by Diane Wald
What follows is one of Eliza’s dreams, told in her own words. That is how it was revealed to me, with the accompaniment of her very own voice, soft and unaffected, as if she were speaking it privately into a tape recorder. I have not developed far enough on my present plane to understand how this voice-over came to be, or if Eliza herself, on some mysterious level, was conscious of creating it. How wonderful to learn that she did not, in fact, forget me—that she was or is still able to receive some kind of spiritual tidings from me, even after the passage of so much earthly time.
“I dreamed of Jack in a blue silk hat.
Death had made him very tall and wise.
He’d come to tell me it was time to go,
but I would not follow, though it made me cry.”
I woke up with those lines in front of my eyes because last night I had a very vivid dream about Jack MacLeod, the first such dream in quite a while. He’s been dead for about twelve years and I still sometimes have these incredibly clear dreams about him. I know it might seem crazy, but I do believe he is my patron saint or guardian angel, and that he comes to me in times of stress with these dreams for me to solve however I can, though I must admit his messages are often puzzling to me. Puzzling, but never troubling. They are always something of a comfort, and I am always thrilled with them, and grateful they have come to me.
Here is my dream. I am getting out of a car with a family of strangers: a woman, a man, and a little girl of about ten. The parents are dressed up as if for church; they are nice-looking middle-class types. The girl is dressed up too: a fitted spring coat, navy blue, with a flared skirt, white buttons, and white collar. She’s wearing a round white hat with an upturned brim and a wide band of dark ribbon. We’re in a very crowded train station, like the kind one sees in old European movies. Jack gets off the train. He seems about seven feet tall and is dressed in a camel hair coat and a tall Mad Hatter silk hat of a beautiful light turquoise color. He’s wearing thick round glasses, wire-rimmed, and looks quite well, but serious.
I run to give him a welcoming embrace, but he tries to turn it into a passionate kiss. I know he’s very glad to see me too, but he still looks so serious, although I am smiling. He pushes himself into the back seat of the car next to the little girl.
My husband Lou is sitting on the other side of her. Jack has one leg still outside the car and I have to push him over to make room for myself. Jack is whispering to the little girl and she’s shaking her head gently. She looks at him with sadness and whispers back, “I don’t want to go now.” Suddenly it hits me that the little girl is me and I feel, absurdly, slightly jealous of myself. I want her to disappear, but at the same time feel very close to her.
We’re on our way to a restaurant. I’ve been holding Jack’s hat. I’m spellbound by its formal shape and beautiful color. I go into a long meditation on the hat, and it makes me very happy. I realize the hat is the same color as Jack’s eyes. At the restaurant, I sit next to him and keep trying to introduce him to my husband, who’s sitting across the round table from us. I long for Lou to move closer so that I can reassure him that nothing is wrong, but he seems oblivious to me. Jack and I talk, and in spite of the fact that we only speak of trivial things, our conversation is charged with importance and deep feeling, and again the great seriousness on his side and the unfettered happiness on mine.
Silent, turbaned waiters in white outfits serve us a marvelous dinner: delicate fish filets wrapped in something apricot-colored and one other interesting greenish dish. I am very hungry, nearly starving; the food smells wonderful, but I do not eat. I notice that Jack is not eating either, and I think, “that’s because he’s dead.” Then suddenly we’re at a long picnic table outside on a high terrace instead of being inside a crowded restaurant. Jack and I are at the end of the table, across from each other. Off to my right, and below us (we are very high—treetop level) I see something floating in the air beyond the trees: a large and semi-transparent flying squirrel, drifting on the breeze. I call to everyone to come look at this apparition and we all go to the railing; then the squirrel turns first into a baby and then into a cloud. The sky is the same gorgeous blue as Jack’s hat and eyes.
