Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (17 page)

Seated on a cushion on the floor, Ricky looked through Dorothea’s LPs for something to listen to over the thunderstorms that had come on with the sunset.

Prokofiev’s
Romeo and Juliet,
the first suite? A bit too youthful and dreamy and overblown, he thought, for an old man like me. Ah, but he had not been too old today. They had made love again, late in the afternoon, and to his joy and astonishment he had been up to it. She had come rolling into his arms with a great sigh, and perhaps it was from her happy confidence that he had drawn his own strength. Afterward he’d hiked up on his elbows, shaking his head at the optimism of his cock, which stood glistening at half-mast and twitching slightly as if minded to have another go.

“Incredible,” he said. “Here I am, tottering toward my grave, and there’s this rooster as eager as he was at twenty. Pity I can’t set him loose, somehow, free him from this foundering hulk he’s hitched to; Noah releasing the dove.”

“A totally different situation,” Dorothea had murmured, “and besides, this bird wouldn’t get far; not flapping those fat, round, hairy little wings, it wouldn’t!” And she had hooted into his shoulder. Fat, round wings indeed!

Now, sitting in the storm-light after dinner, he realized that that moment had been the first in which he had felt any affection for his own body since sentence had been pronounced.

“Ravel, perhaps?” he said. “
La Valse?
No; we’ve got enough of the French on our plate as it is.”

She was sitting at the little chess table by the window, studying the long yellow pages of their translation of the letter. How tired she looked, he thought with a pang; slouched there in her old corduroys and a gracefully shapeless cotton sweater of faded maroon. “Well,” she said, “this has got to come out of the late 1820s, don’t you think? Working up to the revolt in 1832.”

Tired but not the least bit scared. She amazed him. Here they had this incredible document in their hands, a product of her mind and hand, and she pored over it like a student. But then she had been living for years with the amazing products of her own mind; he must not forget that. He must not forget how remarkable she was; not with the ordinary remarkableness of someone you’re in love with, but with the special quality of the creative spirit and the self-reflective mind. If anything, he thought, she must be intensely relieved to have something concrete in her hands, something besides her own memories of her dreams.

“That sounds like the right period,” he said. Rain stippled the window behind her. She looked wonderful against the gray pane, whisps of hair curling on her nape. “Dorothea, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve reconsidered, and I’d like to stay on a bit. I mean, in the light of that letter —”

She shot him a wide, innocent glance. “You mean the sex isn’t good enough to hold you?”

He blushed and stammered, and she rescued him with her mischievous laughter that dissolved him into helpless, red-faced laughter of his own. Then, seriously, she went on, “So it goes like this: first the wicked Old Regime, then the Revolution, then that’s captured and turned into the despotism of the First Empire by Napoleon. Then he’s defeated in, what, l8l7? And the French monarchy is restored. The aristocrats who fled come swarming back and try to reinstate their Old Regime privileges, and the tension between them and the liberals who want to preserve the gains of the Revolution leads to a succession of messy little uprisings in the l830s, right? Which is what it sounds as if our judge is trying to warn his kid to stay clear of.”

“You’ve been reading my books.”

She looked modestly smug. “I once knew all this stuff forwards and backwards, as a matter of fact, from reading about it in college — diaries, propaganda, novels, histories, the lot. Then it all slipped out of my head, but here we are again. Peculiar, isn’t it?”

“Peculiar,” he repeated dryly. “Yes. And you Yanks call us Brits ‘masters of understatement!’ You do realize that we can’t do a damn thing with that letter; nothing public, that is. We’d be branded a pair of dotty old frauds.”

She said, “I don’t want to go to anyone with it. This is ours, my dear; yours and mine and nobody else’s. We’ve earned it.”

“And now?” he said, sliding a record from its sleeve. “How about Brahms?”

“Good,” she said. “A good background for my theory.”

“Ah,” he said, “I knew you had a theory.”

“Yes. I think that the judge is someone from your family history, maybe an unknown or even an illegitimate kinsman. I think that he’s been trying to break through to you using my dreams because you’re too closed to him to receive his communications in any form. He’s using the material of his lifetime in the Revolution and after because he can get through to me that way on account of my past interest in that period. Also because there’s such a strong emotional charge attached to that time for him that it boosts his signal to an intensity that even I can pick up, though believe me, I’m no psychic!”

“And the aim of this excessively roundabout method of communication?” he said with some asperity. The piano quintet began, flowing into him like liquid gold in his veins. He was ashamed of his own sharpness as soon as he had spoken.

“To assure you, my dear,” she said in a tone of infinite gentleness, “that it isn’t all over when you die. And maybe that drifting around the world drinking tea with strangers is a good way to spend a lifetime — better than trying to make a revolution, for example.”

“And,” he said, “that perhaps also that it’s a good idea to communicate with one’s kind in the more conventional ways — letters, phone-calls, even face-to-face conversations — while one still can?”

“You know how I feel about that,” she said. “And how I’ll miss you if you do decide to go home. Hey, come on over here and give me a game, will you? I’m tired to death of looking over and over these pages.”

He hoisted himself to his feet, leaning on the phonograph cabinet — it’s only love, you know, he told himself, not remission — and crossed the room to sit opposite her at the little game table with its inlaid top.

