Mistress of the Runes Read online

  “Fund-raiser. I left early.”

  “—and you have a certain glow about you.”

  “I gave Liz Chase a ride home.”

  “The TV anchor? They don’t pay them well enough to afford a car or cab?” she said slyly, not having had a talk about my love life in quite some time and presumably relishing it since it allowed her to live vicariously—akin to experiencing childbirth without pregnancy. She drifted into the kitchen.

  “I’ll have coffee!” I called out.

  She appeared moments later and handed me a cup of tea, fully aware I wasn’t a tea drinker and not caring. If Madge drank tea, the world could drink tea. Her repertoire of guest formalities exhausted, she plopped down in her huge leather chair across from me. “So what’s Ms. Chase like? She’s attractive, I know that. I watch her on TV.”

  I took off my suit jacket, kicked off my heels, and curled up on the white couch across from the wall of R. C. Gorman prints of Native American women, which in my college days I had viewed as extremely erotic, their black, sleek locks blowing wildly in the wind. In contemplating the artwork, I had delayed too long for Madge, and she ordered me to speak up or go home. I recited the entire evening’s events, and she listened without interruption until I reached the scene at Turtle Creek when Liz’s hand brushed my breast.

  “What kind of a woman does that? She doesn’t even know you!” Madge was up on her feet pacing now as if she held the lead in Medea. “What if you called the station and reported her? She’s a fool to take that chance.”

  “She admitted that, but said—”

  “—that she’s crazy and you should stay away from her? I’m hoping that’s what she said!” She threw her arms up to the heavens in supplication of the unseen.

  “I intend to stay away from her.”

  “You have a lot to lose too, you know.”

  “I’m fully aware of that, Madge,” I said as she suddenly collapsed into her chair and picked up her tea.

  “Living with the dead makes you vulnerable,” she warned in a heartless attack on Clare. “If nothing else, this Liz Chase person has revived you. The blood’s all up in your head again. You’re excited. You’re nervous. You’re aware that you’re alive! What does that tell you about your life?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with my current relationship. You’ve just never thought Clare was right for me. You don’t see her as sexy,” I said dismissively.

  “That makes two of us then, doesn’t it?” She sipped her tea, eyeing me over the half lens of her glasses.

  I looked past her into the dimly lit garden. There was nothing more to say.

  *

  I returned that night to Clare’s elegant north Dallas estate, the house I shared with her but in which I’d never felt quite at home, in a neighborhood of the near famous whose mansions had undergone as many face-lifts as their occupants. After pulling into the three-car garage, I kept my car doors locked until the electric door was down, an odd safety precaution promoted by the local police, who seemed to think that if a burglar managed to slip into the garage before the door was fully down, it would be best for me to be locked in with him.

  My routine was so ingrained that my body could operate on automatic pilot while my mind did other things—enter the house, punch in the code to de-arm the alarm, toss my car keys on the counter, and wander down the long hall to the bedroom where the lights were already out—as my mind wondered what I was still doing here, in this house, in this moment, with this woman.

  As I slipped out of my suit and pulled on a silk nightshirt, I glanced at Clare, who was asleep. Crawling into bed with her, I started to draw myself in close to her back and wrap around her long, angular form, but she somehow sensed my presence and moved away, as if to make room for me, but I felt she was avoiding me.

  I’d been attracted to Clare’s aristocratic roots, her elitist friends, and of course to her talent as a cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra and now the Dallas Symphony. If I were honest with myself, she’d been attracted to my liberal leanings in a conservative city and to my status—a highly paid woman executive doing well in a man’s world. But now here we were with no executive suite, only our bedroom suite; no orchestra, only the music the two of us could make together. And if we listened honestly, the sound was cacophonous.

  I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her to talk to me. She groaned, letting me know she wasn’t interested. I knew it was rude to awaken her for mere conversation, but part of me said, like Rabbi Hillel, if not now, when? Clare was either in rehearsal at the Meyerson Symphony Center, in practice in the living room, or driving between the two.

