Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.
—William Wordsworth,
from “The World Is Too Much With Us”
The sword lies on the grass beside me, not so much a physical presence as an enchantment. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s too big to be real. I can’t imagine anyone being able to hold it comfortably, little say wield it. Looking at it is like looking through water, as though I’m lying at the bottom of a lake and everything’s slightly in motion, edges blurring. I can see the dark metal of the sword’s pommel and cross guard, the impossible length of the blade itself that seems to swallow the moonlight, the thong wrapped round and round the grip, its leather worn smooth and shiny in places.
I can almost believe it’s alive.
Whenever I study it, time gets swallowed up. I lose snatches of the night, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, time I don’t have to spare. I have to be finished before dawn. With an effort, I pull my gaze away and pick up the shovel once more. Hallowed ground. I don’t know how deep the grave should be. Four feet? Six feet? I’m just going to keep digging until I feel I’ve got it right.
Lucy Grey was a columnist and features writer for The Newford Sun, which was how she first found herself involved with the city’s gay community. Her editor, enamored with the most recent upsurge of interest in gay chic and all things androgynous, sent her down to the girl bars on Gracie Street to write an op-ed piece that grew into a Sunday feature. Steadfastly heterosexual in terms of who she’d actually sleep with, Lucy discovered she was gay in spirit, if not in practice. Sick of being harassed by guys, she could relax in the gay clubs, stepping it out and flirting with the other girls on the dance floor and never having to worry about how to go home alone at the end of the night.
Her new girlpals seemed to understand and she didn’t think anybody considered her a tease until one night, sitting in a cubical of a washroom in Neon Sister, she overheard herself being discussed by two women who’d come in to touch up their makeup. They were unaware of her presence.
“I don’t know,” one of them said. “There’s something about her that doesn’t ring true. It’s like after that piece she did in The Sun, now she’s researching a book—looking at us from the inside, but not really one of us.”
“Who, Lucy?” the other said.
Lucy recognized her friend Traci’s voice. It was Traci who befriended her the first night she hit Gracie Street and guided her through the club scene.
“Of course Lucy. She’s all look, but don’t touch.”
“Sounds more to me like you’re miffed because she won’t sleep with you.
“She doesn’t sleep with anybody.”
“So?”
“So she’s like an emotional tourist, passing through. You know what happens when the straights start hanging out in one of our clubs.”
It becomes a straight club, Lucy thought, having heard it all before. The difference, this time, was that the accusation was being directed at her and she wasn’t so sure that it was unfair. She wasn’t here just because she preferred the company of women, but to avoid men. It wasn’t that she disliked men, but that her intimacy with them never seemed to go beyond the bedroom. She was neither bisexual nor experimenting. She was simply confused and taking refuge in a club scene where she could still have a social life.
“You’re reading way too much into this,” Traci said. “It’s not like she’s seriously coming on to anyone. It’s just innocent flirting—everybody does it.”
“So you don’t want a piece of what she’s got?”
Traci laughed. “I’d set up house with her in a minute.” Sitting in the cubicle, Lucy found herself blushing furiously, especially when Traci added, “Long-term.”
“What you’re setting yourself up for is a broken heart.”
“I don’t think so,” Traci said. “I try to keep everything in perspective. If she just wants to be friends, that’s okay with me. And I kind of like her the way she is: social, but celibate.”
That was a description Lucy embraced wholeheartedly after that night because it seemed to perfectly sum up who she was.
Until she met Nina.
It all starts out innocently enough. Nina shows up at the North Star one night, looking just as sweet and lost as Traci said I did the first time she saw me on Gracie Street, trying to work up the nerve to go into one of the clubs. She has her hair cut above her ears like Sadie Benning and she’s wearing combat boots with her black jeans and white T-shirt, but she looks like a femme, and a shy one at that, so I take her under my wing.
Turns out she’s married, but it’s on the rocks. Maybe. There’s no real intimacy in their relationship—tell me about it. Thinks her husband’s getting some on the side, but she can’t swear to it. She’s not sure what she’s doing here, she just wants a night out, but she doesn’t want to play the usual games in the straight bars, so she comes here, but now that she’s here, she’s not sure what she’s doing here.
I tell her to relax. We dance some. We have a few drinks. By the time she goes home she’s flushing prettily and most of the shadows I saw haunting the backs of her eyes are gone.
We start to hang out together. In the clubs. Have lunch, dinner once. Not dates. We’re just girlpals, except after a few weeks I find myself thinking about her all the time, fixating on her. Not jealous. Not wondering where she is, or who she’s with. Just conversations we had running through my mind. Her face a familiar visitor to my mind’s eye. Her trim body.
Is this how it starts? I wonder. There’s no definition to what’s growing inside me, no “I used to like men, now I’m infatuated with a woman.” It’s just this swelling desire to be with her. To touch her. To bask in her smile. To know she’s thinking of me.
One night I’m driving her home and I don’t know how it happens, but we pull up in front of her apartment building and I’m leaning toward her and then our heads come together, our lips, our tongues. It’s like kissing a guy, only everything’s softer. Sweeter, somehow. We’re wrapped up against each other, hands fumbling, I’m caressing her hair, her neck, her shoulder—until suddenly she pulls away, breathless, like me, a surprised look of desire in her eyes, like me, but there’s something else there, too. Not shame. No, it felt too good. But confusion, yes. And uncertainty, for sure.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I know she’s been passing, just like me. Gay in spirit. We’ve talked about it. Lots of times.
