Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

DARK LADY

• • • • • • • • •

Every morning at breakfast Jorrie reads the obituaries in all three of the papers. Some of the write-ups make her laugh, but to the best of Tin’s knowledge none of them has ever made her cry. She’s not much of a sniveller, Jorrie.

She marks the noteworthy dead people with an X — two Xs if she plans to attend the funeral or the memorial service — and hands the papers across the table to Tin. She gets the real paper papers, delivered right to their townhouse doorstep, because according to her they skimp on the obituaries in the digital versions.

“Here’s another,” she’ll say. “‘Deeply missed by all who knew her,’ I think not! I worked with her on the Splendida campaign. She was a sick bitch.” Or else: “‘Peacefully, at home, of natural causes.’ I doubt that very much! I bet it was an overdose.” Or: “Finally! Creepy Fingers! He groped me at a company dinner in the ’80s with his wife sitting right beside him. He was such a lush they won’t even have to embalm him.”

Tin himself would never go to the funeral of someone he dislikes, unless it’s to comfort some needy survivor. The early days of AIDS were hellish; it was like the Black Death: wall-to-wall funerals, widespread numbness and glazed disbelief, survivors’ guilt, a run on handkerchiefs. But for Jorrie, loathing is an incentive. She wants to tap dance on the graves, figuratively speaking; neither of them is up to the actual dancing any more, though he at least was an agile rock ’n’ roller in high school.

Jorrie wasn’t agile, as such; more like enthusiastic. She was rangy, she was coltish, she flung herself around, and her hair slipped out of restraint. But the gang thought it was neat when the two of them took the floor together, on account of their being twins, and he could make Jorrie look like a better dancer than she was: it was his calling from childhood to defend her when possible from her own impetuousness. Also, dancing with her gave him a short respite from whatever belle of the ball he was supposed to be going out with. He had his pick, he played the field. Best that way.

Astonishing to him how popular he’d been with the teenaged lovelies; but not surprising, when he comes to think of it. He’d had a sympathetic manner, and he’d listened to their plaints, and had not tried to disrobe them violently in parked cars, though he’d done the mandatory spate of post-dance necking so they wouldn’t think they had halitosis. When extra favours were offered, including the unhooking of the pointy-titted wired bra and the peeling off of the adhesive panty-girdle, he would considerately decline.

“You’d hate yourself in the morning,” he’d counsel them. And they would have hated themselves, and cried on the telephone, and begged him not to tell; and also they would have feared pregnancy, as kids did in those days before the pill. Or they might even have hoped for it, with a view to trapping him in an early marriage — him, Martin the Magnificent! What a catch!

Nor did he ever tell boastful fibs about his dates, as lesser, pimplier youths were in the habit of doing. When the subject of his previous night’s adventures would come up in the chilly, no-frilly, naked-willie boys’ locker room, he would smile enigmatically, and the others would grin and nudge one another and wallop him on the arm in a brotherly fashion. It helped that he was tall and nimble, and a star at track and field. The high jump was his specialty.

What a rascal.

What a gent.

Jorrie doesn’t want to tap dance on the graves alone because she doesn’t want to do anything alone. If she keeps at it she can nag Tin into attending these doleful bun-fests with her, even though he says he has no desire to be bored out of his occiput by a crowd of faux-gloomy old farts gumming the crustless sandwiches and congratulating themselves on still being alive. He finds Jorrie’s interest in such terminal rites of passage excessive and even morbid, and has told her so.

“I’m only being respectful,” she says, at which Tin snorts. It’s a joke: neither of them has ever made respectfulness a priority except for outward show.

“You just want to gloat,” he replies; and Jorrie snorts in her turn because this is so accurate.

“Do you think we’re brittle?” she’s been known to ask him. Terrific sense of humour is one thing, but brittle is another.

“Of course we’re brittle,” he has answered. “We were born brittle! But seek the bright side: you can’t have much taste unless you’re brittle.” He doesn’t add that Jorrie fails to have much taste anyway; less, as time goes on.

“Maybe we could have been brilliant psychopathic murderers,” she said once, perhaps a decade ago, when they were barely in their sixties. “We could have committed the perfect crime by killing a total stranger at random. Pushed them off a train.”

“Never too late,” Tin replied. “It’s certainly on my bucket list. But I’m waiting till we get cancer. If we’ve got to go, we’ll go in style; take a few with us. De-burden the planet. More toast?”

“Don’t you dare get cancer without me!”

“I won’t. Cross my heart and spit. Unless it’s prostate cancer.”

“Don’t do that,” said Jorrie. “I’d feel left out.”

“If I get prostate cancer,” said Tin, “I pledge to arrange a prostate transplant for you so you can share the experience. I know a lot of guys who wouldn’t mind heaving their prostates out the window about now. They could at least get a good night’s sleep: dispense with the pee parade.”

Jorrie grinned. “Thanks a bundle,” she said. “I’ve always wanted a prostate. One more thing to whine about in the golden years. Think the donor might like to throw in the whole scrotum?”

“That remark,” said Tin, “is lacking in fastidiousness. As you intended. More coffee?”

Because they’re twins they can be who they really are with each other, a thing they haven’t managed very well with anyone else. Even when they’re putting on a front, they fool only outside people: to each other they’re transparent as guppies, they can see each other’s innards. Or that’s their story; though, as Tin is well aware — having once had a lover with an aquarium — even guppies have their opacities.

He gazes fondly at Jorrie as she frowns at the obituaries through her crimson-framed reading glasses; or frowns as much as she is able to, given the Botox. In recent years — in recent decades — Jorrie has developed the slightly pop-eyed expression of someone who’s had too much work done. There are hair issues as well. At least he’s been able to stop her from dyeing it jet black: way too Undead with her present-day skin tone, which is lacking in glow despite the tan-coloured foundation and the sparkly bronze mineral-elements powder she so assiduously applies, the poor deluded wretch.

“You’re only as old as you feel,” she says too frequently, while trying to talk Tin into some absurdity — rumba classes, watercolour painting holidays, ruinous fads such as spinning. He cannot picture himself on a stationary bicycle, wearing Spandex tights, whirring away like a sawmill and further destroying his wizened crotch. He cannot picture himself on a bicycle of any sort. Painting was a non-starter: if he were going to do that, why would he want to do it in a group of whinnying amateurs? As for the rumba, you have to be able to swivel your coccyx, a skill he lost around the time he gave up on sex.

“Exactly,” he replies. “I feel two thousand. I am older than the rocks among which I sit.”

“What rocks? I don’t see any rocks. You’re sitting on the sofa!”

“It’s a quotation,” he says. “A paraphrase. Walter Pater.”

“Oh, you and your quotations! Not everyone lives in quotation marks, you know.”

Tin sighs. Jorrie is not a wide reader, preferring historical romances about the Tudors and the Borgias to anything more substantial. “Like the vampire, I have been dead many times,” he cites to himself, though he doesn’t wish to alarm her by saying it out loud: an alarmed Jorrie is always a lot of work. She wouldn’t be afraid of vampires as such: being rash and curious, she’d be the first into the forbidden crypt. But she wouldn’t like the thought of Tin turning into one, or turning into anyone other than her idea of him.

