I’ve had a dream that Lorelei speaks to me. In the dream, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, when Lorelei walks in on her two hind legs.
She speaks, and her voice is surprisingly high-pitched. She sounds like a character in a cartoon.
‘Give me a meatball,’ she says, ‘and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’
I spear a meatball with my fork and hold it out to her.
She gives it a tentative lick, then grabs it with her teeth and charges out of the room. I jump up and run after her. When I catch up with her, she’s in my office, lying in front of a door I’ve never seen before.
‘She’s in there,’ says Lorelei, her mouth full of meat.
I open the door. Inside is a small closet. Lexy sits huddled on the floor. She’s dressed in a blue nightgown. She is very thin. ‘What took you so long?’ she says.
I wake up then with a start, my chest filled with a wild joy. It’s a moment before I can situate myself, before I come to myself again and remember that I am alone in my bed and my wife is gone. Disappointment runs through me with a terrible heat.
I sit up and turn on the light. It’s almost dawn. Lorelei is sleeping on the floor next to the bed. ‘Lorelei,’ I call.
She raises her head. ‘Come on up, girl. Up, up.’ I pat the bed.
This is an unusual request on my part, and I have to repeat it a second time before she obeys. She yawns, then stands and stretches, and finally jumps up on the bed and settles herself next to me. I stroke her fur. ‘I had a dream about you, girl,’
I say. ‘Do you want to hear my dream?’ She sighs deeply one of her most human sounds - and closes her eyes.
I lie next to her for a minute, my hand on her stomach, feeling the sleepy rise and fall of her breath. “I want nothing more than to close my eyes and to find my way back to Lexy’s hiding place, to gather her in my arms and lift her thin body out into the light, but as the moments pass, it becomes clear to me that I’m not going to get back to sleep, and I know that even if I do, I would probably find myself in a different dream entirely. The sad truth of dreams is that they rarely let you travel to the same place twice.
I decide to go for a walk. I get out of bed and put on my shoes, without changing out of the sweats and T-shirt I slept in. I grab my keys and my wallet and walk out into the misty dawn.
I’m not headed anywhere in particular, but after a few blocks I see the all-night supermarket looming ahead of me, an oasis of light in the dark landscape. It seems as good a destination as any.
The supermarket is a strange place at five a.m. You
find a surprisingly wide cross-section of people - guys who have worked the night shift stopping by to pick
up beer and cigarettes on their way home, mothers who have come out after a sleepless night to buy diapers, baby aspirin, Popsicles to soothe sore throats. I see a woman in a black cocktail dress buying a pint of ice cream. I see a homeless man with a basketful of groceries, holding up a jar of marinated artichoke hearts, examining it closely. He reads the ingredients on the back with great interest and then gently places the jar in his cart. I see that his cart is full of all kinds of luxury food - cans of smoked oysters, a cake from the bakery, a family-size frozen lasagne. I want to offer him some money - actually, I want to pay for his entire basket of food - but I have the sense that it would ruin the fantasy for him, the illusion that he’s just another customer wandering the bright aisles. I leave him in the condiment section, where he’s comparing two different brands of barbecue sauce.
I walk through the aisles like a ghost, my basket empty.
What do I want? It’s all laid out before me, anything I could possibly need. I have only to choose. I remember a time early in our relationship when Lexy and I stayed up all night, talking and making love, and ventured out at dawn to walk to this very supermarket to buy bagels and juice.
‘Don’t think about it,’ I say out loud. ‘Don’t think about it.’ I think about my dream, Lexy hidden in the closet all those months, waiting for me to find her. And then I know what I want. I want spaghetti and meatballs.
I gather ground beef and parsley, tomatoes and bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. I pay for my purchases and walk home under the pale morning sun.
I put on some music while I chop the onions and garlic, break the eggs, measure the bread crumbs. Lorelei comes into the kitchen as soon as I pull the cellophane from the package of meat, and she sits on the floor, watching me with interest. I focus on each small task completely, letting it occupy all of my mind. Now you heat the oil in the pan.
Now you plunge your hands into the cold meat and squeeze it between your fingers.
