Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (4 page)

“Um,” Dorothea said drily, “happy housewife who left her family for art, led a wild Bohemian life, and now lives in the wilderness heroically gives up her hard-won peace and quiet to come to the support of the Rankoviches of this world. Inspiring.”

“Your don’t have to be so negative,” George said plaintively. “What do you think, Rick? Doesn’t Dorothea owe it to her own career, if nothing else, to get in on this? I’m talking about nation-wide publicity, tremendous exposure for a piece of her work.”

“Very valuable, I’m sure,” Ricky said, “to someone who wants it.”

“I am not in the message business,” Dorothea said. “Matter of fact, I’m not in the picture business any more. I don’t have anything to offer you.”

“Yes you do. I’ve seen it.”

To Ricky’s astonishment and alarm, Dorothea blanched.

The odious young man pressed on, oblivious, “One time when I was out at your old place to talk to Nathan, this was just a little while before you two broke up, I saw some pictures tacked up in there — drawings, ink and wash I think, I’m not sure now, a series: cliffs and stones and light, a few gnarly trees. Simple, powerful stuff, a perfect statement about the toughness of creativity under pressure.”

Dorothea laughed. Ricky felt relieved for her. Whatever the threat was, it had not materialized. He hugged to himself the pleasure of knowing there was some sort of secret, and that it was for the moment safe from George.

“What you saw was old work, trivial work,” she said with a shrug of dismissal.

The coffee came. George waited out the waiter.

Ricky saw George take a breath for a renewed attack and thought, why am I so angry? Jealousy. I’ve come all this way, and there is only so much time, and here is this oaf crashing our private party. She is beautiful, my fox-faced friend, she is self-possessed and patient and alert, and everyone wants their piece. I’ve got my bit — the cheek of it, landing myself on her like this! — why grudge this twit a try for his? Especially when he’s doing so damned badly. You don’t want to let yourself turn possessive, old boy, not when you’re within hailing distance of having to surrender the lot.

They wrangled on, but Ricky didn’t listen. Dorothea could hold her own. She didn’t need his creaking defense of her.

To his delight, as he gazed out the window, a rider came galloping up the shoulder of the highway outside, a young man on a buckskin horse. He wore overalls, a t-shirt, and an open-backed billed cap, and in his free hand he carried a coiled lariat. Ricky felt as if a breeze from a wilder, simpler time had brown briskly through his thoughts.

If he turns from the window, she thought in terror, I’ll see his face.

She floated in a miasma of dread that indeed the figure at the window would turn, a warm glow of lamplight shifting among the folds of his black gown and then falling along jaw and brow and the rise of his cheek.

Some huge effort on her part, rooted in the knowledge that to continue this thought was to bring it into being, shook through her with the sensation of a silent explosion. She was conscious of being without form in the sense that this man at the window had form, although she felt physically housed in some minimal way. Her senses functioned well enough. She heard voices, shouting, and clattering footsteps.

She was at the window herself now, right beside him, not daring to turn her head for fear of seeing his face.

Down below the crowd moved along Sixth Avenue. She saw rapid shifts and the bob of colorful bits of clothing. It wasn’t exactly Sixth Avenue because the buildings were of stone and not very large, and there was a hollow sound of wooden shoes on cobbles. In the middle of this thoroughfare, which seemed to have no sidewalks, some sort of clumsy cart was stuck while traffic honked around it.

Behind her a voice — a young voice, the voice of her daughter Claire — said scornfully, “You have already fallen.”

The one beside her, whose confusion of anger and hurt she sensed as if it were her own, stirred, about to turn. His dark sleeve brushed her somewhere as if on the bare skin of her elbow.

Tearing herself free in a panic, she fled into the sky, struggling to fly higher, faster, to soar free, but feeling the her strength fade.

She woke drenched and panting. Her nightgown clung coldly to her back as she sat up and groped shakily for the bedside lamp-switch.

Safe in light, she sat hugging her knees and trying to calm her heart. She went over and over the dream in her mind, tasting each time a more faded echo of the terror, a more tolerable fear. She was too old to start upright in a sweat of horror in her bed at three in the morning!

What, after all, was she so afraid of in the dream? An ugly face? Something scarred, modeled on news photos glimpsed before she could get the page safely turned?

And what in the world was Claire doing in her dream? After today’s conversation she could have understood an appearance by George, come to badger her even in her sleep, but Claire? Hadn’t spoken to her in weeks.

Never mind, it’s only a dream, remember? Claire is firmly embedded in her own life, her own dreams, and here you sit safe in your own home, your dogs snoozing in the kitchen, your old friend asleep in the guest room.

On the other hand, best, maybe, not to try to go back to sleep at once. She got up, threw on her robe, and wrote down the details she could remember from the dream.

Only that morning Ricky had asked her, oh so diffidently, whether she would consider letting him look over some of her dream-notes on the off chance that he might be able to help. An outsider with a fresh viewpoint might be able to shed light on what was happening to her.

