Girl of My Dreams (31 page)

Before heading north I had to see Pogo. His office reflected the man: it was receptive. Unlike the Viennese contingent in Hollywood, who patronized the occupants of their couches with references, possibly fictional, to the time they'd spent with Freud, Dr. Leszek Pogorzelski, from Cracow by way of Lisbon, with only a brief pilgrimage to Vienna, mostly listened. After the initial session in a chair, I had lain on his couch feeling he was looking either at me or at the notepad where he occasionally jotted something. Yancey Ballard had suggested him when I complained of having serious doubts about my worth in the picture industry or anywhere else. “Stick around Pogo for a while,” Yeatsman had said, “and let Pogo stick around you.” When I groaned at his miserable word choice, he added apologetically, “Puns are close to the heart of psychoanalysis, you know.”

Curtains with waltzing couples on them were always drawn over the windows, separating Pogo's consulting room from the outside world, Wilshire Boulevard to be precise, speeding automobiles and ambition. His pictures were in pastels—three women at a sidewalk café, the reproduction of a Juan Gris cubist still life of musical instruments, a few others. At times I would turn to the Gris to speculate whether one of the instruments was a guitar or cello. The couch was a concession to the founder; it was covered in a flowery tapestry like the photographs of Freud's own study at Berggasse 19.

The doctor was blessed with a broad mouth that curved naturally into a smile, a round face with curious owl eyes, and tousled brown hair beginning to have a fringe of gray. No beard. I felt comfortable looking at him though normally my eyes were trained on his walls or on a Florida-shaped crack in his ceiling. He reminded me of no one but himself, with qualities of a genial college professor and a well-informed tour guide.

I told him I'd miss a few sessions while I was in San Francisco; it would be helpful for me, he said, to go forth and be with real people so different from my normal environment where unreality was the objective. I launched into a plaint about the unknown effect of having had an abbreviated childhood. Was it only self-pity? I mused about my mother gone so early, how her loss might have affected me. I recalled searching the face of every woman I met, the features and particularly the eyes, for some sign of motherhood. I was still, fifteen years later, doing this one way or another. Kindly eyes in Louisa Pemberton and Sylvia Solomon, the forty-year-old writers at Jubilee. “They look at me with something beyond interest and edging toward worry,” I said, “at least that's how I read them. Their age the age my mother was when she … ”

I was silent. Pogo was silent.

“ … stopped having age,” I went on. Now I lurched forward, trying to bootstrap myself into the present, telling Pogo of brown-eyed Yvonne, the aging Jubilee script girl (as she was still called at fifty). I couldn't tell if she was condescending to me or flirting. Motherhood slips into girlhood, longing toward lust. I'd been reading Pirandello, pondering the quest for identity in his plays, and I said, “Listen, perhaps it's not a mother or girl or woman of any kind I'm looking for, perhaps this is about my writing. Unlike Pirandello with his characters in search of an author, I am an author in search of his characters.” I stopped, craving a response. How smart I thought I was.

“Not so fast,” Dr. Pogorzelski said. “To find your characters you must first find your own character, which has so far been hiding rather successfully from its presumed author.”

I winced. I thought about telling him okay, I'll see you after San Francisco.

Luckily I'd had a dream, two really, both sexual. “In the first,” I said, “Mossy and Nils Maynard are in Mossy's office. They're over by the reflecting pool measuring penises. They look like statues instead of men, and each points proudly to the tip of his penis. Though they don't notice me—in fact I don't really seem to be there—I see their reflections in the pool and the elongated reflections of their penises. There is no talk. Was this a contest? A light shines suddenly in the window and the dream ends. What I think about this is—”

“What's the second dream?” Dr. Pogo wanted to know.

“As full of talk as the first one was silent,” I said. “I'm in the noisy commissary with Palmyra. Which would never happen, at least I'd never be there alone with her.”

“In dreams anything can happen, like movies.”

“Not movies under the new prude code.”

“The Motion Picture Code hasn't reached into our dreamtime.” Chuckle. “Yet.”