By seven a.m., the house is filled with the warm scent of it. For the first time in months, it smells like someone lives here. I eat a big plateful, and when I’m done, I feed Lorelei three meatballs, one after another, from my fork. The way she takes them in her teeth is surprisingly delicate. I crawl back into bed and fall into a welcome, dreamless sleep.
After our honeymoon, Lexy and I returned home to her little house, the house with the apple tree in the backyard, and settled in with a fresh sense of adventure. It was September, one of Lexy’s busiest times, workwise - something
about the changing colors, the new chill in the air, the glimpse of Halloween looming on the horizon, makes
people think about magic and masquerade in a way they rarely do in the warmer months.
I loved to watch her work. She made her masks through a lamination process of layering torn bits of paper into a clay mold and brushing them with glue. She had experimented with other methods - there’s a commercially produced paper pulp mixture you can buy, and she had also tried a method of pureeing paper and wallpaper paste in a
blender - but this was her favorite. Sometimes she left the masks to dry outside in the sun or the wind; more often she used an electric fan. After they were dry, she painted them with acrylic paints and finished them with a coat of varnish.
She sold her masks at craft fairs and Renaissance fairs and over the Internet, and she also did occasional work for local theater companies; I remember in particular a wonderful donkey head she made for a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She had about a hundred
designs, and she was always coming up with new
ones. She got a lot of special orders. We’re not far from Washington, so there were always requests for political figures, especially in election years, but she also fulfilled a few more unusual requests: a giant pepperoni pizza for a restaurant trade show, a bashed and bloody cow’s head for an animal rights protest. I never knew what strange new creature I might find in my home when I returned at the end of the day.
One day, maybe a month into our marriage, Lexy greeted me at the door wearing a mask of my own face. The likeness was quite good; she had a particular talent for the details that make up a human face. ‘Hi,’ she said in a gruff voice.
‘I’m Paul.’
I laughed. ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s amazing. And I see you were kind enough to leave off the lines around my eyes.’
She swatted me with something she held in her hand, a second mask. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, in the same deep Paul voice. ‘I have an extremely youthful face.’
‘What’s that one?’ I asked, pointing to the mask in
her hand.
She held it up. It was her own beautiful face. ‘Here,’
she said, handing me the Lexy mask. ‘I’ll be you and you be me.’
I covered my face with hers. ‘My name is Lexy,’ I said.
‘My husband is a wonderful, wonderful man.’
‘Hi, Lexy,’ she said. ‘You are one hot mama.’
‘I don’t talk like that,’ I said.
‘Well, maybe you should.’ She took me by the hand and led me into the living room. We sat down on the couch.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Tell me about yourself.’
‘Well,’ I said in my best Lexy voice, which wasn’t
very convincing. ‘As you’ve already noticed, I am one hot mama.’
She laughed. ‘See?’ she said. ‘It just rolls off the tongue.’
‘I’m also a very talented artist, and I’m smart, and I’m funny, and…’ I looked around the living room for inspiration. ‘And it looks like I even cleaned the house today, which was super-nice of me and above the call of duty. I hope I’m not turning into a housewife.’
‘You know, it’s funny you should say that. That’s exactly the thought you had while you were doing it, but you decided that since you’d already gotten your work done and you had some free time, it was probably okay. But enough about you. Let’s talk about me.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What are you like?’
‘Well, let’s see. I am a brilliant man, a wonderful professor, and I’m sweet and caring, and I can be very sexy
in a befuddled sort of way.’
‘Stop,’ I said. ‘You’re making yourself blush.’
‘Now, you, Lexy, are going to get up and open a bottle of wine and make your husband a wonderful dinner.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ll make dinner. You insist.’
The next day, I nailed two hooks into the wall over the couch and hung our masks there. They are there still, the faces of Paul and Lexy, smiling and newly wed, presiding over everything I do. Now, when I lift the Lexy mask off its hook, I can run my fingers over all the curves of her face.
Here is her nose, and here is her chin. Here are the holes where her eyes should be. Here are her own lips, though rendered forever stiff and hard, which I once kissed in every room of this house.
