A City Dreaming (10 page)

An hour disappeared, along with several bottles of wine and about a quarter ounce of hash. Then one of Abilene's associates, a slim Latina girl who looked like a lot of other slim Latina girls Abilene had collected over the years, announced dinner at the long wooden table in the other room.

You couldn't say that the meal was bad, exactly—it just wasn't really anything. Every ingredient seemed to have been substituted for something better, for you or for the environment or for the general spiritual health of the world—coconut oil margarine for butter and almond milk instead of heavy cream and bean curd instead of red meat. Seated to his right was Erin, early thirties, an editor for a young-adult imprint, bad tattoos and kind eyes. On his left was Ariel, who worked at three or maybe four different nonprofits,
but what she really wanted to do was find some way to meld her love for interpretive dance with her passion for the rights of indigenous peoples. Had he met either one of them in a bar he might even have enjoyed the conversation, but their meet-cute being so obviously the product of Abilene's machinations, M found himself feeling distinctly monastic.

For a while it looked like they might have to play a board game, which would have been too much for M, regardless of his respect for or fear of Abilene, but Erin had to get back home to feed her cats and Ariel had an early morning meeting, and everyone else sort of faded into the background.

“That Ariel,” Abilene said, when it was just the two of them. “Isn't she just the cleverest thing you've ever seen?”

“I think I'd rather take the kitten,” M said, waving his hands quickly to indicate that this was a joke.

Abilene obliged him with a long, rich laugh. The joint she rolled didn't have a filter, and the tip was lip-wet when she handed it to him.

Of course, he smoked it anyway, and he waited quietly until Abilene felt like starting.

Because of course the other thing was that Abilene was a heavy hitter, a broom-riding witch from the old school, power settled into her like well-polished hardwood. It wasn't like there were official rankings, but you can spot the sun even through shades, and if Abilene wasn't quite the sun, you were still better off not looking directly at her for too long.

“So you're back,” she said finally.

“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.

“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.”