up to the crux of the span, where the howling of the traffic stopped being a scream and became a sigh. Arrived just there, with the afternoon barely past its daily crisis, he stopped and looked farther across at the tall buildings limned explosively with light, exultant, thinking, This is what you always will forget, this is what you never can remember, this is what you have to be here for .
It’s not the first but the fifth or sixth day of spring when Stuart finally finds Natasha. All winter he’s felt old and moribund, frozen half through, but now a new green shoot of youth begins to uncurl inside of him. It’s a fresh and tingling day, the weather so very fine that it alone would be enough to make you fall in love. Everybody in Washington Square has bloomed into their summer clothes and they all look almost beautiful. Stuart walks around the rim of the fountain, hands in his pockets, a cigarette guttering at the corner of his mouth, smiling a little as the fair breeze ruffles his hair, he’s headed straight for Natasha before he’s even seen her, and then he does: she’s tapped out there on one of the benches just at the bottom edge of the circle, head lolled back, mouth a little open, hands stretched palms up on her knees. When he gets a little closer, he can even see her eyes darting under the closed lids, looking at the things she’s dreaming of. Man, she’s way too thin, she’s got bad-looking tracks, infected, and it’s a fifty-fifty chance she’s dying, but Stuart won’t think about any of that right now, just keeps on walking, up into the moment he’s believed in for so long.
For Wyn Cooper
DRAGON’S SEED
M ACKIE L OUDON LIVED ALONE in a small house made of iron and stone on a short street west of Twenty-first Avenue. She had lived there, alone, for a long time. Old ivy grew in a carpet across her front steps and in her yard the grass was tall, with volunteer shoots of privet standing in it. The street was old enough to have a few big trees and the houses were raised on a high embankment above the sidewalk. It was quiet down the whole length of her block, almost always very, very quiet.
Indoors, it seemed that inertia ruled, though maybe that was just a first impression. The front room had once been a parlor, but now, scattered among the original furnishings were all of Mackie Loudon’s sculpture tools. There were pole lamps, a rocker, a couple of armchairs, some fragile little end tables, also hammers and chisels and files and other devices, and a variety of sculptures in wood and stone. In former times people had come from the North to take the sculptures away and sell them, but it was a long time since their visits had stopped. She did not remember the reason or care about it, since she was not in want.
The things she didn’t need to use stayed put exactly where they were. In the kitchen, on the gas stove, an iron skillet sat with browning shreds of egg still plastered to it, a relic of the very last time Mackie Loudon had bothered to make herself a hot meal. Asians had moved to a storefront within walking distance of her house, to open a store and cafeteria, and she went there to provender herself with things she never knew the names of. She bought salt plums, and packets of tiny dried fish whose eyes were bigger than their heads, and crocks of buried vegetables plugged with mud. She dumped the empty containers in the sink, and when it filled she bagged them up and carried the bag down a rickety outside staircase to a place in the alley from where it would eventually disappear. There was one pot that she used for coffee and that was all. On the window sill above the sink was an old teacup, its inside covered with a filigree of tiny tannin-colored cracks. Each morning, if the day was fair, a bar of sunlight would find a painted rose on its upper rim, warm it a moment, then pass on.
She wore flowered cotton dresses, knee length with no shape, and in winter a man’s tweed overcoat. With the
It’s not the first but the fifth or sixth day of spring when Stuart finally finds Natasha. All winter he’s felt old and moribund, frozen half through, but now a new green shoot of youth begins to uncurl inside of him. It’s a fresh and tingling day, the weather so very fine that it alone would be enough to make you fall in love. Everybody in Washington Square has bloomed into their summer clothes and they all look almost beautiful. Stuart walks around the rim of the fountain, hands in his pockets, a cigarette guttering at the corner of his mouth, smiling a little as the fair breeze ruffles his hair, he’s headed straight for Natasha before he’s even seen her, and then he does: she’s tapped out there on one of the benches just at the bottom edge of the circle, head lolled back, mouth a little open, hands stretched palms up on her knees. When he gets a little closer, he can even see her eyes darting under the closed lids, looking at the things she’s dreaming of. Man, she’s way too thin, she’s got bad-looking tracks, infected, and it’s a fifty-fifty chance she’s dying, but Stuart won’t think about any of that right now, just keeps on walking, up into the moment he’s believed in for so long.
For Wyn Cooper
DRAGON’S SEED
M ACKIE L OUDON LIVED ALONE in a small house made of iron and stone on a short street west of Twenty-first Avenue. She had lived there, alone, for a long time. Old ivy grew in a carpet across her front steps and in her yard the grass was tall, with volunteer shoots of privet standing in it. The street was old enough to have a few big trees and the houses were raised on a high embankment above the sidewalk. It was quiet down the whole length of her block, almost always very, very quiet.
Indoors, it seemed that inertia ruled, though maybe that was just a first impression. The front room had once been a parlor, but now, scattered among the original furnishings were all of Mackie Loudon’s sculpture tools. There were pole lamps, a rocker, a couple of armchairs, some fragile little end tables, also hammers and chisels and files and other devices, and a variety of sculptures in wood and stone. In former times people had come from the North to take the sculptures away and sell them, but it was a long time since their visits had stopped. She did not remember the reason or care about it, since she was not in want.
The things she didn’t need to use stayed put exactly where they were. In the kitchen, on the gas stove, an iron skillet sat with browning shreds of egg still plastered to it, a relic of the very last time Mackie Loudon had bothered to make herself a hot meal. Asians had moved to a storefront within walking distance of her house, to open a store and cafeteria, and she went there to provender herself with things she never knew the names of. She bought salt plums, and packets of tiny dried fish whose eyes were bigger than their heads, and crocks of buried vegetables plugged with mud. She dumped the empty containers in the sink, and when it filled she bagged them up and carried the bag down a rickety outside staircase to a place in the alley from where it would eventually disappear. There was one pot that she used for coffee and that was all. On the window sill above the sink was an old teacup, its inside covered with a filigree of tiny tannin-colored cracks. Each morning, if the day was fair, a bar of sunlight would find a painted rose on its upper rim, warm it a moment, then pass on.
She wore flowered cotton dresses, knee length with no shape, and in winter a man’s tweed overcoat. With the
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