The Regrets
Page 19
Steeling myself, inhaling deeply, I raised the heart to my eye again and looked inside. Then, somehow, aided by the miraculous physics of dreams, I made myself very very small, and I entered my own heart: sliding down the mucus-slick muscular tube, landing on the carpeted living room floor with an ungraceful thunk.
The family seemed aware of my arrival, in the way that they sat up a bit straighter, in the sudden perk of their posture and expressions. But they emitted no sound, attempted no struggle. I knelt down in front of them. One by one, I removed their blindfolds and gags: the two parents on the sofa, the girl in the armchair, the boy on the ottoman.
None of them spoke, even when liberated from restraint; each just looked at me frankly, with both severity and kindness. All of their eyes were exactly the same: their eyes were mine.
I stood up and addressed them. “There’s water for you now,” I said. “At least, there should be.”
They smiled and nodded, but still they said nothing.
“Isn’t there anything you want to say?” I pursued.
They cocked their heads to the side, frowned. One by one, they shook their heads. But then the littlest one—the boy—got up, walked across the room to the Victrola, paused to give me a meaningful look, and then switched off the music.
I had forgotten it was on. I’d only been aware of its tinny, tinkling melody in the subconscious way that one registers any ambient noise: the hum of a furnace, the trilling of crickets or birds. This music seeping out from the tiny Victrola had been the little-noticed, ever-present soundtrack of my heart—and now, the little boy had turned it off. The silence was deafening.
He looked up at me with an air of gentle challenge. Then he spoke. “What are you going to do now?” he said.
I stared back at him, speechless. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had never felt so blank, so void of ideas. Yet a sentence arrived fully formed on my tongue: “I’m going to get a new bed,” I announced.
The boy gave a slow nod of approval. “And where will you find this new bed?” he asked.
I thought for a second. “In reality,” I said.
Again, he nodded. “Reality,” he said, “has the most comfortable beds.” Then he turned to his family, who had been watching our conversation attentively, and addressed them. “Why don’t we play a game of checkers or tiddlywinks?” he said.
They nodded and smiled.
I understood that my job here was done, that our conversation was over, that the family in my heart needed no further services from me at this time. Hazily, slowly, I awoke; I left the little room inside my heart, I left the little family, I opened my eyes onto my own living room, which looked just the same as before. But the question still rang in my ears. What are you going to do now?
* * *
I ordered a new mattress off the Internet. It arrived at my apartment in an impossibly small-looking box; when I cut open the box, the mattress sprang forth from within, like Athena from the head of Zeus: a new idea, fully formed. The mattress was large, a queen, and covered in the whitest cloth I had ever seen. Its whiteness was blinding, astonishing; it filled up my shabby, dimly lit bedroom like a soft rectangle of light. It fit perfectly, snugly, into the new wooden bed frame I’d bought from Ikea. Staring at this mattress, I knew that I had fulfilled the directive from my dream: to purchase a bed that was entirely new, that had been manufactured in reality. It was clear, even just by looking at it, that this mattress had been conceived and assembled in a spirit of American ingenuity, with its brilliantly bleached cotton fibers and its newfangled memory foam and its adherence to international standards of fair trade and environmentally friendly manufacturing. This mattress had never known the touch of bodily fluids or disappointment or death. Nothing bad or strange had ever occurred atop its surface.
It’s a little on the nose, I thought, addressing the boy from my dream. As a metaphor, I mean. But I knew, without having to wait for an answer, what he would say in response: that at some point the distinction between metaphor and reality grew specious, that the saggy old mattress I’d dragged down to the curb that morning was simultaneously an idea and an actual object and a stale sponge of dead dreams, that its relationship to the ghost who had slept on it was more than associative, more than metaphorical or metonymic. If I had learned anything over the course of the past year, it was that there was even less distinction than I’d thought between inside and out, between one body and the next, between solid and liquid and gas and memory.
Which was why it made sense, now, for me to try and work from the outside in—to begin not with my mind but with the furniture. I sat down on the new mattress, felt its gentle yet firm resistance. I swept a hand across its surface.
I was done sleeping with random men. I would sleep by myself until I could find one worthy of this mattress’s newness, its innocence, its utter freshness as an object. By which I meant a man who lived in reality: not the reality of memories and ghosts and dreams, but the consensual reality of ordinary life, the reality to which I had been born and yet had never fully claimed. The reality from which I had attempted to depart, and in which now I must endeavor to stay.
Acknowledgments
A book begins its life as a kind of daydream. I’m grateful to the many people who helped me guide this one into tangible form, into shared reality.
Thank you first of all to my agent, Henry Dunow, who took a chance on this book when only half of it existed; who read several full drafts and spent hours on the phone with me, discussing its characters and cosmology; who advocated passionately for my work when my own enthusiasm was in question; and whose humor, heart, and straight talk were always just the medicine I needed to keep going.
Jean Garnett, my incredibly smart editor, immediately comprehended this book in its totality: its heart, its bones, its nervous system. Her expert edits and reflections gave it strength and vitality.
I am grateful to Lee Boudreaux and Reagan Arthur for bringing The Regrets to Little, Brown, where I’ve been treated with such kindness. My talented team there includes Elora Weil, Carina Guiterman, Katharine Myers, Ira Boudah, and Karen Landry. Julianna Lee is responsible for the killer cover design, and Mio Im for the illustration.
I had the privilege to work on this book at several amazing residencies, some of which supplied me with generous fellowships. Thank you to the Centre d’Art i Natura, Writers Omi at Ledig House, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the MacDowell Colony, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Caldera Arts. Thank you also to the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.
Endless gratitude to the brilliant friends and mentors who read earlier versions of this book and provided crucial feedback: David Busis (who read several drafts), Axel Wilhite, Boris Fishman, Reginald McKnight, Helen Rubinstein, and Peter Cook. Other writerly comrades helped with sections of the novel: Shamala Gallagher, Kseniya Melnik, Mariah Kess Robbins, Sativa January, Ellen Reid, Amanda Altman, Colin Shepherd, Anna North, Vauhini Vara, Anna Kerrigan, Sam Forman, and Stephen O’Connor.
This book took a long time to write. Deep gratitude to the many people who’ve sustained me over the course of the work, nourishing me with love in its many forms: my incredible parents; my fantastic sister; the rest of my family, living and passed; the wonderful man with whom I share a house and a life; my wise and intrepid dream tenders; and my dear ones locally in Georgia and scattered around the world, for whom “friend” feels like too weak a word (you are my family too). I’m so glad I get to be on this side of the veil with you all.
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About the Author
Amy Bonnaffons is the author of the story collection The Wrong Heaven (Little, Brown, 2018). She was born in New York City and now lives in Athens, Georgia. The Regrets is her first novel.
amyb
onnaffons.com
Also by Amy Bonnaffons
The Wrong Heaven