Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(42)

Julian had tried to find a place there. But as a comic he wasn’t vicious enough to excite the crowd. And planted among the audience as a victim, he wasn’t strange or vulnerable enough to bring out the crowd’s bloodlust.

“If there’s something you won’t do for a laugh,” a four-hundred pound comedienne told him, “you got nothing to live for in this business.”

There were many things Julian would not do for a laugh. He decided to stick to his art.

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The apartment was empty when he returned, which was the only good thing that had happened all day. Julian lay on his futon, put his hands over his eyes, and tried not to cry. He was a failure. His father and stepmother lived in a tiny apartment since they’d lost their house and wouldn’t be happy to see him. But there was nowhere and no one else for him to go back to.

At various times during the year he had shared this apartment, Julian had brief, separate affairs with both the waitress/composer and the pedicab driver/dancer. But the waitress didn’t really go for guys and the driver wasn’t all that gay. It turned out the tour guide/

filmmaker could happily accommodate both of them. They formed an ensemble and tended to ignore Julian.

He was twenty-three with no present and no future. He wasn’t asleep, so it was in another of the daydream/visions that he saw a young guy about his age wearing knee pants and a wide, battered hat. He looked dumb and a bit confused. From a dimly remembered art history class, Julian guessed the historical period as maybe seventeenth century.

Then a voice right with him in the apartment said, “The young man who imagined himself to be my owner.” Julian focused his eyes and saw Puss before him, standing on his hind legs. The Cat wore— with considerable panache—ornate leather boots that came up to his hips, a sheathed sword, and a wide-brimmed cavalier hat with a white ostrich feather. Julian thought of the Three Musketeers. The Cat was now the height of a man.

Julian didn’t even ask how the Cat had gotten into the apartment.

He was pretty sure that he’d gone crazy in a kind of baroque-circa-1700 manner.

“You will not mind my coming in uninvited when I’ve done for you what I intend. You are an artist, yes?” asked the Cat, “you have drawings, photos, examples of your work?”

Julian shrugged. He indicated the black portfolio case leaning on the wall next to the futon. Since he was crazed and doomed anyway, it was easiest to go along with his hallucinations.

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“In your utter despair lies your complete acceptance of fate,” Puss murmured as he opened the case. “And in that acceptance you will find your triumph.” Julian watched impassively as the cat pulled out several sketches, some color collages: student work. He also found a headshot or two of the artist.

“These will do and will do nicely,” he announced and tucked them into a boot.

“Stupid, useless stuff,” Julian looked away.

“Simple! Na?ve!! Elegant in their lack of artifice!!!”

Puss strode to the door, turned and bowed. “All this I do in your service, monsieur.”

Julian heard the door click shut, sank back onto the futon, and fell into the vision-dream again. Except this time he saw it through his own eyes, felt it with his own skin.

He swam naked in a pond. The trees, the light looked like something out of a Watteau or Fragonard painting of a formal garden.

It reminded him of nightmares he’d had as a kid of showing up at school bare-assed.

A carriage pulled up and liveried servants rushed forward, pulled him out of the water and dressed him in finery. Puss was in the dream too, cat-sized but wearing the hat and boots and looking very pleased. Julian remembered the story of the miller’s son and his magical cat he’d read in his childhood.





3.


Few people on earth, and no one in New York, knew more about the Politics of Lunch than Angelica Siddons. Some said she attended as many as four luncheons in a single day. That was just spiteful rumor.

But it was she who decreed where each day’s significant lunch would be held and who would partake. A recent venue had been a pizza parlor in the Coney Island Safe Zone that had somehow stayed above water for a hundred years. “A darling little relic,” as a commentator noted.

Anywhere else on Earth, Angelica Siddons would have been a woman of considerable wealth and some influence. In the Big Apple/

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