How the Dead Dream (8 page)

That night, exhausted but jubilant after drinks at a bar, he lay back and watched a news segment featuring politicians. The faces on the small screen were interchangeable, not only with each other but with his own: quite possibly they were

not only his representatives but his representations. What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these electronic faces but the realignment of line and color to shift among symbols? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he would course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold. That near! He moved in impulse and in fret; shot through with glowing nerves he willed himself on to the rest of what was. The tides shifted beneath him but he was holding fast.

That was what they didn’t have, those men of state and industry, he thought before he fell asleep in the flickering blue light. They were hard vectors of self, undisturbed by the vestigial presence of others who were less powerful and therefore eternally unlike them. They did not have what those others had, the softness and the whimsy, the coasting— the others far outside their sphere who imagined and felt and enjoyed everything and ended up going nowhere because they needed nothing more than to be.

Fortunately he was not one of them.

•

She came with an investor to a cocktail-hour meeting one Friday and in minutes he was converted. Like all conversions his own was sudden. The lights of the restaurant bar bathed them in browns and reds and he watched her laugh. Where there should have been the awkwardness of strangers there was fluency. The investor went home to his wife after a short while, leaving the two of them at the counter, where they stayed and stayed on.

Beth, she had said. She was the investor’s assistant. She did not give him her last name. She had erect posture, an effortless dignity and perfect light-brown skin. It was her self-possession that got him, though her features were also lovely. They drank too much as the evening wore on, became lightheaded and carefree: life was an arc in the air, ascending. Everything smaller was treated with a deft and glancing humor, and from the tops of the stools the skin of their knees touched briefly.

In the privacy of the bathroom, where he removed himself for a pause, he felt giddy, liberated and captive both. The bathroom was a confined space but he was hardly confined; nothing was tawdry around him, nothing filthy despite its superficial patina of dirt—or rather he forgave it for its tawdriness. The peeling stickers on the wall, graffiti, wet floors with patches of wet toilet paper adhering—surprising for an upscale establishment but then bathrooms were the main tell when it came to restaurant management, not what came out of the kitchen. All these elements were part of the story, the grounded earth before the flight. This was the instant of exulting, and even the grimy walls could not dull his exhilaration.

The room was a holding pen, a split moment. Outside the room was the rest of his existence. For years he had been detached and now in a stroke of time he was not. He would move, he would touch—no one would think to impede him, they would see him go and be glad—he could be anything. Do not embarrass yourself, he told himself strictly, but could not help smiling. There she was at the bar: their faces met before he got there.

This was how he lost his autonomy—he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung.

Around midnight she agreed to let him drive her home in her car. She had a low tolerance for alcohol and was slurring her words despite the fact that all she had drunk was watery Mexican beer with slices of lime. But his building was nearer than hers, and once in her car they decided to go there instead. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other along the back of her seat; she curled in her seat to watch him as he drove. Music coursed through the car and both of them, he was sure, felt the uplift of the new. A bright panic filled him.

But when they pulled into the parking garage there was his mother—sitting, her suitcases around her, at the base of the stairs that led up to the lobby. She was darkly tanned and smoking a thin cigarette. A few feet away stood a man in a white suit, also tanned and smoking.

“I can’t believe this,” said T., and turned to Beth, who dipped her head to look past him out his window. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m back!” sang out his mother gaily, and stubbed out her cigarette on the concrete step. She stood up and spread her arms. She had lightened her hair. “And this is?”

“Beth. Our first date,” said T. “So don’t say anything I’m going to regret. Beth? My mother. She’s been on a cruise.”

His mother was down the steps and flinging her arms around him in a wild embrace.

“Not just a cruise. I took
buses
. I stayed in these fleabag hotels. Chichén Itzá! Where they sacrificed the virgins? Hello, dear. Pleased to meet you. And T.! Do you even recognize your old mother?”

“You look great,” he said dutifully.

“This is Terry,” she said. “A friend. Terry is Lebanese!” “Pleased to meet you,” said T., and they shook.