Sometimes, I thought, he thinks he's funnier than I do. Apparently he wanted to remind me of the junction between my work and my sleeping fantasies.

“We're surrounded by tables full of faces,” I continued, “though I don't recognize them. They're, well, extras in my dream, everyone jabbering. Pammy laughs heartily in a way I've never heard, and she says, ‘Do you ever wonder how many people in the world, at any given time, are fucking?' I'm shocked at her word. We do some figuring on populations, and she says, ‘Not everyone screws every day.' At this I notice how shy I am—she has said both ‘fucking' and ‘screws' while I've made no reference to sex. But I say, ‘I guess a lot of people are, uh, in bed.' She laughs again, and others around us also laugh, distracting me. Writing numbers on a piece of paper I have with me, we come up with a total. I write something on the paper even though I can't see what it is, and she says, ‘Yes that's it, a normal figure, many millions the world around.' I say, ‘It could be a conservative figure.' ‘Oh yes,' she says, ‘then let's be liberal. At any moment there must simply be oceans of people fucking, whole oceans.' More laughter, and it seems the entire commissary of extras is laughing though I can't understand how they heard what Pammy was saying. At this the waiter brings me the check to pay and the dream ends.”

“So, what to think?” Pogo asked.

“It all shows how inhibited I am,” I said disconsolately. “In the first dream two guys are measuring their pricks and I'm not only not in the contest, I'm not in the room at all. Invisible in my own dream for Christ's sake. These two guys are my superiors, almost my kings. To them I'm a serf.”

“And they are Narcissus, gazing at their images in a pool. You're in awe of them, but you may also look on them as men who cannot see beyond their own reflections.”

“Which doesn't help me in the second dream, where this beautiful woman is talking about sex but I know I can't have it with her even though people all over the world are having it, and others are laughing at me. I'm ashamed to use the words she uses, even in a dream. Shamed. If I think about my parents in connection with this dream … ” I paused.

Pogo was silent. But I paused too long. Psychoanalysis is a bitch mistress, insatiable, sucking the air out of your lungs until you can say no more. Finally I said, “I don't know why I brought up my parents.”

“Shame,” Dr. Pogorzelski said, and for an instant I thought he was shaming me. “You used the word ‘shame' just before you mentioned your parents, the very people who shame us when we venture out sexually. No reason Miss Millevoix and you shouldn't be having a cheery cackle over the sexual calculations you're making. You do the writing, as you do in a script, and she talks it the same as she would in reading lines you've written. She's the one who says millions, but you're the one writing it down. Politics sneaks in, too. You say ‘conservative,' she says ‘liberal,' you're protective, she's bold.”

“You mean sexually or politically?”

“There's a difference?” He chuckled again. I didn't want him enjoying himself. “No,” he said, serious now, “for our purposes here it's a question of being open or closed. We all need to say stop and we all need to say go. Perhaps in your fantasy she is on one side of you, your fears on the other.”

“Okay, good. You think my parents made me ashamed about sex?”

“They didn't have to. Your mother died too early for her to have had a conscious effect on your later sexual habits, but not too early for you to have desired her, not too early for you to have felt guilty about desiring your father's woman, your very strong father at that. So you have the guilt and the fear both. How old were you—seven?”

“Nine. I was nine.”

“Same as Lincoln, no? The perfect age for you to have felt some desire, aimed at your mother in particular. You didn't know many girls because your parents and you traveled so much. And she dies just at that moment when you are beginning to feel desire and before you have transferred it to girls your own age.”

“The guilt wouldn't shame me from even expressing desire in a dream, would it?”

“Unless something else is happening.”

“Like what? What could that be?”

“What could that be,” he repeated without making it a question. I knew he wanted me to keep going.

“Not long before she got sick,” I said, “I remember running into my parents' bedroom early in the morning. I had to tell them something, I forget what. My mother sprang up from the bed, I don't know if she was wearing her nightgown, and she dashed to the bathroom. My father glanced at me with a strange look on his face. Maybe he shook his head. I don't remember anything being said.”

