The woman walked with quick steps through the city streets
while Tremolo the Tale-Teller lagged a few steps behind, the little black puppy
tramping along at his heels.
“Why do
you walk so quickly?” Tremolo objected as they passed under the shadow of a
spired church, “Tremolo can hardly keep up!” Strictly speaking, of course, this
wasn’t true; Tremolo kept up with a minimal effort, and at most his words
expressed a deep-seated distaste for any and all kinds of fast locomotion, and
more broadly of the expenditure of energy of any kind.
The
woman turned over her shoulder to smile slyly at Tremolo, perhaps increasing
her pace a little as she exposed teeth that glimmered white even in the growing
darkness. She said nothing. With an almost military precision she turned
forward once again, tossing her hair with a flourish as of a swishing cape.
“When
are you going to tell Tremolo why you were crying in the garden?” Tremolo
demanded, less out of any hope for an answer than because the punctuated
silence of the city streets filled him with horror. So much noise, he often
thought, and so little worth hearing.
“When
the time is right,” she said simply. She seemed to enjoy inflicting silence,
breaking it only as a kind of foil to deepen her abysmal quietude.
Tremolo
observed her walk fairly closely, as perhaps he cannot be blamed for doing.
Whereas in the Botanical Gardens she had moved circuitously, with faltering
steps and slow, she went now with an impressively direct stride, free and
vigorous and energetic, though with an oddly marked habit of keeping time with
her left hand as she went. Tremolo thought he could detect a note of
involuntary and perhaps even unconscious compulsion in the movement. One, two, three, one, two, three, the
hand hopped along with the rhythm of her step, as if it was a neighbor’s pet
that she kept watch on sometimes yet preferred to keep at some distance on the
leash.
Somewhere
near the rather abrupt transition from the city center to the more inward
neighborhoods frequented by students, malcontents, and the odd political
radical, she turned without warning into a large coffee shop by the street
corner. Tremolo read the name Under Grounds
Coffee Shop: Est. 1991 emblazoned in an arcane and slightly medieval script
of the entrance door’s window.
It was an old brick building, with
two stories, obviously converted into a coffee shop after some lengthy service
in some other kind of work. For no reason he could clearly define Tremolo
suspected it had once been a bakery, or perhaps a sort of laundry. He rushed up
the single stair after her only to feel a slight tugging at the leg of his
pants.
“Who dares to impede the progress
of Tremolo the Tale-Teller?” he demanded with probably quite a bit more fury
than he really felt as he turned around to find the source of his impediment.
The little dog looked up at him with its really quite enormous and moist and
expressive eyes, pulling impotently at his hem. It whimpered quietly, wagging
its tail for emphasis, and Tremolo was hardly able to stifle a feeling of pity,
or even (though he hated to dwell on it) a little warmth for the little
creature.
Not that Tremolo the Tale-Teller
was in the habit of feeling the least affection for any of his fellow
creatures, human or otherwise. He was quite adamant about this point, and so it
was purely out of a really disgusting self-interest that he plucked a few hairs
from his beard, knotted them into a length of string, and made the string into
a kind of leash to hold the dog to the bicycle rack. There was no genuine love
or altruism or fellow-feeling in the way he patted the puppy gently on the head
and fished a chicken bone out of his beard for it to gnaw on. There was not the
least trace of kindness or friendship or humanity in the way he stood up,
saying, “There, there, little buddy. Tremolo will be back for you quite soon.”
It should be repeated, lest the
reader forget: Tremolo the Tale-Teller is, was, and shall always be a hideous
monster. His only concern was, and remains to this day, to extract the most
varied and exquisite pleasures from those around him while inflicting the most
varied and exquisite pains upon them. He was and is not kind. He was and is not
loving. His heart was and is not open to goodness, friendship, and redemption.
Absolute cruelty was and remains his only language.
The reader is of course free to
judge Tremolo by appearances, but truth is truth, and its light (as we shall
see) has a way of penetrating even the most hidden of places.
But to return, Tremolo the
Tale-Teller left the little dog chewing at the chicken bone and walked into the
Under Grounds coffee house. By the time of his entrance, the woman had already
ordered her coffee, black and steaming, and sat with her legs crossed at a high
stool beside the wide window. Tremolo sat beside her, her dark eyes at once
probing and yielding, distant and oh-so-very near, actively searching and so
satisfyingly receptive.
Tremolo felt the need to tell her
she was beautiful, perhaps not classically so, but in some obscure way that set
his soul to vibrating. With her prominent nose and generous lips, with her long
hair and lissome figure, she impressed one with a kind of smallness and
frailty, a delicate fairy-like impression that would have attracted him but
never in itself led him to call her beautiful. After all, many others of the
same physical type had left him cold. No, what really impressed and ensnared
him was not her physical presence as such, but far more the almost regal,
authoritative way she held herself. She moved and kept her posture as one
accustomed to command, active always, as though born and bred for it. But this
in itself had also often left Tremolo not only cold but even actively repelled.
He was fascinated by the coincidence of opposites in her, the palpable tension
between form and substance, and if he hesitated to tell her she was beautiful
it was only because he’d learned that few women like to hear it, and still
fewer perhaps believe it when they are told.
Instead he took an indirect tack,
praising her moral qualities instead, “You know, it seems terribly appropriate,
drinking coffee late at night. Very American, very Protestant ethic, you know?”
She shot him a cynical look, “I’m
not a Protestant.”
“Not Catholic, surely? No, no, no,
you must be an atheist.”
“What else?”
“What else, indeed. But there’s
nothing so Protestant as atheism, don’t you think?”
Her eyes narrowed and Tremolo died
a little inside, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Tremolo grinned.
She shot him a piercing look, but
something like a smile flitted across her lips. She gave him a little more of
her seemingly infinite silence. At last she said, “You never asked me my name.”
“I already know your name.”
“No, you don’t.”
“So what if I don’t? Maybe I do.
And even if I don’t I still do. What really matters,” Tremolo observed, “Is
that you know your name.”
“You’re too transparent, Tremolo
the Tale-Teller. You’ll never get me to tell you my name without asking for it.
Not at this rate, anyway.”
“We’ll see,” Tremolo yawned, “Maybe
I don’t really want to know your name anyways.”
“You have an odd way of not wanting
to know, then, if you’re going to all this trouble about it.”
“There are a lot of names in the
world. Remember that.”
She shook her head, smiled, sipped her
coffee, and gifted him a little more of her silence. “All right, Tremolo the
Tale-Teller,” she said at last, “I’m ready to tell you why I was crying under
that tree.”
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