“I’m not sure,” he said severely, “that I’m willing to accept that old bastard as an ancestor of mine, no matter how obscurely connected. Judging by that self-serving, brazen attempt to justify himself, I’d say he was the worst sort of radical-turned-reactionary, probably as corrupt and cynical as they came, which was impressively corrupt and cynical, if you read Balzac, for instance. Which crooked politician of the time was it who provided the slogan of the whole post-Napoleonic age in France —
‘Enrichez vous!’
he said. Make yourself rich if you can. Pack of damned war-profiteers and heartless exploiters if ever there was one.”

“That’s exactly why I’m inclined to believe it,” Dorothea said. “Because he’s an ordinary, even a less-than-admirable type.” She held out her hands, and he chose the white piece. “Your move,” she said.

He studied the board. “You know,” he said, “I’ve known some odd occurrences. I don’t discount any possibility beforehand. But frankly, I don’t think I need reassurance so badly as to warrant all this effort. People die. I am a person. I shall die. Why all the fuss?”

Did his voice sound bitter? He hoped not.

“I’m not competent to answer that,” she said. “To me, any amount of fuss seems perfectly appropriate if it will make things better for you.”

Lightning flared in the echo of thunder, frosting her hair with an icy light.

“Did you dream last night?” he said.

“No.”

“What if it’s all over? Maybe now you’ve got the message, and the judge can stop trying so hard. Or maybe sex defuses it.”

“It’ll be over,” she said, jumping two of his pieces, “when we don’t just theorize but understand. If we ever do.”

“We will,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I’ll see it. If not, once I’m dead I’ll know the answer, won’t I? Just up and put it to the judge, as one ghost to another, what have you been after with all this? Then I’ll come back and enlighten you. In your dreams.”

“Pax,” she said. “You’re cutting close to the bone.” She turned to the black, wet window. The music — he had forgotten it — rippled limpidly. He sighed. The point was not to win surrender from her. That was not the point at all. He loathed his meanness. She seemed not even to notice it, for she went on, “There is one possibility that we haven’t considered, which is that I am as crazy as a bedbug and simply hallucinating madly in my sleep, and that you’re taking it seriously out of an excess of good manners — the perfect guest.”

He said, “You are not crazy, and I am most certainly not perfect.”

They played three games, growing absorbed. At ten-thirty the rain stopped. She sat back from the table. “I’m going to bed. Will you come with me?”

He had been wondering whether this moment would come. He avoided her eyes. “You don’t have to,” he said awkwardly. “Just because we — I wouldn’t want you to feel in any way obliged —”

“I don’t. I feel damned lucky.”

She touched the lump under the skin of his lower belly and could not prevent herself from checking for an instant: this was it, the killer, death under her touch.

They went on without speaking of it. She came, but he didn’t.

“Not to worry,” he said, after. “Effect of the medication, probably.” His bony arm lay across her ribs, amazingly heavy. The he added, “Doesn’t it put you off a bit — this moribund carcass —”

His breath lightly feathered her shoulder, warm brush and warm brush again, while still inside her his penis wilted with small, creeping movements. Live breath, live flesh: she had not been making love with Death and must not let him think that way. Except that she had felt a lurch of panic in herself when she had touched that enigmatic lump.

She said, “It bothers me, yes.”

Pause. Then he said, “Nothing good can come of this.”

“Nothing has to. It’s good as it is.” She tried to turn to face him, but he held her as she lay and she didn’t want to fight him. “We would be left wondering, later, how we would have been, together. I’d rather remember than wonder.”

“Ah yes,” he grated, “later; when they stick a catheter in it, and I become one great tottering system of failed and rotting pipes. Have you ever read up on cancer deaths? No, of course not, why should you? It’s something one does when one first finds out.”

All right, she thought, this had to come, don’t let it fester, let’s deal with it right now. “Ricky, love, I’m not perfect. I can’t promise that I won’t turn away from you later because of changes in your body. And I can’t alter the likelihood that you’ll be dead long before I will, and that it’s not fair. But I won’t talk about this with you, not lying skin to skin. When we’re in bed together, we’re in bed. You understand?”

His grip on her body became live again, though not strong. He would never be strong again. But he wasn’t playing corpse now, and he buried his wet face against the back of her neck and whispered, “Yes, I understand.”

“What have you done with the covers?” she grumbled after a while. “Half of me is sticking out in the cold. My mother used to say, never marry a skinny man. (She said ‘marry,’ not ‘sleep with,’ because she was an old-fashioned girl.) The little bit of meat on a skinny man won’t keep you warm at night, she said.”

“My mother said, ‘Be prudent, Ricky dear. Foreign women are usually not as forward nor as backward as common knowledge would have them.’”

Their basic understanding held and did not need to be remade each time they went to bed together during the week that followed. It was simple, really: sometimes they were playful and sometimes not, and sometimes they clung together and rocked each other in silent commiseration like two frightened apes in a laboratory cage. What they did not do was tear at each other.

They filed the letter and its translation away in her desk. As if by common consent and without further discussion, they let the subject drop. This was not as difficult as she had expected: the dreams ceased, or at least were suspended for the time being.

Ricky walked less often and less far, ate less (although Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream could still tempt him), rested more. He came out to the wall with her only occasionally and sat reading in the shade, not books on French history any more but a novel that she had brought him from the bookstore, Garcia Marquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

They did not go in for hand-holdings, pecks on the cheek, and pats on the behind. He never spent a full night in her room, but always withdrew to his own well before morning. How proper he was, how articulate and courteous (except when a certain delightful silly-streak came out, most often in bed). She concentrated on how English he was rather than how sick. Most often they did not have sex because he was not up to it. They merely made love.