The Bus of Dreams

by Mary Morris

  After talking to my father, I accidentally packed George’s cuff links away with my grandmother’s jewelry. We spent part of the evening searching for them, because I had no recollection of putting them away. They were a gift from a woman he’d just stopped living with and he said they had sentimental value. They were solid gold cuff links with an Indian chief in full headdress carved on them, a once great warrior perhaps, the kind from old nickels or the fronts of trading posts. I could tell by how badly he wanted to find them that the woman was still somehow important to him, but I didn’t ask about her. I just helped him look. After we found them in the box I’d packed them in, he relaxed. He phoned Shanghai and ordered Cantonese food. He liked sweet and sour shrimp crisp with a special sauce, and he pressed my ear to the phone so that I could hear the man say “Yesa, Doca Linga.” When the shrimp arrived, I decided we couldn’t eat it on my grandmother’s plates—kosher for seventy-five years. George said I was being sentimental about something I didn’t believe in, but I told him I didn’t think he was being sentimental about his cuff links. He knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on, so he went out for paper plates and plastic forks. While he was gone, I missed him. I hadn’t missed a man for a long time, and it seemed as if we’d finally been brought together so many years after two policemen, with nothing better to do, had wrenched us apart.

  After dinner we turned on my grandmother’s television set and stretched out on the four-poster. Little wood nymphs, hand carved, stood guard on top of each poster. My mother said it was a pagan bed and the antithesis of my grandmother. My only girl cousin and I used to build forts out of pillows and blankets to keep the Indians away. It was a big bed, and lying on it I always felt I had to shout to be heard. George knew I didn’t want to be alone, so he agreed to spend the night. He was very tired and slept in his clothes on top of the covers. I slept with my head on his arm, and periodically he clasped me to him like a child with a rag doll. He ran his fingers through my hair as if he were looking for something. We’d never been lovers, and I’m fairly certain it hadn’t crossed our minds when we were younger. George played baseball for Ohio during college, and two or three times a year during the season he came to play in Boston and he stayed with me. One afternoon when the magnolias were blooming, we walked toward Harvard Square, wandering to the address of another high school friend who that same afternoon was killing himself and his girlfriend on Cape Cod. There was also a total eclipse of the sun that day, and George often said it was the eclipse that made our friend go mad. We carried salami sandwiches and a smoky glass down to the banks of the Charles and, with every other student from the Cambridge side of the river who’d never seen a complete solar eclipse, we peered at the flaming corona as the moon crossed in front of and, for a brief instant, blotted out the sun.

  My cousin Sammy rang the doorbell the next morning and accused me of gold digging. What was there to dig for here? He said he was going to put an injunction on me so that I couldn’t touch any of the stuff. “Sammy,” I said, “I’m just packing. The lawyer will decide.”

  “You’d better get yourself a lawyer, you little thief.”

  Sammy and I hadn’t been on great terms since my mother stopped talking to her brother, Sammy’s father. I phoned Bill Swallow, my grandmother’s attorney, and told him I was putting things in order because my mother had told me to. I felt strange, citing parental permission. My grandmother left nothing but her belongings, but Mr. Swallow was very sympathetic and said he’d give me legal permission to be there. The next morning Sammy appeared with two suitcases. “Are you going on a trip?” I asked. He barged in and started packing away towels, porcelain, whatever caught his eye. He’d always been a troublemaker and had never held a steady job. Bill Swallow agreed to meet me for lunch to put an injunction on him.

  He expected a much younger woman, one who might need parental permission, and I a much older man. In fact, I was slightly older than he, but he was very serious for his years. He wore a man’s hat and rubbers because it had recently rained. When he handed the hatcheck girl his rubbers, she held them between two fingers as if she had a dead rat by the tail. His hair was perfectly trimmed, exactly an inch too short all the way around. He seemed to speak Latin when he talked. “I will gladly detain your grandmother’s possessions in probate,” he said after a martini, his hand slipping over mine. I was certain he’d fallen in love with me at first sight. I pulled my hand away. “I only meant to console,” he said, and I agreed to have dinner with him some time during the week.

  George came over that evening. “I saw you having lunch with some guy over at Cricket’s. He looked like an attorney.”

  “My grandmother’s,” I said. “You should’ve said hello.”

  “Sure,” George replied, “and I’m the family doctor.”

  We went to the North Star Inn, an old mob hangout, and George whispered to me the names of everyone in the place with Mafia ties, which seemed to be the majority of the clientele—real leg breakers. They’re a family, too, I thought. When I started to cry, George stretched his hands across the table and I clutched them the way I’ve seen actors do in movies when someone’s taking the bullet from their thigh. I’ve always admired doctors, as if they, like psychics, see a part of ourselves we can never see—though George has told me that all they see are torn sinews and clogged vessels. My grandmother had little faith in doctors. I was home for a wedding when she called and said she wanted to go to the hospital. We didn’t even know she was sick. The admitting intern asked questions, which he said were routine: “Are your parents living? When was the date of your last period?” Around 1929, she said, and my mother and I couldn’t stop laughing.

