Izzy found living on Waterhouse Street to be everything Kathy and Jilly had promised it would be.
While Crowsea itself had always been a popular home base for the city’s various artists, musicians, actors, writers and others of like persuasions, for two blocks on either side of Lee Street, Waterhouse was as pure a distillation of the same as one was likely to find west of Greenwich Village in its own heyday. Izzy quickly discovered her new neighborhood to be the perfect creative community: a regular bohemia of studios, lofts, rooming houses, apartments and practice spaces with the ground floors of the buildings offering cafes, small galleries, boutiques and music clubs. She met more kindred spirits in her first two weeks living there than she had in the whole nineteen years of her life up to that point.
“There’s a buzz in the air, day and night,” she told Rushkin a few weeks after she and Kathy got their small two-bedroom across the street from Alan’s apartment. “It’s so amazing. You can almost taste the creative energy as soon as you turn off Lee Street.”
Living on Waterhouse Street was the first time that Izzy really felt herself to be part of a community.
She’d got a taste of it living in Karizen Hall, but now she realized that what she’d experienced there wasn’t remotely the same. The main commonality shared in the dorm had been that they were all attending Butler U. Beyond school life, her fellow students’ interests and lives had branched down any number of different, and often conflicting, paths. The bohemian residents of Waterhouse Street, on the other hand, despite their strong sense of individuality, shared an unshakable belief in the worth of their various creative pursuits. They offered each other unquestioning support and that, Izzy thought, was the best part of it all. No one was made to feel as though they were wasting their time, as though their creative pursuits were frivolous trivialities that they would outgrow once they matured. It might be three o’clock in the morning, but you could invariably still find someone with whom you could share a front stoop and have a conversation that actually meant something, who would celebrate a success or raise you out of the inevitable case of the blues to which everyone involved in the arts was susceptible at one point or another. Perfect strangers offered advice, shared inspiration, and didn’t remain strangers for long.
And it wasn’t all seriousness. The residents of Waterhouse Street could party with the best of them, and there always seemed to be an open house in full swing on one block or another. Although she could appreciate their need to cut loose, Izzy wasn’t quite as uninhibited as some of her friends. Sometimes she thought a little too much drinking went on, too many psychedelics were ingested, too much hash and marijuana was smoked. She herself didn’t drink, and she was scared to death of drugs, but no one forced her to partake of one or the other, and if it sometimes seemed that everybody had slept with everybody else at some point or another, well, no one forced that upon her either.
The tolerance, the way they took care of each other, was what utterly charmed Izzy and let her forgive all the other excesses. That such strong-minded individuals could still be so open-minded to conflicting tastes and ways of life gave her hope for the world at large. If we can do it here, she would think, then someday it’ll be like this everywhere.
She loved the little apartment she shared with Kathy. Their furniture consisted of wooden orange crates and scattered pillows in place of sofas or chairs; bookcases made of salvaged brick and lumber; throw rugs, lamps and kitchen necessities bought at the Crowsea flea markets; on the walls, posters and various paintings by Izzy and their friends; in the bedrooms, mattresses on the floor; in the kitchen, a scratched and battered Formica kitchen table with mismatching chairs rescued from a curbside one night before garbage day. Izzy knew her mother would have been horrified at the way she was living, but she didn’t care. Her father would have been disgusted by the company she kept, but she didn’t care about that either.
To her, Waterhouse Street was the beau ideal to which the rest of society should aspire; and perhaps that was why, when the harsh reality of the outside world did intrude to leave its mark upon their lives, Izzy always took it as a personal betrayal.
The most awful thing’s happened,” Kathy said as she tossed her coat onto the empty seat and slid into the booth beside Izzy.
They were meeting for dinner in Perry’s Diner at the corner of Lee and Waterhouse, a favorite hangout for the neighborhood because not only was the food good, it was cheap. Izzy had been drawing the people at the bus stop outside the window while she waited for Kathy to arrive, practicing three-quarter profiles. She set her sketch pad aside at Kathy’s arrival.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you remember Rochelle—Peter’s girlfriend?”
Izzy nodded. “Sure. She’s promised to model for me when she gets some spare time. I think she has the most amazing bone structure.”
“Yeah, well, some other people weren’t quite so artistically inclined in their appreciation of her bod.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She was beaten and raped, Izzy. Three guys pulled her into a car while she waiting for the number sixteen by Butler Green. They dumped her back there early this morning—just rolled her out of the car and left her lying on the pavement.”
“Oh my god. Poor Rochelle ....”
“It just makes me sick to think that there are people like that in the world,” Kathy said. She pulled a paper napkin from its holder and methodically began to shred it.
“Have the police been able to—”
“The police! Don’t make me laugh. What they put her through ...” Kathy looked away, out the window, but not before Izzy saw the tears brimming in her roommate’s eyes. Kathy cleared her throat.
“They might as well have been in on it for all the compassion they showed her. Jilly was at the hospital when they were questioning her and she was furious, so that should tell you something.”
Izzy nodded. Jilly simply didn’t get angry—or at least not so as Izzy had ever seen. She could be passionate, but it was as though she didn’t have a temper to lose in the first place.
“What about Jilly’s friend?” Izzy asked. “That guy she knows on the police force—Leonard, or Larry something. Couldn’t he do anything?”
“Lou. He’s going to look into it for her, but he’s only a sergeant and there’s nothing he can really do about the way the other cops treated Rochelle. It was like a big joke to them. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lou told Jilly that if they ever do pick these guys up, their lawyer’s going to treat Rochelle even worse once they get into court. Jilly says Rochelle is devastated; she just wishes she’d never reported it in the first place.”
“But that’s so wrong.”
“No,” Kathy said. “It’s evil—that’s what it is.” The little heap of torn paper on the table in front of her grew as she started on another napkin. “What’s really scary is that this kind of thing’s going on all the time. I guess it doesn’t really hit home until it happens to someone you know.”
“It doesn’t always seem so real until you can put a face to the victim,” Izzy agreed.
“Pathetic, isn’t it? We’re letting these sick freaks take over the world, Izzy. Sometimes I think they’re already starting to outnumber us.” She let the last pieces of shredded napkin fall from her fingers. “Maybe Lovecraft was right.”
“Who?”
“He was this writer back in the thirties who used to write about these vast alien presences that haunt the edges of our world, trying to get back in. They exert this influence on us to make us act like shits and try to convince us to open these cosmic gates through which they can come back. The closer we get to their return, the worse the world gets.” She gave Izzy a sad look. “Sometimes I think they’re due back any day now.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Probably. But something’s gone wrong with the world, don’t you think? Every year we lose a little more ground to the bad guys. Five years ago, you didn’t have to worry about waiting for a bus at Butler Green. You could walk through most parts of the city, day or night, and not have to worry; now that’s unthinkable. We’ve loosed something evil in the world—maybe not you or me, personally, but if we don’t fight the problem, then we’re as much a part of it.”
“I don’t know if I can believe in evil existing of and by itself,” Izzy said. “It seems to be that everybody’s made up of a mix of good and bad and what sets us apart are the decisions we make as to which we’ll be.”