“I tell you what,” said his mother, “why don’t you just let us in and you kids can retire, or do whatever. We just flew in. We need to crash.”

He did not recall the word
crash
in her vocabulary, nor had she called him a “kid” in recent memory.

“I can’t believe you’re smoking,” he said, as they lugged her cases into the elevators and through his front door.

“I picked up the habit,” she said. “Filthy, I know. So, have you heard from your father?”

Less than a minute.

“I haven’t talked to him,” he answered, evasive. “A letter? Anything?”

“He hasn’t written to me. Let’s wait another day to discuss him.”

He drove Beth to her apartment, since the mood was shot. He walked her in and called a cab and kissed her until it came.

Waiting to fall asleep afterward, his mother and Terry installed awkwardly in the next room, his thoughts of her attained a certain plateau. He thought of how she might walk down a future of clean avenues beside him, how she would confer her elegance on any landscape. He saw that this was selfish, or worse was self-aggrandizing, as though she was an accessory, but he felt more than that selfish impulse, felt something more exalted, frankly, and the thought of her beauty extended throughout his life was nothing short of captivating. It was not only that he would benefit from having her at his side, it was the shock of how the world glowed with it—how she lent her surroundings the style of her presence, its effortless assertion of grace.

In the desert subdivisions would spread, life radiate outward from the sand as the tone of her flesh shone on the planes of her face, through buildings and cables and gas mains and

roads. He thought of the cool of night descending over the settlement—were those coyotes howling out there in the dark, beyond the warm lights from thousands of standardized windows? Coyotes. He thought of them rarely but when he did he felt a pulse of identification and regret, curious and painful . . . In the distance homeowners in the settlement would be able to make out in the night sky the hulking shape of the Panamint mountains, the lights of the naval base winking beneath.

And in the morning, as the sun rose to the east over the national monument, automated sprinklers would come on and begin their twitching rotations, misting the putting greens and the fairways and the sculpted oases of red-and-yellow birds of paradise and palm, bringing songbirds out of nowhere to perch in the mesquite and palo verde trees lining the courses.

Hundreds of units were already presold.

The place would not disappoint; it would be almost heaven for the buyers, whose profiles were already known to him. Aging golfers whose children lived far away and avoided contact, whose fixed pensions were supplemented by a moderate annual influx of dividend and interest income from conservatively managed accounts, whose idea of leisure involved little more than a sunny clime, eighteen holes minimum and a view of pastel-colored fake adobe; these golfers and their wives, most of whom would outlive them, watching the sunset as they sat in the dry air, gentle, quiet, sipping their gin-and-tonics, smelling the barbeque from a few doors down and watching the colors in the western sky deepen. Was it not a decent way for life to end, in the peace of all that slowness? That he would not wish for an end like that himself was irrelevant. The buyers were not him.

Never pretend to know better, had been the first lesson of real estate. His own preferences were only a private luxury.

He would drive down the softly curving streets when they were built, he would survey the burg in all its idle readiness before the people moved in, when it was waiting, an infant of a city, clean and unmarked. She would be with him then, with her consent. The shining hair that hung down her back, the quick smile, the set of her shoulders and deep curve at the small of her back. He found it satisfying to imagine the completion of this, the village in the middle of nowhere and the contours of her person.

He knew it was her—was not surprised he had held himself aloof from others till now, knowing the perfection of this new sentiment.

•

In the morning his mother called down from the landing. “Have you been keeping my mail for me?”

She held a toothbrush and wore a black lace robe. In the past she had favored white cotton nightgowns that buttoned to the neck and were patterned with sprigs of flowers.

“In the desk,” he said, inclining his head in the right direction.

But he had noticed, among her letters, one with a Reno postmark. Fear took hold of him. He had to go.

He glanced outside and saw that the taxi that would take him to his car was already waiting at the curb. Hastily he left the buttered toast waiting for him on the counter, the poured juice; hastily he left his dog for the day with a last pat on the head; hastily he grabbed his keys from a bowl on a side table. He left.

