The Bus of Dreams

by Mary Morris

  Andrea, Beverly’s friend and the assistant manager of the store, is crazy about Robert, but Beverly doesn’t see why. Robert is a pale man with stringy brown hair and jagged buck teeth. He is one hundred percent Italian, and Andrea, who studied Italian literature for a term at Pomona College, thinks he is passionate. But Beverly finds him dull and self-absorbed; she thinks the only time Robert ever seems to react to anything is when Mrs. Grimsley comes into the store.

  Mrs. Grimsley is an old Irish lady who always thinks other people are butting in line in front of her. She thinks that somehow people can slip a number in between hers and the one they are currently attending to. Mrs. Grimsley writes novels. She once brought in a copy of a novel that survived Hurricane Agnes. The novel was water-stained, the ink was smeared. It was virtually illegible. She told Robert she wanted it copied so that it would become legible.

  Robert always gets a headache when he sees Mrs. Grimsley, because Mrs. Grimsley wants the impossible. She wants things made bigger so that she can read them with her failing eyesight, but Robert has explained to her many times that he can’t make a page bigger. Mrs. Grimsley doesn’t understand. She wants things darker than they are in reality. She wants fingerprint smudges, water stains, ink blotches, removed from the page. She wants her copies to come out perfect.

  Mrs. Grimsley had a son who looked just like Robert. He was killed in one of the wars before Robert was born. Once she brought in a picture of her son, and everyone agreed that Robert did look like him. Mrs. Grimsley thinks Robert is her son. She wants the impossible.

  When Robert sees her come in, he shudders. He does not get along well with his own mother, so the thought of having Mrs. Grimsley as his mother irks him more. He has tried to explain to Mrs. Grimsley that he is not her son, but she won’t take no for an answer. “Around the eyes,” she says. “And the hair. Just like my Billy.” Andrea tries to wait on Mrs. Grimsley this morning, but she will hear nothing of it. “I want Billy,” she shrieks. “I want my Billy.”

  This particular Monday has been terrible. The 2200 broke down twice, and the repairman had to be called. It seems that every application to everything in the world is due by October 15 and everyone wants his or her copies made on 25% rag. Beverly can barely stand toward the end of the day, and all she wants to do is to go to bed with Doug. But Doug tells her he is going down to the Village to jam with some friends. Beverly is disappointed, but she doesn’t say anything. “Okay, so maybe tomorrow.” Doug smiles. “Maybe tomorrow.” Beverly suspects Doug has another woman, but she doesn’t say anything.

  Steven can’t take his eyes off Beverly as she tries to yank paper out of the 2200. Unlike Doug, Steven will never lose interest in her. He doesn’t know what Beverly sees in Doug, but he knows Doug has lost interest in her.

  Steven thinks he is becoming sterile from the photocopying equipment. He is always careful not to get exposed to the light. Steven reads most of the information he copies, and a few months ago he copied a report from the New England Journal of Medicine that suggested sterility might be caused by the light in the copiers. Once every few days Steven talks about going off to a sperm bank and putting some seeds on ice. “These machines are ruining us,” Steven says in the middle of a busy Monday morning. “Aren’t you people concerned?”

  No one is terribly concerned. Steven wouldn’t be so concerned either if he didn’t want to have children with Beverly. He has been in love with her since she walked into the store. He is short and Jewish, and he always falls for tall blond women who are not going to be interested in him.

  As they are leaving, Steven asks Beverly if she wants to get a bite at Bagel Nosh. It is just around the corner, and Beverly has nothing better to do, so she says, “Why not?” She wanted to go home and take a shower. Instead, she goes to Bagel Nosh. She hopes Steven will not talk about the sperm bank over dinner. She gets an onion bagel with chicken liver, and he gets a sesame bagel with lox.

  Steven feels he is duty bound to level with Beverly. “Well, you know, Doug likes women, I guess. Lots of women, I mean. I’m looking for something a little more secure.” Beverly knows this. Steven is the kind of man who would be looking for something more secure. Things don’t come to him easily, and he isn’t likely to get what he wants out of life.