  On Saturday I persuaded George to drive north. I wanted to follow the Hiawatha Trail as it wound around the lake and see the leaves before they fell. I wanted to pass houses where girlfriends had hit a boundless and unexplained puberty and where boys first knew their powers in darkened rooms when we were all supposed to be baby-sitting for younger siblings. I wanted to see the old house again, now with a flagpole stuck in the lawn, and then have a mushroom and sausage pizza at Scornavacco’s. George said I was nuts, but he drove. He drove past the Bahai Temple—which, one beer-drinking Friday night in a convertible in 1963, just after his mother died, he’d dubbed God’s orange-juice squeezer because of its scalloped domes, and we laughed about vitamin C pouring down from heaven. When we reached Glencoe, I saw sweat on the back of his neck. “Are you sick?” I asked. He shook his head, but the fine features of his face seemed to grow smaller, as if they would disappear into his head. His hands gripped the wheel. His neck was glossy, as if he were being thawed. He pulled over. “Look”—he patted my cheek—“I don’t want to go back there.” He told me that now, some fifteen years later, he couldn’t go home. “Sometimes if I have to go there, I feel like the house could actually keep me from leaving. My father still lives there alone.” His father slept in the same bed where his wife had died.

  We swung off County Line Road and headed back to the city on Edens, and George’s mood shifted as the distance between our town and us increased. He talked about Elena, the one who’d given him the cuff links. “She was crazy about details. A spot on my tie became a character flaw.” She pursued him with a missionary’s zeal. Her calls were relentless; he hadn’t slept in weeks. Sometimes he glanced over his shoulder, only to find that the wind was following at his back. They’d lived together for over a year, but she didn’t quite fit the image. He told me, matter-of-factly, that I didn’t either. “So far no one has.” He kept tucked away in the corners of his mind—the way old athletes keep scrapbooks of all they’ve been and, late at night when no one is around, flip through them—an image of the woman he would eventually love. He couldn’t describe her, but he knew he’d know her when he saw her, and he knew he’d see her. His mother used to tell him that dreams spilled over into reality; this was before he’d watched her dreams crumble. The doorman held the door open for me, and George, refusing a nightcap, kissed
me on the crown of my head.

  I thought I saw my grandmother as I let myself in. She was coming down the corridor in her blue robe to meet me, forgetting I had my own key. Her hand guided her along the dark hallway for a moment and then she was gone. I turned on the television to bring the real world back into the living room. The news forecast snow for the end of the week. When I was a child, I used to be afraid of snowstorms, because I thought the snow could, if it wanted to, fall all at once instead of fluttering down—that it could hit with a thud.

  As the late show began, I heard shouting. It wasn’t coming from the television. I walked through the apartment, lighting every light to see if the noise came from within the apartment. I put on my nightgown and returned to the living room, but the shouting started again. A woman shrieked. A man hollered. I went to the door and peeked from the peephole but saw nothing. The woman was shouting again. I traced the sound to the studio next door, and feeling a need to eavesdrop on other people’s problems, I leaned out, my foot bracing the door. The man yelled; the woman yelled back. There was a crashing sound. I leaned out farther, hoping to catch the details. Did she not fit his image? Or he hers? Was he frightened? Or was she? Or was it something more mundane—a petty jealousy, a wrong word spoken over dinner? And was I now, somehow, like my grandmother, an observer of other people’s lives? I leaned farther, trying to decide if I was getting old, and the door slipped from my foot, slamming shut behind me. I stood in the middle of the hallway, barefoot and bewildered in a semitransparent gown. I couldn’t take the elevator to the lobby. How would the doorman view my nakedness? Would he tell my mother? He probably had a daughter my age.

  I knocked on the door of the arguing couple during a lull in the fight. A complete silence fell over their apartment. Then I heard muffled whispers. “Now you did it,” the woman said. “Somebody called the cops.”

  “Excuse me.” I pressed my lips to the door. “I’m your neighbor and I’m locked out.” The door opened suspiciously. “Could I use your phone?” The first thing I saw was the overflowing ashtray, then the heap of beer cans against the balcony doors, the rumpled sheets of the sofa-bed. A bleary-eyed, balding man with forehead creases poked his head at me. My hands went instinctively to cover my breasts. He tugged at his GIMME SHELTER T-shirt. He wore boxer shorts. Slumped in the armchair like a tattered stuffed animal was my grandmother’s frosty-haired neighbor, not much older than myself, I suspected, but looking the worse for wear. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I heard voices and thought something was wrong.” They exchanged doubting glances.

