The Rules of Dreaming (6 page)

The next morning Dubin arrived at the library shortly after Miss Whipple had sat down at her desk to sort the mail.  At the end of his last visit, disregarding her stern advice, he’d followed the red-haired graduate student she called Nicole to a rambling old house a few blocks away,
where she lived in an attic apartment, and since then he’d kept her in his sights, wondering how much she could tell him about the Morgan twins.  She was a fascinating creature, ethereal and elusive, who darted in and out at all hours to purchase enormous quantities of coffee and little else.  Apparently she never slept, or if she did it was during the day when Dubin had other business to attend to.   At the moment he needed to do some research on Avery Morgan and the library was as good a place to start as any.  The few people in town he had asked about Avery Morgan seemed anxious to avoid saying anything about him.  All he knew about Morgan, beyond his official biography—Exeter, Princeton, and a list of country clubs so exclusive that no one but their members have ever heard of them—were the bloodshot eyes, the chirping voice and the museum of obscure presidents.  This last point was probably the most telling: the man was a collector.  Dubin had known a few rich collectors and they’re an odd breed.  Possessive, secretive, proud—and utterly obsessed with their hobby.  And some men collect wives the way others collect statues or figurines.

“How’s the research going?” Miss Whipple asked.

“Slowly but surely.”  Dubin had taken a seat on a hard wooden chair facing a hard wooden table across from the librarian’s desk.  “I was just thinking about the collecting angle.  The Morgans collect autograph materials, don’t they?”

“Well,” Miss Whipple said warily, “he does.”

“Avery Morgan?”

She nodded.   “He’s been collecting autographs and manuscripts all his life.  Still comes in here now and then to look at the auction records.”

“Auction records? Where do you keep them?”

“And dealer catalogs, when he doesn’t get them in the mail.”  She pointed to a shelf in the reference section.  “They’re right over there.”

Dubin spent half an hour flipping through
American Book Prices Current
, the published records of prices realized at major auction houses for rare books and manuscripts.  He went back seven years, before the date of Maria Morgan’s death and worked forward from there, browsing randomly through the pages, trying to put himself in the mindset of Avery Morgan pursuing his hobby on the eve of his wife’s death and in the years that followed.  Nothing noteworthy struck his eye and he was about to give up when he turned to the dealer catalogs that were filed on the shelf beside the auction records.  In one of the more recent catalogs, just over a year old, he found an item that echoed in his mind.  It had been circled with a felt-tip pen.

“What was the opera
Maria Morgan was rehearsing when she died?” he called to the librarian.

“
The Tales of Hoffmann
.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Offenbach.”

“He wrote the story?”

“No, he wrote the music.  I don’t know who wrote the story.”

There it was, circled in red, in Catalogue 97 of Stephen Witz & Son, 987 Madison Avenue, New York, specializing in rare literary and musical autograph material.  Item number 263:

OFFENBACH, JACQUES.  Autograph letter signed. 28 August 1880.    The last letter written by Offenbach to his friend Albert Wolff before the composer’s death on 5 October 1880.  Offenbach complains about the machinations of his wife, accusing her of destroying his life’s work by “vandalizing” the score of
Les Contes d’Hoffmann
as it neared completion. In the delirium of his last illness, Offenbach insists that he has duped his wife by hiding the real manuscript, which he has arranged to be delivered to Wolff after his death.  Very good condition. $12,000.

Dubin was tempted to rip the page out of the catalog and slip it into his pocket, but since Miss Whipple was watching he walked to the xerox machine and invested a dime making a copy.

“Did you find something interesting?” she asked, appearing beside him.

“Why is this item circled?”

“Vandalism, as far as I’m concerned. If I only knew who did it—”

“Was it Avery Morgan?  Did he look at this catalog?”

“If I ever catch him writing in the books—”

Dubin had the sensation that at last he’d found something tangible that could lead him in the right direction.  “I need to find out more about
The Tales of Hoffmann
.”

