Hunts in Dreams (11 page)

“We have cars and trucks,” said the man. “We have a dog that knows the fox dens, and when the foxes come out, we put the big lights on them. Or we would if they did come out. The one nest we found tonight has been empty for days. I guess that's why they call them Sly Reynard.”

Lyris and the hunter shoveled ashes onto the fire and moved off together through the woods. He said he knew the way. They hiked through an overgrown cemetery with small black stones and under a tree house for deer hunters. Then they were out in the open, beneath the stars, on a lane of short dry grass. The coveralls were warm and dry. The hunter told her his theory of foxhunting and how it differed from what they were doing. He said that crossfire was a legitimate safety issue but one that could be worked out. Perhaps the men could be staggered in such a way that they would not hit each other, or they could call out their positions. Granted, the fox would hear the voices, but by that time it would be on the run anyhow. In a way, the issue of one hunter shooting another was a moot point, because they were using number-two shot, which did not travel more than sixty yards.

As he spoke, a fox slipped from the trees and stood for a moment with one paw raised before trotting away along the lane, nose down, tail high. There wasn't much to it. The fox jumped onto a stone wall, walked on it for a short distance, then dropped off into a field. Lost in his calculations, the hunter did not see the fox, and Lyris couldn't say a word. Every­thing the hunter had told her so far had led her to suspect that the fox was an entirely hypothetical creature, the behavior of which men could guess about while achieving their true goal of wandering around the woods carrying equipment. To have actually seen a fox altered her point of view in a way that left her too preoccupied to speak or react. She kept moving forward, wet clothes rolled under her arm, and then the fox was gone among the cornstalks and Leo was saying how in some areas foxes are hunted with airplanes, although he was not sure how that worked.

Soon Lyris and Leo saw lights angling through the trees. The rest of the men — Kevin, Vincent, and old Bob — met them at a bend in the grassy lane. The hunting dog was white with brown legs and sidled against Lyris.

“She's the first thing that dog found all night,” said old Bob.

“We should try something different,” said Leo.

“No,” said Vincent. “Did you get the sandwiches?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, Jesus Christ.”

“I found this young woman. That kid Follard pushed her in the river.”

“I'd just as soon smack him as look at him,” said Vincent.

Leo drove Lyris home, talking about the Las Vegas trip, how upset he'd been in the desert. She said goodnight in the driveway. Inside, Charles slept at the kitchen table, his head on his arms.

“I'm home,” she said. “I'm home.”

He sat up and looked around. “What time is it?”

“Three o'clock.”

“Is Micah back from school?”

“It's the middle of the night.”

He
got up and took a clouded glass from the drainboard. Moths circled
the ceiling light. Standing before the refrigerator, he poured water from
a pitcher. “Well, where's Micah?”

“Upstairs?”

Charles drank half the water and then stared into the glass.

He nodded. “Micah's at my mother's house. And Joan, we know where Joan is.”

“We went driving after the game.”

“I'm sitting here by the phone.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Where all'd you drive — St. Louis?”

“I should have called.”

“Did we not have a good day? Was there something lacking in the day itself?”

“No,” she said. She drew her hands into the sleeves of the coveralls. “It was a good day.”

“I know how you feel,” said Charles. “Or if I don't, I wonder how you feel. To be dropped into this house, not against your will exactly, but as the last possible place — I see that, I'm not blind to it. Your long-lost mother — I wonder what you make of her. And I'm far from perfect. Far from it.
Perfect
to me is a word with no meaning. I'm just another man in a van. So it must be tempting for you to say, ‘Oh hell, what's the use, if this is the place where I've been left.'”

She did not know what to say. He was right in some ways. And she saw the darkness under his eyes. Had he been in a fight?

“But then I think
— because, you see, I've given it some thought — how different is your experience from anyone'
s? On the surface, yeah, it is different. The bomb business is a mystery to us
all. We don't know what you've been any
more than we know what you will be. But I'm not
sure it's so different underneath. Because it's
all by accident. It's all ‘This happens, that happens, and here
we are.' I'll be honest with you, even the things
I do sometimes don't make sense to me. And the best
we can make of it is to remember each other and
for God's sake get on the telephone when we're going
to be late.”

