'They wanted me to be a doctor—my dad's a doctor—but I couldn't really see going through all that when what I wanted to do was write." He sipped his Coke. "I'm a writer, really."
In Manhattan we spell this word unemployed.
"Anything published?" I asked, although I could guess the answer.
Ned shrugged, embarrassed. "A couple of things. You know, like in magazines? Small press."
About then Daffydd and Belle arrived.
Daffydd is tall and spare and favors tweed jackets with black turtlenecks, giving him a passing resemblance to a member of a road show company of Bell, Book, and Candle. Other than a pen-tacle ring and his HP bracelet he looks absolutely mundane and very reassuring.
Daffydd's interest in the Craft is —to put it tactfully—mild; his association with Changing is primarily in the nature of a favor to Belle, whose friend he has been since her student days twenty-something years ago. The reason for his involvement is that Craft law—from the olden days around 1957, when there was only one Craft and it was Gardnerian — once mandated that all covens be organized in perfect pairs, just like Noaih's Ark.
Magically speaking, it makes sense, but magical theory has never been popular with the masses. These days women outnumber men on the New Aquarian Frontier by about five to one, and the Noah's ark theory of Wicca has gone the way of the hula hoop and casual sex. Meanwhile, Belle and Daffydd go on like an old-time married couple, and Daffydd comes to coven about as often as most people go to church.
Introductions all round. Ned and Daffydd shook hands, then we arranged ourselves again and contemplated the menu. Daffydd ordered a Miller Draft. I had another Tsingtao. Daffydd and 1 did a little catching up—not much, as Ned wouldn't know any of the people and it wasn't polite to underline how much of an outsider he was.
Belle did bring up the subject of the picnic, though, which was Ned's cue to realize that 1 was not an outsider like himself, but one who had already attained Ned's desired goal. He shot me a look of betrayal.
"Not very big," Belle was saying. "I thought we'd start small. We can get High Bridge Park—"
"I know a lot of people you could get to come," Ned burst in, friendly and tactless as a Labrador puppy.
Belle looked at him, wanting to include him but taken a little aback. "We can put up flyers in the bookstores," she said, pitching it as If she were answering him. To me: "I'll cadi you next week."
"It sounds pretty exciting," Ned said heairtily to the table at large. I winced, remembering a time when 1 would have greeted news of a gathering where I could meet actual Witches with the saime maladroit glee.
"I hope you'll come," Belle said. "I'm sure Bast will post it down at the Snake."
"Is Bast your Witch name?" Ned asked me. I thought of telling him my parents were rogue Egyptologists and decided against it. "Yes," I said, and left it at that.
Eventually we got down to the fortune cookies and vanilla Haagen-Dazs with fresh ginger.
Ned waited—first with confidence, then with increasing apprehension—for the invitation that didn't come.
We settled the check.
Ned waited, waited, waited . . .
"I'll call you next week, all right, Ned?" Bellflower said.
"Sure." He smiled, covering his disappointment. "Or I'll call you."
He went to retrieve a jacket, and then went out the door.
170 Bell, Book, and Murder
Was it only my overheated and guilty imagination that told me how rigidly Ned Skelton schooled himself not to look back, not to linger, not to look in our direction?
"My place?" said Daffydd to Belle.
"Sure. Coming, Bast?" Belle asked me.
"Sure." I followed Daffydd and Belle out onto Broadway.
I hate this part. 1 hate having this much power over someone else's happiness, and I hate the possibility that because I'm tired, because I'm irritated, I'll use that power without thinking and leave welts on someone else's psyche that a lifetime can't erase.
This is why non-judgmentalism is so very popular. Because judging and choosing and making decisions means saying yes to one possibility and no to all the others. To do that is to take back all the responsibility that Society encourages you to give away.
Real freedom scares most people to death.
Daffydd has a little apartment on the top floor of one of those former stately homes that Line Riverside all through the hundred-teens. His two rooms are decorated in English Docent Classic and contain more material than Belle's eight rooms and my one put together. Every possible wall is covered in bookshelves. Rolled maps, esoteric fan-tods, and books too big to be conventionally shelved jut from the shelves at all angles. You move through Daffydd's space at your peril.