“Don’t be,” she says. “It felt nice.”
I don’t say anything. I’m on pins and needles, not understanding the intensity of these feelings I have for her, for another woman, not wanting to scare her off, but knowing I want more. Nice doesn’t even begin to describe how it felt to me.
Nina sighs. “It’s just . . . confusing.”
This I understand.
“But it feels wrong?” I ask.
She nods. “Only not for the reason you’re probably thinking. It’s just . . . if I was sure Martin was cheating on me . . . that our marriage was over . . . I think it would be different. I wouldn’t feel like I was betraying him. I could do whatever I wanted, couldn’t I?”
“Do you still love him?”
“I don’t know,” Nina says. “If he’s cheating on me again, the way I think he is . . .” She gives me a lost look that makes me want to just take her in my arms once more, but I stay on my own side of the front seat. “Maybe,” she says in this small voice, her eyes so big and hopeful, “maybe you could find out for me . . . for us . . . .”
Nina shakes her head. “No. I was thinking more like . . . you could try to seduce him. Then we’d know.”
I don’t like the way this is going at all, but there’s a promise in Nina’s eyes now, a promise that if I do this thing for her, she’ll be mine. Not just for one night, but forever.
“You wouldn’t actually have to do anything,” she says. “You know, like sleep with him. We’d only have to take it far enough to see if he’s cheating on me.”
“I don’t know,” I tell her, doubt in my voice, but I can already feel myself giving in.
She nods slowly. “I guess it’s a pretty stupid idea,” she says. She looks away embarrassed. “God. I can’t believe I even asked you to do something like that.”
She leans forward and gives me a quick kiss, then draws back and starts to get out of the car.
“Wait a minute,” I say, catching hold of her arm. She lets me tug her back in the car. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. It’s just . . . we’d need a good plan, wouldn’t we? I mean, where would I even meet him in the first place?”
So we start to talk about it and before I know it, we’ve got the plan. She tells me where he goes after work for a drink on Fridays. We figure it’ll be best if she goes away somewhere for the weekend. We work everything out, sitting there in the front seat of my car, arms around each other. We kiss again before she finally leaves, a long deep kiss that has my head swimming, my body aching to be naked against hers. I don’t even consider second thoughts until I wake up alone in my own apartment the next morning and begin to realize what I’ve gotten myself into.
I remember the last thing she said before she got out of the car.
“If he is cheating on me . . . and he takes you to our apartment, could you do something for me before you leave?”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a sword hanging on the wall over the mantel. Could you take it with you back to your place?”
“A sword.”
She nodded. “Because if it’s over, I’m not ever going back to that place. I won’t ever want to see him again. But . . .” She gave me a look that melted my heart. “The sword’s the only thing I’d want to take away with me. It used to belong to my mother, you see . . . .”
I lie there in bed thinking about it until I have to get up to have a pee. When I’m washing my face at the basin, I study my reflection looking back at me, water dripping from her cheeks.
“Lucy,” I say to her. “What have we gotten ourselves into this time?”
It was a quiet night at Neon Sister, but it was still early, going on to eleven. Lucy saw Traci sitting by herself in one of the booths beside the dance floor. She was easy to spot with her shoulder-length dreadlocks, her coffee-colored skin accentuated by the white of her T-shirt. Lucy waited a moment to make sure Traci was alone, then crossed the dance floor and slid into the booth beside her. She ordered a drink from the waitress, but wasn’t in the mood to do more than sip from it after it arrived. There was always something about being in Traci’s calm, dark-eyed presence that made Lucy want to open up to her. She didn’t know what it was that usually stopped her, but tonight it wasn’t there.
“I’m not really gay, you know,” she said when the small talk between them died.
Traci smiled. “I know.”
“You do?”
Traci nodded. “But you’re not sure you’re straight, either. You don’t know who you are, do you?”
“I guess. Except now I’m starting to think maybe I am gay.”
“Has this got something to do with Nina?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“We’ve all been there before, Lucy.”
Lucy sighed. “So I think I’m ready to, you know, to find out who I really am, but I don’t think Nina is.”
“Welcome to that club as well.”
Lucy took another sip of her drink and looked out at the dance floor. An hour had passed and the club was starting to fill up. She brought her gaze back to Traci.
“Were you ever in love with a guy?” she asked.
Traci hesitated for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “A long time ago.”
“Does it feel any different—I mean, with a woman?”
“You mean inside?”
Lucy nodded.
“It doesn’t feel different,” Traci confirmed. She studied Lucy, her dark gaze more solemn than usual, before going on. “Straights always think it’s hard for us to come out—to the world—but it’s harder to come out to ourselves. Not because there’s anything wrong with what we are, but because we’re made to feel it’s wrong. I used to think that with the strides in gay rights over the past few years, it wouldn’t be like that anymore, but society still feeds us so much garbage that nothing much seems to have changed. You know what kept going around and around in my head when I was trying to figure myself out?”
Lucy shook her head.
“That old The Children’s Hour with Shirley MacLaine from the sixties—the one where she finds out she’s a lesbian and she kills herself. I was so ashamed of how I felt. Ashamed and confused.”
“I don’t feel ashamed,” Lucy said.
