Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (3 page)

There must be some carry-over of her own contentment. If it was not sharable, especially under these circumstances, what was the good of it?

“Dorothea?”

She thrashed to the surface with a groan and opened her eyes wide, washing out the images of her dream with light.

She saw her room, her ordinary room: rugs on the floor, stacks of books on the table, bathrobe slung over the back of the chair. “It’s all right,” she croaked.

Ricky stood in her doorway, head craned anxiously forward. “You’re sure?” he said.

She groaned again. “Shit. No. Yes. It’s not all right. Insomnia would be better than this.”

“May I —?”

She hauled herself upright on the bed, stuffing the pillows behind her back. “Come in, please. God, it’s good to have human company! Would you hand me my robe? What in the world is the matter with me, anyway?”

He crossed to the deep sill of the window and sat, pulling his own faded flannel robe closer around his throat. “What were you dreaming of?”

Another dream, another goddamn dream. Her mind felt empty and flat. “A bunch of people, a mob, roaring through a street, I think. Blood, too. Somebody watching, from a window. It’s not enough to write down, even.” She gestured toward the ring-binder on the dresser. “I’ve got a couple of them down in there already. Or rather, the same one, I think, but changed a little each time. There’s always the mob, though, and this person watching. Nasty stuff.” A shuddering yawn gripped her for a moment. She rubbed her eyes. “Nathan used to try to get me to write down my dreams. He said you could learn a lot about yourself that way. I never thought I’d actually try it, but I don’t know any other way to approach this — whatever’s going on with me.” She squinted at him from between puffy lids. “I wonder if it could be tied up with finishing —”

She stopped. This was certainly not the time to tell him about the wall.

“Finishing?” he prompted.

She shook her head. “Just a vague notion, nothing.” Another yawn. “Did I make any noise?”

“You cried out in your sleep,” Ricky said. He fiddled with the frayed end of his bathrobe belt. “In French.”

“What?” she said, sure she had misunderstood.

“I didn’t know you speak French, Dorothea.”

“I don’t. I mean, I studied French as a schoolgirl, of course, and I used it in some art history courses in college, but I never learned to actually speak. What did I say?”

“‘Ils vont tuer la loi;’
which translates, I believe, as
t‘hey are going to kill the law.’
You spoke in a very agitated tone.”

“What law?” she said stupidly.

“No details were mentioned.”

She gaped at him, blankets hugged to her chest.

“And then you said,
‘Je n’ose pas prenner leur parts.’
Twice. Which means, ‘I dare not take their side.’”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“No pictures come to mind, no scraps of the dream?”

“Nothing.”

“Just as well, perhaps,” he said, sitting back again. The dawn scattered a brightness around the outline of his body. “Sun’s coming up. Shall we have some breakfast?”

What an odd place Taos was, he reflected, sitting in the dining room of the inn on the southern edge of the town. She had brought him here — “You may as well begin getting the full flavor of the place, see if you can stand it” — for a cup of coffee. His appointment with her doctor had been postponed an hour because of an emergency case. Dorothea was chatting and laughing with the woman at the front counter.

An odd place, a straggle of low, jumbled architecture, ragged dirt lanes, tumbledown fences and empty fields, all cradled in the great circular arm of the mountains at which he now gazed through the plate-glass window. At the center of the town were a few large, ugly, official-looking buildings, a plaza lined with a covered boardwalk fronting the souvenir shops, and lots of large-windowed galleries along the narrow side-streets. Then more straggle.

In here, she had led him through a huge dark lobby, a sort of mummy-cave with sinister-looking objects hanging from the age-darkened beams of the ceiling — wrinkled leather saddles, harnesses, and stiff buckskin clothing; dusty Indian baskets, faded blankets, cow skulls, and shriveled, unidentifiable pelts, moccasins shrunk by dryness to fit dolls’ feet.

Dry country, yet green. The low, bluish sage clung to the broad plain. Files of plumy trees marked the water-courses, and the shoulders of the mountains were dark with forest. It was the elevation, of course, that made the difference between this and the lower, parched country that he had crossed to get here. More plentiful rain must slant through the same dry and sparkling air.

Two young people in shorts cycled by on the margin of the highway, the boy bent under a sagging knapsack, the girl carrying a bundled sheepskin in her basket. There came a honk of greeting from a pick-up truck trundling in the opposite direction carrying in the back three blonde girls and two black goats.

So many young people; he had noticed that in town, too. The whole world teemed with them.

He looked down at his skeletal hands, no longer young. But hungry. He knew he shouldn’t even think of laying these hands on Dorothea, not even in a last grasp at sensual joy. He did not want to claim her for his side, the gray side, the dying side, in this sunny country of the young where she had found herself a haven.

On the other hand, she was not young herself (nor, to give her her full and honest due, did she pretend in the least that she was). Her silver hair was cut close and cap-like, no discreet curtains falling to hide the frank webbing of wrinkles at her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

Here she came, leaving her friend who was white-headed herself and sunk into that squarish, squat sort of age that took some people.