All day he worked hard and took very few calls, and it was past seven when he finally finished. He was the last to leave

the office, something he liked because he could survey it at his leisure, walking around, shuffling his nearly noiseless feet across the carpet. He stood and stared out various windows that offered views past other buildings and onto pieces of the ocean. He saw the blurs of ships like cities in the distance, unmoving on the gray surface. They were large ships, dark ships, solid and far across the waves. Often he saw them through these office windows and the next day they were gone.

When he got home his mother sat red-eyed in a lawn chair on the balcony, Terry in another chair beside her, an ashtray balanced on his mother’s chair arm. He felt a pang of need— Beth should be here, she would be better at this than he was.

Of course after one evening they were not at that point. It would be far from appropriate.

He knelt in front of his mother and took her hand. “Are you OK?”

She nodded slowly, vaguely. Her face was clean of makeup.

“Do you need to talk about it?” She shook her head.

“I’ll get us something to eat.”

“She broke things,” said Terry, catching up to him in the kitchen.

“She
broke
things?”

“She threw the dishes down on the floor. See? No plates,” and he opened the cabinet door above his head to display its emptiness. “She threw out all her shoes. And the—what— vacuum cleaner.”

“She was just, what was she? Angry? Crying?”

“I gave her a tranquilizer. I have them for the airplanes? And so she is better.”

When they brought the food out his mother decided she wanted to be inside, but she also wanted to smoke. T. opened the windows and the three of them sat at the table. His mother stared down at her soup with a lit cigarette in her hand; Terry slathered butter onto a piece of bread.

“You shouldn’t be able to do that,” said his mother finally, in a voice so soft he could barely hear it.

“Do what?” he asked.

“Get a divorce without telling the other person.” He watched her long ash fall onto the table.

“I was thinking,” he said softly. “When you were staying here before you went traveling, you were going to Mass at St. Anne’s, right?”

His mother nodded.

“Maybe we should go in together tomorrow. You can talk to the priest.”

“I hardly know him.”

“Then let’s call home. Let’s call Father Stevens. OK? He’ll be able to help with this.”

“I didn’t tell him I was leaving,” mused his mother. “But I did send a postcard. From Cabo.”

“Let’s call him.”

He left his hand on her shoulder. In the morning, he was telling himself, she would talk to her old parish priest, kindly and soft-spoken. She trusted him implicitly.

He would marvel later at how a mind could slip into otherness without you even noticing it. Slip away right beside you, motionless.

After dinner Terry turned on the television in the living room, where he settled down with a beer to watch a game, pretending intense concentration. Angela said weakly that she was going to wash her hair, which T. seized upon as evidence

of a restored normalcy. He said his own goodnights to both of them and retired to his room with the portable telephone, relieved.

While she ran her bath in the room next to his he called Beth and spoke to her, told her in low tones about the crisis. She was sympathetic and sounded sincerely worried; she offered to help but he did not want to give an impression of neediness. After he hung up he lay in bed letting his mind roam to business, legs splayed on the bed, one hand idly scratching the hair on his groin; while his mother picked up and inspected Terry’s orange vial of tranquilizers he patted the bed and watched his dog jump up to curl at his feet. He closed his eyes and considered the wind farms of Palm Springs, the cost of the turbines, the megawattage that powered Coachella Valley. His own development would be powered thus one day, if he could swing it; and he was considering a contract with the wind-farm company when his mother removed her woven sandals and dark blue skirt.

As she stepped into the bath and opened a bottle of baby shampoo, he was already falling asleep. For a while they floated side by side like that, only a thin wall between them—she with her hair lathered, a towel rolled beneath her neck to soften the bathtub edge, he in an undershirt and boxer shorts on the bare sheets, the blankets pushed down hastily to the foot of the bed. As he fell asleep he was seeing the turbines that stretched along the San Gorgonio Pass, rows and rows of long, white windmill blades that whirred against the sky.