Moonlight and Vines

by Charles de Lint

  Turns out she’s married, but it’s on the rocks. Maybe. There’s no real intimacy in their relationship—tell me about it. Thinks her husband’s getting some on the side, but she can’t swear to it. She’s not sure what she’s doing here, she just wants a night out, but she doesn’t want to play the usual games in the straight bars, so she comes here, but now that she’s here, she’s not sure what she’s doing here.

  I tell her to relax. We dance some. We have a few drinks. By the time she goes home she’s flushing prettily and most of the shadows I saw haunting the backs of her eyes are gone.

  We start to hang out together. In the clubs. Have lunch, dinner once. Not dates. We’re just girlpals, except after a few weeks I find myself thinking about her all the time, fixating on her. Not jealous. Not wondering where she is, or who she’s with. Just conversations we had running through my mind. Her face a familiar visitor to my mind’s eye. Her trim body.

  Is this how it starts? I wonder. There’s no definition to what’s growing inside me, no “I used to like men, now I’m infatuated with a woman.” It’s just this swelling desire to be with her. To touch her. To bask in her smile. To know she’s thinking of me.

  One night I’m driving her home and I don’t know how it happens, but we pull up in front of her apartment building and I’m leaning toward her and then our heads come together, our lips, our tongues. It’s like kissing a guy, only everything’s softer. Sweeter, somehow. We’re wrapped up against each other, hands fumbling, I’m caressing her hair, her neck, her shoulder—until suddenly she pulls away, breathless, like me, a surprised look of desire in her eyes, like me, but there’s something else there, too. Not shame. No, it felt too good. But confusion, yes. And uncertainty, for sure.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I know she’s been passing, just like me. Gay in spirit. We’ve talked about it. Lots of times.

  “Don’t be,” she says. “It felt nice.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m on pins and needles, not understanding the intensity of these feelings I have for her, for another woman, not wanting to scare her off, but knowing I want more. Nice doesn’t even begin to describe how it felt to me.

  Nina sighs. “It’s just . . . confusing.”

  This I understand.

  “But it feels wrong?” I ask.

  She nods. “Only not for the reason you’re probably thinking. It’s just . . . if I was sure Martin was cheating on me . . . that our marriage was over . . . I think it would be different. I wouldn’t feel like I was betraying him. I could do whatever I wanted, couldn’t I?”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “I don’t know,” Nina says. “If he’s cheating on me again, the way I think he is . . .” She gives me a lost look that makes me want to just take her in my arms once more, but I stay on my own side of the front seat. “Maybe,” she says in this small voice, her eyes so big and hopeful, “maybe you could find out for me . . . for us . . . .”

  “What? Like follow him?”

  Nina shakes her head. “No. I was thinking more like . . . you could try to seduce him. Then we’d know.”

  I don’t like the way this is going at all, but there’s a promise in Nina’s eyes now, a promise that if I do this thing for her, she’ll be mine. Not just for one night, but forever.

  “You wouldn’t actually have to do anything,” she says. “You know, like sleep with him. We’d only have to take it far enough to see if he’s cheating on me.”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, doubt in my voice, but I can already feel myself giving in.

  She nods slowly. “I guess it’s a pretty stupid idea,” she says. She looks away embarrassed. “God. I can’t believe I even asked you to do something like that.”

  She leans forward and gives me a quick kiss, then draws back and starts to get out of the car.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, catching hold of her arm. She lets me tug her back in the car. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. It’s just . . . we’d need a good plan, wouldn’t we? I mean, where would I even meet him in the first place?”

  So we start to talk about it and before I know it, we’ve got the plan. She tells me where he goes after work for a drink on Fridays. We figure it’ll be best if she goes away somewhere for the weekend. We work everything out, sitting there in the front seat of my car, arms around each other. We kiss again before she finally leaves, a long deep kiss that has my head swimming, my body aching to be naked against hers. I don’t even consider second thoughts until I wake up alone in my own apartment the next morning and begin to realize what I’ve gotten myself into.

  I remember the last thing she said before she got out of the car.

  “If he is cheating on me . . . and he takes you to our apartment, could you do something for me before you leave?”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a sword hanging on the wall over the mantel. Could you take it with you back to your place?”

  “A sword.”

  She nodded. “Because if it’s over, I’m not ever going back to that place. I won’t ever want to see him again. But . . .” She gave me a look that melted my heart. “The sword’s the only thing I’d want to take away with me. It used to belong to my mother, you see . . . .”

  I lie there in bed thinking about it until I have to get up to have a pee. When I’m washing my face at the basin, I study my reflection looking back at me, water dripping from her cheeks.

  “Lucy,” I say to her. “What have we gotten ourselves into this time?”

  4

  It was a quiet night at Neon Sister, but it was still early, going on to eleven. Lucy saw Traci sitting by herself in one of the booths beside the dance floor. She was easy to spot with her shoulder-length dreadlocks, her coffee-colored skin accentuated by the white of her T-shirt. Lucy waited a moment to make sure Traci was alone, then crossed the dance floor and slid into the booth beside her. She ordered a drink from the waitress, but wasn’t in the mood to do more than sip from it after it arrived. There was always something about being in Traci’s calm, dark-eyed presence that made Lucy want to open up to her. She didn’t know what it was that usually stopped her, but tonight it wasn’t there.

