Moonlight & Vines Read Free Page B

couldn’t meet her now if I wanted to because I’ve become too desperate and there’s nothing quite so pathetic or off-putting as the scent of desperation. It clings to you like a second skin, a nimbus of melancholy and pathos that, contrary to the Romantics with their marble skin and pining eyes, adds nothing to your attractiveness. You might as well have “Avoid me, I’m so hopeless” stenciled on your brow.
    â€œThe problem,” Holly tells me the next time we’re talking on the phone, “is that you’re treating her no better than Aaran or Jenny do. No, hear me out,” she says when I try to protest. “They’ve got their misconceptions concerning her and you’re blithely creating your own.”
    â€œNot so blithely,” I say.
    â€œBut still.”
    â€œBut still what?”
    â€œDon’t you think it’s time you stopped acting like some half-assed teenager, tripping over his own tongue, and just talked to her?”
    â€œAnd say what?” I ask. “The last time I saw her was at that launch for Wendy’s new book, but before I could think of something to say to her, Aaran showed up at my elbow and might as well have been surgically implanted he stayed so close to me. She probably thinks we’re friends and I told you how he feels about her. I don’t doubt that she knows, too, so what’s she going to think of me?”
    â€œYou don’t have to put up with him,” Holly says.
    â€œI know. He was on about her half the night again until I finally told him to just shut up.”
    â€œGood for you.”
    â€œYeah, Geordie’d be proud, too. Wait’ll Aaran reviews my next book.”
    â€œDoes that bother you?” Holly asked.
    â€œNot really. What bothers me is that I can’t get her out of my head, but I can’t even find the few ounces of courage I need to go up to her. Instead I just keep seeing her everywhere I go. I feel like I’m being haunted, except I’m the one playing the stalker and I’m not even doing it on purpose. She’s probably seen me as often as I’ve seen her and thinks I’m seriously twisted.”
    â€œA dozen pieces of advice come to mind,” Holly says, “but they’d all sound trite.”
    â€œTry one on me anyway. I need all the help I can get.”
    Sitting there in my apartment, receiver cradled against my ear, I can picture Holly at her desk in the bookshop. The image is so clear I can almost see her shrug.
    â€œJust go up to her,” Holly tells me. “Ask her if she wants to go for a coffee or something. The worst she can do is say no.”
6
    I love the poems in
Mirrors
. They’re as simple as haiku and just as resonant. No easy task, I know. Every so often I turn from prose to verse, but under my direction the words stumble and flail about on the page and never really sing. I sit there and stare at them and I can’t fix them. Give me a pageful of the crappiest prose and some time and I can whip it into shape, no problem. But I don’t know where to begin with poetry. I know when it doesn’t work. I even know what makes it work in someone else’s lines. But I’m hopeless when it comes to trying to write it myself.
    Saskia’s poems are filled with love and sadness, explorations of social consciousness, profound declarations and simple lyric delights. The same small verse can make me smile and weep, all at the same time. But the one that haunts me the most, the one I return to, again and again, is “Puppet.”
    The puppet thinks:
It’s not so much
what they make me do
as their hands inside me
.
    In what shadows did those words grow? And why wasn’t I there to help her?
    That makes me laugh. I can’t even get up the nerve to approach her and I expect to protect her from the dangers of the world?
7
    In the end it’s my brother Geordie, of all people, who introduces her to me.