"You didn"t want me to know," Farrell said. "You really didn"t want me to know. Tanikawa, I"m ashamed of you. I am."
Julie started to answer him, then nodded toward the entranced young cook. Farrell said, "Gracie, about the curried peas. Tell Suzanne absolutely not to add the mango pickle until just before the peas are done, she always puts it in too early. If she"s busy, you do it-go, go." Gracie, enchanted even more by the notion of getting her hands into actual food, fled, and Farrell turned back to face Julie. "Eight months. I"ve known you to take longer over a lithograph."
"He"s a very nice man," she answered him. "No, d.a.m.n it, that sounds terrible, insulting. But he is."
Farrell nodded. "I believe it. You always did have this deadly weakness for nice men. I was an aberration."
"No, you"re my friend," Julie said. "You"re my friend, and I"m sorry, I should have told you I was getting married." A waiter"s loaded tray caught her between the shoulderblades just as a busboy stepped on her foot, and she was properly furious this time. "I didn"t tell you because I knew you"d do exactly what you"re doing now, which is look at me like that and imply that you know me better than anyone else ever possibly could, which is not true, Farrell. There are all kinds of people you don"t even know who know things about me you"ll never know, so just knock it off." She ran out of breath and anger more or less simultaneously. She said, "But somehow you"ve gotten to be my oldest friend, just by G.o.dd.a.m.n attrition. I missed you, Joe."
Farrell put his arms around her again. "I missed you. I worried about you. A whole lot. The rest can wait." There came a crash and a mad bellow from the steamy depths of the kitchen, and Farrell said, "Your dork"s probably missing you too. That was the Table Fourteen dessert, sure as h.e.l.l. Where can I call you? Are you actually back in Avicenna?"
"For now. It"s always for now in this town." She wrote the address and telephone number on the back of the Tonight"s Specials menu, kissed him hurriedly and left the kitchen. Behind her she heard another bellow, and then Farrell"s grimly placid voice saying, "Stay cool, stay cool, big Luis, it"s not the end of the world. Change your ap.r.o.n, we"ll just add some more brandy. All is well."
It took more time than they were used to, even after more than twenty years of picking up, letting go and picking up again. The period of edginess and uncertainty about what questions to ask, what to leave alone, what might or might not be safe to a.s.sume, lasted until the autumn afternoon they went to the museum. It was Farrell"s day off, and he drove Madame Schumann-Heink, his prehistoric Volkswagen van, over the hill from the bald suburb where he was condo-sitting for a friend and parked under a sycamore across from Julie"s studio apartment. The building was a converted Victorian, miraculously spared from becoming a nest of suites for accountants and attorneys and allowed to decay in a decently tropical fashion, held together by jasmine and wisteria. He said to Julie, "You find trees, every time, shady places with big old trees. I"ve never figured how you manage it."
"Old houses," she said. "I always need work s.p.a.ce and a lot of light, and only the old houses have it. It"s a trade-off-plumbing for elbow room. Wait till I feed NMC." NMC was an undistinguished black and white cat who slept with six new kittens in a box underneath the tiny sink set into a curtained alcove. ("She likes to keep an eye on the refrigerator," Julie explained. "Just in case it tries to make a break for freedom.") She had shown up pregnant, climbing the stairs to scratch only at Julie"s door, and sauntering in with an air of being specifically expected. The initials of her name stood for Not My Cat. Julie opened a can, set it down beside the box, checked to make sure that each kitten was securely attached to a nipple, briefly fondled a softly thrumming throat and told her, "The litter tray is two feet to your left. As if you care."
At the curb, gazing for a long time at Madame Schumann-Heink, she said, "This thing has become absolutely transparent, Joe, you know that. I can see the Bay right through it."
"Wait till you see her by moonlight," Farrell said. "Gossamer and cobwebs.
The Taj Mahal of rust. Tell me again where the Bigby Museum is."
"North. East. In the hills. It"s hard to explain. Take the freeway, I"ll tell you where to turn off."