I woke up then; though the images were vivid I couldn’t get back into the dream. I felt a tender love for Lou and another kind of deep tenderness toward Jack, but I couldn’t quite reach or understand him in the dream: his gravity was puzzling and somehow sad. When I knew he was dead in the dream (and for the second time in one of these dreams) I didn’t know how to treat him. Is his spirit not at rest? Or, more likely I suppose, is he trying to teach me something I’m not yet ready to learn? I do long for him sometimes. Oh Jack, we were so unfinished.
17. I Steal an Ashtray
Someone once told me an old folk tale. A man, searching for truth, finally finds it in the form of an ugly, wretched, but very wise old woman who lives in a hovel on a remote mountaintop. He spends a year and a day with her, and then the time comes that he feels he is ready to leave, to carry her message back to the world. When he is about to start back down the mountain, he asks the woman what she would like him to tell people about her. “Tell them,” she says, “that I am young and beautiful.”
That story always touched and mystified me. I thought of it the morning I learned that Sarah Bowe had married Wally Mussel. “Take my word for it; I’m a compulsive liar.” Sarah never said that, but she might as well have. I couldn’t have been any more confused if she had.
Fortunately for my sanity, I did not learn of this unholy union until after she had broken off our affair. Sarah and Mussel were married a few months before we broke up, but I did not know it: if I had, I cannot say what I might have tried to do. While I was alive, and up until the day I died—and yes, as you will see, I certainly did think of Sarah that day—I held the opinion that Sarah Bowe, for all her outward manifestations of health and sweetness, was a severely troubled person. I hesitated to slap any psychological labels on her, but I held some in reserve. However, after my death, I was suffused with a peculiar certainty that Sarah was, not “troubled,” but simply not good. I know that’s a strange thing for a psychologist to say, and I’m afraid I cannot precisely tell you what it means, but it has less to do with whether or not one accepts the usual guidelines of what a good person does and does not do, and more with a pervasive feeling one identifies within oneself regarding the existence of good, or, more to the point, evil. This feeling—this inner knowing—had begun to grow in me even before I started to catch sight of scenes from Sarah’s life. I don’t want to describe those scenes in detail here; they just make me sad, and no purpose would be served by recounting them. Suffice it to say that Sarah sowed unrest everywhere she went.
The terrible truth is this: Sarah married Mussel of her own free will, having eventually, I suppose, come to enjoy his attentions, which were nothing at all like the attentions she’d described to me. She was not only caught in but one of the chief weavers of a web of drama and falsehoods, and I don’t understand exactly why—maybe I will someday.
It is also true that after I’d left NSU, having told Mussel about my relationship with his then wife, that Sarah told him I had beaten and blackmailed her during our relationship. She told him I was a violent, devious man, and that only my illness had saved her. Mussel of course swallowed this whole, since it was the very kind of behavior he had invested in all his life. I’d always known that there were people who believed in the power of evil, but I suppose I called them religious, superstitious, or even hysterical. I never really believed a person could be “possessed by the devil,” or “infused with the spirit of God,” or any of the other clichés people generally use. When I encountered persons whose actions seemed inexplicable in the light of what we know about the human mind, it confused me mightily. The horrifying cases of small children who murder, for example: how does one explain those away? And myriad other cases, criminal and otherwise, come to mind—cases that involve persons seemingly wholly without morals (we ca
ll them sociopaths, for want of a better label), persons who seem to take inordinate joy in causing pain, or sometimes even persons who seem inexplicably unable to cause anything but pain.
Perhaps it’s the soul, and not the mind, that is involved in such cases, and perhaps that is why I understand it all a little better now that I’m no longer living. In any case, I find it difficult now to see Sarah Bowe in any other light. She had me, at least, entirely fooled—fooled to such a lofty degree that I fell head over heels in love with her. If anyone should have been able to see the signs of her mental or spiritual decomposition, it was I, but I never did. I guess I wasn’t in such good mental shape myself—or maybe I’m just not as smart as everyone says I am.