“But you do feel confused.”
Lucy nodded. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, here’s my two cents: Don’t be in a rush to work it out. Be honest—to yourself as well as to Nina—but take it slow.”
“And if I lose her?”
“Then it was never meant to be.” Traci gave her a wry smile. “Pretty lame, huh? But there’s always a grain of truth—even in populist crap like that. You wanna dance?”
Lucy thought about the night she’d overheard Traci and another woman discussing her in the washroom, thought about what Traci had said about her, thought about what she herself was feeling for Nina. Didn’t matter the combination of genders, she realized. Some things just didn’t change. She gave Traci a smile.
“Sure,” she said.
It was a slow dance. She and Traci had danced together many times before, but it felt different tonight. Tonight Lucy couldn’t stop focusing on the fact that it was a woman’s body moving so closely to hers, a woman’s arms around her. But then ever since kissing Nina last night, everything had felt different.
“Gay or straight,” Traci said, her voice soft in Lucy’s ear, “the hurt feels the same.”
Lucy nodded, then let her head rest against Traci’s once more. They were comforting each other, Lucy realized, but while Traci was offering more, the dance was all that Lucy had to give.
So I go ahead and do it. I meet Martin in Huxley’s, that yuppie bar across from Fitzhenry Park, and I flirt outrageously with him. Picking him up is so easy, I wish there was a prize for it. I’d collect big-time.
By the time we’ve had dinner, I’ve got enough on him to take back to Nina, but I’m curious now, about him, about where they live, and I can’t seem to break it off. Next thing I know I’m in their apartment, the same one I sat outside of a few nights ago, necking with his wife in the front seat of my car. Now I’m here with him, sitting on their couch, watching him make us drinks at the wet bar in the corner of the living room.
He comes back with a drink in each hand and gives me one. We toast each other, take a sip. This is seriously good brandy. I like it. I like him, too—not a man-woman kind of thing, but he seems like a nice guy. Except he cheats on his wife—whom I’m trying to get into my own bed. It’s time to go, I realize. Way past time to go. But then he floors me.
“So when did you meet Nina?” he asks.
I look at him, unable to hide my surprise. “How did you—” I break off before I get in too deep and take a steadying breath to try to regain my composure. It’s not easy with that pale blue gaze of his wryly regarding me. Earlier, it reminded me of Traci, kind of solemn and funny, all at the same time, like hers, but now there’s something unpleasant sitting in back of it—the same place the hurt sat in Nina’s eyes the night I first met her.
“She’s sent other people to get the sword, you know.”
I’ve been trying to avoid looking at it all night but now I can’t stop my gaze from going to it. I remember thinking how big it was when I first stepped into the living room and stole a glance at it. No way it was going to fit into my handbag. I’d given up the idea of walking out with it pretty quick.
“What story did she tell you?” Martin went on. “That it belonged to her grandmother and it’s the only thing she’s got left to remind her of the old bag?”
Not grandmother, I think. Mother. But I don’t say anything. One of the things I’ve learned working on the paper: If you can keep quiet, nine out of ten times the person you’re with will feel obliged to fill the silence. You’d be surprised the kinds of things they’ll tell you.
“Or did she tell you about the family curse,” he asks, “and how the sword has to be sheathed for it to end?”
I still say nothing.
“Or did she tell you the truth?”
This time he plays the waiting game until I finally ask, “So what is the truth?”
“Well, it’s all subjective, isn’t it?”
There’s an undercurrent of weirdness happening here that tells me it’s really time to go now. I take a good swig of the brandy to fortify myself, then pick up my jacket and slip it on.
“I don’t mean to sound so vague,” he says before I get up. “It’s just that, no matter what she’s told you, it’s only a piece of the truth. That’s what I mean about it all being subjective.”
I find myself nodding. What he’s saying is something I learned my first week at the paper: There’s no one thing called truth; just one’s individual take on it.
“We’re not married,” he says.
“Uh-huh. It’s kind of late for that line, isn’t it?”
“No, you don’t get it. She’s not even human. She’s this . . . this thing.”
His gaze shifts to the sword above the mantel, then returns to mine. I realize the unpleasant thing I see sitting in the back of his eyes is fear.
“What are you saying?” I ask.
“She really is under a curse, except it’s nothing like what she probably told you.”
“She didn’t say anything about a curse—except for being married to you.”
“The way things look,” Martin says, “I deserve that. But we’re really not married. I don’t have a hold over her. It’s the other way around. She scares the shit out of me.”
I shake my head. Considering the size of him and the size of her, I find that hard to believe.
“I met her a few years ago,” he explains. “At a party. I made her a promise, that I’d help her break the curse that’s on her, but I didn’t. I broke my promise and she’s been haunting me ever since.”
Curses. Haunting. It’s like he’s trying to tell me Nina’s a ghost. I’m beginning to wish that I’d just let it play out in the restaurant and gone on to my own place. By myself. Too late for that now. He’s still sitting there, looking at me all expectantly, and I have to admit that while I think it’s all a load of crock, I can’t seem to check my curiosity. It’s a bad habit I bring home from the office. It’s probably why I applied for the job in the first place.
“So what’s this curse?” I ask.
“She’s trapped in the shape of that sword,” he says, pointing to the mantel.
“Oh, please.”
