Gina created them. She made up games, she made up stories, she made up songs. It was impossible to be bored in her company, and we became inseparable, in school and out.

I don’t think a day went by that we didn’t spend some part of it together. We had sleepovers. We took art and music and dance classes together, and if she won the prizes, I didn’t mind, because she was my friend and I could only be proud of her. There was no limit to her imagination, but that was fine by me, too. I was happy to have been welcomed into her world, and I was more than willing to take up whatever enterprise she might propose.

I remember one afternoon we sat up in her room and made little people out of found objects: acorn heads, seed eyes, twig bodies. We made clothes for them and furniture and concocted long, extravagant family histories so that we ended up knowing more about them than we did our classmates.

“They’re real now,” I remember her telling me. “We’ve given them lives, so they’ll always be real.”

“What kind of real?” I asked, feeling a little confused because I was at that age when I was starting to understand the difference between what was make-believe and what was actual.

“There’s only one kind of real,” Gina told me. “The trouble is, not everybody can see it and they make fun of those who can.”

Though I couldn’t know the world through the same perspective as Gina had, there was one thing I did know. “I would never make fun of you,” I said.

“I know, Sue. That’s why we’re friends.”

I still have the little twig people I made, wrapped up in tissue and stored away in a box of childhood treasures; I don’t know what ever happened to Gina’s.

We had five years together, but then her parents moved out of town—not impossibly far, but far enough to make our getting together a major effort, and we rarely saw each other more than a few times a year after that. It was mainly Gina’s doing that we didn’t entirely lose touch with each other. She wrote me two or three times a week, long chatty letters about what she’d been reading, films she’d seen, people she’d met, her hopes of becoming a professional musician after she finished high school. The letters were decorated with fanciful illustrations of their contents and sometimes included miniature envelopes in which I would find letters from her twig people to mine.

Although I tried to keep up my side, I wasn’t much of a correspondent. Usually I’d phone her, but my calls grew further and further apart as the months went by. I never stopped considering her as a friend—the occasions when we did get together were among my best memories of being a teenager—but my own life had changed, and I didn’t have as much time for her anymore. It was hard to maintain a long-distance relationship when there was so much going on around me at home. I was no longer the new kid at school, and I’d made other friends. I worked on the school paper, and then I got a boyfriend.

Gina never wanted to talk about him. I suppose she thought of it was a kind of betrayal; she never again had a friend that she was as close to as she’d been with me.

I remember her mother calling me once, worried because Gina seemed to be sinking into a reclusive depression. I did my best to be there for her. I called her almost every night for a month, and went out to visit her on the weekends, but somehow I just couldn’t relate to her pain. Gina had always seemed so self-contained, so perfect, that it was hard to imagine her being as withdrawn and unhappy as her mother seemed to think she was. She put on such a good face to me that eventually the worries I’d had faded and the demands of my own life pulled me away again.

6

Gina never liked Christmas.

The year she introduced me to Newford’s gargoyles we saw each other twice over the holidays: once so that she could do her Christmas shopping, and then again between Christmas and New Year’s when I came over to her place and stayed the night. She introduced me to her dog— Fritzie, a gangly, wirehaired, long-legged mutt that she’d found abandoned on one of the country roads near her parents’ place—and played some of her new songs for me, accompanying herself on guitar.

The music had a dronal quality that seemed at odds with her clear high voice and the strange Middle Eastern decorations she used. The lyrics were strange and dark, leaving me with a sensation that was not so much unpleasant as uncomfortable, and I could understand why she’d been having so much trouble getting gigs. It wasn’t just that she was so young and since most clubs served alcohol, their owners couldn’t hire an underage performer; Gina’s music simply wasn’t what most people would think of as entertainment. Her songs went beyond introspection. They took the listener to that dark place that sits inside each and every one of us, that place we don’t want to visit, that we don’t even want to admit is there.

But the songs aside, there didn’t seem to be any trace of the depression that had worried her mother so much the previous autumn. She appeared to be her old self, the Gina I remembered: opinionated and witty, full of life and laughter even while explaining to me what bothered her so much about the holiday season.

“I love the
idea
of Christmas,” she said. “It’s the hypocrisy of the season that I dislike. One time out of the year, people do what they can for the homeless, help stock the food banks, contribute to snowsuit funds and give toys to poor children. But where are they the rest of the year when their help is just as necessary? It makes me a little sick to think of all the money that gets spent on Christmas lights and parties and presents that people don’t even really want in the first place. If we took all that money and gave it to the people who need it simply to survive, instead of throwing it away on ourselves, we could probably solve most of the problems of poverty and homelessness over one Christmas season.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But at least Christmas brings people closer together. I guess what we have to do is build on that.”

Gina gave me a sad smile. “Who does it bring closer together?”