Memory and Dream

Oh boy, Izzy thought. Like you have to ask. Then she remembered how Kathy’d been teasing her the night before and felt herself starting to blush. She wondered if he’d noticed, which made the flush rising up her neck grow hotter, then realized that he was still waiting for her to answer him.

“Urn, sure,” she said. “Maybe we could have dinner tonight. Do you know Perry’s Diner? It’s also on Lee.”

“No, but I can find it.”

“Around six?”

“Sounds fine.”

Feeling a little awkward, Izzy dug out her wallet. All she had was a pair of tens, so she handed one of them over to him.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll bring you the change.”

“Sure. Whatever. Just get yourself something warm.” Izzy glanced back at the coach house and this time she saw Rushkin standing at his window, watching them. “Look,” she added. “I’ve really got to run. I’ll see you tonight —okay?”

He nodded.

“My name’s Izzy,” she said before she left. “Isabelle, actually.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” How did he know?

This time he was the one to look up at the coach house. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, his gaze dropping back down to meet hers once more. “Be careful, Isabelle.”

“What do you mean by ... ?” Izzy began, but he’d already turned away and was walking off down the lane as though he hadn’t heard her. She started to call after him, but then shook her head. She’d ask him tonight. There were a lot of things she was going to ask him tonight. She wondered how many straight answers she’d get, and then realized that she didn’t really care. The whole mystery of it was sort of fun. His resemblance to her painting, the way he just kept showing up, the way everything he said seemed so ... so ambiguous. She remembered how he’d frightened her last night, but she didn’t feel he was at all scary anymore. Odd, yes. And he still seemed a little lost. But any fear she’d felt toward him was gone.

She was humming happily to herself by the time she climbed the stairs up to the studio. Tonight was going to be fun.

XII

Who was that?” Rushkin demanded.

“Just this guy I met last night,” Izzy replied.

She took off her coat and hung it on a nail by the door, then walked over to her easel where The Spirit Is Strong was still drying. Yes. Except for the smile, he was exactly the same.

“But it’s so strange,” she went on. “He looks just like the fellow in my painting here.”

“You must not see him again.”

“What?”

Izzy had been so taken with her encounter in the lane earlier, and in subsequently comparing John to her painting, that she hadn’t really been paying much attention to Rushkin since she’d arrived. She looked up now to see him glowering at her. The fear that had been absent when she’d met John returned now, but John wasn’t the cause of it.

“I ... I’m sorry,” Izzy said. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

And as she spoke, she could hear the last thing John had said to her, the words echoing in her mind: Be careful, Isabelle.— What did he know?

The anger left Rushkin’s face, not without some obvious effort upon his part to calm down. He regarded her now with what was merely a stern expression, but Izzy was unable to relax. She stuck her hands in her pockets to keep them from trembling.

“Do you remember what I told you about angels and monsters?” he asked.

Izzy nodded slowly. “But what’s that got to do with anything?”

“It has to do with everything,” Rushkin replied. “Come, let us sit down.”

He led the way to the windowseat, where Izzy had seen him standing earlier. The bunched knots in Izzy’s neck and shoulders started to ease when she realized that they were only going to talk. She gave the lane a hopeful glance as she sat down, but John was long gone. Although Rushkin noted what she was doing, he made no comment.

“The ancient Hellenes,” he said instead, “believed in the Garden of the Muses as well.”

“The who?” Izzy said, not wanting to break in, but also wanting to make sure she knew what they were talking about. There were often times when the train of Rushkin’s conversation grew so arcane that she was left more confused after they’d talked than before they’d begun.

Rushkin didn’t take offense at the interruption. “The Greeks. They themselves never used the word

‘Greeks.’ That was a Roman invention.”

“Oh.”

“They considered themselves to be descendants of Hellen, the son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah.

When he navigated his ark and landed his passengers on the top of Mount Parnassus, he brought them to the heart of the Garden of the Muses—the home of Apollo. Now one can either take such a story at face value, or consider it a metaphor, but what can’t be denied is that the Hellenes believed that the world abounded in deities, all of whom had their place of origin in this holy garden.”

“Sort of like Eden?” Izzy tried.

Rushkin shook his head. “No one was cast out of this garden. Its inhabitants were free to come and go as they pleased between it and our world. We might call them spirits and the Hellenes believed that they touched upon every facet of our lives. Every country lane and mountain, every river and tree had its own spirit with which we might commune. Every endeavor of man had its patron spirit.”

Although her grasp of classical mythology was undoubtedly not on a par with Rushkin’s, Izzy at least didn’t feel quite so lost. Yet.

“It was through their arts,” Rushkin continued, “they could call these spirits to them. Their presence was considered a great blessing—which we can still see from the stunning display of art that the Hellenes left behind— but those spirits were also responsible for the great wars between the Greeks and the Persians and that which finally decimated their culture, when they went to war with Lacedaemonians—you might know them better as the Spartans.”

Izzy nodded in agreement. She had heard of Sparta, though she’d always been a little fuzzy on the context beyond an adjectival use to describe austere lifestyles.

“Before their downfall,” Rushkin went on, “from artists of great genius to merchants trading in commodities which only happened to be art, theirs was an era of glory; their art, the perfect marriage between inspiration and technique. We have had too few of them in the history of the human race.”

“And ... and this is another?” Izzy asked, wondering if that was what he was leading up to. Living on Waterhouse Street as she did, and from the explosion in all fields of the arts that had begun at the tail end of the sixties, she could easily believe it.

But Rushkin shook his head. “No. I waited forty years to find someone who had the potential to learn and use this gift. It might be another forty years, or even longer, before another could be found. But that will be your concern, not mine.”

“My concern.”

“When the time comes for you to pass on the knowledge I am giving you.”

Izzy wasn’t so sure she was at all interested in teaching anybody anything, but she gave a dutiful, if uncertain, nod of agreement. Rushkin fixed her with a long, considering look before he finally finished up with, “So you see why we must take such great care as to what spirits we invite into this world with our art.”

Now that, Izzy thought, seemed to come right out of left field and all she could do was shake her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t see it at all. What do the ancient Greeks or Hellenes or whatever you want to call them—what do their beliefs have to do with us?”