It was not the content of his remarks, which she did not precisely understand, but the length of them that moved her. He had never said so many words to her at once. She moved across the kitchen and fell into his arms. “She didn't want me,” she said. “She may not want me still.”

“That isn't true, Lyris,” said Charles. “You can't go thinking that way. It was not that she didn't want you but that she didn't know you.”

He stood rubbing her back in the manner of someone trying to set a flywheel right. If he noticed that she was wearing clothes different from the ones she had left in, he chose not to mention it.

10
◆
Joan

J
OAN AND
THE
DOCTOR
wandered
through the morn- ing city
arm in arm, like an old couple looking for a
store that might or might not be open anymore. The sunlight
glittered on cars and windows. One storefront offered so many cameras it made
taking pictures seem hopelessly complicated. It had rained during the night, the air
offered unusual depth of field, and down the street they could see
the restless water of a big lake.

The events in the hotel room had been a fleeting dream brought on by a lost moth, but walking toward the lake in the light seemed altogether real.

People moved about in shops. A tall man in a canvas apron cranked out the awnings over a bakery, which failed to wake the figure lying on the sidewalk in a dirty sleeping bag. A woman who was smoking carried a bass violin up the steps of a church.
It is all here,
thought Joan,
the beautiful and
the unfortunate
.

The violinist rested her instrument on the top step and took a last drag before turning a heavy iron ring that opened the oak-slat door. In front of St. Regina's Hospital, a woman handed the ribbon of a metallic balloon to a child, and the child let the ribbon go. The breeze carried the balloon up and across the façade of a tall building.

“Now what
do we do?” said the woman. “We have no present.”

A block down the street, a young man in dark blue sweat clothes with white stripes stood staring thoughtfully
into a wire basket of trash. The balloon was a shiny dime
in the sky.

They walked on. Dr. Palomino took a raglan hat from his coat pocket and unfolded it and put it on his head. “Cold this morning.”

“Oh, doctor.”

“What?”

“I feel funny.”

He looked around, nodding as if the street had been built according to his specifications. “I could live in this city. Sign on with a hospital, find a townhouse, walk to a store, buy a candy bar and a magazine. I could see it. There's always a demand for competent doctors.”

“Your luck,” said Joan.

She was wondering whom she loved. Micah. Lyris — she would love her. Children are sponges of love; they can't help taking up every drop. But to love only children is to withdraw from the adult world in a way that does not feel so good. What she felt for Charles was a hard question. When Lyris came, he started doubting everything Joan said and did. He had suspicions he had not had before. Resentment had crept into their lives. He hated to be misled more than anyone she knew. Everyone was out to fool him, everyone but Joan; he had not thought her capable. When they turned away from each other in bed now, it seemed to be a statement. The chores they had once taken on lightheartedly had become ammunition to be used against each other
. Oh Charles,
she thought,
what happened to the fun couple
we used to be?
Sometimes life seemed so small she wanted to put it in a ring box and throw it in the tall grass.

“Do my children need me?” the doctor was saying. “I think they need my car. Me, I'm not so sure.”

“I've been aching for something like last night,” said Joan. “Now that I have it, I'm still aching.”

They drank coffee in a restaurant with photographs bearing the splashy signatures of local celebrities. Dr. Palomino theorized about how hard it would be to wait tables. He said that removing the vermiform appendix was easier than taking a plate of soup to a table, because at least the customer in the appendectomy was out cold. Joan said she still had her appendix, and the doctor admitted that many people keep them for life. The main thing to remember when removing them was to count the sponges. Two men sitting in the adjacent booth moved to another booth. Then Dr. Palomino asked if Joan would like to meet the doctor he had mentioned last night.

“I thought you made her up.”

“Why would I lie?”

“To avoid saying you came here on my account.”

“That is a good reason. And I did lie. There is no patient with Schatzki's ring. But there is a doctor. Her name is Mona Lomasney.”