  “I’m not really gay, you know,” she said when the small talk between them died.

  Traci smiled. “I know.”

  “You do?”

  Traci nodded. “But you’re not sure you’re straight, either. You don’t know who you are, do you?”

  “I guess. Except now I’m starting to think maybe I am gay.”

  “Has this got something to do with Nina?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “We’ve all been there before, Lucy.”

  Lucy sighed. “So I think I’m ready to, you know, to find out who I really am, but I don’t think Nina is.”

  “Welcome to that club as well.”

  Lucy took another sip of her drink and looked out at the dance floor. An hour had passed and the club was starting to fill up. She brought her gaze back to Traci.

  “Were you ever in love with a guy?” she asked.

  Traci hesitated for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “A long time ago.”

  “Does it feel any different—I mean, with a woman?”

  “You mean inside?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “It doesn’t feel different,” Traci confirmed. She studied Lucy, her dark gaze more solemn than usual, before going on. “Straights always think it’s hard for us to come out—to the world—but it’s harder to come out to ourselves. Not because there’s anything wrong with what we are, but because we’re made to feel it’s wrong. I used to think that with the strides in gay rights over the past few years, it wouldn’t be like that anymore, but society still feeds us so much garbage that nothing much seems to have changed. You know what kept going around and around in my head when I was trying to figure myself out?”

  Lucy shook her head.

  “That old The Children’s Hour with Shirley MacLaine from the sixties�
�the one where she finds out she’s a lesbian and she kills herself. I was so ashamed of how I felt. Ashamed and confused.”

  “I don’t feel ashamed,” Lucy said.

  “But you do feel confused.”

  Lucy nodded. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Well, here’s my two cents: Don’t be in a rush to work it out. Be honest—to yourself as well as to Nina—but take it slow.”

  “And if I lose her?”

  “Then it was never meant to be.” Traci gave her a wry smile. “Pretty lame, huh? But there’s always a grain of truth—even in populist crap like that. You wanna dance?”

  Lucy thought about the night she’d overheard Traci and another woman discussing her in the washroom, thought about what Traci had said about her, thought about what she herself was feeling for Nina. Didn’t matter the combination of genders, she realized. Some things just didn’t change. She gave Traci a smile.

  “Sure,” she said.

  It was a slow dance. She and Traci had danced together many times before, but it felt different tonight. Tonight Lucy couldn’t stop focusing on the fact that it was a woman’s body moving so closely to hers, a woman’s arms around her. But then ever since kissing Nina last night, everything had felt different.

  “Gay or straight,” Traci said, her voice soft in Lucy’s ear, “the hurt feels the same.”

  Lucy nodded, then let her head rest against Traci’s once more. They were comforting each other, Lucy realized, but while Traci was offering more, the dance was all that Lucy had to give.

  5

  So I go ahead and do it. I meet Martin in Huxley’s, that yuppie bar across from Fitzhenry Park, and I flirt outrageously with him. Picking him up is so easy, I wish there was a prize for it. I’d collect big-time.

  By the time we’ve had dinner, I’ve got enough on him to take back to Nina, but I’m curious now, about him, about where they live, and I can’t seem to break it off. Next thing I know I’m in their apartment, the same one I sat outside of a few nights ago, necking with his wife in the front seat of my car. Now I’m here with him, sitting on their couch, watching him make us drinks at the wet bar in the corner of the living room.

  He comes back with a drink in each hand and gives me one. We toast each other, take a sip. This is seriously good brandy. I like it. I like him, too—not a man-woman kind of thing, but he seems like a nice guy. Except he cheats on his wife—whom I’m trying to get into my own bed. It’s time to go, I realize. Way past time to go. But then he floors me.

  “So when did you meet Nina?” he asks.

  I look at him, unable to hide my surprise. “How did you—” I break off before I get in too deep and take a steadying breath to try to regain my composure. It’s not easy with that pale blue gaze of his wryly regarding me. Earlier, it reminded me of Traci, kind of solemn and funny, all at the same time, like hers, but now there’s something unpleasant sitting in back of it—the same place the hurt sat in Nina’s eyes the night I first met her.

  “She’s sent other people to get the sword, you know.”

  I’ve been trying to avoid looking at it all night but now I can’t stop my gaze from going to it. I remember thinking how big it was when I first stepped into the living room and stole a glance at it. No way it was going to fit into my handbag. I’d given up the idea of walking out with it pretty quick.

  “What story did she tell you?” Martin went on. “That it belonged to her grandmother and it’s the only thing she’s got left to remind her of the old bag?”

  Not grandmother, I think. Mother. But I don’t say anything. One of the things I’ve learned working on the paper: If you can keep quiet, nine out of ten times the person you’re with will feel obliged to fill the silence. You’d be surprised the kinds of things they’ll tell you.