She was touched that he had offered her his time this way, his most precious possession: to throw it away on her nightmares seemed an act of generosity bordering on profligate madness. Why in the world should she allow him to involve himself in this?

Well, because he had asked, of course, and because without asking he had in a way already involved himself. Now and again, since that first night when he had been summoned to her bedroom by her outcries in French, he would keep a vigil by her bed at night. Nothing formal, nothing acknowledged openly by either of them; but she had wakened several times now to find him sitting on the big blanket-chest by the window, just sitting in the dark, breathing softly, sometimes rubbing nervously at the nape of his neck, with a faint dry sound of skin on skin.

To avoid embarrassing him or herself she had said nothing and given no sign of having noticed. But she was moved by his watchfulness, and his silent companionship made it easier for her to get back to sleep.

Now, casting over the accumulation of her night-time scribbles, she felt embarrassed and foolish to have agreed to let him read her notes. And a little bit afraid.

One thing was clear. It was always, in its essentials at any rate, the same damned dream.

Here was her first account of it, which now seemed to her curiously naive and chilling at the same time.

I’m watching a little scene. A man sits writing at a desk, wearing a dark sort of gown with a frilly white tie or something at the neck. A parade goes by in the street below — but it’s not a parade, it’s a noisy crowd, as if at some kind of holiday celebration. A face appears at the window in front of the desk, which is impossible because the window is, I realize, two storeys up. The writer looks up, opens the window, and I see through his eyes that the greenish face with its gaping jaw is a human head fixed on a pole, one of several carried by the baying mob below. The people are looking up; they want something from him. If he doesn’t respond, he is in danger. He throws something out to the cheering mob, who are now in uniform, like soldiers of some kind, but very old-fashioned. I see suddenly that he’s throwing his own inner organs, his guts, just scooping them out and heaving them down to the delighted crowd. Then I look down, and it’s my own fingers that are red and slick.

Lovely.

Lying again in the dark and seeking sleep, she took refuge in thoughts of the wall. I miss it, she thought. I should be working, my mind is all at loose ends, restless, for want of occupation for my hands. No wonder I dream.

But with Ricky here…

She realized with a small shock that though she was willing to show him the record of her dreams, she shied away from the idea of showing him the wall.

They sat together in the shade of tall trees in an enclosed patio, eating pinion brittle from Senior Murphy’s candy shop. This was one of the oldest blocks in Santa Fe, all little shops now around the green interior courtyard. She was thinking about a box of rusted iron hooks of various sizes, not enough of them to make their own stratum on the wall, which she had collected but not yet used. The trouble was some of them were too bulky to fix securely, too damned dimensional.

They had been talking about Santa Fe, about how far it was from the rest of the world. Ricky, as always, brought news of that rest of the world — famine, oppression, corruption, dirty little border wars, the usual patchwork of wretched modern history — in stinging detail from which she turned away. Partly to divert him from a caustic account of a summary execution he had inadvertently witnessed in some benighted desert province, she had begun defending this part of the country as having its own horrors, thank you. The murders of hippies by angry Hispanic farmers whose stream and only water supply the intruders had merrily and ignorantly fouled, a priest kidnapped and found killed out on the mesa, the great prison riot of fairly recent memory, the latest rape-murder of someone’s little girl…

“The big sky country,” she said, “is no Paradise. People will knife and shoot each other in the parking lots of bars, and bodies do keep turning up dumped in the country to dry up and blow away, although they don’t, of course. But the scale is domestic, crude, and seldom political in the world’s sense of that word.”

“You’d never guess it,” he murmured with irony, “looking at all these placid, god-fearing people of the soil.”

“All these lost-looking tourists, you mean,” she snorted. “I don’t really like Santa Fe and I don’t come here often. Only, in fact, when I have guests. It’s pretty, after all, at least here in the center where the old architectural style has been preserved, bastardized, whatever you care to call it.

“But the place is so — well, you can see: even before the season gets into full swing, rich, or comparatively rich, visitors more or less take over the town. Their presence, their interests, drive up prices, jam the restaurants and the parking lots, transform the place even physically — the new hotels, the pharmacy turned ice-cream parlor — into a machine for serving them instead of the people who live here. There are locals who won’t go downtown at all till the tourist season is over.”

Ricky shrugged faintly. “Modern colonialism in one of its guises, with a racist element, no doubt?”

“Yes,” she said. “With the Indians and the Hispanics on the receiving end, as you might guess. But I don’t really know much about any of it, Ricky, only what I read in the papers. I’m a newcomer myself, remember, an outsider by origin, and I’ve chosen not to try to become a local. Not to pretend. Living out in the country, beyond the edge of town — and not even this town that’s the center of things, but a more peripheral town — that’s my privacy, my solitude, my peace.”

“Your studio,” he corrected. “Your work, which I must not keep you from, much as I enjoy taking the local tour with you. I can’t keep you on holiday forever.”

Tell him now, show him when you get back this afternoon: show him what you chose
for,
when you chose against plunging into local issues. Instead she heard herself say in an evasive tone that made her cringe, “I’m not painting, Ricky.”