The Bigby City Museum had been, until fairly recently, Avicenna"s nearest approach to a Roman villa. Together with its long, narrow reflecting pool and its ornamental gardens, it occupied an entire truncated hilltop from which, morning and evening, its masters-copper-mining kinglets-had seen the Golden Gate Bridge rising through the Bay mist like a Chinese dragon"s writhing back. With the death of the last primordial Bigby, the lone heir had quietly sold the mansion to the city, set up its contents (primarily lesser works of the lesser Impressionists, a scattering of the Spanish masters, and the entire oeuvre of a Bigby who painted train stations) as a joint trust, and sailed away to a tax haven in the Lesser Antilles. Julie said there were a few early Brueghel oils and drawings worth the visit. "He was doing Bosch then-maybe forgeries, maybe not-and mostly you can"t tell them apart. But with these you start seeing the real Brueghel, sort of in spite of himself. There"s a good little Raphael too, but you"ll hate it. An Annunciation, with putti."
"I"ll hate it," Farrell said. He eased Madame Schumann-Heink over into the right-hand lane, greatly irritating a BMW, who honked at him all the way to the freeway. "Practically as much as I hate old whoever, the guy you married."
"Brian." Julie punched his shoulder hard. "His name is Brian, and he"s a lovely, wonderful man, and I really do love him. We just shouldn"t have gotten married. We both agreed on that."
"A d.a.m.n Brian," Farrell said. He put his head out of the window and yelled back at the BMW, "She went and married a Brian, I ask you!" The BMW driver gave him the finger. Farrell said, "The worst thing is, I"d probably like him, I"ve got a bad feeling about that. Let"s talk about something else. Why"d you marry him?"
Julie sighed. "Maybe because he was as far away from you as I could get. He"s sane, he"s stable, he"s-okay, he"s ambitious, nothing wrong with that-"
Farrell"s immediate indignation surprised him as much as it did Julie. "Hey, I"m sane. All things considered. Weird is not wacko, there"s a fine but definite line. And I"m stable as a d.a.m.n lighthouse, or we"d never have stayed friends this long. Ambitious-okay, no, never, not really. Still cooking here and there, still playing a bit of obsolete music on obsolete instruments after hours. Same way you"re still drawing cross sections of lungs and livers for medical students. What does old ambitious Brian do?"
"He"s a lawyer." Julie heard herself mumbling, saw the corner of Farrell"s mouth twitch, and promptly flared up again. "And I don"t want to hear one b.l.o.o.d.y word out of you, Farrell! He"s not a hired gun for corporations, he doesn"t defend celebrity gangsters. He works for non-profits, environmental groups, refugees, gay rights-he takes on so many pro bono cases, half the time he can"t pay his office rent. He"s a better person than you"ll ever be, Farrell. Or me either. That"s the d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n trouble." Her eyes were aching heavily, and she looked away from him.
Farrell put his hand gently on the back of her neck. He said, "I"m sorry, Jewel." Neither of them spoke after that until they were grinding slowly up a narrow street lined with old sycamore and walnut trees and high, furry old houses drowsing in the late-summer sun. Julie said, "I do a little word-processing, temp stuff," and then, in the same flat voice, "You never married anybody."
"Too old," Farrell said. "I used to be too young, or somebody was, I remember that. Now it"s plain too late-I"m me, finally, all the way down, and easy enough with it, but I d.a.m.n sure wouldn"t marry me." He braked to keep from running over two cackling adolescents on skateboards, then resumed the lumbering climb, dropping Madame Schumann-Heink into second gear, which was one of her good ones. Looking sideways, he said, "One thing anyway, you"re still the prettiest Eskimo anybody ever saw."
"Get out of here," she answered him scornfully. "You never saw an Eskimo that wasn"t in some National Geographic special." Now she looked back at him, fighting a smile, and he touched her neck again, very lightly. "Well, I"m getting like that myself," she said. "Too old and too cranky to suit anybody but me. Turn right at the light, Joe."
The Bigby City Museum came upon them suddenly, filling the windshield just after the last sharp curve, as they rolled slightly downward into a graveled parking lot which had once been an herb garden. Farrell parked facing the Bay, and the two of them got out and stood silently on either side of Madame Schumann-Heink, staring away at the water glittering in the western sun. Then they turned, each with an odd, unspoken near-reluctance, to face the Museum. It would have been a beautiful building, Julie thought, in another town. It was three stories high, cream white, with a flat tile roof the color of red wine. Shadowed on three sides by cypress trees, camellia bushes softening the rect.i.tude of the corners, a dancing-dolphin fountain chuckling in the sunny courtyard, and the white and peach rose gardens sloping away from the reflecting pool, it was a beautiful house, but one that belonged in Santa Barbara, Santa Monica or Malibu, worlds and wars, generations and elections removed from silly, vain, vainly perverse Avicenna. Farrell finally sighed and said, "Power to the people, hey," and Julie said, "A bas les aristos," and they went inside. The ticketseller and the guest book were on the first floor, the Brueghels on the second. Julie and Farrell walked up a flowing mahogany stairway hung with watercolors from the Southwestern period of the train-station Bigby. On the landing Farrell looked around judiciously and announced, "Fine command of plastic values, I"ll say that," to which Julie responded, "Oh, no question, but those spatio-temporal vortices, I don"t know." They laughed together, joined hands and climbed the rest of the way.