“The Music section is all the way in the back.”

“No. The information I need is more specific.  When I was here before, didn’t you mention the name of the director Maria Morgan was working with?”

Miss Whipple peered at him cautiously over the tops of her
trifocals.  “I might have,” she said.  “It was Casimir Ostrovsky.”

“Do you know where I can find him
?”

Chapter
6

Nicole had been scheduled for a series of follow-up visits at weekly intervals after her discharge from the Institute.  In my growing obsession with Olympia I had almost forgotten about Nicole, but that Wednesday afternoon I was delighted to notice her name in my appointment calendar. 

“Dr. Hoffmann?”   She slipped into my office, a little embarrassed to be there, which I took as a good sign.  By her own account she was adjusting well, taking her medications, and planning to continue in graduate school.  A few panic attacks, occasional disorientation, but no new psychotic episodes.  She’d gotten over the breakup with the boyfriend and had no interest in dwelling on it.  Her main preoccupation was with her frustrating search for a dissertation topic.  “That’s not something I can help you with,” I said without thinking.

Her eyes darted away.  “Maybe you can.  Maybe you’re part of it somehow.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” I finally asked.

“Yes. It’s about Hunter’s piano playing.  I found out what it was.”

“What it was?”

She was looking right at me now.  “You know, what music he was playing.  Don’t you think that’s important?”

“Sure.  It could be very important.  Although—”

“He’s been playing a piece by Robert Schumann.  Just as I thought.  I got a CD from the library and the piece is on it.  It’s called Kreisleriana.”

“Kreisleriana,” I repeated, stalling for time.  “That’s a strange name.”

“There’s an even stranger story behind it.”

“Go ahead.”

“Kreisleriana is named after a fictional character called Johannes Kreisler, who’s an eccentric musician in some stories by Hoffmann.”

I was startled to hear my own name.  “Hoffmann?”

“Not you,” she laughed.  “E.T.A. Hoffmann.  German Romantic writer from the first part of the nineteenth century.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Most people haven’t.  But when Schumann was a young man—which was a few years after Hoffmann’s death—Hoffmann was what today we’d call a cult figure.”

“A Hoffmann cult?”  The idea made me smile.

“He was an incredibly influential writer.  He influenced Poe, Dumas, Dostoevsky.  Offenbach even composed an opera about him—
The Tales of Hoffmann
—which I’m not familiar with.  Do you know it?”

“I’ve been hearing about it all my life,” I frowned.  That opera, or at least its name—which was all I knew about it—was a sore point with me.  Every teacher
I’d ever had had taunted me with it at one time or another.  “Because of my name.  And maybe for that reason I’ve studiously avoided knowing anything about it.  To be quite honest, I have no use for opera as an art form.  It’s totally stupid as far as I’m concerned.”

“I know what you mean.  Well, anyway, Hoffmann was a peculiar blend of Prussian bureaucrat and bohemian artistic genius.  He made his living as a judge, and on his nights off he sat in the local tavern drinking wine and writing these crazy, fantastical stories that became enormously popular after his death.”

I thought it was time to bring this digression back around to its starting point.  “What does all this have to do with Hunter Morgan?”

“I’m getting to that,” she said.  “Hoffmann believed, quite literally, that there’s a ‘spirit world’ that parallels this one, populated
by demons and sprites who represent pure spirit uncontaminated by the corruption of the material world.”

“But wasn’t that just a metaphor for something?”

“No, that’s what’s so hard for us to grasp.  To Hoffmann the spirit world wasn’t just a metaphor—it was the real thing, more real than anything else we ordinarily experience—and he believed that the creative artist had to do everything possible to go there.  Through music, dreams, alcohol, drugs—and if all else failed, madness.”

I was beginning to see the connection.  “He sounds like a character out of the 1960s.”

