Holly Black (17 page)

What I didn’t think about until later was that she knew a lot about R. P. Flint’s stories—about the swords and the dragons—and she knew where I kept my copies.

Not too long after, I found another letter from R. P. Flint, recently arrived, this one torn up in eighths and in the living room wastepaper basket. I took it up to my room and put it on my desk and I fit it together. Then I read it all.

Dick Flint said he was glad he and my mom had met again and how beautiful she was. He talked about the
rhapsody of entry
and my fingers felt numb on the paper. Mr. Flint talked about how doing that with her made him feel young again, and we can’t let a good thing die, honey, and then a lot about her breasts in the hotel room and lying naked while the evening fell, before she had to skedaddle
like a nymph, I’m telling you, viewed by some burly hunter espying her through a thicket in the gloaming. O, the radiant copse
, etc.

I just stared at the letter for a long time. It told a story of a world in which even the falling light on telephone wires was beautiful, and a man and a woman were in love, and it had sat torn up in eighths in a wastepaper basket in a room with two plants and three vases and a painting of horses.

I went downstairs.

My mother was polishing in the kitchen.

I went in and sat down.

My mother kept on polishing.

Finally she looked at me. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I couldn’t say anything. I shrugged.

“Well, why have you been crying?” she asked.

“You’re cheating,” I said.

“What am I doing?”

I didn’t want to repeat it so I kept quiet.

“Don’t twizzle up your legs like that,” she said. “It’s just like your father. Don’t twizzle them up. It’s pathetic.”

I said, “You had an affair.”

She was surprised. She stopped polishing for a minute. “Who told you that?” she asked me. “Have people been talking?”

I didn’t say anything. She kept asking me questions. I didn’t tell her a word.

Finally, she said, “All right. Fine. That’s the past.”

“When?”

“During the war. And your father’s no saint. Don’t twizzle up your legs.”

“I’m not twizzling up my legs.”

“I mean when you wrap them around each other,” she said. “You have to claim the chair as your own. Spread out a little. You sit like nothing in the world belongs to you.”

“Well, you threw away all my magazines.”

“Forget the stupid magazines.”

“Tell me about the, you know, affair.”

“I will not tell you a word. Neither your father or me wants to talk about it.”

“I want to know about the affair. Tell me what happened in the affair.”

“Stop saying ‘affair.’”

She wouldn’t talk about it. My dad came home pretty soon after that. At dinner, my mother started crying. She slammed the salad across the table and walked out.

My father tried not to move, like he was terrified.

I watched them both.

My dad, he watched the table.

A few days later, without telling anyone, I got on the bus for Maine.

“They’re stuck inside their little houses,” said R. P. Flint as we walked past cottages on the bay. Mr. Flint and I were going for some grub and a man-to-man. Mr. Flint cupped his hands around his mouth and repeated loudly, “STUCK INSIDE THEIR LITTLE HOUSES.” He told me, “When people say, ‘I don’t get out much anymore,’ they don’t just mean out the door. They mean outside their own skin. They’re sewed up in their hides. They’re trapped in there. Kid, they need to go out on the town. They need to take their spirit out on a date.” He cupped his hands around his mouth again. “YOU NEED TO GO STEADY WITH YOUR SOUL.”

He was wearing a normal white shirt and a plain suit and I wondered whether that was what he had been wearing when he espied my mother through a thicket in the gloaming and they went to a hotel.

Flint asked, “Is she coming up?”

“Who? Mom?”

“Sure, your mom.”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t tell her I was coming. I just called before I walked to your house. She only just found out I was here.”

“I haven’t seen her in a while. Is she still the fairest vixen to ever sweep across a glade?”

I shrugged, thinking:
the gem of her womanhood
.

“Let me tell you something that won’t cost you a nickel. A great love is necessary for a great art,” Mr. Flint explained.

I told him I didn’t write or anything.