There were ten or twelve other people upstairs in the huge main gallery. Most were younger than Farrell and Julie, with the distinct air of art students on a.s.signment, their eyes flicking nervously from the Brueghels to their fellows to see whether anyone else had caught the trick, fathomed the koan, winkled out the grade points that must surely be hiding somewhere within those depictions of demon priests and creatures out of anchorite nightmares. When Julie took a small pad out of her purse, sat down on a couch and began copying certain corners and aspects of the paintings, the students were eddying silently toward her within minutes, just in case she knew. Farrell winked at her and wandered off toward a wall of train stations. Julie never looked up.
More quickly than she expected, he was back, leaning over her shoulder, his low voice in her hair. "Jewel. Something you ought to see. Right around the corner."
The corner was actually a temporary wall, just wide and high enough to hold three tapestries whose placard described them as "...mid-fifteenth century, artist unknown, probably from Bruges." The highest tapestry, done in the terrifyingly detailed millefleurs style, showed several women in a rich garden being serenaded by a lute-player, and Julie at first thought that Farrell-a lutanist himself-must have meant her to look at this one. Then she saw the one below.
It was in worse shape than the upper tapestry, badly frayed all around the edges and darkly stained in a kind of rosette close to the center, which showed a knight presenting a unicorn to his simpering lady. The unicorn was small and bluish-white, with the cloven hooves, long neck and slender quarters of a deer The knight was leading it on a silvery cord, and his squire behind him was prodding the unicorn forward with a short stabbing lance. There was a soapbubble castle in the background, floating up out of a stylized broccoli forest. Julie heard herself say in a child"s voice, "I don"t like this."
"I"ve seen better," Farrell agreed. "Wouldn"t have picked it as Bruges work myself." The lance was p.r.i.c.king the unicorn hard enough that the flesh dimpled around the point, and the unicorn"s one visible eye, purple-black, was rolled back toward the squire in fear or anger. The knight"s lady held a wreath of scarlet flowers in her extended right hand. Whether it was meant for the knight or the unicorn Julie could not tell.
"I wish you hadn"t shown me this," she said. She turned and returned to the Brueghels, trying to recapture her focus on the sliver of canvas, the precise brushstroke, where the young painter could be seen to step away from his master. But time after time she was drawn back, moving blindly through the growing crowd to stare one more time at the shabby old imagining of beauty and theft before she took up her sketchpad again. At last she gave up any notion of work, and simply stood still before the tapestry, waiting patiently to grow numb to the unicorn"s endless woven pain. The lady looked directly out at her, the faded smirk saying clearly, "Five hundred years. Five hundred years, and it is still going on, this very minute, all to the greater glory of G.o.d and courtly love."
"That"s what you think," Julie said aloud. She lifted her right hand and moved it slowly across the tapestry, barely brushing the protective gla.s.s. As she did so, she spoke several words in a language that might have been j.a.panese, and was not. With the last syllable came a curious m.u.f.fled jolt, like an underwater explosion, that thudded distantly through her body, making her step back and stagger against Farrell. He gripped her shoulders, saying, "Jewel, what the h.e.l.l are you up to? What did you just do right then?"
"I don"t know what you"re talking about," she said, and for that moment it was true. She was oddly dizzy, and she could feel a headache coiling in her temples. "I didn"t do anything, what could I do? What do you think I was doing, Joe?"
Farrell turned her to face him, his hands light on her shoulders now, but his dark-blue eyes holding her with an intensity she had rarely seen in all the years they had known each other. He said, "I remember you telling me about your grandmother"s j.a.panese magic. I remember a night really long ago, and a G.o.ddess who came when you called her. It all makes me the tiniest bit uneasy."
