I decide not to share this with Shirley. I knew her pretty well, but who knows what s going to offend a ghost? She doesn't wait for me to answer anyway.
"It's to remind us of Mystery" she says, "and that makes it both a Gift and a Curse."
She's talking like Pooh in the Milne books, her inflection setting capital letters at the beginning of certain words. I've never been able to figure out how she does that. I've never been able to figure out how she knows so much about books, because I never even saw her read a newspaper all the time we were together.
"How so?" I ask.
"Grab an eyeful," she says. "Did you ever see anything so mysteriously beautiful? Just looking at it, really Considering it, has got to fill the most jaded spirit with awe."
I think about how ghosts have that trick down pretty good, too, but all I say is, "And what about the curse?"
"We all know it's just an oversized rock hanging there in he sky. We've sent men to walk around on it, left trash on its surface, photographed it and mapped it. We know what it weighs, its size, its gravitational influence. We've sucked all the Mystery out of it, but it still maintains its hold on our imaginations.
"No matter how much we try to deny it, that's where poetry and madness were born."
I still don't get the curse part of it, but Shirley's already turned away from this line of thought. I can almost see her ghostly mind unfolding a chart inside her head and plotting a new course for our conversation. She looks at me.
"What's more important?" she asks. "To be happy or to bring happiness to others?"
"I kind of like to think they go hand in hand," I tell her." That you can't really have one without the other."
"Then what have you forgotten?"
This is another side of Shirley I remember well. She gets into this one-hand-clapping mode, asking you simple stuff that gets more and more complicated the longer you think about it, but if you keep worrying at it, the way Rexy'll take on an old slipper, it gets back to being simple again. To get there, though, you have to work through a forest of words and images that can be far too zen-deep and confusing— especially when you're tired and your brain's in neutral the way mine is tonight.
"Is this part of the riddle you were talking about last night?" I ask.
She sort of smiles— lines crinkle around her eyes, fingers work the pocketed buttons, clickety-cliekety-click. There's a feeling in the air like there was last night just before she vanished, but this time I'm not looking away. I hear a car turn onto this block, its headbeams washing briefly over us, bright lights flicker, then it's dark again, with one solid flash of real deep dark just before my eyes adjust to the change in illumination.
Of course she's gone once I can see properly again and there's only me and Frank siring on the steps. I forget for a moment about where our relationship stands and reach out to give him a pat. I'm just trying to touch base with reality, I realize as I'm doing it, but that doesn't matter to him. He doesn't quite hiss as he gets up and jumps down to the sidewalk.
I watch him swagger off down the street, watch the empty pavement for a while longer, then finally I get up myself and go inside.
4
There's a wariness in Angel's features when I step into her Grasso Street office. It's a familiar look. I asked her about it once, and she was both precise and polite with her explanation: "Well, Maisie. Things just seem to get complicated whenever you're around."
It's nothing I plan.
Her office is a one-room walk-in storefront off Grasso Street, shabby in a genteel sort of way. She has a rack of filing cabinets along one wall, an old beat-up sofa with a matching chair by the bay window, a government surplus desk— one of those massive oak affairs with about ten million scratches and dents— a swivel chair behind the desk and a couple of matching oak straigthbacks sitting to one side. I remember thinking they looked like a pair I'd sold a few years ago to old man Kemps down the street, and it turns out that's where she picked them up.
A little table beside the filing cabinets holds a hot plate, a kettle, a bunch of mismatched mugs, a teapot and the various makings for coffee, hot chocolate and tea. The walls have cheerful posters— one from a travel agency that shows this wild New Orleans street scene where there's a carnival going on, one from a Jilly Coppercorn show— cutesy little flower fairies fluttering around in a junkyard.
I like the one of Bart Simpson best. I've never seen the show, but I don't think you have to to know what he's all about.
The nicest thing about the office is the front porch and steps that go down from it to the pavement. It's a great place from which to watch the traffic go by, vehicular and pedestrian, or just to hang out. No, that's not true. The nicest thing is Angel herself.
Her real name's Angelina Marceau, but everyone calls her Angel, partly on account of her name, I guess, but mostly because of the salvage work she does with street kids. The thing is, she looks like an angel. She tries to hide it with baggy pants and plain T-shirts and about as little makeup as you can get away with wearing and still not be considered a Baptist, but she's gorgeous. Heart-shaped face, hair to kill for— a long, ark waterfall that just seems to go forever down her back— and soft warm eyes that let you know straight-away that here's someone who genuinely cares about you. Not as a statistic to add to her list of rescued souls, but as an individual. A real person.
Unless she's giving you the suspicious once-over she's giving me as I come in. It's a look you have to earn, because normally she'll bend over backwards to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I have to admit there was a time when I'd push her, just to test the limits of her patience. It's not something I was particularly prone to, but we used to have a history of her trying to help me and me insisting I didn't need any help. We worked through all of that, eventually, but I keep finding myself in circumstances that make her feel as though I'm still testing the limits.
Like the time I punched out the booking agent at the Harbour Ritz my first day on the job that Angel had gotten for me at QMS.
I'm not the heartstopper that Angel is, but I do okay in the looks department. My best feature, I figure, is my hair. It's not as long as Angel's, but it's as thick. Jackie, the dispatch girl at QMS, says it reminds her of the way they all wore their hair in the sixties— did I mention that these folks are living in a time warp? I've never bothered to tell them that the sixties have been and gone, it's only the styles that are making yet another comeback.
Anyway, my hair's a nice shade of light golden brown and hangs halfway down my back. I do okay in the figure department, too, though I lean more towards Winona Ryder, say, than Kim Basinger. Still, I've had guys hit on me occasionally, especially these days, since I don't put out the impression that I'm some assistant baglady-in-training anymore.
The Harbour Ritz booking agent doesn't know any of this. He just sees a messenger girl delivering some documents and figures he'll give me a thrill. I guess he's either hard up, or figures anyone without his equipment between their legs is just dying to have him paw them, because that's what he does to me when I try to get him to sign for his envelope. He ushers me into his office and then closes the door, leans back against it and pulls me toward him.
What was I supposed to do? I just cocked back a fist and broke his nose.
Needless to say, he raised a stink, it's his word against mine, etcetera, etcetera. Except the folks at QMS turn out to be real supportive and Angel comes down on this guy like he's some used condom she's found stuck to the bottom of her shoe when she's walking through the Combat Zone. I keep my job, and don't get arrested for assault like the guy's threatening, but it's a messy situation right?