Dr. Palomino called Dr. Lomasney from a
pay phone, and away they went, to a neighborhood some distance from downtown.
The cab driver smoked a yellow pipe that smelled like burning grapes
as he squinted into the sun over a divided highway.

Mona Lomasney had spent her professional life in this city, Dr. Palomino told Joan. St. Regina's had hired her out of college in Montana, and Women and Infants had stolen her from St. Regina's. It was at Women and Infants that she became a star, the second woman ever to win the rarely given Golden Pyramid. But when morphine went missing, the hospital had no choice but to confront Mona and the other doctors implicated. They had been providing the drug on the side to patients who, because of a new policy, had been switched to non-narcotic analgesics that didn't work.

Seeking to avoid publicity, the hospital offered the doctors jobs in an affiliated clinic in the depressed suburb of Hartvale. Only Mona Lomasney accepted the deal, for Hartvale was the sort of place that is a springboard to nowhere. Around this time the news made the papers, which called the doctors the morphine angels. In Hartvale, Mona worked with two other doctors. The clinic took up the ground floor of a former shoe factory beneath elevated railroad tracks, and Mona lived in an apartment upstairs.

The cab driver folded the doctor's money and put it in a metal box. He opened his door and banged the bowl of his pipe on the door frame. “Listen, young people, don't be in this neighborhood after dark,” he said.

Mona Lomasney came to the door of her apartment, still in pajamas. She had an angular, high-boned face that must have been amazing in her youth. Even the beautiful have their problems, among them a longer way to fall. Mona held a pair of needle-nose pliers with those slick blue grips that are so satisfying to touch. Charles could not go near needle-nose pliers without getting blood blisters on his fingers. They were the only tool he refused to use.

“My toothbrush fell down the sink,” said Mona.

“This is Mona,” said Dr. Palomino. “Problems follow her.”

Mona laughed warily, pushing her curly brown hair over the shoulders of her striped pajamas. She looked as if she had not gotten a good night's sleep.

“
You
follow me,” she said.

“This is Joan Gower Darling. We've been out walking already this morning.”

“In the fog. How pretty.”

“There was no fog,” said Dr. Palomino.

“Let's not split hairs,” said Mona. “I'm really looking forward to getting that toothbrush out.”

“Let me try,” said Joan. “My husband is a plumber, and I've seen what he does.”

They crowded into the bathroom and stood with their backs to a clawfoot tub. The toothbrush had fallen with the bristles up, but it was too far down for the pliers to reach. The sink was small; it would hardly hold enough water to rinse your face. A thin wafer of green soap rested on one of the porcelain sides.

“Don't say I should get one of those strainer things,” said Mona Lomasney. “I know that.”

Joan peered into the drain.

“There is a way,” she said.

“This makes me claustrophobic,” said Dr. Palomino.

Mona put her hand on his arm. “There's coffee in a pan on the stove,” she said. “I made it a special way I saw in a magazine, and just for you, Stephen. Because I remember what you like.”

“I'll go get that now.” He left them in the bathroom. Why is it, Joan thought, that a man who is sensitive and comfortable with one woman will turn officious and awkward in the presence of two? She reached behind her neck to unclasp a small silver chain that Charles had given her on some birthday. She lowered the loop of the necklace into the drain. Her fingers trembled. If she jarred the toothbrush before snaring it, it might fall down to the trap. Carefully she pulled the silver chain taut under the bristles and drew up slowly until Mona Lomasney could grab the toothbrush. They had both been holding their breath, and now they exhaled and laughed.

Joan put the necklace back on. “What's the deal with you and Stephen?”

“We lived together for two years in medical school,” said Mona. “But I pulled ahead of him academically and he couldn't take it. And he thought I was seeing someone else. Which was true. We were way too young.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Why? You didn't do anything.” Mona pressed the toothbrush into a holder on the wall. “What's the deal with you and Stephen?”

There was no reason not to tell the truth. “We slept together last night,” said Joan. “It just happened. And now, you know, we have to spend some time together.”