The strange soft shock did not come again; the art students and the tourists went on drifting as drowsily as aquarium fish among the Brueghels; the figures in the tapestry remained exactly where they had posed for five centuries. Julie said, "I haven"t done a d.a.m.n thing." Farrell"s eyes did not leave her face. "Not anything that made any difference, anyway," she said. She turned away and walked quickly across the gallery to examine a very minor Zurbaran too closely.
In time the notepad came back out of her purse, and she again began to copy those sc.r.a.ps and splinters of the Brueghels that held lessons or uses for her. She did not return to the unicorn tapestry. More time pa.s.sed than she had meant to spend in the museum, and when Farrell appeared beside her she was startled at the stained pallor of the sky outside the high windows. He said, "You better come take a look. That was one h.e.l.l of a grandmother you had."
She asked no questions when he took hold of her arm and led her-she could feel the effort it cost him not to drag her-back to the wall of tapestries. She stared at the upper one for a long moment before she permitted herself to understand.
The unicorn was gone. The knight and his squire remained in their places, silver cord hauling nothing forward, lance jabbing cruelly into helpless nothing. The lady went on smiling milkily, offering her flowers to nothingness. There was no change in any of their faces, no indication that the absence of the reason for their existence had been noticed at all. Julie stared and stared and said nothing.
"Let you out of my sight for five minutes," Farrell said. He was not looking at her, but scanning the floor in every direction. "All right, main thing"s to keep him from getting stepped on. Check the corners-you do that side, I"ll do all this side." But he was shaking his head even before he finished. "No, the stairs, you hit the stairs. If he gets down those stairs, that"s it, we"ve lost him. Jewel, go!" He had not raised his voice at all, but the last words cracked like pine sap in fire.
Julie gave one last glance at the tapestry, hoping that the unicorn would prove not to be lost after all, but only somehow absurdly overlooked. But not so much as a dangling thread suggested that there had ever been any other figure in the frame. She said vaguely, "I didn"t think it would work, it was just to be doing something," and sprang for the stairway.
By now the art students had been mostly replaced by nuzzling couples and edgy family groups. Some of them grumbled as Julie pushed down past them without a word of apology; a few others turned to gape when she took up a position on the landing, midway between a lost-contact-lens stoop and a catcher"s crouch, looking from side to side for some miniature scurry, something like a flittering dust-kitten with a tiny blink at its brow...But will it be flesh, or only dyed yarn? And will it grow to full size, now it"s out of the frame? Does it know, does it know it"s free, or is it hiding in my shadow, in a thousand times more danger than when there was a rope around its neck and a virgin grinning at it? Grandma, what have we done?
Closing time, nearly, and full dark outside, and still no trace of the unicorn. Julie"s heart sank lower with each person who clattered past her down the stairs, and each time the lone guard glanced at her, then at Farrell, and then pointedly wiped his snuffly nose. Farrell commandeered her notepad and prowled the floor, ostentatiously scrutinizing the Brueghels when he felt himself being scrutinized, but studying nothing but dim corners and alcoves the rest of the time. The museum lights were flicking on and off, and the guard had actually begun to say, "Five minutes to closing," when Farrell stopped moving, so suddenly that one foot was actually in the air. Sideways-on to Julie, so that she could not see what he saw, he slowly lowered his foot to the floor; very slowly he turned toward the stair; with the delicacy of a parent maneuvering among Legos, he navigated silently back to her. He was smiling as carefully as though he feared the noise it might make.
"Found it," he muttered. "Way in behind the coat rack, there"s a water cooler on an open frame. It"s down under there."
"So what are you doing down here?" Julie demanded. Farrell shushed her frantically with his face and hands. He muttered, "It"s not going anywhere, it"s too scared to move. I need you to distract the guard for a minute. Like in the movies."
"Like in the movies." She sized up the guard: an over-age rent-a-cop, soft and bored, interested only in getting them out of the museum, locking up and heading for dinner. "Right. I could start taking my clothes off, there"s that. Or I could tell him I"ve lost my little boy, or maybe ask him what he thinks about fifteenth-century Flemish woodcuts. What are you up to now, Joe?"
"Two minutes," Farrell said. "At the outside. I just don"t want the guy to see me grabbing the thing up. Two minutes and gone."