We arrived. Belle took the hassock, I took the chair that went with it—both upholstered in villainous nappy mauve wool. Daffydd went into the kitchen and came back with three glasses and a bottle with a cork. He extracted the cork and poured, and sat down in a foldable wooden contraption that would have looked perfectly at home in Alexander the Great's RV. He looked at Belle. Belle looked solemn.
Apparently none of us had thought Edward Skelton was right for Changing.
Belle looked at me. I shrugged and pretended I was fascinated by my drink. It was a sweet dessert thing, the kind Belle likes. And me too, come to that. Wine snobbery is not among my virtues.
Neither, apparently, was acceptance. I sat there and disliked myself.
"I don't know if Ned Skelton would really be comfortable in a
traditional Wiccan group," Daffydd said, when it became plain that nobody else was going to say anything.
To call Belle's coven "traditional" is just plain inaccurate, but after a moment I thought I saw what Daffydd meant.
I looked up and saw that both of them were looking at me.
"Traditional meaning Goddess-oriented," I said. Daffydd smiled and raised his glass in salute.
"Hmm," Belle said, thinking it over. Lady Bellflower of the Wicca does not believe in magic, and doesn't trust hunches. "You think he might be uncomfortable with what we do in Changing," she said, trying it on for size.
At least half of the Craft traditions—and all the Gardnerian-descended ones—venerate the perfect balance of male and female energies, as sjnnbolized by the God and Goddess. But to senses blunted by centuries of anthrocentrism, equal time often looks like preferential treatment—which is why, inaccurately, Wiccans are referred to as Goddess-worshipers, as if She had no consort.
I thought over what Daffydd had said. Ned Skelton didn't fit. He just didn't, for reasons I couldn't articulate. Saying he wouldn't like our rituals was as good a polite excuse as any for following a prompting that none of us could put into words.
"He's been working cyber-Welsh down at the Snake," my better self said, unasked.
Lorelli Lee is the Snake's generad-purpose Pag£in priestess. She works a different godform every Saturday; if Ned had been going any length of time he'd already been exposed to old-fashioned God/Goddess polarity as well as to rituals featuring Gala Parthe-nogenete. Heme the Biker, Triple Hecate, and Gilgamesh/Enki.
Belle looked a little surprised. I could see her inclining toward inviting Ned to an Open Circle with Changing so that everyone could meet him and 1 wished I'd kept my mouth shut.
'The picnic will give him a good chance to meet a lot of people," Daffydd said, coming to my rescue.
"Works for me," I said. Yeah. Maybe Xharina'd have an opening.
"That sounds good." Belle looked relieved, and that settled Edward Skelton's fate.
Not for Changing. For someone, but not for us.
Thinking about Xharina made me think about missing Books of Shadows. Belle already knew about Glitter's bereavement. A second loss —of which 1 wasn't even certain—could be only coincidence.
172 Bell, Book, and Murder
And Belle didn't believe in Witch Wars, didn't believe in Pagan-on-Pagan lawlessness, didn't believe in the High Gothic silliness that so many of us love t
o indulge in, with secret passwords and coded recognition signals.
Secrecy is second only to conspiracy as a cheap euphoric decorator accent for Reality.
"Bast?" said Daffydd. I realized I was staring off into space.
"I was just thinking. About Mary, Queen of Scots," I added quickly, grabbing the first name that popped into my head so that Belle wouldn't think I was still wasting any brain cells on Ned.
"Why the sudden interest?" Daffydd asked, leaning forward.
"Well," I said, "Beaner's singing in that opera."
"And probably filled your head with all sorts of nonsense," Daffydd said disapprovingly. Which meant he was, as Beaner would say, one of Them. "Interested in more unbiased information?"
Daffydd's day job is something in the soft sciences at Columbia, which means a lot of people send him free books. In a stunning conflation of resources and inclination, Daffydd's great passion in life is loaning books to people.
