Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  She parked without looking at the wall, hoping that this time she wouldn’t want to throw up or scream when she did see it. Ricky climbed carefully down. He was slightly wobbly under the stronger dose of hospice mix they had him on now. They left the truck doors open so it wouldn’t turn into an oven.

  It was no good, she couldn’t get used to it. She turned quickly away from the wall, her eyes wet. She had been mad to agree to show the thing. It had not been obliterated — that was beyond even a half hour of Roberto at his most violent — but it was not what it had been, what she had set out to make, and what she had made. It had been changed by the destructive hand of a stranger.

  “Come here, sit down,” Ricky said. He spread the old gray blanket in the shade of the juniper. Dorothea sat, her back to the wall.

  Brillo lay on his back grunting with pleasure while Ricky scratched the dog’s stomach. “When are you going to get another dog?” Ricky said. “Brillo’s lonely.”

  “Um,” she said.

  “Such a pity about poor old Mars,” Ricky went on. “The only victim, in the end. He had such a sweet nature, the most innocent creature here, except for Brillo.”

  Dorothea stared at him from under her hat brim. He was hatless as usual, reddening on forehead and nose. She would never forget the sight of him being lifted out of the patio strapped into the lounge chair, his hands like white marble claws clutching at Frank Sanford’s sleeve, his mouth stretched in a frozen, soundless scream.

  “Not the only victim,” she said in a small but stubborn voice.

  He sighed, coughed, covering his mouth. “We’ve been over this. It wasn’t your fault that Frank was delayed trying to find the policeman you asked for. Even at the cost of another hour of misery for me, it’s a damned good thing that he stuck with it and didn’t settle for some more excitable officer. You did the best you could.”

  “The best,” she said with deep self-disgust.

  To her astonishment he sang in a creaky voice, “‘We were the victims of circumstances.’ My dear Dorothea, I was and am still the victim not of any person but of this damned disease.”

  It made her angry that he tried to make light of that horrible experience to spare her feelings. No one had spared his.

  “What other arrangement could you have made with Frank that would have been better?” he said.

  “I don’t know; something. When I think of you abandoned for so long —”

  “Don’t think of it,” he said. “What’s the good?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t help it.”

  “Well, there’s no arguing with the unreasonable.” He rumpled Brillo’s ears and bent closer, picking burrs from the matted fur. He added mildly, “Oh, I admit I sent a few wild curses your way while I was — waiting. There was little that I didn’t curse during that time, and my curses were no more rational than my prayers were. I, now, this self that speaks to you today, won’t have you feeling accountable. I can’t stand the idea of the splendid finale of our mystery all gummed up with guilt.”

  “Oh, Ricky —”

  “You got rid of one ghost, Dorothea. Don’t replace him with some maudlin image of me. Let me be Ricky here, Ricky now, Ricky sitting in comparative comfort on this scratchy blanket and giving Brillo a heavenly scrootch round the ears and even, God help you, on occasion a song.”

  If you ask it, how can I not?

  “No more dreams?” he inquired.

  She hesitated, acutely conscious of the spoiled work behind her back. “I did have a dream last night. All I remember is that a voice said, very matter-of-factly, ‘Fame is creeping upon you.’”

  “And?”

  “That’s it. I remember feeling a little nervous about this creeping fame, but the dream certainly didn’t qualify as a nightmare. And there was no sign at all of the judge.”

  “You are eminently one of those upon whom Fame ought to creep,” he said. “It’s creeping right now, I expect, very quietly.” He resumed his singing:

  “No sound at all, we scarcely speak a word.

  “A fly’s footfall would be distinctly heard.

  “Tarantara, Tarantara…”

  “Well, if this creeping fame is supposed to be on account of the wall,” Dorothea said, “it’s probably all off.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Come, my dear, turn round and look the thing in the face.”

  She looked. If she tried to say anything, she would cry, and she was fed up with crying. Besides, what was there to say? Only that she could not see where to even begin to attack the damage now any more than she had at her first confrontation with what Roberto had done.

  “It looks to me,” Ricky said, “as if it’s primarily that vein of glass pieces that’s suffered. The rest — the scratches and the dents — that all looks inherent in the materials.”

  “Stop trying to make me feel better,” she said through clenched teeth. “I was crazy to let Claire arrange a viewing.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I just said, because I was crazy. There I was, fresh from this insane experience, and somebody should have stopped me, or stopped Claire.” No, that wasn’t fair. “It was because I couldn’t face the idea of touching it ever again, not after what Roberto did to it. I just wanted to get it out into public sight and over.”

  “Then stick with that. Why try to fix it?”

  Helplessly she spread her hands. “I just thought I might be able to do something — but it would take ages, Ricky. And I don’t have the heart.”

  “Then do as you originally planned,” he said. “Let it go as it is. Frankly, I rather like it.”

  “Oh, Ricky, stop! Don’t sit there and tell me soothing lies!”

  He turned his steady blue gaze on her. “I’m not lying. Don’t you see that where the bottle-bases shattered, they look like stars? Think of that painting of Van Gogh, you know the one — ‘Starry Night.’ Wheels of light being borne along on visible currents of darkness, very powerful. Only yours are wheels of splintered glass. I like the way it looks. And besides.”

  She refrained from telling him that she thought Van Gogh’s work showy and heavy handed. “And besides what?”

  “I think the boy made you a spirit-door, an exit for your soul from the perfection of the work.”

  She was speechless.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “if that’s a presumptuous thing to say.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not. Thank you, Ricky.”

  “Oh, thank Frank, it’s a notion I picked up talking with him.”

  They looked together at the wall’s shimmering face.

  “It’s quite magnificent, you know,” Ricky said in a low voice. “I can understand Roberto’s needing to make his mark on it. May I make my own contribution?” He took off his wristwatch and carefully detached it from the expandable metal strap. “May I?”

  “Show me,” Dorothea answered, “where to add it.”

  In silence she made the mixture and applied it where he pointed: the lower left quadrant. He opened the watch and spread it open so that both the engraved inner lid and the face, with its second hand still sweeping, were visible. And that, she realized with a sharp inner jolt, was that. The space in her mind where ideas for the wall had always formed now lay empty and calm. The wall itself, its physical being, was breath-taking to look at, but it had stopped radiating new potentialities.

  Ricky caught her by the elbow and steadied her, as if she had staggered. “It’s all right, isn’t it?” he said with concern. “To have the watch there?”

  “It’s all right,” Dorothea said. “Everything. Even the damage is all right.”

  After a moment he said, “Yes. I see that. I’m so glad you see it too. I’ve been standing here thinking that it was the spell Roberto broke: the spell, not the work.” The spell that had brought him, he’d said once.

  She turned to him. “You’re leaving!”

  “I think I’d better, don’t you?”

  “Listen, if it’s Claire, if she’s
making you uncomfortable —”

  “No, no, I’m making her uncomfortable, but that has nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh, hell, Ricky, you can’t! We’ve come all this way together, and now you want to duck out and leave me hanging? I want to be with you till it’s over. I’ve earned that, damn it!”

  “You won’t have time,” he said with a grimace that he must have meant for a smile. “After all, ