bedroom, looking out at the moon where it hung above the brownstones of Upper Foxville. 'Does she go into another world? Or does she only dream?'
She often watched the moon, noting its phases, her eyes not so much reflecting the light as absorbing it. But that night Jean wasn't looking at her. He sat on the bed, giving Sophie her bottle, and thought Candida spoke of the baby.
'If she's dreaming,' he said, 'I hope they're sweet dreams.'
'Oh yes,' Candida said, still looking at the moon. 'We can only hope they're so sweet as mine.'
8
Another time she told him, 'If I should ever go, it won't be for lack of loving you— not you, not Sophie. It will be because I am called away. It will be because I will have no choice.'
Jean thought she spoke of her death. He didn't like to consider death, little say speak of it. He held her closer to him.
'Don't even think about it,' he told her.
He felt her sigh. 'Sometimes I can think of nothing else.'
9
One time Jean asked her how she knew so many stories, and she replied that they came from her dreams.
'We have to believe in our dreams,' she said, 'because without them we are nothing. Dreams are how we make sense of the world, but they're also how we remember it. When your dreams are real— if only to you— when you believe in them and make them a part of the story that is your life, then anything is possible. You can go anywhere, be anyone, mend any hurt— even a broken wing.'
'A broken wing?' Jean replied, puzzled.
'We fly in our dreams. But if we break a wing, we have to work that much harder to keep them real, or they fade away.' She gave him a sad smile. 'But the trouble is, sometimes we heal ourselves so well that we go away all the same.'
Jean shook his head. 'You're not making sense tonight.'
'Just promise me you'll believe in your dreams. That you'll teach Sophie to believe in hers.'
'But—'
'Promise me.'
For a moment Jean felt as though he didn't know the woman lying in bed beside him. A sliver of moonlight came in through the window, casting strange shadows across Candida's face, reshaping the familiar planes and contours into those of a stranger.
'It's important, Jean. I need to be able to remember this.'
'I... promise,' he said slowly.
She moved out of the moonlight and the familiar features all fell back into place. The smile that touched her lips was warm and loving.
'When we look back on these days,' she said, 'we'll remember them as mythic times.'
'What do you mean?'
'It's as though we stand in the dark of the moon and anything is possible. We're hidden from the sun's light, from anything that might try to remind us that we only borrow these lives we live, we don't own them.'
'If we don't own our lives,' Jean asked, 'then who does?'
'The people we might become if we stop believing in our dreams.'
10
Years later, Jean had trouble remembering all the stories Candida had told him. When he tried to tell them to Sophie, he got them mixed up, transposing this beginning to that ending, the characters of this story into that one, until finally he gave up and read her stories out of books the way other parents did. But he never forgot to remind her to believe in her dreams.
11
Candida went to the store to get some milk one evening, almost three years to the day that they had first met on the back steps of the brownstone, and she never came back, leaving Jean's life as mysteriously as she'd first come into it. He remembered looking at her as she turned back from the doorway to ask if there was anything else she should pick up, and being astounded at the vision he beheld. For one long glorious moment he imagined he saw her bathed in a nimbus of radiant light that shone from her every pore, gold as honey, bright as flames. Wings rose up behind her, huge magnificent feathered wings, each with a span twice her height.
The vision held, one moment, another, and then it was gone, and it was Candida standing there in the doorway, the Candida he'd married and who was the mother of their child. But it was that vision of her that he remembered— as an angel, a faerie, a shaft of moonlight, a gift of wonder that had strayed into his world from some nevernever, drawn by his need, or perhaps her own, to weave the strands of her dreams with his, his with hers. Their time together was too short, far too short, but at least they had had that time together. That was what he reminded himself whenever despair threatened to overwhelm him. The memories... and Sophie... were all that enabled him to carry on.
He remembered Candida as others remember the myths of their ancestors, and he taught their daughter to believe in her dreams. Because in time he came to understand what Candida had meant when she told him that stories begin in dreams and without the stories that we dream, we live someone else's life rather than our own. It wasn't something he realized all at once; instead, he happened upon the fragments of the puzzle, one piece at a time, finding them in the spaces that lay between his memories and his dreams, until one day, when he was sitting alone on the back steps of his apartment building after having put Sophie to bed, the puzzle pieces all came together and he understood.
He smiled then, one of his rare smiles, as sad as it was sweet, but no one was there to see. There were only the stories, the tangled skein of the city's stories, waiting to be shaped by our dreams.
The Pochade Box
The essential thing in art cannot be explained.
1
— What's it like when you're dead?
— You Still dream.
2
One grey September day, Jilly Coppercorn decided to try to break herself of a bad habit she'd managed to acquire over the years. She'd been working on increasingly larger canvases, which was fine, she had no problem with that, but in the process she'd let herself get so finicky that the clarity of her work was getting bogged down with unnecessary detail. She stood back to look at the bewildering complexity of her latest work-in-progress and realized that, despite the near-perfect rendering of the individual sections, the painting as a whole made no sense whatsoever.
What was the point in developing an ideal composition, she thought, when the detailing eventually came to overwhelm the main point of interest to such an extent that it was subservient to all the fussy specifics around it? The viewer's eye, it was plain, could only become confused as it traveled about the canvas trying to find a point of reference amidst the barrage of detail. All she was going to succeed in doing with work such as this was make the viewer look away and walk over to the next piece hanging on the gallery wall, for relief.
So that day she stopped working in the studio, where the temptation to use big canvases would remain a constant niggle in the back of her head. Instead she took to painting on the street, using her pochade box as a studio. It held everything she needed: six tubes of paint for her limited palette, rag, tissues, a turp can, and a couple of brushes with the handles cut down so that they'd fit into the box. Out on the street, she could hold the