  “We never really fell in love, you know. We merely got involved—ended up in bed together,” I said, starting in the middle of the long conversation I had been having in my head. I wanted to add that because of that emotional accident, a hereditary heterosexual DNA-imprinting had kicked in, and without analyzing it, we took the obligatory sequential steps: calling each other lover, moving in together, sharing property—a sort of self-inflicted shotgun wedding for the terminally gay.

  “Why are you waking me up?” She frowned, looking at the clock. “It’s past midnight.”

  “The way we are isn’t working,” I said quietly in my direct way. “You and I aren’t really connected. I feel alone. I might as well be living alone.”

  She studied me dispassionately. “Have you met someone?”

  “No. But I do think I’m vulnerable to meeting someone because we share so little.”

  She rose up on one elbow and pivoted slightly, addressing me over her shoulder. “I think we make a good team, actually.” She spoke in that removed way she talked about us.

  “Athletes make a good team. Horses make a good team. Lovers have to make more.” My tone was flat.

  “It’s the sex thing again, isn’t it? I don’t need it in my life the way you do.”

  “Sex is not an act. Sex is a language that communicates love for one another. That said, you and I haven’t spoken in a very long time.” I felt calm now. It was out.

  Clare paused for several beats, then turned her back to me and went to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  Nothing is by chance. I had forgotten that fact when I stumbled upon the yellow-bodied toy horse, with dark mane and tail, mounted on wheels like a miniature tricycle sitting on the junk-store shelf.

  It was a lazy Saturday, on the heels of the fund-raiser dinner, and having deserted high-style North Park shops in favor of funkier finds near Crossroads, I was trying to corral my emotional life back into the safety zone. I wasn’t sleeping well lately. Restless and irritable, I was trying to think about gardening or antiquing or anything I might do with my hands or my mind.

  “Well, look at you,” I said softly to the twenty-four-inch tricycle-horse as I hoisted it up into the air, allowing light from the dirty windowpanes across the store shelves to filter down on the horse and give it a surreal quality.

  “Hi!” Liz Chase popped up above the store shelves like a prairie dog. “Not stalking you—we’re here for a live shot,” she joked. Her sudden appearance in such an unexpected place caught me completely off guard. “Looks like an Icelandic horse. Now who would think you would like a horse from a cold place,” Liz said, the light dancing playfully in her eyes.

  “You should get a real horse,” the elderly shopkeeper interrupted us, and her ice blue eyes twinkled at me from behind the counter. She reminds me of someone, I thought. She looks worldly, as if she might have been in the theater in her youth.

  “I have absolutely no experience with horses,” I said, uncharacteristically shy now. “Just some vague middle-aged fantasy of riding effortlessly across rolling hills in a light wind, my hair blowing in the breeze like some Clairol girl on steroids.”

  The shopkeeper pulled her long silver ponytail around to the front of her shirt, stroking it and giving me a deliciously mischievous smile. “Then buy the toy horse,” she urged, casting her eyes on it. “It will take you places you’
ve only dreamed of!” And her voice was as melodic as wind chimes in a soft summer breeze.

  “All right, I will.” I made the decision almost as much to please this charming older woman as to please myself.

  She snapped her fingers in the air, in a little burst of glee. “You’ve made the right decision. Your journey begins! Horses always bespeak a journey.” And she took the horse, twirling away from me and swinging it through the air, the ebullient gesture breaking the rubber band on her long platinum locks that now swung freely around her head, startling me with their beauty and reminding me of the tail of a magnificent horse. I blinked, somewhat disoriented, then silently laughed at myself. I can’t tell the difference between a woman’s hair and a horse’s ass…could be definitive of my relationship issues.

  “Its hair’s falling out,” Liz observed as the shopkeeper set it on the counter.

  “Tail,” I corrected.