Nina passing as gay I can buy—I’ve been doing it myself. But passing as human as well?
“Look. I know what it sounds like. But it’s true. She promised me a year of companionship—good company, great sex, whatever I wanted—and at the end of that year I had to fulfill my part of the bargain, but I couldn’t go through with it.”
“Which was?”
The only thing I’m really interested in now is how far he’ll take all of this.
“The sword once had a scabbard,” Martin says. “When it was sheathed, she could stay in human form. But the scabbard got lost or stolen or something—there was something enchanted about it as well. It kept its bearer free from all hurt and harm. Anyway, the way things are now, she can only be human for short bits of time before she has to return into the sword.”
I give him a noncommittal “Uh-huh.”
“The bargain I made,” he says, “was that I’d sheathe the sword for her at the end of the year, but I couldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have to sheathe it in myself.”
I sit up straighter. “What? You mean impale yourself on it—a kind of seppuku like the samurai used to do in Japan?”
He doesn’t answer me, but goes on instead. “See, for the curse to be broken, I have to believe that it’ll work while I do it. And I have to want to do it—you know, be a willing sacrifice. I can’t do either.”
I look at him, I read his fear, and realize that he really believes all of this.
“So why don’t you just get rid of the sword?” I ask, which seems reasonable enough to me.
“I’m scared to. I don’t know what’ll happen to me if I do.”
I think of Nina. I think of this big guy being scared of her and I have to shake my head.
“So . . . has Nina threatened you?”
He shakes his head. “No, she just stands there by the mantel, or at the foot of my bed, and looks at me. Haunts me. She won’t talk to me anymore, she doesn’t do anything but stare at me. It’s driving me crazy.”
Well, something sure is, I want to say. Instead I consider the sword, hanging up there on the wall. I try to imagine Nina’s—what? Spirit? Essence?—trapped in that long length of blade. I can’t even work up the pretense of belief.
“So give it to me,” I say.
He blinks in confusion, then shakes his head again. “No, I can’t do that. Something horrible will happen to me if I do.”
“I don’t think so,” I tell him. “Nina specifically asked me to take the sword with me when I left. You say she’s sent other people to get it. Doesn’t it seem obvious that all she wants is the sword? Give it to me and we’ll all be out of your life. Nina. The sword. Me.” Your sanity, I add to myself, though maybe a good shrink can help you get some of it back.
“I . . .”
He looks from me to the sword, torn. Then he comes to a decision. He gets up and fetches a blanket, wraps the sword in it and hands it to me.
“Look,” I say, staggering a little under its weight. “What you really should do is—”
“Just go,” he tells me.
He doesn’t physically throw me out, but it’s close. Truth is, he looks so freaked about what he’s doing that I’m happy to put as much distance as I can between us. I end up hauling the sword down to the street to where I parked my car. It won’t fit in the trunk, so I put it on the backseat. I look up at the window of the apartment above me. Martin’s turned all the lights off.
It’s weird, I think, sliding into the driver’s seat. He seemed so normal when I first picked him up in Huxley’s, but then he turned out to be loopier than anyone I’ve ever met on this side of the Zebrowski Institute’s doors. It just goes to show you. No wonder Nina wanted to leave him.
I stop at that thought, the car still in neutral. Except that wasn’t why she said she wanted to leave him. I look up at the darkened apartment again, this time through my windshield. Though now that I think about it, if I were in her position, I probably wouldn’t want to tell the truth about why I was leaving my husband either.
I shake my head. What a mess. Putting the car into gear, I drive myself home. I have a column due for the Monday paper and I don’t know what it’s going to be about yet. Still, I know this much—it won’t be about swords.
Nina really was out of town, so Lucy couldn’t call her. “I don’t want to lie to him,” she’d told Lucy. “That’d make me just as bad as he is.” What about Nina’s lying to her? Lucy wondered, but she knew she was willing to give Nina the benefit of the doubt, seeing how nuts her husband was. Besides, even if Nina wasn’t out of town, the only number Lucy had for her was the same as Martin’s—she’d looked his up as she was making herself a coffee on Sunday morning.
She’d left the sword where she’d dropped it last night—wrapped in its blanket on the floor in her hallway, right beside the front door—and hadn’t looked at it since. Didn’t want to look at it. It wasn’t that she believed any of Martin’s very weird story about the sword and Nina, so much as that something about the weapon gave her the creeps. No, that wasn’t quite right. It was more that thinking about it made her feel odd—as though the air had grown thicker, or the hardwood floor had gone slightly spongy underfoot. Better not to think of it.
Saturday, she did some grocery shopping, but she stayed in with a video on Saturday night. Sunday afternoon, she went in to the office and worked on Monday’s column—deciding to do a piece on cheap sources for fashion accessories. She finished it quickly and then spent a couple of hours trying to straighten out the mess on her desk without making any real noticeable progress. It was the story of her life. Sunday night, Nina called.
As soon as she recognized Nina’s voice, Lucy looked down the hall to where the sword still lay and thought of what Martin had told her.
“I’ve got the sword,” she said without any preamble. “It’s here at my place. Do you want to come by to pick it up?”
“And take it where?” Nina asked. “Back to Martin’s and my apartment?”
“Oh. I never thought of that. I guess you need to find a place to live first.”
She hesitated a moment, but before she could offer her own couch as a temporary measure, Nina was talking again.