  “I can’t believe you locked yourself out,” George said, wrapping me in an overcoat. I couldn’t either. “It’s not at all like you.” I agreed. I was grateful he’d answered the phone, knowing he usually just stared at it if there was a late-night call, unless his service beeped him. He said he knew it was me. The man in his boxer shorts tried to elbow the door down. George worked at it with some tools he’d brought. “You’d better come home with me,” he said. I could get a passkey from the doorman in the morning. The fighting couple disappeared back into their studio. “You did this on purpose,” George said, carrying me to the car discreetly out the back door. In his car, I tucked my legs up to my chin. Maybe I did do it on purpose. Maybe I wanted to fight to the bitter end with someone in his boxer shorts. George’s features, which had always seemed to me so dark and fine, again grew smaller and smaller. His pupils contracted as if they would disappear into his head, as if in the face of a blinding light. All women had become potential Elenas to him, making crazy late-night calls. As we zipped along the drive, I wondered if I was confusing memory with feeling. Just because you know a person, a place, for a long time doesn’t mean you know him well. Maybe because it was all so familiar—this lake, this cold, corrupt city, the man driving beside me—maybe because I was barefoot in November in a man’s coat like a bag lady, I thought that I wanted George as much as I’d ever wanted anything.

  He had a bachelor pad with wall-to-wall carpeting and no furniture. The plants sat baking on the radiator like incubating infants, and I made him put them all in the shower. I curled up in George’s bed, and when he lay down, I rested my head again on his shoulder. I was about to press against his thigh when the phone started to ring. It rang four times and stopped. George stared at the phone as if it were a three-headed monster. It started to ring again, and after I counted fifteen rings, I got up to answer it. At twenty-one rings I crossed the wall-to-wall carpeting, and when George didn’t tell me not to, I picked up the phone.

  “Hello, hello.” A woman’s voice was faint at the other end.

  “Can I help you?” I said after a pause. Suddenly I was consumed with empathy for the disembodied voice of a woman I’d never met who made late-night calls, I myself having just done the same. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “You can talk to me.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.

  What was this other woman like? I pictured a chain-smoker with long, yellow hair that she spun nervously around her index finger; B.A. Western Illinois, in public relations. George sat stone-faced on the bed. The truth was, and I knew it, that Elena was like any other person. She paid bills and drank brandy. She went to the Caribbean when she could scrape together the money. She had brothers and sisters and nail polish on her nails. There wasn’t a visible desperate bone in her body when she went to the supermarket. Searching for comforting words, I said, “Listen, it’s not what you think.”

  “I know he’s there!” she shouted at me. “Tell him I’m going to kill myself.”

  I thrust my hand over the receiver. “She’s going to kill herself.”

  George flicked his hand at me. “So what else is new?”

  Once I’d worked on a hot line. Keep them talking, I’d been told. “You don’t have to worry,” I said to her. “He’s just afraid, like everyone else. He doesn’t know what he wants.” She yelled something at me and hung up.

  “She’s into persecution,” George said. At first he too was alarmed; now it’d become a habit. “She didn’t want me when I wanted her. Now she’s going crazy.” The power we have over others’ lives, I thought. “I’m not a bottomless pit,” George said.

  The next afternoon he had time to kill, so we went touring the city. We walked east on Madison, taking in the Loop’s main scent, that of caramel corn, and the perpetual line of poor people waiting to bring it home. The weather was starting to turn. Chicagoans have a stoical attitude toward winter. They tighten their lips and go about their business. The city was born of snow; its beaches and marshes are Ice Age, late Pleistocene. We found this out at the Field Museum, where George took me to see the bones of dinosaurs that had wandered Lake Michigan when it was a mere bowl holding a glacier in its cup. We stood beneath a dinothere, a sad elephant with useless, inverted tusks that never served to protect him. Lines of schoolchildren filed by, their voices echoing through the great hall. George’s hand went instinctively to his neck; he was having one of his phantom pains. He’d had them ever since I met him, when we were just finishing grammar school. He suffered in many of the same places where his mother had suffered. He put an arm around me. When he was the same age as those schoolchildren, he told me, his mother used to bring him here and she’d stand crying under the bones. But the trip to the museum was only an excuse. She made him go with her whenever she went to the doctor. In this way, George admitted, she bound him to her illness—and to everyone else’s.

  “I’m tired of looking after other people’s babies,” he confessed as we walked out of the museum. He’d made a lot of money the previous year in stock options and speculations. “I’m going to buy land in Mexico,” he declared as we drove along the drive.

  Thinking he meant to settle down, I said, “To build a house?”

  “No,” he said. “To start drilling.” It was petroleum that preoccupied him. He was ready to invest in petropesos. He wanted to dip his fingers into pure, black, combustible slime. He wanted to wallow in it like
a pig in the muck. I told him he was crazy. “Medicine isn’t the noble profession it’s cut out to be,” he said as we pulled into the parking garage. “Every day I see terrible things.” The garage attendant stuck a number on our windshield. George clasped my hand. “Lawyers and doctors, we’re overestimated and overpaid. Lawyers don’t save the world.” On the contrary, he said, civilization’s been tied up in the courts for years. “But we could perform a real service.” He held my hand tighter. We’d buy a clump of uninhabitable jungle in Chiapas, where roads hadn’t yet reached; he had a divining rod for a brain.