“Old houses,” she said. “I always need work space and a lot of light, and only the old houses have it. It’s a trade-off—plumbing for elbow room. Wait till I feed NMC.” NMC was an undistinguished black and white cat who slept with six new kittens in a box underneath the tiny sink set into a curtained alcove. (“She likes to keep an eye on the refrigerator,” Julie explained. “Just in case it tries to make a break for freedom.”) She had shown up pregnant, climbing the stairs to scratch only at Julie’s door, and sauntering in with an air of being specifically expected. The initials of her name stood for Not My Cat. Julie opened a can, set it down beside the box, checked to make sure that each kitten was securely attached to a nipple, briefly fondled a softly thrumming throat and told her, “The litter tray is two feet to your left. As if you care.”
At the curb, gazing for a long time at Madame Schumann-Heink, she said, “This thing has become absolutely transparent, Joe, you know that. I can see the Bay right through it.”
“Wait till you see her by moonlight,” Farrell said. “Gossamer and cobwebs. The Taj Mahal of rust. Tell me again where the Bigby Museum is.”
“North. East. In the hills. It’s hard to explain. Take the freeway, I’ll tell you where to turn off.”
The Bigby City Museum had been, until fairly recently, Avicenna’s nearest approach to a Roman villa. Together with its long, narrow reflecting pool and its ornamental gardens, it occupied an entire truncated hilltop from which, morning and evening, its masters—copper-mining kinglets—had seen the Golden Gate Bridge rising through the Bay mist like a Chinese dragon’s writhing back. With the death of the last primordial Bigby, the lone heir had quietly sold the mansion to the city, set up its contents (primarily lesser works of the lesser Impressionists, a scattering of the Spanish masters, and the entire oeuvre of a Bigby who painted train stations) as a joint trust, and sailed away to a tax haven in the Lesser Antilles. Julie said there were a few early Brueghel oils and drawings worth the visit. “He was doing Bosch then—maybe forgeries, maybe not—and mostly you can’t tell them apart. But with these you start seeing the real Brueghel, sort of in spite of himself. There’s a good little Raphael too, but you’ll hate it. An Annunciation, with putti.”
“I’ll hate it,” Farrell said. He eased Madame Schumann-Heink over into the right-hand lane, greatly irritating a BMW, who honked at him all the way to the freeway. “Practically as much as I hate old whoever, the guy you married.”
“Brian.” Julie punched his shoulder hard. “His name is Brian, and he’s a lovely, wonderful man, and I really do love him. We just shouldn’t have gotten married. We both agreed on that.”
“A damn Brian,” Farrell said. He put his head out of the window and yelled back at the BMW, “She went and married a Brian, I ask you!” The BMW driver gave him the finger. Farrell said, “The worst thing is, I’d probably like him, I’ve got a bad feeling about that. Let’s talk about something else. Why’d you marry him?”
Julie sighed. “Maybe because he was as far away from you as I could get. He’s sane, he’s stable, he’s—okay, he’s ambitious, nothing wrong with that—”
Farrell’s immediate indignation surprised him as much as it did Julie. “Hey, I’m sane. All things considered. Weird is not wacko, there’s a fine but definite line. And I’m stable as a damn lighthouse, or we’d never have stayed friends this long. Ambitious—okay, no, never, not really. Still cooking here and there, still playing a bit of obsolete music on obsolete instruments after hours. Same way you’re still drawing cross sections of lungs and livers for medical students. What does old ambitious Brian do?”
“He’s a lawyer.” Julie heard herself mumbling, saw the corner of Farrell’s mouth twitch, and promptly flared up again. “And I don’t want to hear one bloody word out of you, Farrell! He’s not a hired gun for corporations, he doesn’t defend celebrity gangsters. He works for non-profits, environmental groups, refugees, gay rights—he takes on so many pro bono cases, half the time he can’t pay his office rent. He’s a better person than you’ll ever be, Farrell. Or me either. That’s the damn, damn trouble.” Her eyes were aching heavily, and she looked away from him.
