Changewind Moon

Cheryl was in a rut.

Her job was more like a bad habit, a place she went to daily because it was what she had always done, her paycheck a guilty secret, the all-too-quickly fading rush that was the reason for the filthy vice of her job, the mind-numbing, will-sapping daily ritual the led her on a downward spiral of degradation that would eventually kill her as surely as knife to the ribs.

And if her job could be likened to a killing addiction, how much more so could her relationship to Donald?

Of course, to an outsider her life was not so bad. She had a good apartment in a good part of town, a well-paying job in a respected firm, and a boyfriend who showed all the signs of becoming a fiancé before the month was out. All a girl could ask for, right?

But her job took most of her time and energy, and Donald took the rest, so that she had none left over to take care of herself, much less to pursue her secret, innermost dream, the dream she rarely admitted even to herself. Inside, deep, deep inside, she was a poet. But the world, her father, Donald, everyone she knew hated the Poet. Sure, in English class Poetry was lauded and taught as a high ideal, but in this enlightened age the poet was a vagabond, a disreputable character of questionable morals, a slacker unwilling to do real work, a lazy bum. It was okay to have a soul that burned with passion for an art that most saw with slight disdain as archaic at best, and at worst as a kind of childhood brain fever to be endured, healed, and left behind with fading memories of chicken pox and measles, but to devote her life to it was certifiable. So she was told, anyway, and she believed it in the same way anyone believes what she has been told with the daily regularity of a clock chime since childhood — guiltily, with the understanding that something is wrong, but as deeply and thoroughly as she believes her own name.

Be a poet, said her father and all the guidance councilors of the twentieth century, but have a good job first. Build a family first. Make sure your feet are on the ground first, then go woolgathering in your spare time.

“In my spare time,” she thought ruefully. I don’t have enough spare time to keep a goldfish, much less a dream.

And with that thought she bent over her keyboard, transcribing the memo her boss had dictated to her, and gave her dream no more thought that day than she did to the predictions of an approaching storm she had heard on the radio on her coffee break.

* * *

Walking the two blocks from the subway station to her apartment, she noticed the wind had suddenly sprung up, hurtling down the narrow streets like whitewater rapids through a rock-strewn cataract, throwing newspapers and debris into a tizzy, rushing bag ladies along like a truculent policeman, bringing such wild assortment smells to her nostrils she felt like a tourist in a foreign market.

Changewinds, she thought. My grandmother would have called these changewinds. Her eyes teared momentarily as she recalled her grandmother, that last person that had ever encouraged her in her dream.

“You are a poet,” she had said, looking Cheryl deep in the eyes, reading something there that Cheryl could never see herself. “Ignore that at your peril. You can do whatever you like, do what that fool of a son of mine tells you, if you like, but that will never change what you are. I know what they tell you, but listen to me: they are wrong. I love my son, but he’s not doing his duty by you as your father. He only knows himself, and has never taken that plodding mind of his off his business long enough to see the fire beating in his daughter’s heart. He might be able to control what you do, Cheryl, but not what you are. And you are a poet.”

And then, a week later she had died, and her father had called her senile, and everything he told her had seemed more real than her grandmother’s earnest encouragements, and she had settled into the plodding, earth-bound life he had laid out for her, and her spiral-bound notebooks of heart-felt verse had gone into a box with her teddy bear and her rock posters, and she Got On With Life.
And it wasn’t until she got a face-full of this foreign-born Changewind that she remembered any of this, and she felt her pulse quicken and her blood rise to her face and her hair rise in electrically-charged lashings as the wind chaffed her and buffeted her on her winding way through the crowded sidewalk to her home.

“Winds like this,” her grandmother used to say, “winds like this bring change. They come when they’re most needed and least expected, and they sweep the cobwebs out of your attic, and throw the cherished piles of memories and meanings into disarray, and child, when the changewinds blow you never know what they're going to bring.”

Cheryl liked the way her grandmother had talked. Poetry, she thought.

As she climbed, trudgingly, up the stairs to her apartment, eddies of wind followed her up, seeming to race her, skipping two and three steps and entire floors, wrapping her hair around her face and lifting her skirt seductively as she traversed the prosaic hallway she had walked a thousand times before, whistling under the door she had opened twice a day or more for a year, moaning in some crevice or chimney like a mad wolf calling distantly, distantly, an echo of wildness.

The first thing she noticed as she set down her briefcase and fumbled in her purse for her keys was that there was a cold light coming from beneath her door.

As she stared, and distantly wondered whether she had left it on that morning, she noticed that most of the dust the vagrant wind was tossing around the hall seemed to be headed straight for that same crack she was watching and wondering about. Must have left a window open, too, she thought. What’s wrong with me today?