Meanwhile, she’s firmly bent on turning into someone else herself. She does not come up to her own standards. Her only superstitions have to do with the labels on expensive cosmetics. Jorrie actually believes the deceitful come-hither labels — the plumpings, the firmings, the unwrinklings, the returning of youthful dews, the hints of immortality — despite having been in advertising herself, a vocation guaranteed to take the bloom off ornamental adjectives. There are so many things in life about which she ought to know better but does not, the art of makeup being one of them. He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on.

The hair compromise he finally agreed to is a white strip on the left side — geriatric punk, he’d whispered to himself — with, recently, the addition of an arresting scarlet patch. The total image is that of an alarmed skunk trapped in the floodlights after an encounter with a ketchup bottle. He crosses his fingers about that blood-coloured blotch, and hopes he will not be accused of elder bashing.

Gone are the days when Jorrie — once known for her sultry gypsy image and her vivid African prints and clanky ethnic jewellery — could pull off any fashion whim that caught her eye. She’s lost the knack, though she’s kept her flamboyant habits. Mutton dressed as Spam, he’s longed to say to her from time to time, though he hasn’t said it. Instead he’s clamped himself together and held himself back, and said it about other women to make her laugh.

He does usually manage to steer her away from the steeper and more lethal precipices. There was the interlude with the nose ring, back in the ’90s: she’d sprung the tacky doodad on him without prior warning, and asked him point-blank what he thought. He’d had to sew his mouth shut, though he’d done some hypocritical nodding and murmuring. She’d jettisoned the tawdry accessory once she’d caught a cold and practically torn her nostril off when her handkerchief got snagged on the ring.

After that came the threat of a tongue stud, but luckily she’d consulted him first. What had he said? “You want the inside of your mouth to look like a biker’s jacket?” Maybe not: too much risk of the answer being yes. Certainly he wouldn’t have informed her that some men view such baubles as blowjob advertisements: that might have been an incentive. A health warning: “You could die of septicemia of the tongue?” Health warnings don’t work with her, as she considers them a challenge: her superior immune system will surely crush any microbe the invisible world may toss her way.

More likely he’d said, “You’d sound like Daffy Duck and you’d spit all over everyone. Not attractive, in my books. Anyway, the stud wave has passed. Only stockbrokers get them any more.” That at least made her giggle.

It’s best not to overreact to her. Push, and she pushes back. He hasn’t forgotten her childhood tantrums and the fights she used to get into, flailing her long arms ineffectually as the other children laughed and jeered her on. He’d watch, almost in tears himself: he couldn’t extricate her, confined to the boys’ side of the schoolyard as he was.

So he avoids confrontation. Languor is a more efficient method of control.

The twins were christened Marjorie and Martin, at a time when parents thought alliterative names for children were snappy, and were costumed alike in miniature overalls. Even their mother — not the sharpest knife in the drawer — realized that it would not do to stick Martin into a dress because he might turn into a pansy, her term. So there they are, aged two, in their matching sailor suits and their tiny sailor hats, holding hands and squinting into the sun with their elvish, lopsided smiles: his skewed up at the left, hers at the right. You can’t tell whether they’re boys or girls, but you have to admit they’re delicious. Behind them is a man’s body in a uniform, it being the war: their father with the top part of his head cut off, which was shortly to happen to him in reality. Their mother used to weep buckets over that photo when she’d been drinking. She viewed it as a premonition: if only she’d held the camera straight, Weston’s head would not have been cropped like that and the fatal explosion would never have happened.

Gazing at their past selves, Jorrie and Tin feel a tenderness they seldom display to anyone in the present. They’d like to hug those scrumptious little scamps, those yellowing, fading echoes. They’d like to assure the pint-sized seafarers that, though their voyage through time is about to take a turn for the worse and will remain worse for a while, it will all work out in the end. Or near the end; which is, let’s face it, where they are now.

Because, voilà, here they are together again, full circle. A few inner wounds, a few scars, a few abrasions, but still standing. Still Jorrie and Tin, who’d rebelled at being nicknamed Marje and Marv, and who’d taken to using their last syllables as their real, secret names, known to them alone. Jorrie and Tin, in revolt against society’s plans for them: no white weddings, for instance. Jorrie and Tin, who’d refused to knuckle under.

Again, that’s their story. Privately Tin can recall quite a few mortifying though satisfying knucklings-under he has submitted to, in the wild nighttime shrubberies of Cherry Beach and elsewhere, but no need to sully the ears of Jorrie with those. At least he never ran into any of his students while nervously prowling the midnight pathways. At least he never got mugged. At least he never got caught.

“So heavenly,” says Tin, smiling at the photograph, which is framed in fumed oak and resides on the dining room wall above the art deco buffet, a steal when Tin acquired it forty years ago. “Too bad our hair went dark.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Jorrie. “Blond is overrated.”

“It’s coming back,” says Tin. “The ’50s are having a moment again, have you noticed? It’s the Marilyn thing.”

He does not believe in the ’50s moment as portrayed recently on screens large and small. While they were going on, the ’50s seemed like normal life, but now they’ve become the olden days: fodder for television shows in which the colours are wrong — too clean, too pastel — and the crinolines are too numerous. Hardly anyone had a ponytail in real life, nor did the adult men always wear tailored suits, with fedoras tilted at a jaunty angle and white pocket handkerchiefs starched into triangles.

They did smoke pipes, however, though pipes were fading even then. On the weekends they mooched around in moccasins and jeans — primitive jeans, but jeans. They read their newspapers while sitting in their Naugahyde lounge chairs with matching hassocks, drinking a relaxing Manhattan and smoking fit to kill; they lovingly washed and waxed their sharp-finned and over-chromed gas-guzzler cars; they mowed their lawns with push mowers. Or that’s what the fathers of the twins’ friends did. Tin has a spot of wistfulness in his heart about the bulbous lounge chairs and the shiny, lethal cars and the cumbersome push lawn mowers. If their own father had lived, would things have been better for Tin himself?

No. Things would not have been better, they would have been horrific. He would have had to go fishing: hoick fish up out of the water and assassinate them while uttering manly grunts. Crawl under cars with wrenches, saying things like “muffler.” Be slapped on the back and told his dad was proud of him. Fat chance.

“Though Ernest Hemingway’s mother did it,” said Jorrie.

“Excuse me? Did what?”

“Put Ernie in a dress.”

“Right.”

The twins often revert to a previous point in their ongoing conversation, though they know better than to do that if anyone else is around. It’s annoying; not to them, they can pick up each other’s dropped stitches, but it can make other people feel excluded. Or else — nowadays — it can make other people feel they are missing a cog or two.

“And then he blew his head off,” said Tin. “Which I personally have no intention of doing.”

“Better not,” said Jorrie. “It would make such a mess. Brain salad all over the walls. Leap off a bridge, if the urge comes over you.”

“Thanks a bundle,” says Tin. “I’ll keep that suggestion in mind.”

“Any time.”

That’s how they go on: like a ’30s wisecrackers’ movie. The Marxes. Hepburn and Tracy. Nick and Nora Charles, minus the chain-drinking of martinis, which Jorrie and Tin can’t handle any more. They skate over the surfaces, chilled and thin and shiny; they avoid the depths. It wears Tin out a bit, their doubles act. Possibly Jorrie feels the same, but they both understand that they have to keep up their ends.