“I can’t believe he just gave it to you,” she said. “Did he give you a hard time? Was . . . seducing him . . . was it horrible?”
“It didn’t go that far.”
“But still,” Nina said. “It couldn’t have been pleasant.”
“More like strange.”
“Strange how?”
Was there a new note in Nina’s voice? Lucy wondered. A hint of—what? Tension?
“Well, he hit on me just like you said he would,” she said. “He picked me up at Huxley’s after work, took me out for dinner and then back to—” she almost said “his” “—your place.”
“I guess I’m not surprised.”
“Anyway, as soon as we got to the apartment, almost the first thing he asked me was when I’d met you. Nina, he told me you guys were never married. He told me all kinds of weird things.”
There was a moment’s silence on the line, then Nina asked, “Did you believe him?”
“The stuff he was telling me was so crazy that I don’t know what to believe,” Lucy said. “But I want to believe you.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Nina said. “But not now. I’ve just got a few things to do and then I’ll come see you.”
Lucy could tell that Nina was about to hang up.
“What sort of things?” she asked, just to keep Nina on the line.
Nina laughed. “Oh you know. I just have to straighten my affairs, say goodbye to Martin, that kind of thing.”
Lucy found herself remembering Martin’s fear. Crazy as he was, the fear had been real. Why he should be scared of Nina, Lucy couldn’t begin to imagine, but he had been afraid.
“Listen,” she said, “you’re not going to—”
“I have to run,” Nina broke in. “I’ll call you soon.”
“—do anything crazy,” Lucy finished.
But she was talking to a dead line.
Lucy stared at the phone for a long moment before she finally cradled the receiver. A nervous prickle crept up her spine and the air seemed to thicken. She turned to look at the sword again. It was still where she’d left it, wrapped in Martin’s blanket, lying on the floor.
There’s no such thing as an enchanted sword, she told herself. She knew that. But ever since leaving Martin’s place last night there’d been a niggling little doubt in the back of her mind, a kind of “What if?” that she hadn’t been able to completely ignore or refute with logic. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen and whatever it was was connected to the sword and Martin. And to Nina.
She stood up quickly and fetched her car keys from the coffee table. Maybe it was stupid, worrying the way she was, but she had to know. Had to be sure that the boundaries of what could be and what could not still existed as they always had. She left so quickly, she was still buttoning up her jacket when she reached the street.
It took her fifteen minutes to get to the apartment where Nina and Martin lived. She parked at the curb across from the building and studied their place on the third floor. The windows were all dark. There was no one on the street except for a man at the far end of the block who was poking through a garbage can with a stick.
Lucy sat there for five minutes before she reluctantly pulled away. She cruised slowly through the neighborhood, looking for Nina’s familiar trim figure. Eventually the only thing left to do was drive back to her own apartment and wait for Nina to call. She sat up in bed with the telephone on the quilt beside her leg, trying to read because she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. After a while she phoned Traci, nervous the whole time that Nina was trying to get through while she was tying up the line. She told Traci everything, but it made no more sense to Traci than it did to her.
“Weird,” Traci said at last.
“Am I blowing this way out of proportion?” Lucy wanted to know.
She could almost feel Traci’s smile across the telephone line.
“Well, it is a bit much,” Traci said. “All this business with the sword and Nina. But I’ve always been one to trust my intuition. If you feel there’s something weird going on, then I’m willing to bet that there is—something on a more logical level than curses and hauntings, mind you.”
“So what do I do?”
Traci sighed. “Just what you’re doing: wait. What else can you do?”
“I know. It’s just . . .”
“You want some company?” Traci asked.
What Lucy wanted was Nina. She wanted to know that Martin had nothing to fear from her, that Nina wasn’t about to do something that was going to get her into serious trouble. But Traci couldn’t help her with any of that.
“No,” she told her friend. “I’ll be okay.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
“I will.”
Finally she drifted off with the lights on, sitting up against the headboard, the book still open on her lap. She dreamed that the sword lay on the other side of the bed, talking to her in a low murmuring voice that could have belonged to anybody. When she woke, she couldn’t remember what it had told her.
By nine o’clock, Monday morning, I’m a mess. Punchy from the weird dreams and getting so little sleep. Sick with worry. Nina still hasn’t called and I’m thinking the worst. It kind of surprises me that the worst I imagine isn’t that she’s done something to Martin, but that she doesn’t want to see me anymore.
I’m already late for work. I consider phoning in sick, but I know I can’t stay at home—I’m already bouncing off the walls—so I go in to the office. I know I can check my machine for messages from there and at least I’ll be able to find something to keep me busy.
I have this habit of going over the police reports file when I first get in. It’s kind of a gruesome practice, reading the list of break-ins, robberies, rapes, and the like that occurred the night before, but I can’t seem to shake it. It’s not even my beat; I usually get assigned the soft stories. I think maybe the reason I do it is that it’s a way of validating that, okay, so the city’s going down the tubes, but I’m still safe. I’m safe. The people I know and love are safe. This kind of horrible thing goes on, but it doesn’t really touch me. It’s fueled by the same impulse that makes us all slow down at accidents and follow the news. Sometimes I think we don’t so much want to be informed as have our own security validated.
This morning there’s a report of an apparent suicide on a street that sounds familiar. They don’t give the victim’s name, but the street’s all I need. Shit. It’s Martin. It says, Caucasian male did a jump from his third-story apartment window, but I know it’s Martin. The coroner’s still waiting for the autopsy report; the cops are pretty much ruling out foul play. But I know better, don’t I? Martin himself told me what’d happen if he got rid of the sword and he looked so terrified when I left his place Friday night.
But I still can’t believe it of Nina. I can’t believe all this crap he told me about her and the sword.
I’ve only been away from home for thirty-five minutes, but I immediately close the file and phone my apartment to check for messages. Nothing. Same as ten minutes ago—I called when I first got here.
There’s nothing all day.
I try to stick it out, but in the end I have to leave work early. I start for home, but wind up driving by the apartment—looking for Nina, I tell myself, but of course she wouldn’t be there, hanging around on the pavement where Martin hit. I know why I’m really doing this. Morbid curiosity. I look up at the windows, third floor. One of them’s been boarded up.
I go home. Shower. Change. Then I hit the bars on Gracie Street, looking for Nina. The North Star. Neon Sister. Girljock. Skirts. No sign of her. I start to check out the hardcore places, the jack-and-jill-off scenes and clubs where the rougher trade hangs out. Still nothing. The last place I go into this blonde leatherette in a black push-up bra and hot pants smiles at me. I start to smile back, but then she makes a V with her fingers and flicks her tongue through them. I escape back up the stairs that let me into the place. I’m not sure what I am anymore—gay, straight, what—but one thing I know is I’m still not into casual sex.
Once outside, I lean against the front of the building, feeling just as lost as I did the night Traci took me under her wing. I don’t know what to do anymore, where to turn. I start to look for a pay phone—I figure I can at least check my answering machine again—when someone grabs me by the arm. I yelp and pull free, but when I turn around, it’s Nina I find standing beside me—not the blonde from the club I just left.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to make you jump like that.”
She’s smiling, but I can see she really means it. She leans forward and gives me a kiss on the lips. I don’t know what to do, what to think. I’m so glad to see her, but so scared she had something to do with Martin’s death. Not magic mumbo-jumbo, nothing like that. Just plain she couldn’t take the shit from him anymore and it all got out of hand.
“Martin’s dead,” I say.
“I know. I was there.”
My breath catches in my throat. “You . . . you didn’t . . . ?”
I can’t get it out, but she knows what I’m asking. She shakes her head. Taking my arm, she leads me off down the street.
“I think we have to talk,” she tells me.
She leads me to my car, but I don’t feel like I’m in any condition to drive. I start to go to the passenger’s side.
“I can’t drive,” Nina tells me.
Right. So we sit there in my car, parked just off Gracie Street, looking out the windshield, not saying anything, not touching each other, just sitting there.
“What did he tell you about me?” Nina asks finally.
I look at her. Her face isn’t much more than a silhouette in the illumination thrown by the streetlights outside. After a few moments, I clear my throat and start to talk, finishing with, “Is it true?”
“Mostly.”
I don’t know what to say. I want to think she’s crazy but there’s nothing about her that I associate with craziness.
“Where did you go after you called me?” I ask instead.
Nina hesitates, then says, “To the lake. To talk to my sister.”
“Your sister?”
I hadn’t stopped to think of it before, but of course she’d have family. We all do. But then Nina pulls that piece of normal all out of shape as well.
“She’s one of the Ladies of the Lake,” she says. “Bound to her sword, just like me. Just like all of us.”
It’s my turn to hesitate. Do I really want to feed this fantasy? But then I ask, “How many are you?”
“Seven of us—for seven swords. My oldest sister is bound to the one you’d know best: Excalibur.”
I really have to struggle with what I’m hearing. I’d laugh, except Nina’s so damn serious.
“But,” I say. “When you’re talking about a Lady of the Lake . . . you mean like in Tennyson? King Arthur and all that stuff?”
Nina nods. “The stories are pretty close, but they miss a lot.”
I take a deep breath. “Okay. But that’s in England. What would your sister be doing here? What are you doing here?”
“All lakes are aspects of the First Lake,” Nina says. “Just as all forests remember the First Forest.”
I can only look blankly at her.
Nina sighs. “As all men and women remember First Man and First Woman. And the fall from grace.”
“You mean in Eden?”
Nina shakes her head. “Grace is what gives this world its worth, but there are always those who would steal it away, for the simple act of doing so. Grace shames a graceless people, so they strike out at it. Remember Martin told you about the scabbards that once protected our swords?”
“I guess. . . .”
“They had healing properties and when men realized that, they took the scabbards and broke them up, eliminating a little more of their grace and healing properties with each piece they took. That’s why I’m in my present predicament. Of the seven of us, only two still have their swords, kept safe in their scabbards. Three more still retain ownership of their swords. Ailine—my sister—and I don’t have even that. With our swords unsheathed, we’ve lost most of our freedom. We’re bound into the metal for longer and longer periods of time. A time will come, I suppose, when we’ll be trapped in the metal forever.”
She studies me for a long moment, then sighs again. “You don’t believe any of this, do you?”
I’m honest with her. “It’s hard.”
“Of course. It’s easy to forget marvels when your whole life you’re taught to ignore them.”
“It’s just—”
“Lucy,” Nina says. “I’ll make the same bargain with you that I made with Martin. I’ll stay with you for a year, but then you must hold up your side.”