Dr. Palomino found three cups and poured coffee into one of them from a white metal pan with a red handle. It was exactly the sort of bright and little-used pan that a single person would have. He drank the coffee thoughtfully and called his house. His wife answered. She could be testy on the phone. Mona's kitchen smelled of coffee beans and cinnamon. The surfaces were not sticky. The doctor's wife said that she wished he had not put the storm windows on so early, since the house needed more air. She said it still smelled of smoke from the fire in the eaves. The doctor countered with his theory that if he had not told her about the fire, she would not smell anything. In other words, she said, it was all in her mind. Well, no, that was not what he meant, not exactly, only that we notice what we are prepared to notice, this is true of everyone, not just her by any means. He did it himself. It was exactly the wrong thing to say, as if he were offering her the generous gift of his own fallibility.

Mona Lomasney had a globe on her kitchen counter, and the doctor turned it idly to see if it reflected the current geography of the former Soviet Union. His wife spoke softly into the phone, offering a second “in other words” interpretation, which, like the first, suggested that he put little stock in her cognitive skills. A small purple country labeled Belarus seemed to indicate that the globe was fairly recent, but the doctor's knowledge of the
eastern bloc
was so sketchy that he did not know, for example, if the very term eastern bloc still held meaning, or why there was no
k
in
bloc
. Then his wife was saying that their son had walked in his sleep last night. He had gone up to the attic and tried to bring down his old wooden train set, mounted on plywood. He'd only managed to get it hung up in the stairwell, where she found him disoriented and angry, and this morning he had no memory of any of it. Dr. Palomino's wife loved to lay the family disturbances on him when he was out of town. The doctor pointed out that their son had not touched the train in years, and she said,
That's the point, isn'
t it
. He considered this remark as evidence of how his wife was better than he was, more in touch with the things one should be in touch with. But he did not really see the point made by the sleepwalking and the train.

Dr. Palomino hung up the phone, remembering the work he had put into the train set. He glued down the track segments, puttied and sanded the joints so the cars would not derail; he painted green grass, blue water, yellow roads and tracks; he worked into the small hours of the night. The boy had liked it, even though, as the doctor's wife told him later, he'd had his heart set on a bow and arrow.

“Amazing,” he muttered as Joan and Mona walked into the kitchen. “How people are.”

“And how is that?” said Mona.

“I don't know.”

He looked at Joan with what he hoped was an expression of affection, as if to say that what had happened between them last night was an example of the mystery of human behavior.

Joan's lips were finely formed
and soft-looking. He liked the way she never wore makeup. She had on
a red cotton sweater and a suede skirt. Already he wanted to kiss her again. Stephen
Palomino recalled a phrase he had read in a book, back when he
and Mona were in college — “the most interesting woman in St. Petersburg” — and
he thought that the woman in the book must have looked and acted
like Joan. Maybe he was in love with her.

Mona opened the oven and took out a tray of cinnamon rolls. She put the tray on a glass table by the windows. Steam rose from the rolls as everyone pulled and cut them apart and stuffed the torn pieces into their mouths. They didn't even bother to sit down. Joan licked her knife. They were not embarrassed by their rough manners but seemed to agree that formality was not required, given their variously deficient natures. There is, the doctor thought, a well-known sort of desperation to Sunday morning. The day was too long, the newspaper too large. Also, people might be hung over from Saturday night, as he was, which never helps.

Joan asked to see the award Mona had won
at Women and Infants, and Mona said she had taken a train ride to
a limestone quarry one day in the spring and had
thrown the Golden Pyramid into the water and watched it
sink to the bottom.

“Quarries are murky as a rule,” said Stephen.

“Not this one, smart boy,” she said. “And all this success that everybody thinks they want, it only took me away from my work. They want you to speak here, they want you to speak there, they want you to write some introduction . . . To tell you the truth, I've never been happier than the day I walked into the clinic downstairs.”

Joan moved her finger around her plate for the icing. “How come?” she said. “Because it was a chance to help people?”