"Hey," Julie said loudly. "Hey, it is not a thing, and you will not grab it." She did lower her voice then, because the guard was glancing at his watch, whistling fretfully. "Joe, I don"t know if this has sunk in yet, but a unicorn, a real unicorn, has been trapped in that miserable medieval scene for five centuries, and it is now hiding under a d.a.m.n water cooler in the Bigby Museum in Avicenna, California. Does that begin to register at all?"
"Trouble," Farrell said. "All that registers is me being in trouble again. Go talk to that man."
Julie settled on asking with breathy shyness about the museum"s legendary third floor, always closed off to the public and rumored variously to house the secret Masonic works of Rembrandt, Goya"s blasphemous sketches of Black Ma.s.ses, certain Beardsley ill.u.s.trations of de Sade, or merely faded p.o.r.nographic snapshots of a.s.sorted Bigby mistresses. The guard"s money was on forgeries: counterfeits donated to the city in exchange for handsome tax exemptions. "Town like this, a town full of art experts, specialists-well, you wouldn"t want anybody looking at that stuff too close. Stands to reason."
She did not dare look to see what Farrell was doing. The guard was checking his watch again when he appeared beside her, his ancient bomber jacket already on, her coat over his arm. "On our way," he announced cheerfully; and, to the guard, "Sorry for the delay, we"re out of here." His free right hand rested, casually but unmoving, on the b.u.t.tonless flap of his side pocket.
They did not speak on the stairs, nor immediately outside in the autumn twilight. Farrell walked fast, almost pulling her along, until they reached the van. He turned there, his face without expression for a very long moment before he took her hand and brought it to his right coat pocket. Through the cracked leather under her fingers she felt a stillness more vibrant than any struggle could have been: a waiting quiet, making her shiver with a kind of fear and a kind of wonder that she had never known and could not tell apart. She whispered, "Joe, can it-are you sure it can breathe in there?"
"Could it breathe in that d.a.m.n tapestry?" Farrell"s voice was rough and tense, but he touched Julie"s hand gently. "It"s all right, Jewel. It stood there and looked at me, and sort of watched me picking it up. Let"s get on back to your place and figure out what we do now."
Julie sat close to him on the way home, her hand firmly on his coat-pocket flap. She could feel the startlingly intense heat of the unicorn against her palm as completely as though there were nothing between them; she could feel the equally astonishing sharpness of the minute horn, and the steady twitch of the five-century-old heart. As intensely as she could, she sent the thought down her arm and through her fingers: we"re going to help you, we"re your friends, we know you, don"t be afraid. Whenever the van hit a b.u.mp or a pothole, she quickly pressed her hand under Farrell"s pocket to cushion the legend inside.
Sitting on her bed, their coats still on and kittens meowling under the sink for their absent mother, she said, "All right, we have to think this through. We can"t keep it, and we can"t just turn it loose in millennial California. What other options do we have?"
"I love it when you talk like a CEO," Farrell said. Julie glared at him. Farrell said, "Well, I"ll throw this out to the board meeting. Could you and your grandmother possibly put the poor creature back where you got it? That"s what my mother always told me to do."
"Joe, we can"t!" she cried out. "We can"t put it back into that world, with people capturing it, sticking spears into it for the glory of Christian virginity. I"m not going to do that, I don"t care if I have to take care of it for the rest of my life, I"m not going to do that."
"You know you can"t take care of it." Farrell took her hands, turned them over, and placed his own hands lightly on them, palm to palm. "As somebody quite properly reminded me a bit back, it"s a unicorn."
"Well, we can just set it free." Her throat felt dry, and she realized that her hands were trembling under his. "We"ll take it to the wildest national park we can get to-national wilderness, better, no roads, people don"t go there-and we"ll turn it loose where it belongs. Unicorns live in the wilderness, it would get on fine. It would be happy."
"So would the mountain lions," Farrell said. "And the coyotes and the foxes, and G.o.d knows what else. A unicorn the size of a pork chop may be immortal, but that doesn"t mean it"s indigestible. We do have a problem here, Jewel."
They were silent for a long time, looking at each other. Julie said at last, very quietly, "I had to, Joe. I just never thought it would work, but I had to try."
Farrell nodded. Julie was looking, not at him now, but at his coat pocket. She said, "If you put it on the table. Maybe it"ll know we don"t mean it any harm. Maybe it won"t run away."
