red lips, hiding there by his back steps, of all places, he knew she was on the run. Knew she needed help. And while he had neither broad shoulders nor a gun, he did carry in his heart a need to see justice done. It was why the books appealed to him in the first place.
'Don't be frightened,' he said when she realized he had seen her. 'I won't hurt you.'
'I'm not frightened.'
Jean was too much the gentleman to point out that her hands were trembling so much that she had to make an effort to hold them still on her lap. Instead he asked, 'What's your name?'
'Candida.'
Jean nodded. Of course. An exotic given name— if it even was her own— and no surname. This was how the stories always started.
'Do you need some help?' he asked.
'I need a place to stay.'
Jean nodded again. He put his paper bag full of garbage into the bin beside the steps, then turned back to her. She was sitting on the steps now, back straight, hands still clasped together on her lap.
'I've got an extra bed,' he said. 'You can use it for as long as you need.'
'Really? You don't know anything about me.'
'I know you need help. Isn't that enough?'
Candida gave him a long considering look, then smiled and followed him up the steps to his apartment.
3
Needless to say, Jean had a good heart. If Candida hadn't been beautiful, or even a woman, he would still have offered his help. And it was, as I said, a more innocent time. But his mystery novels about the seamier side of life were no more real than the protagonists after which he was now modeling his actions. Private detectives were rarely larger than life, and even more rarely solved murder investigations that had left the police baffled— it was as true then as it is now. Nor were real prostitutes the unblemished beauties that could be found on the covers of those same pulp novels. Walking the streets leaves scars, as many visible as hidden.
Jean's secret passion was misled, as romantic as a fairy tale. By such token, Candida might well have been something more exotic still: A faerie, perhaps, strayed from some enchanted forest glen. Or a wounded angel, fallen from heaven. For she had wings. Hidden from ordinary sight, it's true, but she did have them. When she rose to follow him up the apartment steps, they could be seen lifting from her shoulderblades, one a majestic sweep of feathers as imagined by da Vinci, or Manet; the other broken, hanging limp.
They could be seen, if you had more than ordinary sight. Or you might see only what you expected to see, what you wished to see. Jean saw a prostitute on the run, in trouble with the law, or with her pimp; perhaps both. Standing at her kitchen window, Hannah Silverstein looked up from her sinkful of dishes to see her neighbor befriend a pretty girl in a pink sweater and a modest skirt that hung just below her knees. The stranger had thick chestnut hair failing free to her shoulders, eyes that seemed as luminous as moonlight, and Hannah was happy for Jean because she had always thought of him as such a nice, pleasant man, but too old at twenty-seven to be living on his own. Too lonely. It was time he met himself a nice girl like this and settled down.
That was what Hannah saw, but then Hannah had her own preconceptions concerning what she expected to see in the world. She once met the great god Pan at the reception following Janet Carney's wedding and thought him a quaint little man who had imbibed perhaps too much wedding cheer.
'Pan is dead,' he told her, lifting his glass to clink its rim against hers. 'Long live Pan,'
But she thought he'd said, 'What a spread— long live Jan.'
Perhaps it was his accent. Or perhaps, as many of us will, she used a similar filter to listen to him as the one through which she viewed the world.
4
Jean's own perception of his houseguest changed as he came to know Candida. That first autumn day when he returned home from work, not even expecting her to be in his apartment anymore, she had already undergone a slight alteration from the woman he remembered meeting the previous night. She was still sexy, he could still picture her gracing the cover of an issue of
'You look different,' he said.
'So do you.'
It was true. Last night he'd been wearing casual slacks and a short-sleeved polo shirt. But the difference seemed to run deeper in her— beyond a mere change in clothing.
'That's not what I meant,' he began.
He was going to go on to tell her that he was dressed for work now, while last night he hadn't been, that he had a chest of drawers and closet full of different clothes into which he could change, while she'd come into his apartment with only what she was wearing, nothing more. But then he smelled the air.
'You made dinner,' he said, unable to hide his delight. The last time he'd come home to dinner was when he was still living with his parents, years ago. He looked in the oven, his smile broadening. 'Shepherd's pie. It's my favorite.'
'I know.'
And Jean forgot the anomaly of her wardrobe, never thought to ask how she might know his favorite dinner. It was as though someone had found the room in his mind that housed his curiosity and simply turned off the light and closed the door quietly behind them as they left. The riddles remained, but his questions were gone, just like that.
5
In older, more superstitious days, it might have been said that Candida had bewitched him, for theirs was a whirlwind romance— especially at that time, in that community. They met in September, but the odd circumstances of that meeting had been forgotten. They were married in January, a quiet civil ceremony, because neither had any other family. They had their first and only child late the next September and named her Sophie.
Jean didn't read his detective novels and magazines anymore— he didn't need other stories. At night when they lay in bed, Candida would tell him hers. She had an impossible storehouse of tales tucked away behind her eyes; like Scheherazade, she had so many, she never had to repeat one. In response, Jean felt an unfamiliar stirring in his own mind, a need to communicate his love for his wife and their child, a desire to share with them dreams that were his own, instead of the fantasies he had borrowed from his books and magazines.
Once he had carried a secret life inside him, an ongoing adventure in which he was the tall man in the trenchcoat with the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes, who acted when others stood by helpless, to whom the hurt and lost were drawn that he might find them justice, to whom men looked with respect and women with desire. Now the hat and trenchcoat were put aside. Now he had a child who had offered him her unconditional love from the moment he first saw her in the hospital. Now he had a wife who was not only his partner and his lover, but also his best friend. His life was so complete that he had no need for that old secret life.
6
But there was still something unusual about Candida, even if Jean could no longer see it. Though he wasn't alone in that particular blindness, for no one did— not in their circle of friends, not in the neighborhood, though no one ever did remember her quite the same. To some she was tall, to others she was of medium height. To some she had a classical beauty, others thought her a little plain. Some, when they looked at her, marveled at how she retained an unaffected girlishness, belying her motherhood and maturity; others were reminded of their mothers, or their grandmothers.
She was a charming conversationalist, and an even better listener, but it was only to Jean that she told her stories; stories, and cryptic remarks to which Jean never gave much thought until much later.
Because he'd been bewitched, some would say.
7
'Where does she go when she sleeps?' Candida murmured one evening, leaning on the windowsill in their