“But you have a lyrical soul,” he said. “I can see it. People don’t understand you. But that’s because you haven’t spoken yet. I mean, spoken in the voice that echoes off cliffs and mountaintops.” He grabbed my arm and stopped the two of us from walking. He said, like a prophet, “You will speak in that voice, ere long.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t want to look at his eyes. I wanted to keep walking. But Mr. Flint wasn’t letting go. I figured he was waiting for something but I didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe thanks or something. So I said, “Thanks.”

Mr. Flint let go of my arm and smiled and we kept walking toward the village. The water was real quiet in the bay. Some lobster boats drifted out between the isles. It was a bright day, and the wind blew over the church steeples and the warehouses on the docks.

I asked Mr. Flint whether he ever got lonely up in Maine.

“Why’s that?”

“I thought writers lived in New York or Hollywood. And they had all kinds of friends who are other writers and movie stars.”

“I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.”

I looked out where the sun glanced along the harbor and I could kind of see what Mr. Flint meant. It looked heroic, with all the ocean and the coves and their pines. Everything seemed big.

That’s one of the things I love about R. P. Flint’s stories: They make the land feel huge. Even though they’re set on an ancient, strange Earth, there’s the feeling of a huge America in them. They have the pioneer spirit. The sea with the fishermen, and the fields of wheat to the west.
The frigid north, where roams the wolf, and the sands of the desert south
. The white marble cities and the little farms lost in the hills.

Looking out at the sea, I felt something cosmic in the nation and older than the settlers.

And I guess maybe that’s what he’d made my mother see, how huge everything was, and I pictured them standing in some high place, and for a moment they looked out on the world together, the height of space, and maybe they felt like they were falling through it, but holding each other.

A lobster boat was puttering near to the shore. Men in rubber pants pulled up their traps. There was wood smoke in the air, which is a smell I like. We kept walking. I scuffed the dirt in streaks with my heels. I looked at Mr. Flint and I thought,
the rhapsody of entry
, and then I didn’t say any more.

A few minutes later, we reached the luncheonette. We got a table.

“I’m buying,” said Mr. Flint. “It’s a celebration.”

I got fried chicken. Mr. Flint got the Reuben sandwich. I picked the skin off the fried chicken. I like the breading, but not the skin. The skin is too wet and bumpy. I stacked little pieces of the broken breading on top of the meat. That way I could eat just the breading.

Mr. Flint announced, “The white knights, formerly Caelwin’s allies, catch him and try to mate him with the inferior, watery beauties of Pelinesse. Those are no women for Caelwin—fine ladies taken up with needlepoint and the gentle arts. Weaving. Giggling in their snoods. He will not go to stud to improve the bloodlines of those anemic decadents.”

“In the new story?”

“The wizard Arok-Plin, thirsty for the blood of the young nations of the north, seeks him, too, riding out of the desolate lands of Vnokk. He wishes to use Caelwin’s life-strength in an amulet that will give him the power to melt metal with his very gaze. How do you like that? Would you like to have such an amulet?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what I’d really do with it. I mean, you can bust metal with stuff now and I never need to.”

“Ah. Right.” He nodded.

I was just trying to answer truthfully, but now I could see Mr. Flint was a little hurt about me not liking his amulet. So I said, “I have about every Caelwin story you ever wrote.” He still didn’t say anything, so I asked him, “How did you get such a big imagination?”

“By never ordering from the menu of life, except à la carte. By letting my own heart beat so strong that my body jumps to its rhythms. Do you understand?”

I nodded. But then I thought about it and I said, “You ordered a lunch special.”

“I like the pickle.”

“I mean, you didn’t order a separate side. You just got the Reuben basket.”

“I don’t have anything against fries. What’s got into you?”

“I thought à la carte meant you ordered everything separate.”

“I wasn’t talking literally. Don’t be a chump. Anyway, why are you stacking up all your fried on your chicken after you just pulled it off?”

“I just like the fried.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m the one who has to watch it.”

I said, “Tell me about my mother.”