"Oh, sure," I said innocently. Hadn't Beaner said I should read more history?
Daffydd went off. He came back with a book. "Here," he said, handing it to me. 'This should give you the basics."
Yeah. To start a fight with my closest friends and selected strangers over someone who'd been dead for four centuries. Oh, yeah—and eight years. I glanced at it. Academic press; small, heavy, acid-free paper. Blue buckram binding (the optimal meld of economics and respectability) with title-name-and-publisher stamped in gold (Optima 24-point for the title; Times Roman 18-point for the author's name; publisher in 12-point Caslon Antique plus stamp-blurred colophon) on the spine. It might even have come through Houston Graphics—we do a lot of academic press work.
"Call me if you have any questions," Daffydd said as I flipped through Mary Stuart: A Rose in the Shadows by Olivia Wexford Hunt. "History can be a little daunting when you're dropped into the middle of it, but it's just—history." Daffydd shrugged. I recollected that he's also a member of the Richard the Third Society; possibly Daffydd's interests lie in being spin doctor for dead royals in need.
The talk turned to the picnic and Belle's hopes for it.
Despite all of us being stuffed onto one island and/or five boroughs, the New York Metropagan Community is really fragmented. Some of us only meet at festivals far outside the city. Getting us together where we lived sounded like a better idea the more Belle pitched it—but then, BeUe can talk almost anyone into almost anything.
We finished the wine. I agreed to coordinate Beltane Ecu-menipicnic I. Daffydd insisted I take a cab home. He was probably more concerned about Mary than about me.
I live across Bowery (which used to be a high-rent district about 150 years ago) in the usual sort of crumbling Middle European prewar monocultural neighborhood that developers love to target. My landlord would love them to target it, too: my building's one of those prixjixe renter's dreams.
I had to pay three months' key money to get in, and my apartment strongly resembles a coffin—being ten feet wide and something more than twice that long with a fifteen-foot ceiling—but I've never regretted it, not with my rent being what it is.
I paid off the cab and went up five flights and opened three locks and 1 was home. I dumped my hat, jacket, and bag on my old-enough-to-be-an-antique-but-not kitchen table and went to check my answering machine. It used to be the only techno-toy I had, but at Yule I blew myself to a "portable" boom box with two cassette decks and a CD player. I doubt if I'll go any farther into consumer electronics, though—anything more would probably blow the building's wiring.
Even though it was well after midnight, I wasn't sleepy. I put on the water for tea, scaring the roaches half to death, and decided to t£Lke a look at Daffydd's book. The only other thing I had on my To Be Read pile was a romance by Pat CaHfia, anyway.
The water boiled. I made tea. I put Ned Skelton and peripatetic Books of Shadows out of my mind in favor of the musical question of what made someone four centuries dead hot news?
The basic facts Beaner had given me were correct. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. Raised in the French court, the Manhattan of its day. Married at sixteen, widowed at seventeen. Superfluous to her de Medici mother-in-law (Mary wasn't in the succession for the French throne), she was packed off home to Scotland—away from
174 Bell, Book, and Murder
glamour, away from sophistication, away from the meeting of like minds.
As far as I could tell, Mary did not hsmdle being formerly important well. She was still a queen, but in Scotland she was a queen surrounded by people who were not at, who could not aspire to be at, the center of the world.
Every transplanted New Yorker—even those leaving voluntarily and for the best of reasons—knows the regret of leaving Avalon, Atlantis, the Hesperian garden that is the biggest and most golden apple of them all, and Mary Stuart was no exception. Her life was spent attempting to regain that same orient and enchanted sense of place that living at the center of the world had given her.
Looked at that way, Mary Stuart's life had a sort of grisly relevance to modem times. If there's something you want, something you think you need to have to survive as the person you think you are, what price is too high to pay for it?
Compared to her cool Apollonian cousin to the south—Elizabeth the First, England's virgin queen of cities —Mary does not come off particularly well in the historical accounts. As Beaner said, a moron who failed Interpersonal Politics 101.