Tin turned into a pansy anyway, which the twins purport to regard as a hilarious booby trap sprung on their mother, even though she was dead by the time he stopped concealing his pansyhood. The role betrayal should have gone the other way round — Jorrie having been the child gender-crosser as far as the sailor outfits went — but she could never make the jump to lesbianism because she didn’t like other women much.

Why would she, considering their mother? Not only was Mother Maeve dumb as a sack of hammers, but as time went by and her grief over their exploded father failed to abate, she’d morphed into a binge drinker who’d robbed the twins’ piggy banks for booze money. She also brought home oafs and thugs, for the purpose — said Tin, when describing these episodes at dinner parties, much later — “for the purpose of sexual congress.” Too funny! When the twins would hear the front door opening, they’d skin out the back. Or they’d hide in the cellar, then creep upstairs once things went quiet to spy on the congressional goings-on; or they’d eavesdrop if the bedroom door was closed.

What had they felt about all that when they were children? They can’t really recall, since they’ve papered over the too-frequently-repeated primal scene with so many layers of hare-brained and possibly mythological narration that the original simple outlines have been obscured. (Did the dog really run outside with a large black brassiere in its mouth and bury it in the backyard? Did they even have a dog? Did Oedipus solve the riddle of the Sphinx? Did Jason make off with the Golden Fleece? It’s the same sort of question.)

For Tin, the anecdotal family humour has long ceased to be amusing. Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick. And it meant that their life was free of the oafs and thugs by the time they went to university. Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Two of the oafs had the nerve to come to the funeral, which may explain Jorrie’s fixation on funerals. She still feels she shouldn’t have let those assholes get away with it: turning up at the grave side, pretending to be sad, telling the twins what a fine and kind-hearted woman their mother had been, what a good friend. “Friend, like shit! All they wanted was an easy lay!” she’d raged. She ought to have called them on it; she ought to have made a scene. Punched them in the nose.

Tin’s view is that maybe these men really were sad. Is it so out of the question that they could actually have loved Mother Maeve, in one or two or even three senses of the word? Amor, voluptas, caritas. But he’s kept that view to himself: to express it would be too irritating to Jorrie, especially if he includes the Latin. Jorrie has scant patience with anything Latin. It’s a part of his life she’s never been able to grasp. Why waste your life on a bunch of fusty, forgotten scribblers in a dead language? He was so smart, he was so talented, he could have been. . (A long list of things he could have been would follow, none of them in any way possible.)

So best not to hit that button.

“Oafs and thugs” was a phrase they’d lifted from their eighth-grade principal who’d harangued the whole school about the dangers of turning into oafs and thugs, especially if you threw snowballs with rocks in them or wrote swear words on the blackboard. “Oafs vs. Thugs” became, briefly, a schoolyard game invented by Tin in his popular, pre-pansy period. It was something like Capture the Flag and was played only on the boys’ side of the playground. Girls could not be oafs and thugs, said Tin: only boys, which made Jorrie resentful.

It was she who came up with the idea of calling Mother Maeve’s on-again, off-again gentleman callers — “or you could say, in-again, out-again,” Tin would quip later — the Oafs and Thugs. That ruined the game for Tin; no doubt it contributed to his pansyhood, he decided later. “Don’t blame me,” said Jorrie. “I didn’t invite them home.”

“Darling, I’m not blaming you, I’m thanking you,” Tin said. “I’m deeply grateful.” Which, by that time — after he’d sorted out a few things — he really was.

Their mother wasn’t drunk all the time. Her binges took place only on weekends: she had an underpaid secretarial job that she needed to make ends meet, the military widow’s pension being so minuscule. And she did love the twins in her own way.

“At least she wasn’t too violent,” Jorrie would say. “Though she got carried away.”

“Everyone spanked their kids then. Everyone got carried away.” Indeed it was a point of honour to compare your slice of corporal punishment with those of other children, and to exaggerate. Slippers, belts, rulers, hairbrushes, ping-pong paddles: those were the parental weapons of choice. It made the young twins sad that they didn’t have a father to administer such beatings, only ineffectual Mother Maeve, whom they could reduce to tears by pretending to be mortally injured, whom they could tease with relative impunity, from whom they could run away. There were two of them and only one of her, so they ganged up.

“I suppose we were heartless,” Jorrie would say.

“We were disobedient. We talked back. We were out of control. But adorable, you have to grant that.”

“We were brats. Heartless little brats. We showed no mercy,” Jorrie sometimes adds. Is it regret, or bragging?

On the cusp of adolescence, Jorrie had a painful experience with one of the oafs — a sneak attack from which Tin failed to defend her, being asleep at the time. That has weighed on him. It must have messed up her life in regards to men, though most likely her life would have been messed up anyway. She deals with this incident now by making fun of it — “I was ravished by a troll!” — but she hasn’t always managed that. She was downright sullen on the subject of rape in the early ’70s when so many women were going on the rampage, but she seems to have got over that by now.

Molesting isn’t everything, in Tin’s view. He himself never got molested by the oafs, but his relationships with men were just as scrambled, and if anything more so. Jorrie said he had a problem with love: he conceptualizes it too much. He said Jorrie didn’t conceptualize it enough. That was back when love was still a topic of conversation for them.

“We should put all of our lovers in a blender,” Jorrie said once. “Mix them up, average them out.” Tin said she had a brutalist way of putting things.

The truth is, thinks Tin, that the twins never loved anyone except each other. Or they didn’t love anyone unconditionally. Their other loves had many conditions.

“Look who just croaked,” says Jorrie now. “Big Dick Metaphor!”

“That nickname could apply to a lot of men,” says Tin. “Though I assume you mean someone in particular. I can see your ears twitching, so he must be important to you.”

“Three guesses,” says Jorrie. “Hint: He was at the Riverboat a lot, that summer when I was doing their bookkeeping, volunteer, part-time.”

“Because you wanted to hang out with the bohemians,” said Tin. “I do have a vague recollection. So who? Blind Sonny Terry?”

“Don’t be silly,” says Jorrie. “He was decrepit even then.”

“I give up. I never went there much, it was too fetid for me. Those folksingers made a fetish of not bathing.”

“That’s untrue,” says Jorrie. “Not all of them. I know it for a fact. No fair giving up!”

“Who ever said I was fair? Not you.”

“You should be able to read my mind.”

“Oh, a challenge. All right: Gavin Putnam. That self-styled poet you were so nuts about.”

“You knew all along!”

Tin sighs. “He was so derivative, him and his poetry both. Sentimental trash. Quite gruesomely putrid.”

“The early ones were very good,” says Jorrie defensively. “The sonnets, except they weren’t sonnets. The Dark Lady ones.”

Tin has slipped up, he’s been maladroit. How could he have forgotten that some of Gavin Putnam’s early poems had been about Jorrie? Or so she’d claimed. She’d been thrilled by that. “I’m a Muse,” she’d announced when the Dark Lady suite first appeared in print, or in what passed for print among the poets: a stapled-together mimeo magazine they put out themselves and sold to one another for a dollar. The Dirt, they’d called it, in a bid for grittiness.

