To what do we owe this transformation? That he was mindful of police and the continuous danger of his circumstances certainly did not explain all, for a larger part of him remained quixotic and incognizant of the threats of the world. On the streets, and with his toilet, he proved competent as always: only twice did he find himself significantly interviewed, each time by armed squadrons on horseback. Polite and sober-eyed throughout, still “in character”—but with the lambent fire of an actor more than midway through a very long run — Will’m refrained from the extemporaneous outbursts that were already so much a part of his past. In both instances, though he couldn’t produce sufficient I.D., he remained apologetic and unmolested, Santa Monica on the whole being indigent-friendly; the tanned, hairy-armed cops cantered off in search of nubile beachgoers committing misdemeanors.
How, then, to explain the mellowing?
He spent hours atop a Macy’s bath towel, burning his skin at the shore. The waves lapped relentlessly as is their wont; sunbathers lazed and sortied in pointillist ballet; dusk ushered in the nebulae. He imagined himself illustrated, a hero on a dead world that was tentatively beginning to flower again — saw himself standing tall under empyrean tempera of cloud-scudded sky, replete with William Morris’s beloved Arthurian garb, a gleaming, high-crested morion stuffed onto thickened head, with smoky visor and ventail, fat thighs squeezed into cuisses, wearing épaulières of rubies plucked from Saturn’s rings, sword and escutcheon raised against bottomless heavens filled with vessels of improbable size disgorging a-hundred-thousand-score armies of desperate, adventuresome men: celestial warriors! Will’m lay on the sand with his recumbent DNA and bore minuscule, magisterial witness to the wonder-book of yawping cosmological eye. (Science fiction pocket-book covers had forever seared the memory of a boy called Marcus Weiner, but the cryptonesic Will’m knew not whence the images came.) The pounding of surf stupefied him with reverence — any damn fool knew there had to be life elsewhere. Soon starships would hover like floating Escherian cities, ivied and fountain-filled, populated by toga’d handmaidens. “Fitz?” Will’m used to say. “We are temporal and temporary beings, nebulous childr’n on a wildly moving place!”
Like most fellow nomads, our friend enjoyed roaming the 3rd Street Promenade and varied fringes of this fair Bay City, and sitting on benches in front of the bookstores. The presence of so many volumes preening for passersby from behind the glass was heartening. One day, mused Will’m, he must use a portion of Fitz’s legacy to take a cab to that downtown place where the News from Nowhere journal of his wandering years was stored; a taxi would be more prudent than profligate — the detective and his minions were likely to entrap him if he went on foot.
On emerging from his reverie, he found that a woman of tremendous bulk had materialized beside him. She panted and perspired, her tender dewlap trembling as she turned to address him with doleful eyes.
He could do nothing but place an arm about her shoulders — something she seemed to sorely need, for her shaking instantly ceased.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She made a guttural sound, then sneezed. He looked at her quizzically, and she sneezed again. Coughed. Laughed. Trembled and coughed again. He laughed himself, then said: “Christ! Can you speak?”
“Ih c’n! Ih c’n! C’n spake!”
But not well enough to intelligibly give her name: Jane Scull.
“Are you — are you hungry?”
“Yihss! Am — am unh-gree!”
She spoke in great grunting edicts, like a cannonball angel. Dirty white hearing aids were shoved in both ears.
“Good!” he shouted. “Let’s get you a Johnny Rocket’s!”
Will’m stood and walked a pace, then turned to see what she was up to. She stayed rooted, staring back like a frightened child — it panged him, for her helplessness evoked his orphan-daughter Amaryllis. Seizing a clammy hand, he steered them past storefronts. Three cheeseburgers and a quantity of milk shakes were ordered (strawberry, vanilla, chocolate), for which the cashier made him pay in advance. Then all the waiters and waitresses seemed to go mad, abandoning their posts while dancing and gesticulating to the music of the little silver jukes; he’d been to this café before, but had never seen such mayhem. Of an instant, their choreographies ceased and everything returned to normal. A few patrons laughed among themselves, amused by the gaping transient couple.
That he called her Janey (a thing that made the startled girl feel as if he could read minds), was a happy coincidence to his own privately parallel world — a slew of personae now alternately burning bright and fading too within the frayed fabric of a serpentine, superbly demented history. For while Will’m had begun to molt (as established), strange plumage persisted: wife Jane Burden, daughters Jenny and Mary; mentor Ruskin; boon companions Burne-Jones and Rossetti — the latter his best friend, who, so legend had it, betrayed Mr. Morris to become Janey’s paramour …
At dusk, they made their way to the boarded-up hotel where he’d been squatting. Jane Scull’s eyes widened with delight on seeing the room, as if it were Bexleyheath itself. It was clean and presentable enough, with a large scrap of wax paper tacked to the wall, upon which Will’m had stenciled flowers — trademark latticework of poppy, honeysuckle and fritillaria. The work left off abruptly, its maker having lost the thread.
“Lay down awhile, girl!”
He nearly pushed her onto the futon, retrieved during a freeway-litter sally. While ecstatic to have found something like a real bed to lie down upon, this Jane flushed and demurred.
“I won’t take advantage of you! What would you have me for? I want you to rest. I’ve some aspirin — you’re feverish. Here: water. Drink!” She swallowed the pills, too, and he lit some liquor store — bought votives. “Dangerous for a woman out there, no? Brigands’ll rape and leave you bleeding. Happen yet? And the policemen—thugs and abominations! The policemen are worse! ’Cepting the ones on horseback … they seem a reasonable lot. Though maybe it’s the horses who are reasonable. But you don’t have to worry now, Janey — where’ve you been living? Where’ve you had a bath? Or have you had one at all?”
“ ’ave! ’ave uh bith!”
She would not have him think she was careless and filthy; Lord, not him!
He sat back on his heels and stared, like a director at an audition. She was all jiggling flesh and great salmon-sushi lips, thighs and buttocks tattooed with the black-and-blue fingerprints of roughhouse vagrants, and wore deep squarish patches of dirt on shoulder and hip that would take more than scouring soap to erase. She kept repeating “un-keen” (which Will’m eventually translated: “I’m clean”), her echolalia accompanied by an almost involuntary disrobing, so that suddenly she sat before him naked and quaking, breasts avalanching to either side, bruised-white mutton legs rudely splayed.
He had never seen a woman of such epic proportions, and was humbled by her offering. Gently, he covered her up and sat down at futon’s edge.