She leaned forward as Farrell reached slowly into his pocket, unconsciously spreading her arms to left and right, along the table"s edge. But the moment Farrell"s expression changed she was up and whirling to look in every direction, as she had done on the museum stair. The unicorn was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the cat NMC. The six kittens squirmed and squeaked blindly in their box, trying to suck each other"s paws and ears.
Farrell stammered, "I never felt it-I don"t know how..." and Julie said, "Bathroom, bathroom," and fled there, leaving him forlornly prowling the studio, with its deep, murky fireplace and antique shadows. He was still at it when she returned, empty-handed as he, and her wide eyes fighting wildness.
Very quietly, she said, "I can"t find the cat. Joe, I"m scared, I can"t find her."
NMC-theatrical as all cats-chose that moment to saunter grandly between them, purring in throaty hiccups, with the unicorn limp between her jaws. Julie"s gasp of horror, about to become a scream, was choked off by her realization that the creature was completely unharmed. NMC had it by the back of the neck, exactly as she would have carried one of her kittens, and the purple eyes were open and curiously tranquil. The unicorn"s dangling legs-disproportionately long, in the tapestry, for its deerlike body-now seemed to Julie as right as a peach, or the nautilus coil inside each human ear. There was a soft, curling tuft under its chin, less like hair than like feathers, matched by a larger one at the end of its tail. Its hooves and horn had a faint pearl shine, even in the dim light.
Magnificently indifferent to Farrell and Julie"s gaping, NMC promenaded to her box, flowed over the side, and sprawled out facing the kittens, releasing her grip on the unicorn"s scruff as she did so. It lay pa.s.sively, legs folded under it, as the squalling mites scrimmaged across their mother"s belly. But when Farrell reached cautiously to pick it up, the unicorn"s head whipped around faster than any cat ever dreamed of striking, and the horn scored the side of his right hand. Farrell yelped, and Julie said wonderingly, "It wants to be there. It feels comforted with them."
"The sweet thing," Farrell muttered, licking the blood from his hand. The unicorn was shoving its way in among NMC"s kittens now: as Julie and Farrell watched, it gently nudged a foster brother over to a nipple next down from the one it had chosen, took the furry tap daintily into its mouth, and let its eyes drift shut. Farrell said it was purring. Julie heard no sound at all from the thin blue-white throat, but she sat by the box long after Farrell had gone home, watching the unicorn"s flanks rise and fall in the same rhythm as the kittens" breathing.
Surprisingly, the unicorn appeared perfectly content to remain indefinitely in Julie"s studio apartment, living in an increasingly crowded cardboard box among six growing kittens, who chewed on it and slept on it by turns, as they chewed and slept on one another. NMC, for her part, washed it at least twice as much as she bathed any of the others ("To get rid of that nasty old medieval smell," Farrell said), and made a distinct point of sleeping herself with one forepaw plopped heavily across its body. The kittens were not yet capable of climbing out of the box-though they spent most of their waking hours in trying-but NMC plainly sensed that her foster child could come and go as easily as she. Yet, unlike its littermates, the unicorn showed no interest in going anywhere at all.
"Something"s wrong," Farrell said after nearly a week. "It"s not acting properly-it ought to be wild to get out, wild to be off about its unicorn business. Christ, what if I hurt it when I picked it up in the museum?" His face was suddenly cold and pale. "Jewel, I was so careful, I don"t know how I could have hurt it. But I bet that"s it. I bet that"s what"s wrong."
"No," she said firmly. "Not you. That rope around its neck, that man with the spear, the look on that idiot woman"s face-there, there"s the hurt, five hundred years of it, five hundred frozen years of capture. Christ, Joe, let it sleep as long as it wants, let it heal." They were standing together, sometime in the night, looking down at the cat box, and she gripped Farrell"s wrist hard.
"I knew right away," she said. "As soon as I saw it, I knew it wasn"t just a religious allegory, a piece of a composition. I mean, yes, it was that too, but it was real, I could tell. Grandma could tell." NMC, awakened by their voices, looked up at them, yawning blissfully, round orange eyes glowing with secrets and self-satisfaction. Julie said, "There"s nothing wrong with it that being out of that d.a.m.n tapestry won"t cure. Trust me, I was an art major."
"Shouldn"t it be having something beside cat milk?" Farrell wondered. "I always figured unicorns lived on honey and-I don"t know. Lilies, morning dew. Tule fog."