  As they are about to leave Bagel Nosh, Robert walks in with Andrea. They were doing the books and decided to get a bite. Andrea stares at Robert wide-eyed as if she were a fish he just caught on a line. Robert smiles brightly at Beverly, and she can tell that Andrea is jealous. Andrea thinks Robert likes Beverly. It would make sense. Everyone else does, except Doug. Beverly looks at Andrea in the Bagel Nosh reflecting glass. She is a rather dumpy brunette with frizzy hair. Andrea is the kind of woman most men would like to marry; they just don’t want to date her.

  Robert and Andrea sit down, and Steven is disappointed. He wanted to go to Beverly’s and drink wine. He wanted to tell her about his deprived childhood in Buffalo. Steven thinks he is a marvelous storyteller and that he can charm her with his yarns. Then he wants to get her into bed. Once he is able to convince a woman to go to bed with him, she usually has no regrets. Robert and Andrea order bagels and coffee.

  Robert says, “Boy, this is copy center night, huh. We just ran into Doug going uptown.”

  Beverly takes this in carefully as Andrea nudges Robert. “Uptown?”

  Andrea says, “Oh, we didn’t know which way he was going.” Andrea, who helped Beverly get her job, has watched Doug go through many women at the copy center. Every time a new woman comes in, Doug, who has wonderful green eyes and thick black hair, gets interested. But then, after a month or so, he loses interest, and usually the girl has a broken heart.

  Andrea has thought several times about firing Doug, but he is the fastest copier she has ever seen. Doug can keep three machines going at the same time and be hand-feeding another machine as well. Because the copy center is the busiest one in the neighborhood, Andrea can’t really afford to fire him. She has tried to hint to Beverly that Doug has lost interest in her. Andrea knows the signs, because Doug lost interest in her once a few years ago.

  Robert is somewhat oblivious. “No, he said he was meeting a friend at Empire Szechuan, don’t you remember?”

  Andrea doesn’t know what else to say. “Yes, I remember.”

  Robert is the only one who doesn’t know exactly what is going on in his store. He doesn’t know, for example, that every chance she gets, Andrea tries to work beside him. He has no idea that the reason why Andrea, who once had ambitions to go to law school, has stayed at the copy center for the past three years is that she is hoping someday Robert will pay attention to her.

  After a few minutes, Beverly gets up. “I’m going home.” Steven gets up to go with her, but Beverly waves him down and away, as if she were the trainer of an animal act.

  As Beverly climbs the stairs to her apartment, she hears the phone ringing. She counts almost fifteen rings, but she is not in a hurry to get the call. If it is not her mother, it is Doug. If it is Doug, she is not sure she wants to talk to him. When Beverly gets inside, she is glad to be alone. She is especially glad because her apartment is so quiet and the copy center is so noisy.

  Beverly calls her service and tries not to be upset when she learns no one has phoned her for auditions. Like everyone in the copy center, she wants to be doing something else. In high school she was named “Most Likely to Appear on ‘Saturday Night Live.’” Once a month she has new pictures of herself made up with new résumés and mails them to all the agents in New York. Andrea thinks there is no other actress in the city with that much determination. Because she is very beautiful, sometimes Beverly gets calls, but she never gets a part.

  The phone rings again and Beverly answers on the fifth ring. Doug sounds anxious on the other end. “Where’ve you been? We finished jamming a while ago. The tenor sax never showed. Can I come up?”

  Beverly wants to say no, but she says all right. She wants to say no because the truth is that
she wants to be alone. She wants to read a book and wash her hair. She wants to watch “Family Feud” and call her mother. She wants to tell her mother she hasn’t made it big yet and that she’d like to come home for Christmas but she can’t afford it. Beverly’s mother lives in a retirement village in Arizona; she always asks Beverly to visit but never sends her the money for a ticket.

  There are a dozen things she wants to do, but when Doug calls, she tells him to come on up. Beverly has always had a hard time saying no to men, and she has spent too many nights with men she didn’t want to be with. Doug arrives out of breath. He always runs up her steps, two steps at a time. She wonders why he does this, since he is never all that happy to see her. Beverly suspects that Doug is seeing another woman. He was probably going to see her tonight, but her husband called off his meeting, so she had to be home.