I shake my head. I don’t even have to think about it.
“But you wanted to sleep with me,” Nina says. “You wanted my love.”
“But not like this. Not bargaining for it like it’s some kind of commodity. That’s not love.”
Nina looks away. “I see,” she says, her gaze locked on something I can’t see.
“Tell me what you’d want me to do,” I say.
Nina’s attention returns to me. “There’s no point. You don’t believe.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“You must take the sword inside yourself. You must do it willingly. And you must believe that by doing so, you are freeing me.”
“I just stick it into myself?”
“Something like that,” Nina says. “It would be clearer if you believed.”
“And what would happen to me?” I ask. “Would I die?”
“We all die, sooner or later.”
“I know that,” I say, impatiently. “But would I die from doing this?”
Nina shakes her head. “No. But you’d be changed.”
“Changed how?”
“I don’t know. It’s—” She hesitates, then plunges quickly on. “I’ve never heard of it being done before.”
“Oh.”
We look some more out the windshield. The street we’re on is pretty empty, cars parked, but not much traffic, vehicular or pedestrian. Over on Gracie we can see the nightlife’s still going strong. I want to ask her, Why didn’t you tell me the truth before? but I already know. I don’t believe her now so what difference would having heard it a few days earlier have made?
“Did you love Martin?” I ask instead. “I mean, at first.”
“I’m not sure what love is.”
I guess nobody really does, I think. Is what I’m feeling for Nina love? This feeling that’s still swelling inside me, under the confusion and jumpiness—is it love? People die for love. It happens. But surely they know when they make the sacrifice?
“I really didn’t kill him,” she tells me. “I went to the apartment—I’m not sure why or what I meant to do—and let myself in. When he saw me, he went crazy. He looked terrified. When I took a step closer, he threw himself out the window—straight through the glass and all. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t give me a chance to speak either.”
“He told me he was scared.”
Nina nods. “But I don’t know why. He had no reason to be scared of me. If I hadn’t harmed him in the two years since he failed to keep his side of our bargain, why should he think that I’d hurt him now?”
I have no answer to that. Only Martin could explain it, but he’d taken the secret with him on his three-story plunge to the pavement below his window.
“I should go,” Nina says then, but she makes no move to open the door.
“What about the sword?” I ask.
She turns to me. My eyes are adjusted enough to the vagaries of the lighting to see the expression on her face, but I can’t figure it out. Sadness? My own feelings returned? Fear? Maybe a mix of the three.
“Would you do this for me?” she asks. “Would you bury the sword—in hallowed ground?”
“You mean like in a churchyard?”
She shakes her head. “It will need an older hallowing than that. There is a place where the river meets the lake.”
I know where she’s talking about. The City Commission keeps the lawns perfectly groomed around there, but there’s this one spot right on the lake shore where a stand of old pines has been left to make a little wild acre. The trees there haven’t been touched since the city was first founded, back in the eighteenth century.
“Bury the sword there,” she tells me. “Tonight. Before the sun rises.”
I nod. “What’ll happen to you?”
“Ailine says it would let me sleep. Forever.” She smiles, but it doesn’t touch her eyes. “Or at least until someone digs it up again, I suppose.”
“I . . . I’d do this other thing,” I say, “but I’m too scared.”
She nods, understanding. “And you don’t believe.”
She says it without recrimination. And she doesn’t say anything at all about love, about how, to make the sacrifice willingly, I’d have to really love her. And she’s right. I don’t believe. And if I love her, I don’t love her enough.
She leans across the seat and gives me a kiss. I remember the last time she did this. There was so much promise. In her kiss. In her eyes. Now she’s only saying goodbye. I want to talk to her. I want to explain it all over again. But I just let her go. Out of the car. Down the street. Out of my life.
There’s a huge emptiness inside me after she’s gone. Maybe what hurts the most is the knowledge I hold that I can’t let go—that I love her, but I don’t love her enough. She asked too much of me, I tell myself, but I’m not sure if it’s something I really believe or if I’m trying to convince myself that it’s true to try and make myself feel better. It doesn’t work.
I drive home to get the sword. I unwrap it, there in my hall, and hold it in my hands, trying to get some sense of Nina from it. But it’s just metal. Eventually I wrap it up again and take it down to my car. I get a shovel from the toolshed behind the building. It belongs to the guy who lives on the ground floor, but I don’t think he’ll miss it. I’ll have it back before he even knows it’s gone.
And that’s how I get here, digging a grave for a sword in hallowed ground. I can hear the lake against the shore, the wind sighing in the pines above. I can’t hear the city at all, though it’s all around me. Hallowed ground—hallowed by something older than what I was taught about in Sunday school, I guess. Truth is, I turned into an agnostic since those long-ago innocent days. I was just a girl then, didn’t even know about sapphic impulses, little say think I might be feeling them.
It’s easier to dig in amongst the roots of these pines than I would have thought possible, but it still takes me a long time to get the grave dug. I keep stopping to listen to the wind and the sound of the lake, the waves lapping against the shore. I keep stopping to look at the sword and the minutes leak away in little fugue states. I don’t know where my mind goes. I just suddenly find myself blinking beside the grave, gaze locked on the long length of the sword. Thinking of Nina. Wanting to find the necessary belief and love to let me fill the emptiness I feel inside.
