Green Fairy (Dangerous Spirits) (17 page)

“You know what time it is, Solly?” was the first thing the ram asked when Sol called him Saturday morning.

“Sorry,” Sol said. It was after nine, but he guessed the ram could’ve been up late. Carcy did sound tired, his normally smooth voice gravelly. Sol rubbed his paw. “It’s okay for me to call, isn’t it?”

“It’s okay. So what’s up?”

“Well…” Sol hesitated. “You know how you said I should come see you this summer?”

“Course, Solly. We been talking about it for a couple months now.”

“Yeah.” There was no reason this should be so hard to say. “What if I came for, um, a little while?”

“More than just a weekend? Sure, like a week?” The ram sounded very casual. Almost as if he were distracted and not paying complete attention to Sol.

“A week, yeah. But I was thinking about trying to get a summer job in Millenport.”

“I remember you said that.” Carcy sounded amused. “So you could come by more often.”

“Thing is,” Sol said, “the thing is, I don’t really have a place to stay.”

The phone got quiet. “You were thinking about staying here,” Carcy said when Sol didn’t go on. There was no doubt now that Sol had his full attention.

“Kind of.” Sol waited.

Again, he thought he heard another voice in the background, just for a moment. Then it went quiet, and Carcy spoke again. “Look, Solly, it’s not that I don’t love ya.”

Sol interrupted before the rejection could become final. “I know it’s a lot to ask. But it’d be a really good way for us to get to know each other. And it’d be just three months.”

Carcy’s breathing sounded like the ocean in Sol’s ear. “Maybe. There’s some stuff I’d have to work out.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“No.” This time the response came quickly. “No, I just need to work out things.”

Sol didn’t quite know what to say to that, but at least Carcy hadn’t said no. “I can see if I can find another place. In case it doesn’t work out.”

“That might be a good idea.”

The matter-of-fact tone lowered Sol’s ears and curled his tail around his leg. “I’ll look around, I guess.”

“Can you cook?”

As fast as his ears had lowered, they came up. “Sure! I mean, I can make salad.”

Carcy laughed. “Anything else?”

“I’ll work on it.” Sol’s tail wagged. “My mom is looking up vegetarian recipes.”

“Okay-dokay.” The ram had gone back to being casual. “So what was up with this dream? Was I in it? Was it a naughty dream?”

“Oh.” The ribbon had been a week ago, the paint days before that. Sol hoped that the dreams and hallucinations only came the nights he drank absinthe. Even so, it wasn’t something that happened to most people; it was weird and different and scary. He imagined telling Carcy, and the ram asking,
So some morning there’d randomly be ribbons and paint in bed with us?
There’d be no chance of him moving in then. “Yeah, no, it was just one of those, those horror dreams, y’know? It freaked me out and, and I wanted to talk to you.”

“That’s sweet, Solly.”

And they talked a little longer before Carcy had to get going, though the ram said he would be around that night for some texting. Sol hung up and paced his room for a little while, and then he called Meg.

“Hey, jock,” she said. “Wanna come over and hang out?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not going to smoke any pot.”

“I wasn’t going to ask. Though you really should.”

Sol sighed. “I can’t…it’d mess up my baseball…”

“Oh, bullshit. Those major leaguers are all on drugs. But whatever. How’s your work on the project going? Read all those books yet? Written reports on them?”

“Um.”

“Just kidding. How’s Operation Wheels coming along?”

His tail wagged. “Hopes are high. Hey, I was thinking, what would you want a potential roommate to do?”

“Stay the fuck out of my room and my life.”

“No, I mean, if someone wanted to move in with you. What would make you say yes?”

“Financial obligation.”

He laughed. “Really? You wouldn’t live with me unless you owed me money?”

“Honestly, Sol, you’re kinda uptight. You’re a good friend, but once in a while you need to unclench.”

“Unclench.”

His father knocked on the door. “Sol? You wanna catch some grounders?”

