hello like guests at a party, a few of them introducing their real-life counterparts to me. When I woke the structure of my novel was as clear to me as if I had been given a map.
So I’m not sure what I believe in anymore.
—
Cal and Tina believed in everything. Fairies, elves, spirits of earth air water fire; Tibetan gods, Minoan sea goddesses, totemic animals, reincarnation, Iroquois spirits. Their names for each other were Fox and Wolf; when they were married, nineteen years before, it was a marriage by capture, with Tina and her attendants dressed as sprites and Cal and his men like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Their house was a renovated barn filled with masks they’d made, columns and porticos and temples from sets Cal had built, Tina’s galaxies of scarves and capes and hats, posters from Grateful Dead shows they’d attended over the course of decades. Cal’s canvases covered the walls, and the gorgeous leather bags they made and sold, with Tina’s elaborate beadwork and braiding and Cal’s painting and leatherwork. There were papier-maché skeletons everywhere, crowned with paper roses; animal skulls on ribboned standards; grinning Day of the Dead figures holding chalices and hash pipes between bony fingers. The cats prowled among them, and slept beneath daturas drooping with waxy white blossoms, or alongside the marijuana plants growing in plastic pots by the big picture window, or in the tiny head-crunching loft above Cal and Tina’s bed.
That was where I slept. After the first two weeks there was a small group of us who took turns staying over, two or even three at a time, so we could spell each other during the night. I was usually there for two nights a week; Robert took care of the children.
Cal and Tina’s friend Loki often stayed over with me. Loki was unusually quiet, for a friend of theirs; wore chinos and polo shirts or, sometimes, a very old faded Star Wars T-shirt. He lived forty-five minutes away, in Rockland, where he worked as a paralegal. A few mornings a week before work he would drive over and take their laundry home with him, wash and dry it, and then return it that evening, sometimes staying overnight. I knew Loki from the elaborate solstice and equinoctial rituals Cal and Tina had staged over the years, where Loki wore an otter’s mask he had made, and his usual beige pants and topsiders.
When Loki and I stayed over we didn’t talk much. He was strong and serious but occasionally laughed unexpectedly; he was very fond of the cats. I wasn’t as useful as I wanted to be. I wasn’t a masseuse, like Luna, or strong, like Loki, although I had a strong stomach. I showed Loki how to give Cal morphine injections, after the hospice nurse taught me; then how to administer the morphine IV, morphine suppositories, morphine spikes, morphine pump.
“You know, I could get you a job down on Fifty-Second Street,” another friend, Jerry, remarked one day. We laughed: Jerry and his wife, Pansy, laughed a lot. They stayed over together, and in the morning when I arrived they’d report on the previous night and show me the yellow legal pad where we kept track of Cal’s injections, meds, liquid intake.
“Tina still hasn’t slept,” Pansy whispered hoarsely. She ran a greenhouse in Verona and looked like a flower herself, slender with huge violet-circled eyes, fine silvery hair, voice husky from sleeplessness and pot smoke . “See if you can get her to sleep.”
“We can’t,” said Jerry. He was a boatbuilder who’d helped make the pagan standards that he and Pansy had put out on the porch, to billow in the winter wind. “She’s getting kinda crazed.”
“The nurse says if she doesn’t sleep she’ll have no strength left for when he goes.” Pansy’s eyes were bloodshot; she fingered a little leather bag around her neck, an amulet made by Cal with loons painted on it. “See if you can get her to sleep.”
For five weeks that was my job: getting Cal and Tina to sleep. The
So I’m not sure what I believe in anymore.
—
Cal and Tina believed in everything. Fairies, elves, spirits of earth air water fire; Tibetan gods, Minoan sea goddesses, totemic animals, reincarnation, Iroquois spirits. Their names for each other were Fox and Wolf; when they were married, nineteen years before, it was a marriage by capture, with Tina and her attendants dressed as sprites and Cal and his men like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Their house was a renovated barn filled with masks they’d made, columns and porticos and temples from sets Cal had built, Tina’s galaxies of scarves and capes and hats, posters from Grateful Dead shows they’d attended over the course of decades. Cal’s canvases covered the walls, and the gorgeous leather bags they made and sold, with Tina’s elaborate beadwork and braiding and Cal’s painting and leatherwork. There were papier-maché skeletons everywhere, crowned with paper roses; animal skulls on ribboned standards; grinning Day of the Dead figures holding chalices and hash pipes between bony fingers. The cats prowled among them, and slept beneath daturas drooping with waxy white blossoms, or alongside the marijuana plants growing in plastic pots by the big picture window, or in the tiny head-crunching loft above Cal and Tina’s bed.
That was where I slept. After the first two weeks there was a small group of us who took turns staying over, two or even three at a time, so we could spell each other during the night. I was usually there for two nights a week; Robert took care of the children.
Cal and Tina’s friend Loki often stayed over with me. Loki was unusually quiet, for a friend of theirs; wore chinos and polo shirts or, sometimes, a very old faded Star Wars T-shirt. He lived forty-five minutes away, in Rockland, where he worked as a paralegal. A few mornings a week before work he would drive over and take their laundry home with him, wash and dry it, and then return it that evening, sometimes staying overnight. I knew Loki from the elaborate solstice and equinoctial rituals Cal and Tina had staged over the years, where Loki wore an otter’s mask he had made, and his usual beige pants and topsiders.
When Loki and I stayed over we didn’t talk much. He was strong and serious but occasionally laughed unexpectedly; he was very fond of the cats. I wasn’t as useful as I wanted to be. I wasn’t a masseuse, like Luna, or strong, like Loki, although I had a strong stomach. I showed Loki how to give Cal morphine injections, after the hospice nurse taught me; then how to administer the morphine IV, morphine suppositories, morphine spikes, morphine pump.
“You know, I could get you a job down on Fifty-Second Street,” another friend, Jerry, remarked one day. We laughed: Jerry and his wife, Pansy, laughed a lot. They stayed over together, and in the morning when I arrived they’d report on the previous night and show me the yellow legal pad where we kept track of Cal’s injections, meds, liquid intake.
“Tina still hasn’t slept,” Pansy whispered hoarsely. She ran a greenhouse in Verona and looked like a flower herself, slender with huge violet-circled eyes, fine silvery hair, voice husky from sleeplessness and pot smoke . “See if you can get her to sleep.”
“We can’t,” said Jerry. He was a boatbuilder who’d helped make the pagan standards that he and Pansy had put out on the porch, to billow in the winter wind. “She’s getting kinda crazed.”
“The nurse says if she doesn’t sleep she’ll have no strength left for when he goes.” Pansy’s eyes were bloodshot; she fingered a little leather bag around her neck, an amulet made by Cal with loons painted on it. “See if you can get her to sleep.”
For five weeks that was my job: getting Cal and Tina to sleep. The
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