Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (6 page)

He caressed the bony back of his neck with his palm.

Not a bad body. He had given it a hell of a time, after all. Frozen and starved and roasted and soaked and desiccated, scraped raw with blowing sand, chewed up by insects, half-poisoned with villainous water and flyblown food, it was a wonder the poor beast had lasted this long.

And five-star feeds in France, let’s not forget that; wines with more pedigree than his whole family put together; endless Oriental feasts; and the comforts of fine hotels. To offset abstinence in some places, he had allowed himself indulgence in others — for instance, with a brilliant blonde economist in Brussels, an old connection often reaffirmed over the years, to whom he had considered going with his horrible news before his impetus toward Dorothea had become clear. With a doctor’s widow in Wales, although he had known her in the Biblical sense well before her bereavement. Homely as he was, he had not done badly in that department.

Abstinence and indulgence had probably done the carcass in. Drove it round the bend with too much right-hand, too much left. Now here it was bending the knee to its own tyrant cells run amok. His initial rage at this treachery was long since spent. He had torn up the reams of bitter outpourings that had at first relieved those feelings and had begun to develop a mood of rumination, judgment, a weighing and sorting and searching for patterns.

But I don’t care about my past, he objected. How could the already-lived past compete with the excitement of exploring Dorothea’s dreams?

He sipped lemonade and read the latest account. A man sits by a window, hearing the mob below, and he writes and writes and shakes with terror…

That evening he had an attack of the horrors, brought on by nothing more evocative than feeding the dogs and letting them out for the night, as instructed.

When he shut the door after them, his solitude struck him with sledge-hammer force. He stood clutching the counter-edge in the kitchen, unable to let go. His consciousness spun in a heavy black vortex of fear. He whimpered and clung there, bent over his clenched, white-knuckled hands, trying desperately to take deep breaths and pull out of it. But every breath made it worse, as if he breathed in the panic with the air.

I can’t stand this, he thought, not again. I’ve been through this. Why again; isn’t it ever done with? How much worse can it get, how long can it last, what is it?

Mad, he thought, sweating; I’m going mad. Dorothea will come back and find me raving.

Eventually, undramatically, the dark, pulsing dread simply withdrew, leaving him wracked and gasping, while the electric clock on the wall clucked faintly to itself as the second hand jerked another fraction forward.

He dragged in the deepest breath he dared to, wary of triggering the damned cough, and shuffled out onto the back patio, where he whispered his curses at the moon; croaked his curses, finally shouted them with all the meager power of his diseased lungs; and cried. And then felt not better but simply too exhausted to feel worse.

Call her up, she left the number of the hotel, ask her to come back, tell her you’re leaving, something —

Next to the phone in the kitchen, on the pink pad, she had left him a message. It was an invitation to walk down the arroyo behind the house and find something — she didn’t say what. A little map was added, firmly and clearly drawn.

Well. He never could resist a map. He took his medicine and went to bed.

In the morning he walked down the arroyo.

And she dared to question whether she were an artist or not! Ricky, confronted with the mosaic wall, was outraged. What was the matter with the woman? Just look at this bloody thing! How could anyone doubt?

He moved toward it and away from it, muttering and swearing and groaning to himself under a sky so rich with cloud that only vagrant gleams of sunlight reached the coruscated surface of the work. A woman’s work, he thought — a myriad of tiny details adding up to one stupendous gesture. Oh, she would bridle to hear him say that!

He chuckled and wiped his forehead on his cuff, stepping back and back so that he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to see it all.

Lord, what hubris! What a gigantic action to take in the midst of this sweep of dry land and mutinously fulminant sky!

A god’s work, a myriad of tiny details adding up…

No wonder she kept it a secret. Wait until the environmentalists saw what she’d done to a grand, handsome chunk of rock!

Not his style, of course. He was a lover of Dutch painting, all domestic clarity and northern light. No matter. He couldn’t stop looking at this, trudging forward to caress the river of chipped and sand-blasted glass marbles she had made, the hot chaos of a bed of bright copper scraps not yet verdigrised over.

By God, I could write something wonderful about this, he thought. It makes me want to sit down and drive my pen across the paper, but what words could I possibly find to convey the impact of this? He coughed, drank from his water bottle, and wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. Better than the great Egyptian sphinx, he thought. The sort of thing one always hoped to stumble on in some trackless barrens, relic of a lost civilization no one had ever heard of before, marker of some hitherto undreamed of stage of humanity’s development. Why, he might be on Mars at this moment, stumbling upon some arrogant testament to the existence — once — of the builders of the canals (which were a figment, of course, but what the wall did was mine the imagination so that one could not look at it without visions bursting before the mind’s eye).

His chukka boots had sand in them. He sat down on a rock in the shade of a withered tree. As he worked at the knots in his laces, the wall seemed to move. She had somehow endowed it with an ability to shift when one wasn’t looking.

He felt a sudden wave of gratitude engulf and warm him. He was reminded of a time walking in England, in the south somewhere; he had entered a church in some nondescript town to rest. On the organist’s bench a young fellow in a sagging suit had played — practicing, it soon became apparent, for some future recital or ceremony, unaware of anyone being in the church. Had played and created such a joyful, romping glitter of beauty that Ricky had found himself brimming with this same undirected gratitude: not to God, in whom he did not believe, nor yet to the young man himself, who was not giving anything, only practicing — just gratitude.

