But Rosalind did have her weaknesses, as well. From the first moment that Rosalind had arrived Izzy wanted her to come back to the apartment to meet Kathy, but Rosalind was far too shy.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t,” she told Izzy. “I would feel terribly awkward.”
“But Kathy wouldn’t be weird about it at all. I just know she’d love to meet you. You were always one of her favorite characters.”
Rosalind sighed. “But that’s just it. You brought me across, but you don’t treat me as though I’m something you made up out of nothing. But Kathy would. She might not think she was doing so, she wouldn’t even mean to do so, but the only way she would be able to see me is as something she created on the page that has now been magically brought to life. How could she possibly think otherwise? It would seem such a natural assumption.”
Izzy was ready to argue differently, to try to explain that Kathy simply wouldn’t be like that, but she heard in Rosalind’s voice an echo of John’s, reminding her of her own inability to deal with him, and she knew Rosalind was right. She could deal with all of her numena as separate from herself, as real in their own right, except for John. Even now, no matter how hard she tried, no matter that she truly believed that she’d only given him passage into this world, she hadn’t made him up out of thin air, the act of having painted The Spirit Is Strong still lay between them and it wouldn’t go away.
“I ... I understand,” she said.
Rosalind gave her a sad smile. “I thought you would.” She glanced at the canvas on Izzy’s easel and used the unfinished painting to change the subject. “You have me so curious about this new painting,” she said. “How long before it’s done and you can tell me about the surprise?”
“Soon,” Izzy promised her.
But when she finished the painting the next day, Rosalind was out on one of her walkabouts through the city. Izzy busied herself with cleaning brushes and her palette and straightening up the studio, feeling ever more fidgety as the afternoon went by and still Rosalind hadn’t returned. Nor had the painting’s numena arrived. Finally Izzy’s patience ran its course and she just had to go out and look for Rosalind.
She found her wandering through the Market in Lower Crowsea, engrossed in studying all the varied wares that were displayed in the shop windows. Izzy ran up to her, bursting with her news.
“The painting’s finished,” she said.
Rosalind looked delighted.
“Now, don’t you go teleporting yourself back to the studio,” Izzy added. “I want to be there when you see it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rosalind assured her.
But when they returned to the coach house, nothing went quite the way Izzy had planned. The painting was still there, looking even better than Izzy had remembered it, and its numena had finally crossed over and come to the studio, but instead of the bold-as-brass gamine Izzy remembered from Kathy’s story, the wild girl lay on the floor in a corner of the studio, curled up into a fetal position and moaning softly.
“Oh, no!” Izzy cried. “Something went wrong.”
Horrible visions raced through her mind. Cosette must have been hurt as she crossed over. Or she was somehow incomplete—there was enough of whatever it was that animated the numena present to allow her to make the crossing, but not enough that she could survive here. It must have been because of how the painting was done, Izzy realized, berating herself for not sticking to her tried-and-true method of painting.
She dashed across the studio to where Cosette lay.
“There’s a blanket under the recamier,” she called to Rosalind, but when she turned to see if Rosalind was getting it, she found the other woman merely standing by the door, shaking her head, a smile on her lips.
“Rosalind!” Izzy cried.
“She’s not sick,” Rosalind said. “She’s drunk.”
“Drunk?”
Rosalind pointed to what Izzy hadn’t noticed before: an empty wine botde lay on its side a few feet from where Cosette lay. It had been a present from Alan that Izzy had been planning to bring home. A full bottle of red wine. All gone now.
“But you don’t drink or eat,” Izzy said.
Rosalind shook her head. “No, it’s that we don’t have to. But it appears that our young friend arrived very thirsty indeed.”
She crossed the room and knelt down beside Cosette, lifting the girl’s head onto her lap. With a corner of her mantle, she wiped Cosette’s brow. Cosette looked up at her.
“Hello,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Izzy ran to get a pail, but she was too late.
They cleaned Cosette up and laid her out on the recamier, where she complained that the room wouldn’t stop moving. After they scrubbed the floor and washed out Rosalind’s mantle, they each pulled a chair over to where Cosette lay.
“I take it that this is the surprise,” Rosalind said.
Izzy gave a glum nod. “I guess I blew it. It’s just that you said you were looking for someone and I remembered Kathy telling me once how you and Cosette would be so good for each other. So I thought I’d bring her across to surprise you, because I was sure she was who you were looking for. Kathy said you two had a story that you’d be in together, but that she couldn’t tell it. You’d have to tell it yourselves
....”
Izzy’s voice trailed off. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment.
Rosalind shook her head. “Don’t be. I was looking for her—I simply didn’t realize it until you brought her across.”
“But ...” Izzy waved a vague hand around the studio, which was meant to include the empty wine bottle, Cosette getting so drunk, her getting sick on Rosalind’s lap.
“We are who we are,” Rosalind said, smiling. “And I think Cosette and I are going to get along just fine.”
