The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll Page B

had been his wife, I would have been enraged to know another woman was in my home, looking at my life, touching it.
    So why was I here? If I was going to be with Hugh, why didn’t I work to keep his two worlds separate and be satisfied with what I had? Because I was greedy. I wanted to know as much about him as I could. That included how he lived when I wasn’t around. By seeing his apartment, I figured, I would be less afraid of what went on there.
    I was right: walking through the rooms, I felt calmer seeing that only people lived here, no master race or gods, all impossibly better, stronger, and more heroic than I could ever hope to be.
    As a girl, I read every fairy tale and folktale I could find. A story that began, “In an ancient time, when animals spoke the speech of men and even the trees talked together…” was my chocolate pudding. More than anything, I wished my own small world contained such magic. But growing up means learning the world has little magic, animals talk only to each other, and our years go over the tops of the mountains without many marvels ever happening.
    What carried over from my childhood was the secret hope that wonders lived somewhere nearby. Dragons and pixies, Difs, Cú Chulainn, Iron Henry, and Mamadreqja, grandmother of witches…I wanted them to be and was still mesmerized by TV shows about angels, yetis, and miracles. I snatched up any copy of the National Enquirer that headlined sheep born with Elvis’s face, or sightings of the Virgin at a souvlaki stand in Oregon. On the surface I was a briefcase and a business suit, but my heart was always looking for wings.
    They were in his study waiting for me, but I wouldn’t know that until many years later. The room was large and bare except for a pine table Hugh used as a desk. It was piled with papers, books, and a computer. On the wall facing the desk were four small paintings of the same woman.
    “What do you think?”
    I was so involved in looking at them that I hadn’t heard him come in. “I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re fascinating or they scare me.”
    “Scare you? Why?” There was no amusement in his voice.
    “Who is she?”
    He put his hands on my shoulders. “I don’t know. Around the time we met, a man came into the office and asked if I wanted to buy them. He didn’t know anything about them. He’d just bought a house in Mississippi and they were in the attic with a bunch of other stuff. I didn’t even haggle about the price.”
    “Why do I feel like I know her?”
    “Me too! There’s something very familiar about her. None of them are signed or dated. I have no idea who the artist was. I spent a good deal of time researching. It makes them even more mysterious.”
    She was young—in her twenties—and wore her hair down, but not in any special fashion that gave you an idea of the time period. She was attractive but not so much so that it would stop you for a second look.
    In one picture she sat on a couch staring straight ahead. In another she was sitting in a garden looking slightly off to the right. The painter was excellent and had genuinely caught her spirit. So often I looked at paintings, even famous ones, and felt a kind of lifelessness in the work, as if beyond a certain invisible point the subject died and became a painting. Not so here.
    “Hugh, do you realize that since we met, I got beat up, saw a ghost, made out in a Gap store, and now am looking at pictures of someone I’ve never seen but know I know.”
    “It’s the story of Zitterbart. Do you know it?”
    “No.”
    “ Zitterbart means “trembling beard.” It’s a German fairy tale, but not from the Brothers Grimm. There was a king named Zitterbart who got his name from the fact that whenever he grew angry, his beard shook so much his subjects could feel its breeze in the farthest corners of his kingdom. He was ferocious and whacked off people’s heads if they so much as sneezed the wrong way. But his weak spot was his