Farrell put his hand gently on the back of her neck. He said, “I’m sorry, Jewel.” Neither of them spoke after that until they were grinding slowly up a narrow street lined with old sycamore and walnut trees and high, furry old houses drowsing in the late-summer sun. Julie said, “I do a little word-processing, temp stuff,” and then, in the same flat voice, “You never married anybody.”
“Too old,” Farrell said. “I used to be too young, or somebody was, I remember that. Now it’s plain too late—I’m me, finally, all the way down, and easy enough with it, but I damn sure wouldn’t marry me.” He braked to keep from running over two cackling adolescents on skateboards, then resumed the lumbering climb, dropping Madame Schumann-Heink into second gear, which was one of her good ones. Looking sideways, he said, “One thing anyway, you’re still the prettiest Eskimo anybody ever saw.”
“Get out of here,” she answered him scornfully. “You never saw an Eskimo that wasn’t in some National Geographic special.” Now she looked back at him, fighting a smile, and he touched her neck again, very lightly. “Well, I’m getting like that myself,” she said. “Too old and too cranky to suit anybody but me. Turn right at the light, Joe.”
The Bigby City Museum came upon them suddenly, filling the windshield just after the last sharp curve, as they rolled slightly downward into a graveled parking lot which had once been an herb garden. Farrell parked facing the Bay, and the two of them got out and stood silently on either side of Madame Schumann-Heink, staring away at the water glittering in the western sun. Then they turned, each with an odd, unspoken near-reluctance, to face the Museum. It would have been a beautiful building, Julie thought, in another town. It was three stories high, cream white, with a flat tile roof the color of red wine. Shadowed on three sides by cypress trees, camellia bushes softening the rectitude of the corners, a dancing-dolphin fountain chuckling in the sunny courtyard, and the white and peach rose gardens sloping away from the reflecting pool, it was a beautiful house, but one that belonged in Santa Barbara, Santa Monica or Malibu, worlds and wars, generations and elections removed from silly, vain, vainly perverse Avicenna. Farrell finally sighed and said, “Power to the people, hey,” and Julie said, “A bas les aristos,” and they went inside. The ticket seller and the guest book were on the first floor, the Brueghels on the second. Julie and Farrell walked up a flowing mahogany stairway hung with watercolors from the Southwestern period of the train-station Bigby. On the landing Farrell looked around judiciously and announced, “Fine command of plastic values, I’ll say that,” to which Julie responded, “Oh, no question, but those spatio-temporal vortices, I don’t know.” They laughed together, joined hands and climbed the rest of the way.
There were ten or twelve other people upstairs in the huge main gallery. Most were younger than Farrell and Julie, with the distinct air of art students on assignment, their eyes flicking nervously from the Brueghels to their fellows to see whether anyone else had caught the trick, fathomed the koan, winkled out the grade points that must surely be hiding somewhere within those depictions of demon priests and creatures out of anchorite nightmares. When Julie took a small pad out of her purse, sat down on a couch and began copying certain corners and aspects of the paintings, the students were eddying silently toward her within minutes, just in case she knew. Farrell winked at her and wandered off toward a wall of train stations. Julie never looked up.
More quickly than she expected, he was back, leaning over her shoulder, his low voice in her hair. “Jewel. Something you ought to see. Right around the corner.”
The corner was actually a temporary wall, just wide and high enough to hold three tapestries whose placard described them as “…mid-fifteenth century, artist unknown, probably from Bruges.” The highest tapestry, done in the terrifyingly detailed millefleurs style, showed several women in a rich g
arden being serenaded by a lute-player, and Julie at first thought that Farrell—a lutenist himself—must have meant her to look at this one. Then she saw the one below.
It was in worse shape than the upper tapestry, badly frayed all around the edges and darkly stained in a kind of rosette close to the center, which showed a knight presenting a unicorn to his simpering lady. The unicorn was small and bluish-white, with the cloven hooves, long neck and slender quarters of a deer. The knight was leading it on a silvery cord, and his squire behind him was prodding the unicorn forward with a short stabbing lance. There was a soapbubble castle in the background, floating up out of a stylized broccoli forest. Julie heard herself say in a child’s voice, “I don’t like this.”