R. P. Flint got a look on his face that was either worried or angry, and he chewed real slow and hard, chops full.

Now I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I played with the paper placemat instead. I rolled a corner of it around the handle of my fork.

“How are you boys doing here?” the waitress said. “Still working?”

“I am always working, kindly Ruby,” said Flint. “So long as breath and mind persevere.”

“You were going to write a sonnet about me on my apron,” she said.

“Sure. I’m a couplet short of a quatrain. Think of something that rhymes with ‘carbonation.’”

“This should be good.”

I offered, “Inflammation.”

“Real cute,” said Ruby about me.

“Ain’t he the bee’s knees?” said Flint, wriggling a finger.

“Your nephew?”

“Sort of.”

I explained, “He had an affair with my mother.”

The waitress looked at Mr. Flint with a friendly kind of disgust and then said, “Prince Charming. Excuse me. I have a date with a side of mashed.”

When she was gone, Mr. Flint told me, “I wish you hadn’t said that. You can’t just say things like that.”

“It’s true. If you didn’t want people to say it, you shouldn’t have done it.”

Mr. Flint chewed again.

I said, “So?”

“So what?”

“So you knew her in high school.”

Mr. Flint took another bite of his Rueben. He wiped pink sauce off his lips with his napkin. He half-shrugged and said, “Okay. We knew each other in high school.”

“Did you date her then?”

“Did I…? No, not really. Not what you could call ‘date.’ You know, this is a colliding of worlds. You here. One world runs into another one.” He sucked at his teeth. “Think about this: I could have Caelwin stumble on an electrical citadel. With a field of static energy like a veil of light and a buzzing sound. And in the citadel could be some creatures from another planet with ray-guns and all. But I’m worried how it would be, with a sword yarn mixing with a space yarn. What do you think?”

“You’re…You aren’t answering.”

“You haven’t asked any question.”

“When did you see her again?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this, pal.”

“But now I asked a question.”

“She’s a gorgeous woman, your mother. You must know that. If she’s ever in the dumps, you’ve got to tell her that. Tell her people think she’s gorgeous. You’ve got to make a woman realize how they delight men’s eyes. Because otherwise they all think they have lousy figures or bad hair.”

“You’re not answering.”

“I don’t have to answer a thing. Your mother is a delicious woman. That’s all you’ve got to know. Do you have to go to the john?”

“No. Why?”

“Because you have your legs all screwed up like that.”

“Sorry,” I said, and unwound them. I told him that my mother always says I need to sit like I’m willing to take up more room.

“She’s not wrong,” he said. “She’s a smart woman, your mother. Smart as well as beautiful. It’s one of the great mysteries that people take up different amounts of room. I mean, you think of, for example, a guy like me, normal sized, and a short little guy, let’s say he’s five two or something. We both have these thoughts and these feelings, but mine extend through more of the universe. More of the universe is made up of me. No matter how big his thoughts are, when it comes down to it, more of space is not him—and more of it is boiling with R. P. Flint. It’s a question of how much you fill. Isn’t that funny?”

“Where was the hotel?”

“You don’t let up.”

“I read your letter.”

“You read my goddamn letter.”

“She tore it up.”

Mr. Flint wiped his mouth with his napkin, creased it into a square, and threw it down on his plate. “Look, kid, you’ve met me. Here we are. That’s it. Now you know me. You’re done. We’re right in town. Let me give you change for the bus. You go back home and tell your mother I’m here whenever she wants to come up and see me.” He stood up. “Get up. I’m paying. You need to use the john.”

“I don’t. That’s just my legs.”

“You have a long trip ahead of you.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Why? What do you want to learn?”

That stumped me. I didn’t answer.

“What do you want to learn?”

I didn’t have anything to say.

Mr. Flint took his coat from the hook on our booth and he put it on and the moment was passing. He said, “I’ve got to go. Our hero is tied to a pillar, about to be gored by a pterodactyl.”

“You said it might be a bat.”

“I just said that to make conversation. That’s the stupidest goddamn idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”