While I was living, I thought Sarah was troubled, nothing more. I thought, optimistically, that although there was no doubt she would eventually require some kind of professional assistance to straighten out her life and restore her good opinion of herself, she would someday be completely well, and my vision of a Sarah wholly well was a vision of a very remarkable and lovable woman indeed. When Sarah and I started up our affair, I became instantly and deliriously happy. Far from entering into the problem-ridden relationship I would have imagined for us, we were able, almost effortlessly, to slide from what might have been an affair beleaguered by sordid, weary discussions of Wally Mussel and my family obligations into a world that seemed created just for us. All lovers have such a world, of course; but most lovers, thank goodness, don’t have such enormous and maleficent hellhounds crashing at the gates.
I know now, and indeed I knew at the time, that I should never have allowed Sarah to push the Mussel problem so far under our rug, but I simply could not bear to hear too much about him: it made me feel powerless and enraged. I preferred, idiotically, to ignore the subject whenever possible. I knew that Sarah was probably still under his thumb at the same time that she spent so many hours in my arms, but unless Sarah mentioned him we did not broach the subject at all.
I was still searching then, of course, for the key that would unlock Mussel’s comeuppance, but I had nothing solid to go on, so my search was more or less a psychic one; I suppose I thought I would someday simply happen upon the answer and all would be well. And it did, in fact, happen almost that way—it happened upon me, that is, though all was not well—but I will explain that later.
A red light should have gone off somewhere along the way for me owing simply to the fact that Sarah seemed not to mind my being married. We would, on occasion, fantasize about how lovely life would be if we were married to each other, and I did, on occasion (although it made me feel oddly cheap and disloyal), explain to her how Frances and I were no longer at all in love, but, unlike most women who have serious affairs with married men, Sarah never tried to find out if I intended to get a divorce from Frances in order to marry her. Had she asked it of me, even casually, I think I would have accomplished both feats in a minute. It might have even solved all our problems—who knows? She never even asked me if I were still sleeping with Frances, a natural question I always expected to hear. It did hurt me a little, this avoidance of such a looming topic, but I assumed it had something to do with the Mussel problem—another looming topic, and one that I was guilty of avoiding assiduously. Two psychologists, both in deep denial. We were quite a pair.
And yet I was so happy when we were together. We’d steal away from our offices sometimes and drive to a little isolate woodland stream we’d discovered in nearby New York state. The bird life there was almost deafening, and the clarity of the cool water, racing along toward some distant sea, made me remember a favorite place of mine in childhood—another hidden stream where sometimes we children would wade and even bathe in the icy water in our shorts and tee shirts. When the sunlight was able to make its way through the vast curtains of leaves, it would light up the dragonflies and water-striders as if they were neon.
In the colder weather, Sarah and I would walk around and talk for a while until it got too cold, then we’d go to a motel and make love. When it was warm enough, we’d have lovely picnics there, then go to a motel and make love. One time, just before our breakup, we made love to each other in a billow of fallen leaves, with leaves still falling around us. It was cold and uncomfortable; it was bliss. We then proceeded to our motel.
So the months went by, and the months went by. I found Sarah infinitely attractive, interesting, and sweet. She seemed to care as much for me; in fact, I would have sworn to it. The whole thing was slightly marred of course, as these things always are, by the clandestine nature of our union, but it seemed to me, after years of feeling more or less unfulfilled, a small price to pay for the happiness that loving Sarah brought me. I thought we were successful enough at school in keeping our relationship secret; perhaps the only one who guessed was Donald Rath, with whom I had become rather close. I never came right out and told him, but I know he knew.
When Sarah came to me one rainy afternoon in my office, I was more delighted to see her than ever because the bit of sleuthing Don Rath and I had done on her behalf had yielded some remarkable results. I was bursting to tell her that what we’d found out about Mussel might eventually free not only her but all of us in the department from his unsavory influence—and that this fabulous feat could easily be pulled off without involving her at all. I whisked her into my office and closed and locked the door (this was unwise, and would have made our meeting a little awkward to explain had anyone knocked, but I was so happy to see her that I’d thrown that particular caution to the winds). But instead of returning my embrace as she always did, she walked slowly to my bookshelf, turned on the radio, took a seat across from my desk and lit a cigarette. Sarah smoked only when under extreme stress. I knew she had turned on the radio to eliminate the chance that anyone outside might overhear our conversation. She looked around distractedly for somewhere to put her ashes, so I offered her my shoe. Normally, Sarah found my shenanigans quite amusing. That day she did not laugh; she did not even acknowledge my gesture. She pulled the wastebasket over to her, selected a used paper cup from its contents, and flicked her cigarette into that. “Jack,” she said, “I’ve something terrible to tell you.”