  “Or did she tell you about the family curse,” he asks, “and how the sword has to be sheathed for it to end?”

  I still say nothing.

  “Or did she tell you the truth?”

  This time he plays the waiting game until I finally ask, “So what is the truth?”

  “Well, it’s all subjective, isn’t it?”

  There’s an undercurrent of weirdness happening here that tells me it’s really time to go now. I take a good swig of the brandy to fortify myself, then pick up my jacket and slip it on.

  “I don’t mean to sound so vague,” he says before I get up. “It’s just that, no matter what she’s told you, it’s only a piece of the truth. That’s what I mean about it all being subjective.”

  I find myself nodding. What he’s saying is something I learned my first week at the paper: There’s no one thing called truth; just one’s individual take on it.

  “We’re not married,” he says.

  “Uh-huh. It’s kind of late for that line, isn’t it?”

  “No, you don’t get it. She’s not even human. She’s this . . . this thing.”

  His gaze shifts to the sword above the mantel, then returns to mine. I realize the unpleasant thing I see sitting in the back of his eyes is fear.

  “What are you saying?” I ask.

  “She really is under a curse, except it’s nothing like what she probably told you.”

  “She didn’t say anything about a curse—except for being married to you.”

  “The way things look,” Martin says, “I deserve that. But we’re really not married. I don’t have a hold over her. It’s the other way around. She scares the shit out of me.”

  I shake my head. Considering the size of him and the size of her, I find that hard to believe.

  “I met her a few years ago,” he explains. “At a party. I made her a promise, that I’d help her break the curse that’s on her, but I didn’t. I broke my promise and she’s been haunting me ever since.”

  Curses. Haunting. It’s like he’s trying to tell me Nina’s a ghost. I’m beginning to wish that I’d just let it play out in the restaurant and gone on to my own place. By myself. Too late for that now. He’s still sitting there, looking at me all expectantly, and I have to admit that while I think it’s all a load of crock, I can’t seem to check my curiosity. It’s a bad habit I bring home from the office. It’s probably why I applied for the job in the first place.

  “So what’s this curse?” I ask.

  “She’s trapped in the shape of that sword,” he says, pointing to the mantel.

  “Oh, please.”

  Nina passing as gay I can buy—I’ve been doing it myself. But passing as human as well?

  “Look. I know what it sounds like. But it’s true. She promised me a year of companionship—good company, great sex, whatever I wanted—and at the end of that year I had to fulfill my part of the bargain, but I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Which was?”

  The only thing I’m really interested in now is how far he’ll take all of this.

  “The sword once had a scabbard,” Martin says. “When it was sheathed, she could stay in human form. But the scabbard got lost or stolen or something—there was something enchanted about it as well. It kept its bearer free from all hurt and harm. Anyway, the way things are now, she can only be human for short bits of time before she has to return into the sword.”

  I give him a noncommittal “Uh-huh.”

  “The bargain I made,” he says, “was that I’d sheathe the sword for her at the end of the year, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have to sheathe it in myself.”

  I sit up straighter. “What? You mean impale yourself on it—a kind of seppuku like the samurai used to do in Japan?”

  He doesn’t answer me, but goes on instead. “See, for the curse to be broken, I have to believe that it’ll work while I do it. And I have to want to do it—you know, be a willing sacrifice. I can’t do either.”

  I look at him, I read his fear, and realize that he really believes all of this.

  “So why don’t you just get rid of the sword?” I ask, which seems reasonab
le enough to me.

  “I’m scared to. I don’t know what’ll happen to me if I do.”

  I think of Nina. I think of this big guy being scared of her and I have to shake my head.

  “So . . . has Nina threatened you?”

  He shakes his head. “No, she just stands there by the mantel, or at the foot of my bed, and looks at me. Haunts me. She won’t talk to me anymore, she doesn’t do anything but stare at me. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Well, something sure is, I want to say. Instead I consider the sword, hanging up there on the wall. I try to imagine Nina’s—what? Spirit? Essence?—trapped in that long length of blade. I can’t even work up the pretense of belief.

  “So give it to me,” I say.

  He blinks in confusion, then shakes his head again. “No, I can’t do that. Something horrible will happen to me if I do.”

  “I don’t think so,” I tell him. “Nina specifically asked me to take the sword with me when I left. You say she’s sent other people to get it. Doesn’t it seem obvious that all she wants is the sword? Give it to me and we’ll all be out of your life. Nina. The sword. Me.” Your sanity, I add to myself, though maybe a good shrink can help you get some of it back.

  “I . . .”

  He looks from me to the sword, torn. Then he comes to a decision. He gets up and fetches a blanket, wraps the sword in it and hands it to me.

  “Look,” I say, staggering a little under its weight. “What you really should do is—”

  “Just go,” he tells me.

  He doesn’t physically throw me out, but it’s close. Truth is, he looks so freaked about what he’s doing that I’m happy to put as much distance as I can between us. I end up hauling the sword down to the street to where I parked my car. It won’t fit in the trunk, so I put it on the backseat. I look up at the window of the apartment above me. Martin’s turned all the lights off.