She found her keys and unlocked her door, tugging against the unexpected air pressure that seemed to want to keep her from entering at first, and then to suck her in as soon as she had got the door partway open. Once inside, she stood, gaping at the unexpected sight that greeted her, the briefcase forgotten where it lay toppled in the hall, the errant wind blowing months of hallway dust past her, into the room, and out the open window before her, white gauze curtains billowing Gothically into the night. There, in a pool of light cast by her desk lamp, her childhood teddy bear nestled comfortably in his lap, one of her notebooks folded back on itself in one had and a half-eaten sandwich in the other, was a man dressed all in black, right down to smudges of black greasepaint like a football player’s warpaint. He was munching raptly on the sandwich and reading her poetry, ignoring her dramatic entrance, and, as she watched, a dollop of mayonnaise extricated it from the sandwich and fell to its death on her carpet.

“Excuse me,” she said, somewhat shaken by this apparition, an apparent burglar in her apartment reading her secret, forgotten writing, eating her food, and, most infuriatingly, pointedly ignoring her.

And he spoke, not in response to her, but to read aloud what was apparently a particularly delightful verse, and when he spoke Cheryl felt a shiver run her spine. She had never heard her poetry read aloud before, and his voice was a deep, warm, somehow charged voice, and hearing her own words gave her an eerie feeling of being in two places at once.

“Ah, desperate criminal, Love,
Frantically fleeing some unworthy assailant,
Furtively hiding in a passing glance, 
A sigh,
Holed up in a smile 
While the smoke of hastily-drawn cigarettes encircles his head, 
Awaiting a first glimpse of the Heat.”

He looked up at her at last. “This is amazing,” he said, his coal-dark eyes taking her in with a look that intimated that she could hold no secrets, no sacred lies before his gaze.

Cheryl tried to remember who she was, where she was, what her rights were.

“Who are you,” she asked, “and what are you doing in my apartment?”

“Ah,” he said, “therein lies the story. But won’t you come in? It is your home, after all.”

Startled, Cheryl stepped inside, retrieving her fallen briefcase and closing the door.

“To begin with,” the burglar said as soon as she looked at him again, dazed but somehow not frightened. It’s the Changewinds, she thought.

“To begin with,” he said again, “you were supposed to be Irma Appelbaum. My sources tell me she’s out of town visiting a sick relative, and had recently inherited a number of priceless heirlooms, including a certain piece of jewelry I had my eye on. Unfortunately, I got somewhat turned around in this confounding wind and wound up prying up your window by mistake.” Here he paused to take another bite of the sandwich. Cheryl wondered briefly if she was dreaming, but knew she was not.

“Of course,” he continued, “I knew my mistake at once. Mrs. Appelbaum’s decor is markedly different. Late Aging Widow rather than Early Struggling Poet, you might say.”

“I’m not—” A poet, she started to protest, but she remembered her grandmother’s words and kept silent. The stranger continued as if he hadn’t heard.

“But I believe firmly in serendipity, and in my experience there is no accident that doesn’t carry within it the potential for gain, so I looked around. My first discovery was the making of dinner,” he said, waving the remnants of his sandwich toward her, “and I thought that might be all I was going to get out of this apartment. But then I found myself drawn to that box under your bed. In it I found this wonderful teddy bear here in my lap,” and he jogged his knees up and down like a father playing horsey with a small infant, and the stuffed animal tottered crazily and nearly fell before he stopped. 

“And,” he went on, arching one eyebrow like a melodrama villain, “the collected works of one Cheryl Scribner, the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Listen to this:”

Again he read from the notebook, and Cheryl felt her stomach clutch as she recognized just which one he was reading. This was so...personal, yet she didn’t feel embarrassed, or violated. Why wasn’t she more afraid of this burglar in her apartment? Why was it she felt...expectant?

“In the brief, midwinter stillness
Of the lapse between thoughts,
Sudden, bright, like the nova at the end of the world
Came a brittle, happy vision
Of your smile.”

“Who did you write these for?” he asked. “Surely not Donald.”

“I don’t have to answer that,” she said. “get out of my apartment.” But that’s not what she wanted, was it? Was she longing so desperately for someone to share with that she’d consider sharing with this burglar? “Get out,” she said again, a little less sure of herself, but instead he merely turned a page and started again to read.

"Help me, she cried, and no one came
Except her tormentor. 
Shivers ran through her frame
As he approached her.
Please, she cried, Don’t do this to me—
Help, she screamed, she made a plea
For mercy.
Rape, she screamed, I’m being attacked,
But the passing drivers never looked back.
There were eyes at the windows, but no one came,
Except him.
Now is the time, she began to recite,
For all good men, she’d heard it before,
To come to the aid
Of a lady.
But no one came,
And eventually he left,
And she had to walk home
Alone."

