Moonlight & Vines Read Online Free PDF Page B

me like this, exposing such a private piece of himself at such length.
    â€œFor me it’s like a soundtrack,” I tell him. “I can’t write a tune, but I hear this music all the time, especially when I’m with somebody.”
    Geordie smiles. “So what do you hear when you’re with me?”
    â€œSad tunes,” I tell him. “Adagios. A bittersweet music on bowed cellos and piano that seems to hold a great promise that never quite had the chance to break through.”
    Geordie’s smile falters. He wants to think I’m kidding him, but he can tell I’ve given him an honest answer. One thing we’ve never been able to do is lie to each other. To ourselves, yes, but never to each other.
    â€œI guess we should try harder,” he says.
    â€œWe do try, Geordie. Look at us, we’re here, talking to each other, aren’t we? Have been for years. When was the last time you saw anybody else in our family? Our problem isn’t a lack of trying, it’s getting past all the crap we’ve let get in the way.”
    He doesn’t say anything for a long time, but his gaze holds mine for longer than I can ever remember him doing.
    â€œAnd Saskia?” he asks finally.
    â€œI can’t even begin to describe that music,” I tell him.
10
    Until I met Saskia, the most curious person I knew was Jilly. Everything interests Jilly—no object, no event, no person is exempt—but she’s particularly taken by the unusual, the same as I. I know the reason I startedchasing down urban legends and the like was because it was a way for me to escape from what was happening in my home life at the time, a chance for me to feel like I was a part of something. I don’t know what her excuse is. She and Geordie have exchanged war stories, but conversations between Jilly and me invariably center around the latest curiosity we’ve happened to stumble across.
    Saskia’s inquisitiveness is more like Jilly’s than mine—only multiplied a hundredfold. She wants to see and hear and taste everything. Whenever we eat out, it has to be at a different ethnic restaurant from the one before. I’ve seen her try every kind of coffee in a café, every kind of beer in a tavern, every kind of pastry in a bakery—not all in one day, of course. She simply keeps going back until she’s had the chance to sample them all.
    She’s entranced with music and while she has very definite likes (opera, hip hop and flamenco) and dislikes (anything by Chopin—go figure), she approaches it in the same way she does food and drink: She wants to sample it all. Ditto live theater, films, TV, how and where we make love—everything except for books. The odd thing is that while she’s incredibly knowledgeable with the background of just about everything she experiences, she savors each experience as though coming upon it for the first time. It can be disconcerting, this juxtaposing of familiarity and ignorance, but I like it. It’s like being in the company of a friend with a particularly up-to-date edition of
Brewer’s Phrase and Fable
in the back of her head.
    What’s less easy to accept is the negative reaction she garners from most people. Even complete strangers seem to go out of their way to be rude or impolite to her. Needless to say, it infuriates me, though it doesn’t seem to bother Saskia at all. Or at least not so she ever lets on. Who knows how she really feels about it? It’s not exactly the kind of question I feel comfortable bringing up this early in our relationship. What if she’s never noticed it?
    I ask Holly about it when I drop by the store, almost a month to the day I made my last visit. This time I come bearing fresh slices of banana bread with the usual coffees and doggie bone for Snippet.
    â€œSo now you’ve met her,” I say. Saskia and I ran into Holly at the opening for a new show by Sophie last night