They both returned their attention to the occupant of the recamier. Cosette nodded her head slightly in agreement. She sat up a little and tried to smile, but then had to put her hand to her mouth, her eyes going wide. Izzy ran to get the pail again.
XI
September 1977
By the time Alan published Kathy’s first collection he already had two books under his belt and had worked out most of the kinks involved to make a successful promotion for a book. He sent out a mass of review copies, not just to the regional papers, but to selected reviewers across the country. For the launch, he booked Feeney’s Kitchen, one of the folk clubs that they all used to hang out at when they were going to Butler U., and hired Amy Scallan’s band Marrow-bones to handle the musical honors. By the time Izzy arrived, the little club was full of Kathy’s friends, the press and all sorts of various hangers-on who’d managed to get in. Marrowbones was playing a rollicking set of Irish reels and the free bar was doing a booming business.
Izzy paused in the doorway of the club, a little taken aback at the bombardment of sound and people. Finishing up the last few pieces for a new show that was due to be hung in a couple of weeks, she’d been spending sixteen-hour days at the studio, even sleeping there a couple of nights. The noise and bustle had her blinking like a mole, and she almost left. But then she spotted Kathy looking oddly wistful at the far end of the long room and slowly made her way through the crowd.
“You’re supposed to be happy,” she told Kathy when she finally had her to herself for a moment.
“I know. But I can’t help but feel as though I’ve lost my innocence now. Every time I sat down to write up to this point, I wrote for me. It was me telling stories to myself on paper and publication was secondary. But now ... now I can’t help but feel that whenever I start to write I’ll have this invisible audience in my mind, hanging on to my every word. Weighing them, judging them, looking for hidden meanings.”
“Welcome to the world of criticism.”
“That’s not it,” Kathy said. “I’m used to being criticized. It’s not like I haven’t had stories appear in magazines and anthologies and been the brunt of one or two attacks by someon
e who’s not even interested in my work—they just have an axe to grind. But this is going to be different. It’s the scale of it that freaks me.
Izzy smiled. “I don’t mean to bring you down, Kathy, but Alan’s only published three thousand copies of the book.”
“You know what I mean.”
Izzy thought about her own shows and slowly nodded. Success, even on the small scale that she was having, had already made her more self-conscious when she approached her easel. She tried to ignore it, and she certainly didn’t work for that invisible audience, but she was still aware of its existence. She still knew that, so long as she kept doing shows, her paintings didn’t only belong to her anymore—they also belonged to whoever happened to come to the show. Whoever saw a reproduction of one. Whoever bought an original.
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I do.”
“Alan told me tonight that there’s all this interest in the paperback rights for the book,” Kathy went on. “And we’re not talking chicken feed, ma belle Izzy. These people are offering serious money—like six-figure-advances kind of money.”
Izzy’s eyes went wide. “Wow. But that’s good, isn’t it?”
“I suppose. I know just what I’d do with the money, too.”
Kathy didn’t have to explain. They’d had any number of late-night conversations about Kathy’s dream to found an organization devoted to troubled kids—a place that didn’t feed them religion in exchange for its help, or try to force the kids back into the same awful family situations that had driven them out onto the street in the first place. “We should be able to choose our families,” Kathy often said,
“the same way we choose our friends. The round peg is never going to fit in the square hole—it doesn’t matter how much you try to force it.”
“You’re just going to have to teach yourself to ignore that invisible audience,” Izzy said. “Just remember this: it doesn’t matter how big it gets, they still don’t get to see what you’re working on until you’re ready to show it to them.”
“But I’m afraid that I’ll start to try to second-guess them,” Kathy said. “That I’ll tell the kind of stories that I think they want to hear, instead of what I want to tell.”
“That,” Izzy assured her, “is the one thing I don’t think you ever have to be afraid of “
“Money changes people,” Kathy said in response, “and big money changes people in a big way. I don’t want to have this deal of Alan’s go through and then find myself looking in a mirror five years from now and not recognizing the person who’s looking back at me.”
“That’s going to happen anyway,” Izzy said. “Think about what we were like five years ago.”
Kathy gave her a look of mock horror. “Oh god. Don’t remind me.”
“So maybe change isn’t always so bad. We just have to make sure that we pay attention to it as it’s happening to us.”
“Too true,” Kathy said. “But this conversation is getting far too earnest for the occasion. Any more of it and I’m going to become seriously depressed.” She looked down at her empty beer mug, then at Izzy, who wasn’t holding a mug at all. “Can I buy you a drink?” she asked.
“I thought there was supposed to be a free bar.”
“There is, there is.” Putting her arm around Izzy’s shoulders, she steered them toward the bar, where Alan was drawing ale from the three kegs he’d provided for the launch. “But I’m in the mood for some Jameson’s, and that, ma belle Izzy, Alan isn’t providing.”
“And here you are, about to make him all sorts of money.”
“I know,” Kathy said. “It’s a bloody crime, isn’t it? Let’s go give that capitalist pig a piece of our minds.”
XII
January 1978
“They’re paying you how much?” Izzy asked.