But as a woman who had been at the hub of her century's Manhattan glitterati circle and would do anything to regain that place, I understood her. She wanted the only importaint thing, and its gift was in the hands of others. Like Ned Skelton, she was desperate, obsessed —not to return to France, but to transcend France, by making her own island kingdom even more glorious.
Surrounded by incomprehension of what she was, maybe even knowing that what she wanted more than anything she could never have, but driven desperately to try for it. . .
That woman I knew.
Maybe too well for my peace of mind.
The sun was finally coming up when I turned out my lights.
SATURDAY, APRIL 30-SUNDAY, MAY 1 ^'^^
I spent the next three weeks playing amanuensis to Belle's Beltane picnic, which grew from a New York-only event that maybe sixty people would attend to a happening welcoming every Pagan in New York, New Jersey, and parts of Connecticut.
Setting this up required more than just a phone call.
Belle got the permit to assemble from the Parks Department, and Dorje arranged the one-day liquor license so that we could legally bring kegs into High Bridge Park. The Cat posted our picnic on the appropriate computer bulletin boards, and I posted flyers in all the right places.
So much for the easy part.
What was slightly less easy was keeping amy kind of track of who was coming, what (and how much) they were bringing for the potluck (and telling them over and over to label what they were bringing, to keep from accidentally poisoning someone with food allergies), and deciding who was in and who was out of the opening and closing rituals that Belle was working on.
Every time we got the cast list settled, something came up.
Either somebody couldn't invoke the East because Belle assigns the element of Water to the East on the fairly reasonable logic of there being cin entire ocean in that direction, or they couldn't participate in a ritual where edged metal was used (even though we weren't using any).
Or they couldn't participate in a ritual where edged metal
176 Bell, Book, and Murder
wasn't being used, since the one thing everybody found to pick on was the fact that Belle was being real nonnegotiable about letting people flash their athames in a public place. An athame is the purely ceremonial knife used by most Wiccans and Pagans in their religious rituals, and a knife is a knife is a real button-pusher, especially if John Q. Mundane sees sixty people in weird clothes waving them.
I wished it would only be sixty. New York magazine reports there are over
ten thousand practicing Witches in Manhattan.
I hoped they weren't all coming.
But if they were, I bet they were all bringing potato salad.
In between bouts of damage control on the Ecumenipicnic came my stints at Houston Graphics. Ray d liked the catalog, Mikey'd liked the catalog, even the customer'd liked the catalog, and it looked like a coffee-table book on the same theme was in the pipeline.
Despite which, it looked like being a bad summer for Houston— bad in the sense that the big jobs that kept the studio staff fully employed just didn't seem to be out there.
And that wasn't good.
Winter is Houston's traditional slack time, but every publisher going still does a Fall/Winter list. Fall/Winter pubdates mean that raw manuscript is turned into what you take to the printer from May through August—peak season for in-house art departments and places like Houston Graphics.
Not this year. And that meant lean times ahead.
There are other things I could do to pay the rent besides courting planned obsolescence. I could read tarot cards for money— good money in that, so I'm told, and working conditions no more uncertain than these. Only I have a small ethics problem with taking money for magic, and in my book, reading tarot is working magic.
I could go to work in an occult bookstore, but when all is said and done that's just retail sales, and even less job security than I had now. Not that I hadn't done it, but it was more in the nature of a hobby and I wanted to keep it that way.
I could hustle harder for freelance design work, I suppose, or pack up my portfolio and try to get a job at Chiat/Day or someplace like it. But the media in its wisdom has finally coined a term for us just-post-Woodstock folk (that's Woodstock/), and it's slackers. I'd hate to disappoint them.
Or maybe Fm just waiting for a sign to appear in the heavens. And while I was waiting, it became April 30.
Beltane Eve is one of the Eight Great Sabbats in the Wheel of the Year and one of the two biggies, Samhain (Halloween to you) being the other. Changing would end tonight's Beltane ritual by turning out at dawn to watch a Morris side that was dancing its traditional greeting to the spring around 5:30 a.m. in Riverside Park. In addition to no sleep, that meant doing on Saturday everything that we possibly could about Sunday.
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