Tin found it touching that Jorrie was so excited by these poems. He hadn’t seen much of her that season. She had, to put it mildly, a hyperactive social life, due no doubt to the alacrity with which she flung herself into bed, whereas he’d been living in a two-roomer over a barbershop on Dundas and having a quiet sexual identity crisis while toiling away at his doctoral thesis.

This was a solid enough but not honestly very inspired re-examination of the cleaner and more presentable epigrams of Martial, though what really drew him to Martial was his no-nonsense attitude towards sex, so much less complicated than that of Tin’s own era. For Martial, there was no romantic pussy-footing, no idealization of Woman as having a higher spiritual calling: Martial would have laughed his head off at that! And no taboos: everyone did everything with everyone: slaves, boys, girls, whores, gay, straight, pornography, scatology, wives, young, middle-aged, old, front, back, mouth, hand, cock, beautiful, ugly, and downright repulsive. Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance. Chastity was not the primary virtue, for men or for women either, but certain forms of friendship and generosity and tenderness did get top marks. His contemporaries labelled Martial as unusually sunny and good-natured, nor did his scathing, acerbic wit do anything to diminish that perception. His criticisms were not directed at individuals, he claimed, but at types; though Tin had his doubts about that.

But a thesis was not about why you appreciated your subject: in academia, he’d come to understand, that kind of thing should be reserved for social chit-chat. You had to cook up something more focused. Tin’s central hypothesis revolved around the difficulties of satire in an age lacking in shared moral standards, which Martial’s age did, in spades: he’d moved to Rome when Nero was in power. Indeed, was Martial a true satirist or just a smutty gossip, as some commentators had claimed? Tin intended to defend his hero against this charge: there was so much more to Martial, he would say, than cocks and boy-fucking and sluts and fart jokes! Though he would not of course use those crude vernacular terms in his thesis. And he’d do his own translations, updating the diction to fit Martial’s well-crafted slang, though the filthiest of the epigrams were prudently to be avoided: their time had not yet come.

“You imitate youth, Laetinus, by dyeing your hair. Presto! Yesterday a swan, you’re now a raven. But you can’t fool everyone: Proserpina spots your grey hair. And she’ll yank your stupid disguise right off your head!” This was the tone he sought in his translations — contemporary, punchy, not stilted. He used to spend a week over one or two lines. But he doesn’t do that any more, because who cares?

He’d received a grant for his doctoral studies, though it wasn’t large. Jorrie told him Classics was surely going to disappear very soon, and then how would he earn his living? He should have gone into Design, because he would have made a killing. But, said Tin, a killing was exactly what he didn’t want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.

“Money talks,” said Jorrie, who despite her bohemian leanings wanted to have lots of it. She had no intention of toiling away in some tedious, soul-grinding factotum job, overworked and underpaid and a prey to oafs and thugs, the way their mother had. Her nascent vision involved flashy cars and vacations in the Caribbean and a closetful of figure-hugging fabrics. She hadn’t articulated that vision yet, not out loud, but Tin could see it coming.

“Yes,” said Tin. “Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.” Martial could have said that. Possibly Martial did say it. He would have to check. Aureo hamo piscari. To fish with a golden hook.

The barbers on the ground floor of Tin’s building were three elderly misanthropic Italian brothers who did not know what the world was coming to except that it was bad. The shop had a rack of girlie magazines featuring police stories and pictures of hookers with enormous bosoms, which was what men were supposed to like. These magazines made Tin feel queasy — the spectre of Mother Maeve hovered rakishly above anything to do with black brassieres — but he got his hair cut there anyway as a goodwill gesture and leafed through the magazines while he waited. It didn’t do to be too openly gay then, and anyway he was still deciding; and the Italian barbers were his landlords and needed to be buttered up.

He’d had to make it clear to them, however, that Jorrie was his twin sister, not a girlfriend of loose character. Despite their stash of lurid magazines, which they probably viewed as professional equipment, they were puritanical about any unsanctioned goings-on in their rental accommodations. They thought Tin was a fine, upstanding scholarly youth, called him The Professor, and kept asking him when he was going to get married. “I’m too poor,” Tin would say. Or “I’m waiting for the right girl.” Sage nods from the barbershop trio: both excuses were acceptable to them.

So when Jorrie would arrive on her infrequent visits, the Italian barbers would wave to her through the window and smile in their triste way. How nice that The Professor had such an exemplary sister. It was what a family should be like. When the Dark Lady issue of The Dirt came out, Jorrie could hardly wait to share her Musehood with Tin. She’d galloped up the stairs, waving her hot-off-the-mimeo Dirt, and plumped herself down in his wicker basket chair.

“Look at this!” she’d said, thrusting the stapled pages at him while sweeping back her long dark hair with one hand. She had a swatch of red-and-ochre block-printed cloth wound around her trim waist, and a necklace of — What were those? Cow’s teeth? — dangling over her scoop-necked peasant blouse. Her eyes were shining, her bangles were jangling. “Seven poems! About me!”

She was so guileless. She was so avid. If Tin hadn’t been her brother, if he’d been straight, he would have run a mile; but away from her or towards her? She was faintly terrifying. She wanted it all. She wanted them all. She wanted experiences. In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.

“You can’t be in a poem,” he’d said, crossly, because this infatuation of hers was worrying him. She was bound to cut herself on it: she was a clumsy girl, not skilful with edged tools. “Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is in them, really.”

“Nitpicker. You know what I mean.”

Tin sighed, and at her insistence he sat down at his rickety third-hand pedestal table with the mug of tea he’d just made for himself and read the poems. “Jorrie,” he said. “These poems are not about you.”

Her face fell. “Yes, they are! They have to be! It’s definitely my. .”

“They’re only about part of you.” The lower part, he did not say.

“What?”

He sighed again. “You’re more than this. You’re better than this.” How could he put it? You’re not just a piece of cheap tail? No, too hurtful. “He’s left out your, your. . your mind.”

“It’s you who keeps on about mens sana in corpore sano,” she said. “Sane mind in a sound body, both together. I know what you’re thinking: that this is just about the sex. But that’s the point! I represent — I mean, she, the Dark Lady, she represents a healthy, down-to-earth rejection of the false, wispy, sentimental. . It’s like D. H. Lawrence, that’s what he says. That’s what Gav loves about me!” And on she went.

“So, in Venus veritas?” said Tin.

“What?”

Oh, Jorrie, he thought. You don’t understand. Men like that get tired of you once they’ve had you. You’re in for a fall. Martial, VII: 76: It’s only pleasure, it isn’t love.

He was right about the fall. It was fast, and it was hard. Jorrie didn’t go into the details — she was too stunned — but what he pieced together at the time was that there was a live-in girlfriend, and she’d walked in on Jorrie and the Earthy Poet while they were disporting themselves on the sacrosanct domestic mattress.

“I shouldn’t have laughed,” said Jorrie. “That was rude. But it was such a farce! And she looked so shocked! It must have seemed really mean to her, me laughing. I just couldn’t help it.”