  “Hair, tail, whatever.” Liz rolled her sky blue eyes skyward and picked a few loose strands of horse tail off the floor, then held them to the light. “I think it’s got mange, Brice.” And I detected a smile in her voice. “We may have to call the antique vet.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Shopkeeper’s pretty happy. Must have been trying to unload this for quite a while. For the record, this purchase falls into my old-ladies-collecting-crap category.” Her voice had a little too much edge for my taste.

  “For the record, it’s not crap you’ll ever see.” I cut my eyes at her and gave her a smile designed to let her know she was out of line. How dare she put me in the old-lady category, even in jest.

  “Ouch!” she grimaced.

  Liz’s cameraman shouted for her to hurry up, they were going live in two minutes.

  “Gotta go be a talking head,” she said.

  I left the shop thinking that Liz Chase was a dangerous woman: too familiar too fast. Madge was right—steer clear of her.

  *

  Clare backed up as I lugged the antique horse through the laundry room from the garage.

  I placed it atop a tall handy-kitchen that my grandmother had given me. It had held potatoes and pies and memories long before the signers of the Declaration of Independence had held a quill. The toy horse looked ominously unsteady on its weathered surface, so I carefully lifted it back down and set it on the floor, where it seemed to disappear into the highly polished terrazzo. As I sighed and hoisted it up again, Clare followed me, always at the ready to protect pristine areas of the house from clutter. I finally set the horse down on a long, low parson’s table under a picture of two women in faux kabuki garb.

  “There!” I said triumphantly as I slipped out of my shoes and loosened my belt after a tiring weekend of errands. “It looks like a very expensive antique. Really.”

  “Lysol,” Clare said, and smiled. We were on friendly terms again, my recent late-night confession buried. Like cats in a litter box throwing sand on their own feces, Clare and I kept the shit out of our lives by covering it with civility.

  Moments later, Clare called to me from the garage, reminding me that I needed to unload the car: groceries, dry cleaning, hardware, plants, and various miscellany.

  “I want servants,” I said, struggling to yank the one-by-two-inch wooden slats I’d purchased for the small rose trellis out of the back seat of the Jag.

  “Servants are not in vogue.”

  “I’m not talking about slaves,” I said, assuring her of my political correctness. “They could be eunuchs, or cowboys, or really big dykes—anyone to lug this stuff other than me.” Clare plopped the bookstore sack on top of the lumber I was balancing and patted my behind, urging me forward as one would a mule.

  The car unpacked and groceries put away, I headed out to the terrace with my new book. It was spring, that fleeting but glorious time in Texas when azaleas and wisteria overpower patios, brick walls, and the sides of buildings, turning every living space into a breathtaking vista of hope and promise.

  My goal for the weekend had been to lie on the patio, feel the wind blow softly on my body, listen to the distant church bells, and read. I was obsessed with books: the feel, the smell, the design. I thought about Liz Chase and imagined she would hate books, preferring the speed of the Internet—with its hip, hot, happening ether-info. Typical talent—all air and hair, I thought, happy to find a reason to chase the thought of her from my mind.

  I made myself focus on Clare. She had been very attentive today, insisting on rendezvousing with me at the bookstore, to make sure, amidst all my errands, that I did something nice for myself. We were a good match, really. Everyone fights occasionally. Everyone feels unloved on this day or that. I need to unwind and not blame her for my own internal turmoil.

  Part of my discontent centered around my obsession with corporate life despite the fact that I knew it to be dysfunctional on the whole and not worthy of such fixation. During the handful of years I’d been division president of A-Media Entertainment, we had already experienced two corporate takeovers: one in which we were the eaters, followed quickly by one in which we were the eaten.

  Our leadership consisted of a disparate group of board members, none of whom wanted to share a planet, much less a company. And then there was Anselm, the crusty, conniving CEO who lay awake nights like a lizard on a hot rock with one eye open waiting for opportunity to present itself. Boards of directors are accustomed to sharks, and snakes, but lizards with fast, clever tongues that can snatch a lesser life form out of the air and eat it—boards are wary of such creatures. It would be fair to say that the new board, created in the most recent merger, was wary of Anselm.

  I’d gotten a look at the new org chart, and it had more dotted lines than a subway map. I would have a dual reporting structure: continuing to report to Anselm, but also reporting to the new CEO, Walter Puckett. I fretted over this news—two CEOs and six directors all trying to steer the same ship. I was reminded of legendary ad mogul David Ogilvy’s comment, “In all the parks, in all the cities, there are no statues to committees.”

  Perhaps the board viewed dual CEOs as one would redundancy in an aircraft: if one system failed they had a backup. However, rumor had it that we had two CEOs solely because an egregious snafu in legal had snarled up Walter Puckett’s employment contract and basically given him Anselm’s job title. Anselm threatened to sue. The board gods were angry and someone would have to be sacrificed.

  Other office tales reported that Walter Puckett drank and ran around on his wife, but the only rumor that troubled me said he knew nothing about the entertainment business. I couldn’t bear the learning curve with another corporate CEO. Of course, I could always quit, but corporate dysfunctionality had its trade-offs—financial gain, and its own peculiar and addictive adrenaline rush not unlike war.

  And that’s why I’d taken Clare’s advice and met her at the bookstore today—to think about something else. There I’d chosen a glossy hardback book about horses, and Clare had given me a quizzical look that clearly asked what I was up to.

  Frankly, I didn’t know. Why am I interested in reading a book on horse breeds, as if I were ten years old?

  A light breeze rippled the book’s pages, as I lay on the white slats of the Adirondack chair reading the short paragraphs that accompanied the large color photos stating the horse’s origin, use, gaits, and temperament. Midway through the book, I came upon a photo of a small, muscular horse with Tina Turner hair and chunky legs. The caption read Icelandic Horse—Famous for its tolt, a four-beat lateral gait so smooth a man can drink a stein of beer while riding and never spill a drop. Horse size 12.5-13.5 hands. I tried to concentrate on the book again but felt my eyes grow heavier and heavier until I could not stay awake. The combination of the soft church bells in the distance and the even softer spring breeze rendered me happily unconscious.

  In the depths of my sleep, a vivid scene projected on the screen of my subconscious.

  A man with soft but thick pale red hair and a golden-red beard that fits neatly against his face a
nd eases its way across his upper lip. His eyes are green and weary; he is young—yet old for his occupation.

  The man is well proportioned, with muscular legs and massive arms. His shoulders are cupped in intricate chain mail, held to him by thick leather thongs that cross his bare chest, light red chest hair visible through the strappings. His circular shield bears the symbol of war, a stylized arrow pointing toward the heavens; his skirt, blades of leather, fans out around his thighs that clench the body of his muscular horse—small but thick-coated, its mane and tail massive and silver in color. Its ready stance and fearless eye communicate the horse knows it is about the business of war. The man is dressed as a Viking warrior. He is among the better men, one whose name men fear and on whose strength they rely.

  His band of men tears across the landscape, moving with speed and surprise; they kill villagers and burn their homes, showing not the slightest empathy for the afflicted as they flee screaming and burning. A horn sounds in the distance, signaling riders approaching from the south…

  I awoke to the low notes of the cello and Clare rehearsing her symphonic solo and opened my eyes, startled by the realism of the dream. Through the porch screen I could see Clare, so furrowed and focused and fierce, her tall, supple frame almost graceful when wrapped around and stabilized by the heavy instrument she played, her hair streaks of dark and light gray pulled back and secured at the nape of her neck. She was older than I but wore no makeup, having the good bone structure of a New England matron, which in fact she was, her family having traced its lineage to the Founding Fathers.

  “I had the strangest dream—a battle scene and people being burned—must be because I watched part of that old Charlton Heston movie,” I called out to her.

  For a long, unanswered moment I thought she hadn’t heard me, but finally her voice came from far away. “Sounds like office stress.” Another long pause and then a detached follow-up. “You haven’t mentioned Anselm lately, or his girlfriend.” She stopped playing, perhaps more to rest her arms than to give me her full attention.