The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

me you’re strapped again. I’ve enclosed a check—just add it to the tab and pay me back when you’re a filthy rich celebrity. I’ve sold the property I inherited in England, so Anna and I are fine for a while, and it costs us very little to live in the desert. Even a poet can survive out there.

You know, you’re already a cause celebre in an underground way here in New York. Half the young poets who showed up for my signing last night were more interested in the fact that I knew you, you bastard, than in Exile Songs. I can’t quite get used to being the older generation at thirty-five—hardly an old man yet. These kids all want to recreate the cafe life we lived in Paris before the war. Impossible here. New York is too fast, too slick, and too jazzed up for that. Where can you linger over coffee or wine, trade books and ideas, argue, make love? You eat, you drink, you vacate your table or the waiter will throw you out.

I’ll tell you, after arguing with Anna about coming, I find I don’t want to be here after all. I’m in Frank’s old rooms on 13th Street, just down the block from Hugo and Anaïs. My plan was to stay in the city three weeks, head on out to Caresse’s place—where Dalí and his wretched wife are staying—then back to Tucson next month. But after a week of New York I am ready to catch any train headed west. I want silence again, and vast blue skies. I want the heat, honest earth underfoot. I can’t sleep here. I don’t think I’ll sleep till I reach the mountains and Anna.

Where is the man I used to be? All those things I’ve missed, the crowded streets, the talk, the advertising cant, all worthless now. There is poetry in this man-made place, but its language is stilted, its vision is grey, it holds no interest for me anymore. I see now that it is not only Anna that Red Springs Canyon has claimed after all. I need the wild. I need the source. I need a land where sun and wind will strip a man down to the soul and bleach his dying bones. I want to speak the language of stones, even if there is no one but Anna to hear, and patient old friends like you, Henry, and Pablo, and Anaïs.

Frank is angry. I’ve cancelled two signings in order to get out of here. Exile Songs is having the success I’ve always craved, but I no longer care. It feels odd to sit signing copies of the book when I’m no longer the man who wrote it. I hung onto that man just long enough to finish the poems, correct the proofs. The war is over. It’s time to go on with the lives we are making now. I’ve agreed to stay in Manhattan through Friday and go to lunch with Pat Clarke from Scribners, if only to mollify Frank—or else, he threatens, I’ll need a new agent.

Did you hear that Anna has six paintings hung at the Wallace Gallery this month? My entire trip has been worth it just to see them shining like small, perfect jewels in that grey city box of a place. When you come through Tucson, you’ll see her new work. Her vision is witchy, disturbing, uncomfortable—and beautiful. Bring your own paints when you come, old boy. There’s nothing like the desert light.

Yours as ever,

Cooper

Chapter Four ❋

Tonight they have won.

Dusk is hard to breathe, it catches

in my throat, and I am less a man

than a hunger. Waiting.

—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

Waking up in Dora’s house, Maggie felt none of the sense of dislocation she’d had her first morning at Cooper’s. She woke to the homey smell of bacon frying; the sound of bathwater running; the warmth of a plump tuxedo cat draped across her stomach. The guest room was still under construction, so they’d bedded her down on the couch instead, in a cozy living room of fat thirties’ chairs, hooked rugs and patchwork quilts. The beautiful desert morning light streamed through curtains of old ivory lace.

But for all of its charm, the room was an absolute mess, filled with lumber, tiles, tools, art supplies, books and papers piled on every available surface. Maggie pushed away the urge to tidy it all up—that streak of the Puritan in her that her granddaddy said must have come from her granny, since he was a slob himself. She smiled, thinking of her grandfather. She’d give him a call later in the day. She eased herself out from under the cat and the cat continued to purr.

Dora looked up from the stove at the other end of the L-shaped room. She was wearing a bathrobe covered with pictures of cowboys and cartoon cactus; her long copper-colored hair was loose and tousled, hanging in Botticelli curls. “Coffee?” she asked.

“Bless you,” Maggie said, coming to take the mug from her hand. “This is a wonderful old building you’ve got. How long have you been working on it?”

“Oh, off and on for a couple of years, whenever a chunk of money comes in. Which isn’t very often these days,” Dora confided cheerfully, “so at this rate we may never finish. Which is exactly what happened with the place we were rennovating before this, downtown in the Barrio. We’re setting a new style: the construction-site look. Don’t you think its trés chic?”

“Oh indeed.”

Dora switched the radio on to the local public radio station. The music of Pycard’s Gloria filled the room with rich choral voices. Maggie listened closely. It was not her ex-husband’s recording of the piece but some other, and the tension left her shoulders. Sometimes it seemed she could never go far enough to escape from Nigel.

She sat down at the table, pushing aside piled lumber, laundry, and two wrestling cats. She craddled the coffee mug