She nodded.  “Hoffmann was Jack Kerouac and Timothy Leary and Jim Morrison all rolled into one.  But at heart he was a bourgeois functionary.  He was never able to rise above the commonplace and make the leap into the spirit world.”

This was starting to make me uncomfortable.  “Now bring me back to earth.  Why are we talking about this?”

“Because Hunter’s been playing this music by Schumann that was inspired by Hoffmann’s stories, remember?”

“Right.”

“Schumann accepted the artistic ideology that Hoffmann had never been able to put into practice.  And he worked at it so hard that he actually became what Hoffmann only wrote about.”

“Didn’t you say he went mad?”

“Absolutely stark raving mad.  Institutionalized—in a much worse place than this—for the last two years of his life.”

“Are you suggesting—”

“As a follower of Hoffmann, Schumann concluded that in order to be an artistic genius you have to enter the spirit world and stay there.  You can’t leave to go to law school or medical school or take a government job.  You have to get crazy and stay crazy.  And that’s exactly what Schumann did.”

I stood up and looked at my watch.  “This is all very interesting,” I said curtly, “but it will have to wait until next time.  I have another appointment.”

“But what are you going to do in the meantime?  Obviously Hunter’s trying to tell you something.”

“As you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll have to discuss that next time.  Are you planning to come next week?”

She stood up, glaring.  “But this isn’t about me!” she protested.  “I told you all this because it’s about Hunter.” 

“Of course it’s about Hunter.”

“You’re just humoring me, aren’t you?  You think I just made all this up.”

“No, absolutely not.  I just don’t know what to make of it.  We can talk about it again next week.”

After Nicole went home—I didn’t really have another appointment—I sat at my desk in the gathering darkness, mulling over the bizarre tale she had just told me.  Was this a story about Hunter, as she claimed—or was it really about Nicole herself?  In either case, the fact that it involved a writer named “Hoffmann” could not be a mere coincidence.  And clearly it was no accident that this “Hoffmann” was described as a “bourgeois functionary” who could never rise above the commonplace.  Assuming the story was really about Hunter, what was Hunter trying to tell me with his piano playing?  That he inhabited a spirit world apart from the one most of us regard as reality?  That much was obvious.  But surely it went farther than that.  Wasn’t he saying that I—after all, I was the “Hoffmann” of the piece—was somehow responsible for his insanity?  That like Schumann he had taken on the madness I projected and made it real?  Or was Nicole saying this about my relationship to her?  Merely to ask such questions was to demonstrate their absurdity.  It was clear that Nicole’s “research” had little or nothing to do with Hunter but was an elaborate fantasy of her own. 

I suspected a disguised form of transference.  Transference is a phenomenon in which the patient transfers a repressed emotional
conflict—often of a sexual nature—onto the therapist.  In this case Nicole made it appear that she was focused on Hunter, but her emphasis on “Hoffmann” and his almost supernatural power to influence events pointed in another direction.  It pointed at me.

*   *   *

Dubin rose early on Thursday and worked out at the gym between six and seven.  Over breakfast he avoided reading the
USA Today
some misguided soul had started leaving on his doorstep—as a recovering news junkie, he never allowed himself to be exposed to the news media before five in the afternoon—and when he climbed into the BMW to begin his day’s work he deftly manipulated the radio buttons with the same end in mind.  Thursday was collection day, the most satisfying day of the week, when his clients paid for their misdeeds.  He insisted on personal delivery, usually in cash, in suburban venues of his own choosing: convenience stores, gas stations, even banks—in fact he preferred banks, where armed guards and surveillance cameras were assigned to protect him from any recurrence of antisocial behavior.  The clients were sullen, bitter, contemptuous, the meetings hurried and impersonal with a dash of weary familiarity, like illicit sex or banking itself.   On days like this, when he sensed that he was being watched, he conducted business with a Zen-like simplicity.  Nothing was said that could be transmitted through a wire.