Here it comes, I thought, she’s going to talk about Mussel. I steeled myself. I told myself I had it coming; the poor girl had probably been storing up awful stories for months, afraid to tell me anything at all that might bring her down in my eyes. Why should she have to carry such a crippling burden alone? Wasn’t I, her lover, supposed to soothe and succor? I had been selfishly allowing her to hide her worst moments from me and she had finally broken under the strain.
“What is it, dearest?” I said, very slowly and kindly. I pulled my desk chair out, rolled across the carpet, and sat facing her. I took her hands, which were limp and cold. She shrugged me off. I stood up.
“Sarah, my poor duck,” I told her. “It can’t be that bad. Tell me what’s bothering you and then I’ll make it all go away: I’ve got some terrific news that’ll make you feel so much better.”
She gave me a despairing look. “I don’t think you can make this go away,” she said.
“Mussel?” I asked her.
“No.”
In spite of my resolve to bravely confront the worst, I was relieved; I felt almost happy. The thought flashed through my mind that she might be pregnant, but the joy of that idea was instantly lessened by the crushing fear that any pregnancy Sarah might embark on could be the product of a less pure love than ours. I couldn’t even say the word Mussel in my mind in connection with the whole idea, so I banished the thought.
“Then what’s so terrible?” I asked her. “Let me help you. I can’t bear to see you feeling so sad.”
She brushed some damp hair off her forehead and looked me straight in the eye.
“I can’t see you anymore, Jack,” she said.
It did not really register.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her. “What’s wrong?”
But she was already standing up,
and when I reached out to her she nearly pushed me over trying to get away. It was then I panicked. I think I yelled.
“Sarah, NO!”
She turned up the radio. She said, “Keep your voice down.” She sounded tired, but worse than that, she sounded cold. I hardly recognized her voice; all I knew was that the earth was slipping out from under me. I sat down on a corner of the desk.
She leaned against the filing cabinet. I had to get her to talk to me.
“What is it, Sarah? Don’t say these things to me. Tell me what the trouble is—we can fix it …” I started to get up to go to her, but she extended both arms and held out her hands palms forward and fingers spread as if she were fending off a predator. The look on her face was foreign to me. I sat back down. I just stared at her.
She did not cry. She did not try to comfort me or soften the blow in any way. She offered no explanation, nor would she allow me to question her; whenever I tried, she would raise her hands again in that gesture of refusal. I hardly remember what she said, but I think she simply repeated, over and over, “I can’t see you anymore, Jack. I just can’t see you anymore.”
The shock was too great: I began to weep soundlessly, huge tears plopping rapidly onto my tie and jacket as if shot from my eyes. Even my tears, which she had never, I think, seen before, did not move her. She seemed to be wearing a mask of white clay; her lovely eyes had hardened so that they looked like the fixed, blank, staring eyes of a marble statue. I went back around my desk to try to find some tissues, and when I looked back she was gone. I had not heard the door open or close, but she was gone.
That afternoon I told the department secretary I felt suddenly ill and asked her to post my classes as cancelled. I drove out to our woodland stream. I sat down on a fallen tree close to where Sarah and I had made love the week before. It was a very warm day; a group of starlings had established themselves in the surrounding half-naked trees and were making an insanely loud, angry racket, of which I approved. The stream trickled lazily over its rocks. The sun made knife-sharp shadows. I sat there unmoving, in my suit jacket, for several hours, sweating copiously and feeling utterly blank. I could not “think straight”; in fact, I could not think at all.