The girlfriend, whose name was Constance (“How prissy!” Jorrie snorted) and who was the embodiment of that very same wispiness and sentimentality so despised by the Poetaster — this Constance had gone white as a sheet, even whiter than she already was, and had said something about the rent money. Then she’d turned and walked out. Not even stomped: scuttled, like a mouse. Which just went to show how wispy she was. Jorrie herself would have done some hair-pulling and slapping at the very least, she claimed.

She had felt the departure of Constance ought to be a cause for celebration — the forces of vitality and life and the truths of the flesh had triumphed over those of abstractness and stagnation — but that had not been the outcome. No sooner had the Half-Rhymer been barred from the moon-maiden’s chamber than he began caterwauling to get back in: he yowled for his vaporous Truelove like an infant deprived of its nipple.

Jorrie was less than tactful about this excess of whimpering and regret — the words pussy-whipped and limp prick were thrown about by her with perhaps too much abandon — so her expulsion was inevitable. According to Mr. Poetaster, the imbroglio was suddenly all her fault. She’d tempted him. She’d seduced him. She was the viper in the orchard.

There was something to that, Tin supposed; Jorrie had been the huntress, not the hunted. But still, it takes two to tango. The Minor Minnesinger could have said no.

Short form, Jorrie had told him to shut up about Constance, and they’d had a fight about it, and Jorrie had been flung down onto the sewer grating of life like a used condom. No one had ever treated her like that before! His own heart wrenched with pity, Tin had tried to distract her — a movie, a drink, not that he could afford many of either — but she was not to be placated. There were no hysterics, no visible tears, but moping set in, followed by an ill-concealed, smouldering rage.

Would she step over the edge? Would she confront the poet in public, scream, hit? She was angry enough for that. A cruel joke had been played on her, since her Musehood, once a source of pride and joy, had become a torment: the Dark Lady non-sonnets were now enshrined in Gavin’s first thin collection, Heavy Moonlight, and they sneered at Jorrie from its pages, mockingly, reproachfully.

Worse, these poems accumulated gravitas as Gavin clambered up the ladder of acclaim, collecting the first in what was to be a string of minor but nonetheless career-enhancing prizes. Those early poems had been augmented by others, different in tenor: the lover recognized the mere fleshliness, indeed the grossness and fickleness of the Dark Lady, and returned to the pursuit of his pallidly glowing Truelove. But that ice-eyed paragon had declined to forgive the heartbroken lover, despite his overcrafted and bathos-heavy and subsequently published pleas.

These later poems did not reflect well on Jorrie. She’d had to look up the word trull in Tin’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. It was wounding.

Jorrie went on a retaliatory stud-gathering riff, plucking lovers like daisies from every wayside ditch and parking lot, then casting them carelessly aside. Not that such behaviour ever has any effect on the one who’s spurned you, as Tin knows from his own experience: if it’s gone as far as that, they don’t care how much you debase yourself to get back at them. You could fuck a headless goat and it would make no earthly difference.

But then the wheels of the seasons turned, and tender-fingered Dawn chalked up three hundred and sixty-two pink morning entrances, and then another year’s worth of them, and another; and the moon of desire rose and set and rose again, and so on and so forth; and the Poet of the Sprightly Prick receded into the dim and misty distance. Or so Tin hoped, for Jorrie’s sake.

Though it seems he has not receded. All you have to do is kick the bucket and you’re right back in the memory spotlight, thinks Tin. He hopes the lingering shade of Gavin Putnam will prove a friendly one, supposing it is indeed lingering.

Now he says, “Right, the Dark Lady sonnets. I remember them. Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder, but verse is cheaper: it certainly hooked you. You used to stagger into my barbershop enclave reeking of gutter sex, you stank like a week-old whitefish. You were cross-eyed over that dickhead the whole summer. I never could see it, myself.”

“Because he never would show it to you,” says Jorrie. She laughs at her own joke. “It was well worth the sight. You’d have been jealous!”

“Just don’t claim you were in love with him,” says Tin. “It was low, sordid lust. You were out of your mind on hormones.” He understands that kind of thing, he’s gone through similar infatuations. They’re always comic in the eyes of others.

Jorrie sighs. “He had a great body,” she says. “While it lasted.”

“Never mind,” says Tin. “It can’t be much of a great body any more, since it’s a corpse.” The two of them snicker.

“Will you come with me?” says Jorrie. “To the memorial service? Have a gawk?” She’s putting on a jaunty air, but she fools neither of them.

“I don’t think you should go. It would be bad for you,” says Tin.

“Why? I’m curious. Maybe a few of his wives will be there.”

“You’re too competitive,” says Tin. “You still can’t believe some other woman elbowed you out and you didn’t win the prize pig. Face it, you two were never meant for each other.”

“Oh, I know that,” says Jorrie. “We burnt out. Too hot to last. I just want to see the double chins on the wives. And maybe What’s-her-name will be there. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

Oh please, thinks Tin. Not What’s-her-name! Jorrie’s still so knotted up over Constance, the live-in girlfriend whose mattress she’d defiled, that she won’t even pronounce her name.

Unfortunately Constance W. Starr has not faded into obscurity as her wispiness ought to have dictated. Instead she’s become obscenely famous, though for a ludicrous reason: as C. W. Starr, she’s the author of a brain-damaged fantasy series called Alphinland. Alphinland has made such a vast shitload of money that Gavin the Relatively Penurious Poet must have been revolving in his grave decades before he actually died. He must have cursed the day he allowed himself to be led astray by Jorrie’s overheated estrogens.

As the Starr star has risen, so has Jorrie’s own star faded: she no longer twinkles, she no longer monkey-shines. The C. W. Starr feeding frenzy generates long and clamorous lineups in bookstores on the publication days of new books, with children and adults both male and female dressed up like the villainous Milzreth of the Red Hand, or the blank-faced Skinkrot the Time-Swallower, or Frenosia of the Fragrant Antennae, the insect-eyed goddess with her entourage of indigo and emerald magic bees. All of this hoopla must get right up Jorrie’s nose, though she’s never confessed to having noticed.

From the few times he’d accompanied Jorrie to the Riverboat, Tin has a vague memory of Alphinland’s unlikely genesis. The saga began as a clutch of ersatz fairy tales of the sword-and-sorcery variety, published in two-bit magazines of the kind featuring semi-naked girls on the covers being leered at by Lizard Men. The Riverboat hangers-on — especially the poets — used to make fun of Constance, but he guesses they don’t do that much any more. Money fishes with a golden hook.

Of course he’s read the Alphinland series, or parts of it: he felt he owed it to Jorrie. In case she ever asks for his critical opinion, he can loyally tell her how bad it is. And of course Jorrie has read it too. She’d have been overcome by jealous curiosity, she wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself. But neither of them has admitted to having so much as cracked a spine.

Happily, thinks Tin, Constance W. Starr is said to be somewhat of a recluse; more so since her husband died, a newspaper obituary Jorrie had passed over in silence. In a perfect world, C. W. Starr won’t turn up at the funeral.

Odds of a perfect world? One in a million.

“If this Putnam funeral is going to be all about Constance W. Starr,” says Tin, “I am definitely vetoing it. Because it will not be, as you say, a hoot. It will be very destructive for you.” What he doesn’t say: You’ll lose, Jorrie. The same way you lost the last time. She’s got the high ground.