“I’ve seen better,” Farrell agreed. “Wouldn’t have picked it as Bruges work myself.” The lance was pricking the unicorn hard enough that the flesh dimpled around the point, and the unicorn’s one visible eye, purple-black, was rolled back toward the squire in fear or anger. The knight’s lady held a wreath of scarlet flowers in her extended right hand. Whether it was meant for the knight or the unicorn Julie could not tell.
“I wish you hadn’t shown me this,” she said. She turned and returned to the Brueghels, trying to recapture her focus on the sliver of canvas, the precise brushstroke, where the young painter could be seen to step away from his master. But time after time she was drawn back, moving blindly through the growing crowd to stare one more time at the shabby old imagining of beauty and theft before she took up her sketchpad again. At last she gave up any notion of work, and simply stood still before the tapestry, waiting patiently to grow numb to the unicorn’s endless woven pain. The lady looked directly out at her, the faded smirk saying clearly, “Five hundred years. Five hundred years, and it is still going on, this very minute, all to the greater glory of God and courtly love.”
“That’s what you think,” Julie said aloud. She lifted her right hand and moved it slowly across the tapestry, barely brushing the protective glass. As she did so, she spoke several words in a language that might have been Japanese, and was not. With the last syllable came a curious muffled jolt, like an underwater explosion, that thudded distantly through her body, making her step back and stagger against Farrell. He gripped her shoulders, saying, “Jewel, what the hell are you up to? What did you just do right then?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and for that moment it was true. She was oddly dizzy, and she could feel a headache coiling in her temples. “I didn’t do anything, what could I do? What do you think I was doing, Joe?”
Farrell turned her to face him, his hands light on her shoulders now, but his dark-blue eyes holding her with an intensity she had rarely seen in all the years they had known each other. He said, “I remember you telling me about your grandmother’s Japanese magic. I remember a night really long ago, and a goddess who came when you called her. It all makes me the tiniest bit uneasy.”
The strange soft shock did not come again; the art students and the tourists went on drifting as drowsily as aquarium fish among the Brueghels; the figures in the tapestry remained exactly where they had posed for five centuries. Julie said, “I haven’t done a damn thing.” Farrell’s eyes did not leave her face. “Not anything that made any difference, anyway,” she said. She turned away and walked quickly across the gallery to examine a very minor Zurbaran too closely.
In time the notepad came back out of her purse, and she again began to copy those scraps and splinters of the Brueghels that held lessons or uses for her. She did not return to the unicorn tapestry. More time passed than she had meant to spend in the museum, and when Farrell appeared beside her she was startled at the stained pallor of the sky outside the high windows. He said, “You better come take a look. That was one hell of a grandmother you had.”
She asked no questions when he took hold of her arm and led her—she could feel the effort it cost him not to drag her—back to the wall of tapestries. She stared at the upper one for a long moment before she permitted herself to understand.
The unicorn was gone. The knight and his squire remained in their places, silver cord hauling nothing forward, lance jabbing cruelly into helpless nothing. The lady went on smiling milkily, offering her flowers to nothingness. There was no change in any of their faces, no indication that the absence of the reason for their existence had been noticed at all. Julie stared and stared and said nothing.
“Let you out of my sight for five minutes,” Farrell said. He was not looking at her, but scanning the floor in every direction. “All right, main thing’s to keep him from getting stepped on. Check the corners—you do that side, I’ll do all this side.” But he was shaking his head even before he finished. “No, the stairs, you hit the stairs. If he gets down those stairs, that’s it, we’ve lost him. Jewel, go!” He had not raised his voice at all, but the last words cracked like pine sap in fire.
Julie gave one last glance at the tapestry, hoping that the unicorn would prove not to be lost after all, but only somehow absurdly overlooked. But not so much as a dangling thread suggested that there had ever been any other figure in the frame. She said vaguely, “I didn’t think it would work, it was just to be doing something,” and sprang for the stairway.