Now he looked up, and for the first time seemed to see her, how she still stood stiffly in the doorway, one hand clutching the handle of her briefcase, the other holding the lapels of her dun-colored wool coat shut as if to keep out the cold. Her hair, nest now for the wind-rats, stood out at odd angles, tendrils of it whipped past her face as if yearning for the escape of the open window. As he looked, his own eyes, green as spring grass, mirrored the pain he saw in hers. He pulled his black watchcap off, revealing a tangle of copper-wire curls almost as unruly as her more muted auburn ones.

“Oh, God,” he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—I didn’t mean—”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, and slid, gracelessly, to sit on the floor in a heap.

He stood up, alarmed, dropping the last of the sandwich and the notebook in his haste to ... what? To do something. 

She waved him away as he came near. “What’d you expect?” she asked. “That I’d be happy to have an intruder break into my home and start reading through my most...intimate, my private... my heart?” She realized she was getting incoherent now, but she found she just couldn’t stop herself from going on.

“How dare you come in here, when I’d already given up, when I’d settled, when I’ve already grown up and taken the responsible path, how dare you come in here without so much as a by-your-leave and tell me I’m a goddam' poet?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, intending to go on, intending to tell him how much she hated him, intending to drive him out of her apartment and out of her life with the sheer force of her will alone, but when she saw him, mouth comically agape in impotent surprise, she could only laugh. “Look at yourself,” she said, and gave a strangled half-chuckle. In a minute she knew it was a mistake, for with even that most innocent of emotional release her floodgates cracked, and a steady stream of bitter tears began to spew forth, until all restraint crumbled and she found herself helplessly sobbing and moaning, rolling on the floor in an agony of misery repressed over twenty years or more of “act your age” and “stiff upper lip.”

The burglar, if anything, looked even more surprised and helpless, and awkwardly as any yogic stork bent to comfort her, to soothe her with meaningless shushes and there-theres. In her blind anguish she clutched at him as the only stable thing within reach, and within seconds she had soaked the shoulder of his black turtleneck, and there they sat, she sobbing and he soothing, for an hour or more, as she poured out the wordless heartaches of her life, and he ... he was there for her, though she didn't know his name.

Fortunately, human beings aren’t built to weep forever, and eventually her tears dried, and she sniffled, and gave a passing thought to how terrible she must look, and he moved some damp strands of hair from her eyes and reflected on how lovely her tear-bright eyes were by the dim light of the reading lamp.

“What you must think of me,” she sniffled, “going to pieces like that in front of a complete stranger.”

“I make it a point to never judge a person to whom I’ve never been introduced,” he said, a bright smile contrasting the dark smudges under his eyes.

“I know you—most likely I know you better than Donald, whose name I gleaned form your journal, certainly better than your father, and, I’d bet, better than you know yourself. But, Cheryl, I have yet to introduce myself. My name is Jack Gideon.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jack,” she said with a smile of her own. “You appreciate the irony of this introduction, of course.”

“Of course,” he said. 

“What happens now?”

“You could turn me over to the police,” he said, “or you could give up all this.” He made a sweeping gesture that included her apartment, and also somehow her job and Donald. “And come away with me.”

Cheryl’s heart leapt at his words, and fear, elation, ire and ... something else vied for control of her heart. “Why on earth would I do a damfool’ thing like that?” she asked, unconsciously mimicking her father’s mode of speech.

In answer, he closed his eyes and recited:

“How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

She watched his face as he spoke, and the sincerity of the verse rang a deep note within her, and she suddenly felt more alive. When he was done he opened his eyes and looked into hers, and reached a hand to cup her cheek.

“That’s beautiful,” she breathed. “Did you write that?”

Slowly he shook his head, never removing his gaze from her tear-stained visage. “No, Yeats wrote that. I am not a Poet myself. I am, however, a much rarer thing in this day: I am one who loves the Poet. And you, my dear, are a Poet.”

And slowly, slowly, like glacier lovers parting on the Northern sea, he leaned, closed, grew towards her, and kissed her, and the kiss held fire, and the kiss held Magic, and the Kiss held Poetry.

“This is all I have to offer you, Lady,” he said, “and not a scrap of surety, not a steady paycheck, nothing but love of the pilgrim soul in you, and love of the Poet you are when you allow yourself to be.”

“You are everything I wanted,” she said, “and everything my father warned me against. 

"Let my life be now a verse, 
And my love a song, 
And let us walk dusky paths together, 
Swing drunkenly across rope bridges made of faeries’ hair
And love in the dewy grass on Midsummer’s Eve,
And never earn a penny in the name of Security,
And offend every right-thinking soul
In the great, dark, soul-sucking City
With our sloppy joy and sensual illumination,
Let our souls guide us
And our minds dream
And our hearts love,
As it should be.”

“What about Donald?” he asked from within her exuberant embrace.
“Donald who?”

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