“It isn’t about her, I promise!” says Jorrie. “That was more than fifty years ago! How could it be about her when I can’t even remember her name? Anyway, she was so wispy! She was such a pipsqueak! I could have blown her over with a sneeze!” She gasps with laughter.

Tin considers. Such bluster, in Jorrie, is a sign of vulnerability; therefore, she needs his support. “Very well. I’ll go,” he says, with unfeigned reluctance. “But I’m not having a happy feeling about this.”

“Shake on it like a man,” says Jorrie. The phrase is from a Western matinee movie routine they used to do when they were kids.

“Where is the dreaded affair?” Tin asks on the morning of the memorial service. It’s a Sunday, the one day Jorrie is permitted to cook. Mostly her cooking is a matter of opening takeout containers, but when she gets ambitious there will be smashed crockery, swearing, and incinerations. Today is a bagel day, praise the lord. And the coffee’s perfect because Tin made it himself.

“The Enoch Turner Schoolhouse,” says Jorrie. “It offers a gracious atmosphere reminiscent of a bygone era.”

“Who wrote that?” says Tin. “Charles Dickens?”

“I did,” says Jorrie. “Years ago. Right after I went freelance. They wanted an archaic tone.” She hadn’t exactly gone freelance, as Tin recalls: there had been a civil war at the advertising company and she’d been on the defeated side, having unfortunately told her antagonists what she really thought of them. However, she’d collected a reasonable parachute, which had enabled her to go into real-estate speculation. That had kept her in designer foot-fetish objects and vulgar, overpriced winter vacations until one of her menopause-era lovers made off with her savings. Then she was overleveraged, had to sell in a down market, and lost a crock of gold, so what could Tin do but offer her a refuge? His house is big enough for the two of them, just barely: Jorrie takes up a lot of space.

“I hope this schoolhouse venue isn’t a hotbed of kitsch,” says Tin.

“Do we have a choice?”

After ferreting through her closet, Jorrie holds up three of her outfits on hangers so Tin can evaluate them. It’s one of his demands — one of his requests — on the days when he agrees to attend events with her. “What’s the verdict?” she says.

“Not the shocking pink.”

“But it’s Chanel — an original!” Both of them frequent vintage clothing stores, though only the upmarket end. They’ve kept their figures, at least: Tin can still wear the elegant three-piece ’30s ensembles he’s sported for some decades. He even has a lacquer cane.

“That doesn’t matter,” he says. “No one’s going to read the label, and you are not Jackie Kennedy. Shocking pink would draw undue attention.”

Jorrie wants to draw undue attention: that’s the whole idea! If any of Gavin’s wives are there, and especially if What’s-her-name shows up, she longs to have them notice her the moment she walks in. But she backs down, because if she doesn’t, she knows Tin won’t come with her.

“And not the faux-leopard stole either.”

“But they’re in fashion again!”

“Exactly. They’re far too in fashion. Don’t pout, you look like a camel.”

“So you’re voting for the grey. May I say yawn?”

“You may say it, but that won’t change reality. The grey has a beautiful cut. Understated. Maybe with a scarf?”

“To cover up my scraggy neck?”

“You said it, not me.”

“I can always depend on you,” says Jorrie. She means it: Tin saves her from herself, on those occasions when she takes his advice. By the time she walks out the door she’ll be confident in the knowledge that she’s presentable. The scarf he chooses for her is muted Chinese red: it will perk up the complexion.

“How do I look?” says Jorrie, turning before him.

“Stupendous,” says Tin.

“I love it when you lie for me.”

“I’m not lying,” says Tin. Stupendous: causing astonishment or wonder. From the gerund of stupere, to be astounded. That about covers it. After a certain moment, there is only so much a beautifully cut grey outfit can redeem.

At last they are ready to set forth. “You’ll have to wear your warmest coat,” says Tin. “It’s frore out there.”

“What?”

“It’s very cold. Twenty below, that’s the predicted high. Glasses?” He wants her to be able to read the program for herself, without pestering him to do it for her.

“Yes, yes. Two pairs.”

“Handkerchief?”

“Don’t worry,” says Jorrie. “I don’t intend to cry. Not over that bastard!”

“If you do, you can’t use my sleeve,” says Tin.

She sticks out her chin, the flag of battle. “I won’t need it.”

Tin insists on driving: being in a car with Jorrie at the wheel is too much like Russian roulette for him. Sometimes she’s fine, but last week she ran over a raccoon. She claimed it was dead already, though Tin doubts that. “It shouldn’t have been out anyway,” she said, “in all that weather.”

They proceed cautiously through the icy streets in Tin’s carefully preserved 1995 Peugeot, tires squeaking on the snow. The accumulation from the day before still hasn’t been cleared away, though at least it was only a blizzard, not an ice storm like the one that hit over Christmas. Three days in the Cabbagetown house without heat or light had been trying, since Jorrie viewed the storm as a personal insult and complained about its unfairness. How could the weather be doing this to her?

There’s a parking lot north of King — Tin has taken care to identify it online, since the last thing he needs is Jorrie issuing false directions — but it’s a surprisingly tight squeeze: several cars behind them are turned away. Tin extracts Jorrie from the front seat and steadies her as she slides on the ice. Why didn’t he nix those spike-heeled boots? She could have a serious fall and fracture something — a hip, a leg — and if that happens she’ll be propped up in bed for months while he carries trays and empties bedpans. Grasping her firmly by the arm, he propels her along King Street, then south on Trinity.

“Look at all the people,” she says. “Who the hell are they?” It’s true, there’s quite a crowd heading to the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse. Many of them are what you’d expect — the geezer generation, like Tin and Jorrie — but oddly enough there are quite a few young ones. Could it be that Gavin Putnam is now a youth cult? What an unpleasant notion, thinks Tin.

Jorrie presses closer to his side, her head swivelling like a periscope. “I don’t see her,” she whispers. “She’s not here!”

“She won’t come,” says Tin. “She’s afraid you’ll call her What’s-her-name.” Jorrie laughs, but not very heartily. She doesn’t have a plan, thinks Tin: she’s charging in blindly the way she always does. It’s a good thing he’s here with her.

Inside, the room is crowded and overly warm, though it does have a gracious atmosphere reminiscent of a bygone era. There’s a subdued gabble, as of distant waterfowl. Tin helps Jorrie out of her coat, struggles out of his own, and settles back for the duration.

Jorrie elbows him, emits a sizzling whisper: “That must be the widow, in the blue. Crap, she looks about twelve. Gav was such a perv.” Tin tries to see but fails to spot the likely candidate. How can she tell, from the back?

Now there’s a hush: a master of ceremonies has taken the podium — a younger man in a turtleneck and a tweed jacket, a professorial getup — and is welcoming them all to this commemoration of the life and work of one of our most celebrated and best-loved and, if he can put it this way, most essential poets.

Speak for yourself, thinks Tin: not essential to me. He tunes out the audio and turns his mind to the honing of a phrase or two from Martial. He doesn’t publish his efforts any more because why bother to try, but the impromptu translation process is a private mental exercise that passes the time agreeably on occasions when the time has to be passed.