By now the art students had been mostly replaced by nuzzling couples and edgy family groups. Some of them grumbled as Julie pushed down past them without a word of apology; a few others turned to gape when she took up a position on the landing, midway between a lost-contact-lens stoop and a catcher’s crouch, looking from side to side for some miniature scurry, something like a flittering dust-kitten with a tiny blink at its brow…. But will it be flesh, or only dyed yarn? And will it grow to full size, now it’s out of the frame? Does it know, does it know it’s free, or is it hiding in my shadow, in a thousand times more danger than when there was a rope around its neck and a virgin grinning at it? Grandma, what have we done?
Closing time, nearly, and full dark outside, and still no trace of the unicorn. Julie’s heart sank lower with each person who clattered past her down the stairs, and each time the lone guard glanced at her, then at Farrell, and then pointedly wiped his snuffly nose. Farrell commandeered her notepad and prowled the floor, ostentatiously scrutinizing the Brueghels when he felt himself being scrutinized, but studying nothing but dim corners and alcoves the rest of the time. The museum lights were flicking on and off, and the guard had actually begun to say, “Five minutes to closing,” when Farrell stopped moving, so suddenly that one foot was actually in the air. Sideways-on to Julie, so that she could not see what he saw, he slowly lowered his foot to the floor; very slowly he turned toward the stair; with the delicacy of a parent maneuvering among Legos, he navigated silently back to her. He was smiling as carefully as though he feared the noise it might make.
“Found it,” he muttered. “Way in behind the coat rack, there’s a water cooler on an open frame. It’s down under there.”
“So what are you doing down here?” Julie demanded. Farrell shushed her frantically with his face and hands. He muttered, “It’s not going anywhere, it’s too scared to move. I need you to distract the guard for a minute. Like in the movies.”
“Like in the movies.” She sized up the guard: an over-age rent-a-cop, soft and bored, interested only in getting them out of the museum, locking up and heading for dinner. “Right. I could start taking my clothes off, there’s that. Or I could tell him I’ve lost my little boy, or maybe ask him what he thinks about fifteenth-century Flemish woodcuts. What are you up to now, Joe?”
“Two minutes,” Farrell said. “At the outside. I just don’t want the guy to see me grabbing the thing up. Two minutes and gone.”
“Hey,” Julie said loudly. “Hey, it is not a thing, and you will not grab it.” She did lower her voice then, because the guard was glancing at his watch, whistling fretfully. “Joe, I don’t know if this has sunk in yet, but a unicorn, a real unicorn, has been trapped in that miserable medieval scene for five centuries,
and it is now hiding under a damn water cooler in the Bigby Museum in Avicenna, California. Does that begin to register at all?”
“Trouble,” Farrell said. “All that registers is me being in trouble again. Go talk to that man.”
Julie settled on asking with breathy shyness about the museum’s legendary third floor, always closed off to the public and rumored variously to house the secret Masonic works of Rembrandt, Goya’s blasphemous sketches of Black Masses, certain Beardsley illustrations of de Sade, or merely faded pornographic snapshots of assorted Bigby mistresses. The guard’s money was on forgeries: counterfeits donated to the city in exchange for handsome tax exemptions. “Town like this, a town full of art experts, specialists—well, you wouldn’t want anybody looking at that stuff too close. Stands to reason.”
She did not dare look to see what Farrell was doing. The guard was checking his watch again when he appeared beside her, his ancient bomber jacket already on, her coat over his arm. “On our way,” he announced cheerfully; and, to the guard, “Sorry for the delay, we’re out of here.” His free right hand rested, casually but unmoving, on the buttonless flap of his side pocket.
They did not speak on the stairs, nor immediately outside in the autumn twilight. Farrell walked fast, almost pulling her along, until they reached the van. He turned there, his face without expression for a very long moment before he took her hand and brought it to his right coat pocket. Through the cracked leather under her fingers she felt a stillness more vibrant than any struggle could have been: a waiting quiet, making her shiver with a kind of fear and a kind of wonder that she had never known and could not tell apart. She whispered, “Joe, can it—are you sure it can breathe in there?”