And another day - I sink into the memory as if it were a warm bath - another day, I came home to find that Lexy had painted the kitchen while I was at work. We had
spoken once or twice about doing something to brighten the room, but months had passed, and we still hadn’t gotten around to going to the paint store and picking out a color.
That morning, I’d drunk my coffee in a room with the same dingy beige walls that had been there since before I moved in, but when I came home, I found my wife sitting in a room with walls the color of pale sunshine.
‘So what do you think?’ she asked, smiling up at me as I walked into the kitchen. It was a cool night, but she had the back door open to let the evening air wash away the smell of fresh paint.
‘I love it,’ I said, looking around. ‘It looks great. I can’t believe you did all this.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was more work than I expected. But I wanted to get it done before you got home.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘What a nice surprise.’ I bent to kiss her. She had a smudge of yellow paint just above her top lip.
‘There’s another surprise, too,’ she said. ‘But you’re going to have to find it yourself.’
‘Here in the kitchen?’
She nodded.
I looked around, but I couldn’t see anything else that was different. I opened a cupboard and scanned its contents.
‘Chickpeas,’ I said, pulling out a can. ‘What a nice surprise.’
She laughed. ‘That’s not it.’
‘Are these new sponges?’ I asked, picking one up from the sink ledge.
‘Relatively. But that’s not it either.’
I went through the kitchen slowly, going through the cabinets, picking up mugs, heads of garlic, decorative platters we never used. ‘I give up,’ I said finally.
‘You’ll find it,’ she said. ‘Eventually.’
I found it the next morning. I was sitting at the table, having breakfast, when I looked up from my newspaper and saw, toward the top of the wall in front of me, the word ‘you’ glinting in a square of sunlight. The word was almost transparent; it was only the slant of the morning sun that made it visible. Trailing my eyes farther along the wall, I saw the word I and the word ‘love,’ followed again by the word ‘you.’ Following the line of words across the top edge of the wall, I could see that Lexy had written ‘I love you’ over and over again, a hidden border that could only be seen in the morning light.
Lexy came into the kitchen just then and saw me looking up. ‘Did you find it?’ she asked.
I got up and put my arms around her. ‘I found it,’ I said.
‘It’s a translucent glaze,’ she said. ‘I think you’ll be able to see it every morning.’
And I do. In the beginning, right after Lexy died, I avoided the kitchen during those morning hours. If I had to go into the room, I kept my gaze focused on the floor. I couldn’t bear to lift my eyes. But now I look forward to it. I like knowing it’s there; it helps me greet each new day. Some mornings I sit in the kitchen and linger over my coffee for an hour or more, watching the sun shift across the wall, illuminating each repetition of the phrase until the afternoon shadows come and the words are gone.
Do you see, then, the way that my Lexy liked to make a game of the things of this life? That she carried within her a fine sense of play that colored everything she did?
Is it any wonder that I look around at everything she left behind and wonder if she may be playing with me still?
I think I may finally be making some progress with Lorelei.
I believe I am on my way to teaching her her first word.
Here’s the way it happens: Lorelei is lazing on the carpet in a patch of sun, lolling on her back, and I’m observing her from across the room. As she lies there, she lets out a yawn, and as she yawns, she makes a noise that sounds like wa. I jump up from where I’ve been sitting.
‘Good girl!’ I cry. I run to the kitchen and pick up her water bowl. It sloshes dangerously as I run back to the living room. Lorelei is sitting up now, roused by my sudden activity. ‘Good girl,’ I repeat, and set the bowl down in front of her. She looks up at me, then at the bowl. Lazily, she sniffs at the water, then gives it a single lap with her tongue.
‘Wa,’ I say. lWa.’ I remove the bowl and put it aside, up on the coffee table. I sit down on the floor next to Lorelei.
I have to get her to repeat the sound.
‘Roll over, girl,’ I say, pushing on her flank. She resists.
‘Come on, girl,’ I cajole. ‘Roll over.’ After a few tries, I’m able to roll her onto her back. But how to make her yawn again?