Unlike you, who court our view,

They shun an audience, those whores;

They fuck in secret behind closed doors.

In curtained, sealed chambers;

Even the dirtiest, cheapest ones

Sneak off to ply their trade behind the tombs.

Act more modestly, like them!

Lesbia, you think I’m being mean?

Shag your head off! Only — don’t be seen!

Too much like Mother Goose, the rhyme, the rhythm? Then, perhaps, even more succinctly:

Why not emulate the strumpet?

Bump it, pump it, multi-hump it,

Lesbia! Just don’t blow your trumpet!

No, that won’t do: it’s sillier than Martial at his silliest, and with too much detail sacrificed. The tombs in the original deserve to be preserved: there’s much to be said for a graveyard assignation. He’ll have another run at it later. Maybe he should take a crack at the one about the cherry versus the prune. .

Jorrie elbows him sharply. “You’re falling asleep!” she hisses. Tin comes to with a start. Hastily he consults the pamphlet that outlines the order of events, with Gavin’s photo glowering magisterially from its black border. Where are they in the timeline? Have the grandchildren sung? Apparently so: not even some lugubrious hymn, but, oh horrors — “My Way.” Whoever proposed that should be flogged, but luckily Tin himself was zoned out during it.

The grown-up son is now reading, not from the Bible, but from the oeuvre of the deceased troubadour himself: a late poem about leaves in a pool.

Maria skims the dying leaves.

Are they souls? Is one of them my soul?

Is she the Angel of Death, with her dark hair,

with her darkness, come to gather me in?

Faded wandering soul, eddying in this cold pool,

So long the accomplice of that fool, my body,

Where will you land? On what bare shore?

Will you be nothing but a dead leaf? Or. .

Ah. The poem’s unfinished: Gavin had died while writing it. The pathos of it all, thinks Tin. No wonder there are repressed weeping noises rising around him like spring frog-song. Still, when further refined, the poem could have yielded a passable result, apart from its ill-concealed rip-off of the dying Emperor Hadrian’s address to his own wandering soul. Though possibly not rip-off: allusion is how a well-disposed critic would frame it. That Gavin Putnam knew Hadrian well enough to steal from him has improved Tin’s view of the expired versifier considerably. As a poet, that is; not as a person.

“Animula, vagula, blandula,” he recites under his breath. “Hospes comesque corporis/Quae nunc abibis in loca/Pallidula, rigida, nudula/Nec, ut soles. Dabis iocos. .” Hard to put it better. Though many have tried.

There’s an interlude of silent meditation, during which they’re all invited to close their eyes and reflect on their rich and rewarding friendship with their no longer present colleague and companion, and on what that friendship meant to them personally. Jorrie digs Tin with her elbow again. What fun this will be to recall afterwards! that dig is saying.

The next funeral baked meat treat is not long in coming. One of the less successful Riverboat-era folksingers, much bewrinkled and with a straggling goatee that looks like the underside of a centipede, arises to favour them with a song from the period: “Mister Tambourine Man.” A curious choice, as the folkie himself admits before singing it. But this isn’t about being, like, mournful, right? It’s about celebration! And I know Gav’s probably listening in right now, and he’s tapping his foot in joy! Hey up there, buddy! We’re waving at you!

Choking sounds from here and there in the room. Spare us, Tin sighs. Beside him, Jorrie is shaking. Is it grief or mirth? He can’t look at her: if it’s mirth they will both giggle, and that could prove embarrassing because Jorrie might not be able to stop.

Next there’s a eulogy, spoken by a criminally pretty coffee-skinned young woman in high boots and a bright shawl. She introduces herself — Naveena something — as a scholar of the poet’s work. Then she says she wants to share the fact that, although she met Mr. Putnam only on the last day of his life, the experience of his compassionate personality and his contagious love of life had been deeply moving for her, and she is so grateful to Mrs. Putnam — Reynolds — for making this possible, and though she has lost Mr. Putnam, she has made a new friend in Reynolds through this terrible ordeal they have gone through together, and she is just glad she hadn’t left Florida on the day it happened, and was able to be there for Reynolds, and she is sure everyone in the room will join her in sending warm wishes to Reynolds at this tragic and difficult time, and. . tremulous breakdown of the voice. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I wanted to say more, about, you know, the poetry, but I. .” She hurries from the stage in tears.

Touching little creature.

Tin consults his watch.

At last, the final musical number. It’s “Fare Thee Well,” a traditional folk song said to have been inspirational to Gavin Putnam when he was writing his now-famous first collection, Heavy Moonlight. A copper-haired young man who can’t be more than eighteen stands on the stage to sing it for them, backed up by two lads with guitars.

Fare thee well, my own true love,

And farewell for a while;

I’m going away, but I’ll be back

If I go ten thousand miles.

That will do it every time: the promise to return, coupled with the certain knowledge that no return is possible. The singer’s quavering tenor fades away, followed by a fusillade of sobbing and coughs. Tin feels a nuzzling against his jacket sleeve. “Oh, Tin,” says Jorrie.

He told her to bring a handkerchief, but of course she didn’t. He digs out his own handkerchief and hands it to her.

Now there’s a murmuring, a rustling, a rising, a mingling. There will be an open bar in the Salon and refreshments in the West Hall, they are informed. There’s a discreet stampede of footsteps.

“Where’s the washroom?” says Jorrie. She’s blotted her face, inexpertly: there’s mascara running down her cheeks. Tin recovers his handkerchief and dabs away the black smudges as best he can. “Will you wait outside for me?” she asks plaintively.

“I’m heading there myself,” says Tin. “I’ll meet you at the bar.”

“Just don’t take all day,” says Jorrie. “I need to get out of this henhouse.” She’s waxing querulous: her blood sugar must be down. In the fracas of preparation, they forgot to have lunch. He’ll funnel some alcohol into her for a quick lift and steer her over to the crustless sandwiches. Then, after a lemon square or two, for what is a funerary occasion without a lemon square, they’ll skedaddle out the door.

In the Men’s he runs into Seth MacDonald, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Languages at Princeton and the celebrated translator of the Orphic Hymns and, as it turns out, an old acquaintance of Gavin Putnam. Not professionally, no, but they’d been on a Mediterranean cruise together — “Hotspots of the Ancient World” — where they’d got on well and had followed up with a correspondence over the past few years. Commiserations are exchanged; Tin does some routine prevarication and invents a reason for his own presence.

“We were both interested in Hadrian,” he says.

“Ah, yes,” says Seth. “Yes. I noticed the allusion. Skilfully done.”

The unexpected delay means that Jorrie makes it out of the washroom before Tin does. He should never have let her out of his sight! She’s gone to town with the sparkly metallic bronzer, and on top of that she’s applied something else: a coating of large, glittering, golden flakes. She looks like a sequined leather handbag. She must have smuggled these supplies in her purse: payback for his redaction of the shocking-pink Chanel. Of course she hasn’t been able to take in the full effect of her applications in the washroom mirror: she wouldn’t have been wearing her reading glasses.

“What have you. .” he begins. She shoots him a glare: Don’t you dare! She’s right: it’s too late now.

He grasps her elbow. “Forward the Light Brigade,” he says.

“What?”

“Let’s get a drink.”