Dorothea sat on the floor in the front room sorting books to be contributed to the library sale into a carton; a soothing activity, since it was a wet day and she could not go out to the wall. The group of plastic dashboard saints that she had acquired in the flea market in Albuquerque would contribute their hands, perhaps, somewhere or other in the design, a whole patch of blessing, pleading, bleeding plastic hands. But first she must look at the wall with the hands laid out in front of it.

Ricky had greeted her return with the presentation of a gift, something he said that as a guest he liked to wait to bestow until he was sure he had the right item for the host in question. He had given her a small metal charm of beaten silver from North Africa in the form of an eye. It was supposed to insure good sight, he said, although in her case he had seen with his own eyes that her vision — in artistic terms at least — was excellent.

Perhaps he would come and keep her company while she worked. This prospect aroused not the anxiety she would have expected but a shy eagerness instead. Knowing that he had seen the wall and admired it made her feel not that she had handed the work to the world but rather that she had drawn him into the world of the work with her.

See, she told herself; nothing to it. What a way to show the thing to him, so childish! Six steps from the hollow tree, five hops to the right, and find the treasure — while I’m gone, safely distant from your reaction in its first freshness. So, now, human eyes other than her own had looked upon the work and not only done no harm but had found it good.

On the other hand, Ricky wasn’t just anybody, any old pair of eyes.

She stared at the book in her hand:
Disturbing the Universe
, Freeman Dyson’s autobiographical reflections. One of Nathan’s better choices, which she might dip into again. Keep it.

People say we’re all dying, but dying sometime-or-other is not the same thing as dying, progressively, recognizably, moment by moment toward a painfully foreseeable end. Not exactly, of course; Ricky had set her straight on that, stressing the maddening unpredictability of cancer, the falsehood of doctors “giving” one this much time or that much time. But he had told her, too, that he thought his horizon was not far.

Sometimes his doses of the hospice mix made him so chipper and bright-seeming that she almost could not believe that he was dying at all. At other times she had only to glance at him, to listen to the uncertainty of his step, to know it for truth all over again. Each time the knowledge hurt as much.

God, these books were dusty. She managed to grab a tissue out of her pocket just in time and jam her nose in it for a fit of sneezing.

But how long is he staying with you, someone had asked her at the bookstore the other day. I don’t know, she’d answered. But that’s awfully hard on you, isn’t it? Dorothea remembered herself saying, It’s hard any way you do it, I guess. She was a little embarrassed now at having presented herself as some sort of heroine about this. How could anyone know how good it sometimes felt to have Ricky here in the house? How pleasing to come upon him browsing these bookshelves or brushing sleek Mars till his black coat glowed?

Now there was this matter of the art class coming up here sometime soon on a “field trip.” Mary Morgan, a teacher in the Taos schools when Dorothea arrived, now ran an alternative high school program down in Albuquerque. She had run into Dorothea at the flea market, where Mary was hunting cheap but colorful objects for a still-life for the art class in the company of the young woman from New York who was teaching the course as a volunteer.

“Let us bring them up to see you,” Mary had begged. “There’d be only eight of them and two adults, for an afternoon. I found them a fellow to visit down here, who shall remain nameless, and while I was looking over the drawings on his walls I heard him wandering from comments on art to stories about artists and their hangers-on, and the next thing you know he was describing some model of somebody’s as the kind of ‘girl’ who really needed to be raped for her own good. No kidding, I heard him with my own ears. I need an antidote, Dorothea. Those kids need an antidote.” And when the other teacher had wandered off to look at some jewelry, “You can see that even little Miss Stern from big, bad New York is still pale from that moment. Please be our antidote, will you?”

Have to ask Ricky, of course, in some way so that he must answer truthfully rather than as the always-accommodating guest. Unless of course she herself could really not stomach the idea and needed a good excuse to avoid the class-visit.

Sneak.

“What subjects did you read at university?” Ricky said, looming suddenly above her, pad in hand.

Taken aback, she blinked up at him. “English Lit, of which I remember next to nothing. Why?” And why were his cheeks flushed and his head reared back and his eyes so bright? She scrambled to her feet. “Ricky, is something wrong?”

“Something’s pretty queer, I can tell you that,” he said. “Your having done literature instead of history makes it all the queerer. I was rereading your notes on the dream you had down in Albuquerque —”

She grimaced. “Yes, so much for the therapeutic effect of distance! Right there in the Plaza Hotel in glorious downtown Albuquerque, up pops my mystery man-at-the-window, and this time he throws them a cat, a tortoise-shell cat like the one Claire used to have! Don’t tell me that makes some kind of sense to you?”

He tucked the note-pad under his arm and stood rubbing his palms together in slow satisfaction. “Not that bit,” he drawled, “but put together some other factors — the pieces of layer-cake your crowd-members were wearing on their hats, red, white, and blue layers — the soft red cap the fellow with the pike is wearing — the cart in the middle of Sixth Avenue —”

“Ricky, what is it?” She spoke more sharply than she’d intended. Scared?

“Cake, cake,” he said triumphantly, “don’t you remember? ‘Let them eat cake.’ And the colors are those of the French Republican cockade worn by the revolutionaries and then the soldiers of Napoleon. The red cap is a liberty cap, the cart is a tumbril — you’re dreaming about the French Revolution of 1789, my girl!”