“It’s not a bad thing,” Meg said. “Just I wouldn’t want to live with it.”

“Fine. Just a minute,” he called to his father, then said to Meg, “Sorry, I can’t come over. I gotta go practice.”

“Goddammit, Sol, if you don’t come over I’m going to be so bored I’m going to smoke right away. You don’t want to contribute to the delinquency of a minor, do you?”

“I’m a minor too. Anyway, you’d light up as soon as I left.”

“Maybe not tonight.”

“Well, sorry. I have to practice with my dad. The one thing I don’t get to do so much after school is field. Nobody wants to hit to me anymore.”

“Probably because you’re so uptight. No, wait. Jocks like that. I dunno what it is.”

“It’s that I went vegetarian,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“You’re not a wolf.”

“Goddamn.”

He snorted. “Kind of like, I dunno, if you said you didn’t want to swim anymore.”

“That’s different. We all swim with relatives and everything. Who cares what you eat?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say. We all eat meat. If you don’t, you’re like…you’re like a rabbit, or a mouse.”

Her tone got sharper. “Or an otter?”

“You eat meat.” He sighed.

“Mostly fish. So am I like a, what, like a pelican?”

“You don’t have packs like wolves. We all stick together. Do something different, and you’re not quite part of the pack any more.”

“Good thing they don’t know you like boys, huh? Or is there a gay wolf pack, too?”

“It’s not funny.”

“It’s kind of funny.”

Sol felt irritation like a whine in his head. The argument was pointless and Meg would never understand anyway. “I gotta go.”

“Wait! At least do some reading this weekend, okay? I’m getting stuff together for the report, I can show you next week. If you have time, you can make it better. But you gotta know what we’re talking about. When does all this practicing end?”

“Next week. We have a game Friday and then after that Mr. Zerling will set the starters for the Lakeside game.”

His father asked about the same thing when they went out to the park, and Sol told him the same. He shared how optimistic he felt, and was glad when his father’s ears perked up at the news. “I stayed later than Taric every night this week,” he said, slipping through the park gate behind his father.

“You tell the rest of the team that?” his father asked.

“No…I mean, they’re gone by then, and school is busy with classes. I don’t want to brag about it or anything.”

“That coyote would brag, you’d better believe it. Do they ask at lunch? They must notice you stay until they leave, right?” His father hefted the bat, holding one of the baseballs.

“They…don’t really ask.” Sol trotted across the grass, to avoid having to tell his father that he ate alone all week. That would bring up his salad lunches again. His father was happy about his baseball, so Sol was going to focus on that.

He finished his homework Saturday night, so Sunday after church, after his father had hit grounders to him for another two hours, Sol settled down to do some reading for his project. He read some of Meg’s books, but every mention they made of the artists’ community recalled the small studio of Abrazzo, every painting brought back in his imagination the fine figure Henri had been painting in his dream. The words he read were black and white; the images in his head were in color. He missed those images, wanted to return to the world again.

He wouldn’t drink absinthe. That way he could go back to Jean’s narrative and not have to worry about bringing anything back from a dream. Heartened by that logic, he opened “Confession” and found the spot where he’d left off, just after Jean’s second visit to the Moulin Rouge and his second night with Niki.

I returned home that night in high spirits. My fingers remained warm with the touch of his fur, and the anticipation of seeing him again in two nights carried my feet high above the paving stones. Thierry remarked that he had rarely seen me so gleeful. You must understand: the first night alone with him was the brightest of my life. To have experienced an echo of the night had brought me such bliss as to make me spin and dance in the street, and the promise of a future night was more than I could have hoped for.