Inexpensive but passable white wines in hand, they head for the refreshments table. As they near the crowd surrounding it, Jorrie stiffens. “With the third wife, look! There she is!” she says. She’s quivering all over.

“Who?” says Tin, knowing all too well. It’s the gorgon What’s-her-name — C. W. Starr in person, recognizable from her newspaper photos. A short, white-haired old lady in a frumpy quilted coat. No glitter powder on her; in fact, no hint of makeup at all.

“She doesn’t recognize me!” Jorrie whispers. Now she’s bubbling with merriment. Who would recognize you, thinks Tin, with that layer of stucco and dragon scales on your face? “She looked right at me! Come on, let’s eavesdrop!” Shades of their childhood snooping. She tugs him forward.

“No, Jorrie,” he says, as if to a poorly trained terrier. But it’s no use; onward she plunges, straining at the invisible leash he’s failing to tighten around her neck.

Constance W. Starr is clutching an egg salad sandwich in one hand and a glass of water in the other. She looks beleaguered and wary. To her right must be the bereaved widow, Reynolds Putnam, in chaste blue and pearls. She is indeed quite young. She doesn’t look overly afflicted, but then, time has passed since the actual death. To the right of Mrs. Putnam is Naveena, the fetching young devotee who’d broken down while delivering her funeral oration. She appears to have recovered completely, and is holding forth.

But not on the subject of Gavin Putnam and his deathless verbiage. As Tin attunes himself to her flattish Midwestern speech, he realizes that she’s effusing over the Alphinland series. Constance W. Starr takes a bite of her sandwich: she’s probably heard this kind of thing before.

“The Curse of Frenosia,” Naveena is saying. “Book Four. That was so. . with the bees, and the Scarlet Sorceress of Ruptous walled up in the stone beehive! It’s such a. .”

There’s a space to the left of the renowned authoress, and Jorrie slides herself into it. Her hand locks on to Tin’s arm. Her head pokes forward, in an attitude of rapt listening. Is she going to pose as a fan? Tin wonders. What’s she up to?

“Book Three,” says Constance W. Starr. “Frenosia first appears in Book Three. Not Book Four.” She takes another bite and chews imperturbably.

“Oh, of course, Book Three,” says Naveena. She gives a nervous titter. “And Mr. Putnam said, he said you’d put him into the series. When you were out of the room, getting the tea,” she says to Reynolds. “He told me that.”

Reynolds’s face has hardened: this is poaching on her territory. “Are you sure?” she says. “He always denied specifically. .”

“He said there were a lot of things he never told you,” says Naveena. “To spare your feelings. He didn’t want you to feel left out because you weren’t in Alphinland yourself.”

“You’re lying!” says Reynolds. “He always told me everything! He thought Alphinland was drivel!”

“Actually,” says Constance, “I did put Gavin into Alphinland.” So far she hasn’t acknowledged the presence of Jorrie, but now she turns and looks at her directly. “To keep him safe.”

“This is inappropriate,” says Reynolds. “I think you should. .”

“And it did keep him safe,” says Constance. “He was in a wine cask. He slept for fifty years.”

“Oh, I knew it!” says Naveena. “I always knew he was in the series! Which book is that?”

Constance doesn’t answer her. She’s still talking to Jorrie. “But now I’ve let him out. So he can come and go whenever he likes. He’s not at risk from you any more.”

What’s the matter with Constance Starr? Tin wonders. Gavin Putnam, at risk from Jorrie? But he’d been the rejecting one, the harmful one. Is there vodka in that water glass?

“What?” says Jorrie. “Are you talking to me?” She’s squeezing Tin’s arm, but not to keep from laughing. Instead she looks frightened.

“Gavin is not in that fucking book! Gavin is dead,” says Reynolds. She’s beginning to cry. Naveena takes a small step towards her, but then moves back.

“He was at risk from your ill will, Marjorie,” says Constance, her voice level. “Coupled with your anger. It’s a very potent spell, you know. As long as his spirit still had a flesh container on this side, he was at risk.” She knows exactly who Jorrie is: despite the gold flakes and the bronze powder, she must have known from the first minute.

“Of course I was angry, because of what he did to me!” says Jorrie. “He threw me over, he kicked me out, like, like an old. .”

“Oh,” says Constance. There’s a frozen moment. “I didn’t realize that,” she says at last. “I thought it was the other way around. I thought you’d wounded him.” Is this a face-off? thinks Tin. Is this matter and anti-matter? Are the two of them going to explode each other?

“Is that what he said?” says Jorrie. “Shit, it figures! Of course he’d say it was my fault!”

“Oh my God,” Naveena says to Jorrie, sotto voce. “You’re the Dark Lady! Of the Sonnets! Could we maybe talk. .”

“This is supposed to be a funeral,” says Reynolds. “Not a conference! Gavin would hate this!” None of the other women shows any sign of having heard her. She blows her nose, gives a furious, red-eyed glare, then walks away towards the bar.

Constance W. Starr sticks the remains of her sandwich into her water glass; Jorrie stares at her as if she’s mixing a potion. “In that case, I’m honour-bound to release you,” Constance says finally. “I’ve been under a serious misapprehension.”

“What?” Jorrie almost screams. “Release me from what? What are you talking about?”

“From the stone beehive,” says Constance. “Where you’ve been imprisoned for such a long time, and stung by indigo bees. As a punishment. And to keep you from hurting Gavin.”

“She’s the Scarlet Sorceress of Ruptous!” says Naveena. “This is so wicked! Could you tell me. .” Constance continues to ignore her.

“I’m sorry about the bees,” she says to Jorrie. “That must have been very painful.”

Tin grips Jorrie’s elbow and attempts to pull her back. It wouldn’t be out of the question for her to jump into tantrum mode and kick the old authoress on the shins, or at the very least start yelling. He needs to extract her. They’ll go home and he’ll pour them each a stiff drink and he’ll calm her down, and then they can make fun of this whole thing.

But Jorrie doesn’t move, though she lets go of Tin’s arm. “It was very painful,” she whispers. “It’s been so painful. Everything has been so painful, all my life.” Is she crying? Yes: real, metallic tears, sparkling with bronze and gold.

“It was painful for me too,” says Constance.

“I know,” says Jorrie. The two of them are gazing into each other’s eyes, locked in some kind of impenetrable mind-meld.

“We live in two places,” says Constance. “There isn’t any past in Alphinland. There isn’t any time. But there’s time here, where we are now. We still have a little time left.”

“Yes,” says Jorrie. “It’s time. I’m sorry too. And I release you as well.”

She steps forward. Is this a hug? thinks Tin. Are they embracing, or wrestling? Is there a crisis? How can he help? What sort of female weirdness is going on?

He feels stupid. Has he understood nothing about Jorrie, all these decades? Does she have other layers, other powers? Dimensions he never suspected?

Constance has pulled back. “Bless you,” she says to Jorrie. The white parchment skin of her face is glittering now with golden scales.

Young Naveena can scarcely believe her luck. Her mouth’s half open, she’s biting the tips of her fingers, she’s holding her breath. She’s embedding us in amber, thinks Tin. Like ancient insects. Preserving us forever. In amber beads, in amber words. Right before our eyes.