Not Dorothea. She would become slender as a deer, fined down to a ghost before she became a ghost. But I won’t live to see that happen: blessing, or curse? His lips twisted with disgust at his own self-pity.

“So,” she said, smoothing down the cotton tunic she wore over her blue jeans and settling herself across the low table from him. “Marian says she thinks you look very distinguished, and where did I get you?”

“What’s so distinguished about a walking bone-rack?” he said.

“I think Marian is a little jealous,” Dorothea said mischievously.

“Jealous! What have you been telling her?” Do you read my mind, my silver-headed dear? Lord, how embarrassing…

“Only that you’re staying with me for a while. She infers more from the sparkle in my eye and the rose in my cheeks, or is that roses, one for each?”

This has gone far enough, he thought. “Dorothea, I don’t want to make problems by staying with you. It is a small town, after all —”

“Tut,” she said. “They had their chance to stone me to death when I came and lived here with Nathan. Actually, we’d have to do a hell of a lot more than drive sedately into town for a cup of coffee together to get noticed around here. You forget, if you ever knew it, that this is one of the nation’s major centers for old hippies, and they do their best to uphold the reputation of the breed.”

“Didn’t think they had those,” he observed. “It’s an oxymoron, isn’t it, an old hippie?”

“No, it tends to be a pseudo-or-even-really-intellectual drunk, at least around these parts. With beads and feathers and as much hair as they can manage to hang onto.” She made a face. “Sorry, the inn always brings out the worst in me. Something about the place. Did you order our coffees?”

“Couldn’t. Nobody’s come.”

She leaned back perilously in her chair and shouted, “Marian! Can’t you send somebody with a couple of cups of coffee for us?”

There came a hail in return, and Dorothea thumped down the front legs of her chair again.

“The service in town tends to be amateur and terrible,” she confided. “They hire these kids, very cheap, who’ve come wandering out here for a taste of the high, free life, or the skiing, or whatever. You just have to try to get their attention as best you can.”

“You know,” he said, “I didn’t come for the place. I came for you. I might as well tell you. I could easily have lived and died without seeing Taos and its old hippies and its young ones, but I had a compulsion to come and see you while I still could.”

She said quietly, “I’m glad you did.”

“You were smiling, and I made you stop.”

“The hell you did,” she sighed, looking past him at the doorway. “George did, and, damn it, here he comes to do it some more.”

Ricky turned to see a tall fellow in a three-piece brown corduroy suit and cowboy boots, wild brown hair frizzing electrically in the air, come loping down on them with a wave and a grin. Dorothea put on a soberly pleasant face but did not smile. Ricky thought of all the women he’d known to smile automatically when a man, any man, approached. It seemed suddenly not charm or courtesy in them but weakness and manipulation.

“George, this is Ricky Maulders, an old friend,” Dorothea said. “Ricky, George Willis.”

Ricky shook hands and sat back, already not liking George.

George snagged a spare chair from the neighboring table and swung it round so that he sat spraddle-legged facing them, his arms folded across the top of the chair-back.

“Have you heard?” he said. “They’ve thrown Rankovitch in jail. Well, dumped him in a psychiatric hospital with a ‘breakdown,’ which is the same thing.” George rushed on, full of outrage, pausing only when a blond boy with a sleepy look ambled over to take their order, at last.

Ricky took advantage of the gap. “Excuse me, but are you speaking of Yuri Rankovitch, the pianist? Hasn’t he scheduled a tour of Canada and the United States next winter?”

“Exactly!” cried George, giving the table a thump. “And we’d arranged for him to come out here as a special engagement and play at our New Western Music Festival afterwards.” And so on — much enthusiastic verbiage about the festival, the benefits Rankovitch would have contributed and gained in return, the loss his absence represented. But George had an idea. George wanted to dedicate the festival to Rankovitch and to oppressed artists everywhere.

Clever George. What a puffed up ass, Ricky thought. How does Dorothea stand him? But of course it was obvious: this was probably one of Nathan’s acquisitions, just the sort of hanger-on that he used to attract, and now Dorothea was too polite to tell him to buzz off and leave her alone.

But not too polite to deal with him, Ricky was pleased to note. “You want something from me, George,” she said. “What is it?”

George grinned engagingly. Spoilt by his mother, no doubt, thinks his charm makes the world go round. Ricky wished he had insisted on waiting at the doctor’s office after all.

“You’re way ahead of me, Dorothea,” George admitted ruefully, “as usual. I’d like something only you can give me: a picture for our posters, our program cover, all our publicity. One real knock-out of a picture for a knock-out, nation-wide campaign.”

Dorothea looked taken aback. “But George, you know I’m not political. I don’t do protest art. Why not try Ernest Stimme, or some up-and-coming young Indian or Spanish painter who could use the boost?”

“Because their stuff wouldn’t pack the punch that yours would,” George said. “Face it, Dorothea: the retrospective show in New York has made you, well, a leading figure, like it or not. And you are an artist who’s part of a sort of oppressed population. The feminist slant would mean something.”