Of course, I had hoped, and had bought a dress and suit upon the strength of that hope. But one never knows, in these times, and especially in the poorer quarters, how long any of us have. I had twice woken from nightmares of returning to the Moulin Rouge to find that Niki had been claimed by another, had been struck by consumption, or had been killed. Your many lectures to me have driven home the danger of public expression of affection for another male, but Niki had no such instruction. He seemed to believe that in his blissful haven of Montmartre, he was safe from persecution. How naïve! With only a few more days, I would be able to extend the protection your station affords me to the lovely fox, but until then, he existed on the sufferance of those around him, subject to the whims and vagaries of fortune that have taken so many fine artists from us before their time.

So on that night, I was able to dispel those morbid thoughts and devote myself entirely to rejoicing in the good fortune my life had brought me. I slept but little, and the following morning found me in the same good humor. Bertrand de P— and Charles L— joined me at Galerie Beaumont for our regular luncheon, and it took them the entire span of two minutes to remark upon my mood. I modestly confessed the reason for it, that I had found a date for the ball at the Justines’ mansion, and that news met with their enthusiastic approval. I told them that “Nikky” was a red fox dancer of modest talent but great beauty, and as Bertrand is a red fox himself, and Charles of Rhonese wolf descent, they were quite impressed. Later, I would learn that they immediately contrived to part me from my fox if “she” were as lovely as I claimed, but those schemes—well, you know how they ended.

The luncheon carried on for some hours, as these things do, and Bertrand and Charles of course prated on about all the lovely ladies they had bedded, or wanted to bed, or knew that someone else was bedding. Bertrand expressed his relief that I had found a lady to bring to the ball who was not one of my father’s friends (you will excuse his rudeness), and Charles asked if this meant that I was finally discovering an interest in ladies myself.

I rarely complained about this, but this topic of conversation was not uncommon, most especially when Bertrand and Charles and I were dining in the company of other peers, whom Bertrand and Charles wished to impress by calling out my flaws, as they saw them. I had friends of my own, but they would not join me, Thierry because he thought himself too old, Minon because he did not appreciate my lighthearted teasing of him in front of the others. Still, it was important for me to continue to dine with Bertrand and Charles. You understand that they were and are of a different class. You have told me upon many an occasion how you put aside your personal feelings in order to place yourself in select company, how by so doing you raise yourself up. I admire that quality in you, and my luncheons with Bertrand and Charles, however tedious they may have been upon occasion, were my attempt to emulate your skill and manners in my own social circle. I am sure they viewed the luncheons as a droll amusement, or else an act of charity: what other predators would dine so frequently with a mere chamois?

I suffered through that afternoon with a smile, because I knew that come the ball, Bertrand and Charles would be the ones with their tongues lolling after the beauty on my arm. And so I turned the conversation to the classical beauty of the ladies they chose to accompany them, and did my best to subtly suggest in whatever ways I could the manners in which they were lacking, manners in which, of course, my Niki would shine far above them. Bertrand and Charles, well-mannered sons of privilege that they are, were only too happy to join in my deconstruction of their consorts, never guessing my true intent behind it all.

Their consorts, they said, were like living works of art. Bertrand and Charles had each of them experienced phases of their life during which they sang the praises of a certain artist, or style of art, and these phases coincided most closely with the favor those artists enjoyed in society circles at the time. Their families bought paintings as mother buys dresses, according to the current fashion, and the paintings that fall out of favor are sold at auction or quietly stored in secluded rooms that are never visited by guests.

Similarly, the wolf and fox could be seen with a new consort at each new event. I had supposed for a short time that their fickle nature could be attributed, as mine was, to the search for a partner in life; I soon found that their likely marriages were being arranged by higher powers, and they treated their companions as accessories to their mood and fashion. So it was that when white was in fashion, Bertrand could be seen with Valerie the arctic fox, and Charles with a lovely white wolf from the northern countries. When wide skirts and bodices dominated every gathering, Bertrand and Charles arrived at the Justines’ ball that year accompanied by a pair of plump tigresses who spoke very little of the mother tongue. And this year, when ladies find it more fashionable to be seen in trim dresses that accentuate their feminine lines, both my luncheon companions would be escorted by the slender, pretty wolves visiting from the Iberian court.