Julie shook her head against his shoulder. "Serenity," she said. Her voice was very low. "I think they live on serenity, and you can"t get much more serene than that cat. Let"s go to bed."
"Us? Us old guys?" Farrell was playing absently with her black hair, fanning his fingers out through it, tugging very gently. "You think we"ll remember how it"s done?"
"Don"t get cute," she said, harshly enough to surprise them both. "Don"t get cute, Farrell, don"t get all charming. Just come to bed and hold me, and keep me company, and keep your mouth shut for a little while. You think you can manage that?"
"Yes, Jewel," Farrell said. "It doesn"t use the litter box, did you notice?"
Julie dreamed of the unicorn that night. It had grown to full size and was trying to come into her bedroom, but couldn"t quite fit through the door. She was frightened at first, when the great creature began to heave its prisoned shoulders, making the old house shudder around her until the roof rained shingles, and the stars came through. But in time it grew quiet, and other dreams tumbled between her and it as she slept with Farrell"s arm over her, just as the unicorn slept with NMC.
In the morning, both of them late for work, unscrambling tangled clothing and exhuming a fossilized toothbrush of Farrell"s ("All right, so I forgot to throw it out, so big deal!"), they nearly overlooked the unicorn altogether. It was standing-tapestry-size once again-at the foot of Julie"s bed, regarding her out of eyes more violet than purple in the early light. She noticed for the first time that the pupils were horizontal, like those of a goat. NMC crouched in the doorway, switching her tail and calling plaintively for her strange foundling, but the unicorn had no heed for anyone but Julie. It lowered its head and stamped a mini-forefoot, and for all that the foot came down in a bright puddle of underwear it still made a sound like a bell ringing under the sea. Farrell and Julie, flurried as they were, stood very still.
The unicorn stamped a second time. Its eyes were growing brighter, pa.s.sing from deep lavender through lilac, to blazing amethyst. Julie could not meet them. She whispered, "What is it? What do you want?"
Her only answer was a barely audible silver cry and the glint of the fierce little horn as the unicorn"s ears slanted back against its head. Behind her Farrell, socks in hand, undershirt on backwards, murmured, "Critter wants to tell you something. Like La.s.sie."
"Shut up, Farrell," she snapped at him; then, to the unicorn, "Please, I don"t understand. Please."
The unicorn raised its forefoot, as though about to stamp again. Instead, it trotted past the bed to the rickety little dressing table that Farrell had helped Julie put together very long ago, in another country. Barely the height of the lowest drawer, it looked imperiously back at them over its white shoulder before it turned, reared and stretched up as far as it could, like NMC setting herself for a luxurious, scarifying scratch. Farrell said, "The mirror."
"Shut up!" Julie said again; and then, "What?"
"The Cluny tapestries. La Dame a la Licorne. Unicorns like to look at themselves. Your hand mirror"s up there."
Julie stared at him for only a moment. She moved quickly to the dressing table, grabbed the mirror and crouched down close beside the unicorn. It shied briefly, but immediately after fell to gazing intently into the cracked, speckled gla.s.s with a curious air almost of puzzlement, as though it could not quite recognize itself. Julie wedged the mirror upright against the drawer-pull; then she rose and nudged Farrell, and the two of them hurriedly finished dressing, gulping boiled coffee while the unicorn remained where it was, seemingly oblivious of everything but its own image. When they left for work, Julie looked back anxiously, but Farrell said, "Let it be, don"t worry, it"ll stay where it is. I took Comparative Mythology, I know these things."
True to his prediction, the unicorn had not moved from the mirror when Julie came home late in the afternoon; and it was still in the same spot when Farrell arrived after the restaurant"s closing. NMC was beside it, now pushing her head insistently against its side, now backing away to try one more forlorn mother-call, while the first kitten to make it into the wide world beyond the cat box was blissfully batting the tufted white tail back and forth. The tail"s owner paid no slightest heed to either of them; but when Julie, out of curiosity, knelt and began to move the mirror away, the unicorn made a sound very like a kitten"s hiss and struck at her fingers, barely missing. She stood up calmly, saying, "Well, I"m for banana cake, Bringing Up Baby, and having my feet rubbed. Later for Joseph Campbell." The motion was carried by acclamation.