  Beverly kisses Doug perfunctorily on the cheek when he walks in. She wonders why she always falls for men who never pay much attention to her. Beverly’s father died when she was fourteen, and she’s never felt so betrayed before or since. She knows Doug likes to be with more than one woman at a time. He has told her he has no desire to settle down. Doug’s mother has been married three times, and as far as Doug can tell, the new men were never improvements over the old ones.

  After they make love, Beverly falls asleep and Doug strums his guitar. First he tunes it, then he plays “I Write the Songs That Make the Whole World Sing.” In the middle of his tune, Beverly shoots out of bed. “Oh, my God!” she cries.

  Doug grabs her hand. “What was it?”

  “Another DC 10.” Since she was a little girl, growing up near LaGuardia, Beverly’s dreams have been filled with airplanes crashing into her sheets. She can be in the middle of a dream about Yosemite, a place she visited with another boyfriend she met when she did mailings for the Sierra Club, and suddenly an airplane will crash into her sheets. Beverly always wakes up when there is a crash, but otherwise she can sleep through anything.

  He pulls the covers up over her chin. “You were just dreaming,” he tells her. “Go back to sleep.”

  There are steady customers at the copy center, and Beverly knows them all. She knows Mrs. Grimsley and she knows the homosexual playwright. She knows the Jehovah’s Witness, who sends prayers to his brother on Riker’s Island, and the impatient woman who puts down her American Express Gold Card. She knows the music school teachers with dandruff on their collars, the desperate unemployed with their tattered résumés. And she knows a woman named Emily, who has been coming to the copy center since she began working there.

  Everyone who works at the copy center is jealous of at least one person who brings in work and stands at the other side of the oak counter. Robert is jealous of a graphic designer who does a lot of annual reports. Robert wants to have his own graphic design business someday. Doug is jealous of a musician who is always having his scores printed and bound for his publisher. Steven is jealous of a medical doctor, and Andrea is jealous of a social worker. Beverly is jealous of Emily.

  Emily comes in often. She has soft, doelike eyes, and she cannot speak without smiling. She never comes up and says, “I’m Ninety. Why are you taking Ninety-one?” She always says, “Excuse me. Did you call Ninety?” Beverly knows Emily is happy and successful. Emily comes into the copy center calmly to have the music for her newest concert run off. She has blurbs Xeroxed in which Diana Ross says, “I’d be honored to sing any of Ms. Barkington’s songs.”

  Beverly doesn’t suspect that Emily curses the day she had her baby, that her work brings her no pleasure, and that she married a record producer for his money. She has no idea that Emily takes tranquilizers before going out, and she has no idea that Emily is one of Doug’s lovers. This isn’t some strange coincidence. Emily and Doug worked together on a musical production in the Village two years ago, and he’s been her lover on and off ever since.

  It is because of Emily that Beverly has decided to leave the copy center, give up her acting ambitions, and go to school in public health. Beverly bought a copy of Are You Really Creative? and took the quiz in the book. Would you rather (a) fix a clock, (b) fly a plane, (c) sit in a wild bird sanctuary? On New Year’s Eve would you rather be (a) the life of the party, (b) the person who gives the party, (c) the person who stays home from the party and reads a book?

  Beverly has no idea how to answer these questions, so she answers at random. Then she adds up her score and learns that “you are too ambivalent about creativity but would work well with people. Why not try a helping profession?” Since she decided to go back to school in public health, her dreams of planes have been increasing, only now she dreams of bombers, B-52S to be specific.

  When Emily comes into the copy center in the afternoon, the mood is very tense. Mrs. Grimsley came in a little while ago. She wanted to make a hundred copies of a telegram from 1951 that read, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Grimsley: We regret to inform you that your son, William, has been killed in action . . .” Mrs. Grimsley told Robert, whom she called Billy, that they were invitations to a party, and she gave a copy to him. Even Robert, who normally isn’t shaken by anything, was shaken by Mrs. Grimsley.