Having completed his collections, he decided to take a quick drive into the city, as if such a thing were possible—in fact the traffic
beyond the Lincoln Tunnel was worse than usual, an impenetrable Middle Eastern bazaar of taxicabs and desperate throngs, locked in deadly combat for every square inch between Eleventh Avenue and Grand Central Station.  Angry, agonized faces on cab drivers and pedestrians alike. He  crawled uptown, then over to Madison, and at last his luck turned.  He found what he was looking for, even found a parking garage with an hourly rate that was less than a lawyer’s.

It was upstairs in a posh building that housed an art gallery on the ground floor.  Stephen Witz & Son, Inc.  Rare books and manuscripts.  The man who grudgingly unlocked the door—after checking Dubin’s skin color to make sure he wasn’t there to rob him—was fortyish, tidy-looking and smug.
Undoubtedly Witz
fils
, if a Witz at all.

“Can I help you?”

Dubin decided not to waste his time with pointless preliminaries.  He reached in his pocket and pulled out the wrinkled page from the dealer’s catalog he’d photocopied at the library and stuck it under Witz’s skeptical nose.

“Is this still available?”

“The Offenbach letter?  Heavens, no!  That was sold months ago.”

“Did you get your price for it?”

The son of Witz chuckled shrewdly.  “We always get our price.  In this case, we could have asked a lot more.  There was someone who really wanted it.” 

“You wouldn’t happen to have a photocopy, would you?”

“A photocopy of the letter?  I couldn’t show it to you, even if I had one.  There is such a thing as ethics, you know.”

“What’s ethics got to do with it?”

The dealer’s patience for Dubin’s gaucherie was wearing thin.  “When people buy a manuscript,” he sniffed, “part of what they’re buying—sometimes most of what they’re buying—is exclusivity.  You wouldn’t pay these prices in order to have photocopies floating all over the place, would you?”

“What if I told you I know where the manuscript is and could get it for you?”

“What manuscript?”

“The manuscript
score of
The Tales of Hoffmann
that Offenbach is referring to in the letter.”

Witz pretended to laugh as he watched Dubin carefully.  “You mean the one he claims to be hiding from his wife, who he thinks
is trying to kill him?  I mean, really, wasn’t that all a paranoid delusion?”

“I don’t know.  Was it?”

“Do you have the manuscript?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You know where it is?”

“That’s what I said.”

“In that case, I’d say I’m interested.”

Dubin folded his photocopy slowly and put it back in his pocket.  “You have a buyer?”

“I might have one.”

“Probably the same one who bought the letter.  But this deal would have to be handled
very discreetly.  Not through a catalog.”

The dealer nodded in acquiescence.  “No,
very discreetly.  That will suit my client fine.”

Dubin picked up one of the dealer’s business cards from the counter and stuck it in his pocket, as if he was impatient to leave.  “We’re talking a lot of money.  Well into s
ix figures.”

“I realize that.”

“My commission is fifteen percent.” 

Witz winced.  “That’s a bit rich.”

“That’s exactly what I intend to be when I’ve sold it.” 

“Excuse me?”

“A bit rich.”  Dubin turned around and headed for the door.

“Did I get your name?” the dealer called after him.

“I’ll give you a call.”

*   *   *

Day and night, at the library, on the internet, commuting in and out of the city to the university, Nicole devoted herself to her researches into every nook and cranny of nineteenth century literature, with an emphasis on fantasy and the supernatural:  Mary Shelley, Monk Lewis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe.  She was under enormous pressure to select a thesis topic, but she was convinced that if she could understand Hunter Morgan’s playing of Kreisleriana and what it signified, her own problems would fall into place.  She spent as much time with Hunter and Antonia as possible and kept them abreast of her findings, though neither was capable of adding any useful insights or even of showing any understanding of what she was trying to do.  Nicole listened to all of Schumann’s piano music, read most of Hoffmann’s tales, and after two weeks, on the eve of a desperate meeting with her thesis advisor at which she was expecting to be asked to leave the program, she hit pay dirt.