The unicorn stayed by the mirror that night and all the next day, and the day after that. On the second day Julie came home to hear the sweet rubber-band sound of a lute in her apartment, and found Farrell sitting on the bed playing Dowland"s "The Earl of Ess.e.x"s Galliard." He looked up as she entered and told her cheerfully, "Nice acoustics you"ve got here. I"ve played halls that didn"t sound half as good."
"That thing of yours about locks is going to get you busted one day," Julie said. The unicorn"s eyes met hers in the hand mirror, but the creature did not stir. She asked, "Can you tell if it"s listening at all?"
"Ears," Farrell said. "If the ears twitch even a bit, I try some more stuff by the same composer, or anyway the same century. Might not mean a thing, but it"s all I"ve got to go by."
"Try Bach. Everything twitches to Bach."
Farrell snorted. "Forget it. Bourrees and sarabandes out the yingyang, and not a wiggle." Oddly, he sounded almost triumphant. "See, it"s a conservative little soul, some ways-it won"t respond to anything it wouldn"t have heard in its own time. Which means, as far as I can make out, absolutely nothing past the fifteenth century. Binchois gets you one ear. Dufay-okay, both ears, I"m pretty sure it was both ears. Machaut-ears and a little tail action, we"re really onto something now. Des Pres, jackpot-it actually turned and looked at me. Not for more than a moment, but that was some look. That was a look."
He sighed and scratched his head. "Not that any of this is any help to anybody. It"s just that I"ll never have another chance to play this old stuff for an informed critic, as you might say. Somebody who knows my music in a way I never will. Never mind. Just a thought."
Julie sat down beside him and put her arm around his shoulders. "Well, the h.e.l.l with unicorns," she said. "What do unicorns know? Play Bach for me."
Whether Farrell"s music had anything to do with it or not, they never knew; but morning found the unicorn across the room, balancing quite like a cat atop a seagoing uncle"s old steamer trunk, peering down into the quiet street below. Farrell, already up and making breakfast, said, "It"s looking for someone."
Julie was trying to move close to the unicorn without alarming it. Without looking at Farrell, she murmured, "By Gad, Holmes, you"ve done it again. Five hundred years out of its time, stranded in a cat box in California, what else would it be doing but meeting a friend for lunch? You make it look so easy, and I always feel so silly once you explain-"
"Cheap sarcasm doesn"t become you, Tanikawa. Here, grab your tofu scramble while it"s hot." He put the plate into the hand she extended backwards toward him. "Maybe it"s trolling for virgins, what can I tell you? All I"m sure of, it looked in your mirror until it remembered itself, and now it knows what it wants to do. And too bad for us if we can"t figure it out. I"m making the coffee with a little cinnamon, all right?"
The unicorn turned its head at their voices; then resumed its patient scrutiny of the dawn joggers, the commuters and the shabby, ambling pilgrims to nowhere. Julie said, slowly and precisely, "It was woven into that tapestry. It began in the tapestry-it can"t know anyone who"s not in the tapestry. Who could it be waiting for on East Redondo Street?"
Farrell had coffee for her, but no answer. They ate their breakfast in silence, looking at nothing but the unicorn, which looked at nothing but the street; until, as Farrell prepared to leave the apartment, it bounded lightly down from the old trunk and was at the door before him, purposeful and impatient. Julie came quickly, attempting for the first time to pick it up, but the unicorn backed against a bookcase and made the hissing-kitten sound again. Farrell said, "I wouldn"t."
"Oh, I definitely would," she answered him between her teeth. "Because if it gets out that door, you"re going to be the one chasing after it through Friday-morning traffic." The unicorn offered no resistance when she picked it up, though its neck was arched back like a coiled snake"s and for a moment Julie felt the brilliant eyes burning her skin. She held it up so that it could see her own eyes, and spoke to it directly.
"I don"t know what you want," she said. "I don"t know what we could do to help you if we did know, as lost as you are. But it"s my doing that you"re here at all, so if you"ll just be patient until Joe gets back, we"ll take you outside, and maybe you can sort of show us..." Her voice trailed away, and she simply stared back into the unicorn"s eyes.
When Farrell cautiously opened the door, the unicorn paid no attention; nevertheless, he closed it to a crack behind him before he turned to say, "I have to handle lunch, but I can get off dinner. Just don"t get careless. It"s got something on its mind, that one."