She’d gotten home from the studio early for a change, so she happened to be at the apartment when Kathy came bursting in with the news of the paperback sale Alan had negotiated for The Angels of My First Death.
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Kathy repeated.
“Oh, my god. You’re rich!”
Kathy laughed. “Well, not exactly. The East Street Press gets fifty percent of that.”
“I can’t believe Alan’s taking such advantage of you.”
“He’s not. That’s the standard cut for a hardcover house when it sells off the paperback rights.”
“Oh. Well, a hundred thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at.”
Kathy nodded. “Mind you, I don’t get it all at once. Half on signing, half on publication. Alan figures I’ll see a check for fifty thousand in about a month and a half “
“It seems like all the money in the world, doesn’t it?”
“More than we’ve ever seen in one place before, that’s for bloody sure. Mind you, if Albina keeps doing as well by you, who knows? You could be selling paintings for that kind of money in a year or so.”
Izzy laughed. “Oh, right.”
“You got nine thousand for that last one.”
“Fifty-four hundred after the gallery’s commission.”
“And you’re complaining about Alan’s cut,” Kathy said.
“I never thought of it like that,” Izzy said. She considered it for a moment, then added, “Maybe Tom’s right—you know, the way he’s always going on about how middlemen are feeding off the artists that they represent. They don’t do the work, but they get almost as much money for it.”
“Where would we be without Albina and Alan?” Kathy wanted to know. “It’s all very well to complain about middlemen, but if it wasn’t for them, you and I wouldn’t have an audience—or at least not the kind of audience they got us. I don’t want to be a waitress all my life.”
“No, no,” Izzy said. “How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t define yourself by what you have to do to make a living, but by what you want to do. You’re a writer. I’m an artist.”
“I still find it hard to believe that I can actually make a living at writing,” Kathy said.
Izzy knew just what she meant. The only reason Izzy herself had been able to survive as long as she had without a second job was because she’d had the bulk of her art supplies and her studio space provided for by Rushkin, and since she and Kathy still lived here on Waterhouse Street, where the rent on their little apartment remained so cheap, her living costs were minimal. Before this, the money Kathy had made from her writing barely paid for her paper and type-writer ribbons.
“So now that you’ve got this money,” she asked, “are you really going to use it to start the Foundation?”
“Absolutely.”
“It doesn’t seem like it’d be enough.”
Kathy sighed. “I don’t think any amount of money would be enough, but I’ve got to start somewhere and fifty thousand dollars makes for a pretty good jumping off point.”
It was Kathy’s turn to make dinner that night. When she went into the kitchen, Izzy tried to imagine whether she could be as philanthropic if she were to come into that kind of money. There were so many other things one could do with it. Use it as a down payment on a house. Go traveling all around the world.
“I saw one of your new numena today,” Kathy said, poking her head around the kitchen door. “It was mooching around down by the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station. I wonder if some of them have taken to living in Old City.”
Old City was the part of Newford that had been dropped underground during the Great Quake, around the turn of the century. Rather than try to recover the buildings, the survivors had simply built over the ruins. Although Izzy had never been down there herself, she knew people like Jilly who had.
Apparently many of the buildings had survived and were still standing, making for a strange underground city that extended down as deep in places as it did aboveground.
There’d been plans at one time for making a tourist attraction of the underground city, as had been done in Seattle, but the idea was put aside when the
city council realized that the necessary restructuring and maintenance simply wouldn’t be cost-efficient. Recently, after many of the growing numbers of homeless people began to squat in the abandoned ruins, city work crews had been sealing up all the entrances to Old City, but there were still anywhere from a half-dozen to twenty others that the street people knew. The best-known entrance was a maintenance door situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station, where Kathy had seen the numena.
“Which one was it?” Izzy asked.
There were so many now. She still had her old coterie of numena friends who dropped by the studio on a regular basis, but the newer ones went their own way and she’d never even met some of them.
Kathy had met even less of them. Most of the numena didn’t like to spend time with people who knew their origin. It made them feel less real, Rosalind had explained to Izzy on one of her visits from the island, where she lived with Cosette and those numena who felt more comfortable out of the city.
“I’m not sure,” Kathy said. “But I think they’re making a home for themselves in Old City. July’s told me that the people squatting down there have been seeing all sorts of strange things.”
As she went back into the kitchen to return to her dinner preparations, Izzy trailed along behind her.
She pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table and slouched in it.
“What kinds of strange things?” she wanted to know.
Kathy shrugged. “Hybrids like in your paintings—part human and part something else. So they must be your numena.”
“Well, what did the one you see look like?”
Kathy stopped chopping carrots long enough to close her eyes and call up an image of the numena she’d seen.
“Very feline,” she said, turning to look at Izzy. “Small, but with broad lion-like features and a huge tawny mane of hair. And she had a tail with a tuft at the end of it. I guess she’s from a painting that you haven’t shown me yet, because I didn’t recognize her. I remember thinking at the time that it was kind of odd how you’d mixed elements of a male lion with a young girl.”
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