Finally it’s getting on to the dawn. The grave’s about four feet deep. It’s enough. I’m just putting things off now. It’s all so crazy—I know it’s crazy—but I can’t help but feel that it really is Nina I’m getting ready to lay in the hole and cover over with dirt.
I consider wrapping the sword back up again, but the blanket was Martin’s and somehow it doesn’t feel right. I pick the sword up and cradle it for a moment, as though I’m holding a child, a cold and still child with only one long limb. I touch the blade with a fingertip. It’s not particularly sharp. I study the tip of the blade in the moonlight. You’d have to really throw yourself on it for it to pierce the skin and impale you.
I think maybe Nina’s craziness is contagious. I find myself wishing I loved Nina enough to have done this thing for her, to believe, to trust, to be brave—crazy as it all is. I find myself sitting up, with the sword tip lying on my knees. I open my blouse and prop the sword up, lay the tip against my skin, between my breasts, just to see how it feels. I find myself leaning forward, putting pressure on the tip, looking down at where the metal presses against my skin.
I feel as though I’ve slipped into an altered state of consciousness. I look down to where the sword meets my skin and the point’s gone, it’s inside me, an inch, two inches. I don’t feel anything. There’s no pain. There’s no blood. There’s only this impossible moment like a miracle where the sword’s slipping inside me, more and more of its length, the harder I push against it. I’m bent almost double now and still it keeps going inside me, inch after inch. It doesn’t come out my back, it’s just being swallowed by my body. Finally I reach out with my hands, close my fingers around each side of the hilt, and push it up inside me, all the rest of the way.
And pass out.
When I come to, the air’s lighter. I can’t see the sun yet, but I can feel its light seeping through the trees. I can still hear the lake and the wind in the pines above me, but I can hear the traffic from the city, too.
I sit up. I look at the grave and the shovel. I look at the blanket. I look for the sword, but it’s gone. I lift my hands to my chest and feel the skin between my breasts. I remember the sword sliding into my chest last night, but the memory feels like a hallucinatory experience.
No, I tell myself. Believe. I hear Nina’s voice in my mind, hear her telling me, It’s easy to forget marvels when your whole life you’re taught to ignore them, and tell myself: Don’t invalidate a miracle because you’ve been taught they’re not real. Trust yourself. Trust the experience. And Nina. Trust Nina.
But she’s not here. My body might have swallowed the sword, impossibly sheathing the long length of its metal in my flesh, but she’s not here.
My fingers feel a bump on my skin and I look down to see I’ve got a new birthmark, equidistant from each of my breasts. It looks like a cross. Or a sword, standing on its point . . . .
I feel so calm. It seems as though I should be either freaking out completely or delirious with wonder and awe, but there’s only the calm. I sit there for a long time, running my finger across the bump of my new birthmark, then finally I button up my blouse. I fill the grave—this goes a lot quicker than digging it did—and cover up the raw dirt with pine needles. I wrap the shovel in my blanket and walk back to where I parked my car on Battersfield Road.
Traci has to know the whole story, of course, so I tell her everything. I don’t know how much she believes, but crazy as it all sounds, she believes that I believe, and that’s enough for her. I’m afraid of getting involved with her at first—afraid that I’m turning to her on the rebound from what I never quite had with Nina but certainly felt for her. But it doesn’t work that way. Or if I am rebounding, it’s in the right direction.
I remember Nina telling me that I’d be changed if I—I guess absorbed the sword is the best way to put it—but that she didn’t know how. I do now. It’s not a big thing. My world hasn’t changed—though I guess my view of it has to some degree. What’s happened is that I’m more decisive. I’ve taken control of my life. I’m not drifting anymore—either in my personal life or on the job. I don’t go for the safe, soft stories anymore. One person can’t do a whole lot about all the injustice in the world, but I’m making damn sure that people hear about it. That we all do what we can about it. I’m not looking for a Pulitzer; I just want to make sure that I leave things a little better behind me when I go.
Six months or so after Traci and I start living together, she turns to me one night and asks me why it didn’t disappoint me that Nina never came back to me after I did what she asked.
“It’s because I remember what she told me in that dream I had the night Martin died,” I explain. “You know, when I dreamed the sword was lying on the bed beside me and talking to me? I didn’t remember when I woke, but it came back to me a few days after I got back from the pine grove.”
Traci gives me a poke with her finger. “So aren’t you going to tell me?” she says when I’ve fallen silent.
I smile. “She said that if she was freed, she might not be able to come back. That really being human, instead of passing for one, might mean that she’d be starting her life all over again as an infant and she wouldn’t remember what had gone before.”
Now it’s Traci’s turn to fall silent. “Is that why you want us to have a kid?” she asks finally.
With modern medicine, anything’s possible, right? Or at least something as basic as artificial insemination.
“I like to think she’s waiting for us to get it together,” I say.
“So you’re planning on a girl.”
“Feels right to me.”
Traci reaches over and tracks the contour of my sword birthmark with a finger. “Think she’ll have one of these?”
“Does it matter?” I ask.
“Doesn’t matter at all,” Traci says. She rolls over to embrace me. “And I guess it means we don’t have to worry about what to name her either.”
I snuggle in close. I love finally knowing who I am; loving and being loved for who I am. I just hope that wherever and whenever Nina is reborn, she’ll be as lucky as I feel I am.