“You believe you disturbed them at coitus?”

“I don't know. Possibly. Soon after that my mother went into the hospital.”

“What do you think was going on—for you?”

I was silent as I tried to remember more. Then I thought remembering was beside the point. Then I worried I'd never know anything. Then suddenly without my being aware of any thought at all, I heard myself blurt, “I stopped my parents from having intercourse? I desired my mother for myself and then she got sick so my own desire killed her. Is that what you mean?”

“I don't mean anything. You just said it. Is that what
you
mean?”

“I don't know—so the mere having of desire awakens an old guilt?”

“If you think so. We need to know more.”

“I am doomed to walk the earth searching for a woman, feeling I don't deserve her when I do find her?”

“It's not so simple, not so final, dear Owen. In the first dream you said you were the serf of your bosses, yes?”

I was touched he called me dear. “Something like that,” I said. “A serf is what I said I was to those two men at the studio. I can see them right now, as if I'm having the dream while I'm awake, comparing penises over that reflecting pool with Monet's lilies hovering over it.” I swiveled on the couch to look up at Dr. Pogo. He wasn't looking at me but off to his right at a picture on his wall of a tree whose branches, scrutinized closely, became human forms. “I'm not dreaming now, am I, doctor?” I asked. “That would mean I'm going mad.”

“Madness is having dreams while you're awake, and not knowing they're dreams,” he said. “You're neither dreaming nor mad.”

“Unless I'm mad at you for not getting Mossy out of my dreams.”

Dr. Pogo was not interested now in kidding around. He said, “And in the second dream Palmyra Millevoix tells you oceans of people are fucking.”

“Yes, but—”

“What about the mermaid?”

“Who? What mermaid?”

“The woman who came from the ocean that you had the fling with recently?”

“Well, she was hardly a mermaid.”

“Pardon me for remembering, but you said she tasted salty.”

“I see. And Pammy swam, too, that afternoon before I met the woman you call a mermaid. She even vanished, Pammy did, in her pool. The sun blinded me.”

“And in the first dream, which ends when the light shines into Zangwill's window, you call yourself a serf.”

“Right, but—”

“No buts. Serf is also the surf of the ocean, and if you're part of that perhaps even at some distance you're allowing yourself to desire it and plan for the eventuality of sex with a woman you want most. You'll be in the surf, Owen, we don't know with whom, not only with the woman from Arcadia who was almost anonymous with her two names. Remember she herself was just out of the surf. Your first dream is silent, like the old pictures, while the second is a talkie. Pictures growing up, you too. Palmyra says oceans of people fucking. Remember, too, you took charge, paid the check. You had intercourse with someone from the ocean, your own mermaid, yes? Be patient.”

“I'll have to dream more.”

“You'll have to live more.”

15

Overnight

Downtown I booked the sleeper to San Francisco. The old station was dingy, dark with misfits and bums, hungry Mexican kids offering shoeshines for two cents. To bolster myself against Curtt Weigerer, I picked a high-end shoeshine from a toothless man who might have been forty and looked seventy. That shaved a nickel off my thousand dollars, but I gravely handed him a quarter, keep the change. The aroma of a Mexican spice garden, enticing, made me hungry, but it mingled with ancient piss. A guitar player in a food-stained serape serenaded passengers boarding the Lark with “Cielito Lindo,” and I tossed him another quarter. Defying Weigerer. The assignment excited and menaced me.

The Lark took you from the western anarchy of Los Angeles to the formality of San Francisco with its eastern ways, perched improbably on the Pacific. Like my session with Dr. Pogo, both an ascent and a descent. A stranger among strangers, I avoided the other passengers, disdaining the hoi polloi as if their souls were unworthy of attention, knowing that by any studio standard I belonged among them.

I couldn't sleep in my compartment. The story in San Francisco would be the dying framing the living in today's Sodom. Turned into pillars of saltpeter. Would survivors remember what it felt and looked and sounded like when the earthquake struck almost thirty years ago, when the fire took over after the quake? Municipal vengeance.