  Beverly is a little upset when Emily walks in, and she calls out her number rather impatiently. “Forty-seven,” Beverly snaps, and Emily tells her she’d like to wait for Doug. Emily knows that Beverly and Doug are lovers, but Beverly has no suspicions at all. She does not even suspect when Emily hands Doug a note and Doug smiles. She thinks Doug is supposed to make a copy of the note.

  That evening Doug tells Beverly he is going to jam downtown again and he’ll be late, so why don’t they see one another the next night. She knows he is going to meet someone else, but she has no idea it is Emily. Doug and Emily could be drug dealers, they are so discreet. Beverly is disturbed but doesn’t say a word. As she is leaving the store, Steven asks if she’d like to go to dinner with him uptown. Since she has no other plans, she agrees.

  They go to a burger place near West 90th and Steven orders a bacon cheeseburger. Beverly orders the same thing, because she can’t make a decision. Even before their Cokes arrive, Steven grabs Beverly’s hand. “Listen,” he says, “Doug Cransfield isn’t worth this joint on your little finger.” He extracts the joint from the mass of fingers he is holding. She pulls her hand away.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I’m not looking for anything serious.”

  “Well, I am,” Steven says boldly. “I’d like to see you more often.”

  “I already see you about eight hours a day.” Beverly yawns and Steven frowns. “I just don’t want to date much these days.” She pats his hand gently. Steven and Beverly finish their burgers and walk downtown.

  As they pass the 86th Street subway, they see Doug and Emily coming out of the station. There is an odd moment of recognition as Beverly thinks to herself, There’s Doug with that woman. And Doug thinks he should do something, but he doesn’t know what. He smiles at Beverly; there is a strange mix of guilt and affection and confusion behind his smile. Beverly thinks he looks boyish, smiling at her, with Emily holding his arm.

  Doug says, “Hello,” and then Beverly says, “Hello.” And not knowing what else to say, Doug says, “See you tomorrow.”

  Because she is somewhat disoriented, Beverly does something she would not ordinarily do. She asks Steven to come over. When they get to her apartment, a place Steven has wanted to get to for a long time, he praises her choice of furniture. He praises the posters that hang over her bed. He praises the cat; he praises a rather wilting lotus plant. Finally Beverly says, “Steven, let’s face it. This place is a dump.”

  Beverly gives the cat, named Walter, a can of 9-Lives mackerel, which he sniffs. Then he walks away. She dumps a glass of water on the plant. Then she puts on Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert and rolls a joint.

  Steven is sure he will spend the night, and he hardly knows what to do, he is so overjoyed. “I told you, baby, that guy wasn’t worth your tiny toenail.”

  B
everly doesn’t want to think about Doug at all. She gets stoned, and instead of thinking about Doug, she thinks about her father. She thinks about how she used to be afraid of the airplanes that passed so close over their house, and one day her father took her outside. He lay down in the grass and told her he was the runway and she should fly around the yard and come in for landings on his chest. So she spent the day running around their yard, making a buzzing noise, and then crashing into her father’s rib cage.

  Beverly is thinking about her father when Steven lunges across the candle between them and grabs her by the arm. He puts his thumbprint into her muscle. Beverly pulls back. “I’m tired,” she says. She gets up, goes into her bedroom, lies down, and falls asleep.

  Bewildered, Steven follows. He gets into bed with her and caresses her. Beverly wakes up screaming. “Oh, my God, two little private planes in midair!” Then she looks at Steven, unsure of what he is doing there. “Please leave,” she says, and Steven, because he has almost no will where she is concerned, gets up and leaves.

  The next day, when Beverly comes in to work, Doug says, “Hi,” and Beverly says nothing. When Beverly is running off an actor’s résumé, Doug comes over. “How are you?” He waits, but she doesn’t reply. “Look, about last night . . .”

  Beverly says, “There is nothing to say.” And she says nothing.

  She knows that Doug can stand anything but the silent treatment. His mother used to give him the silent treatment when he did something she didn’t like, and it drove him crazy. Once his mother didn’t talk to him for five days, and they even ate their meals together. All afternoon Doug follows Beverly around, saying dumb things like “You’d think they’d fix the fan in this place,” but she doesn’t respond.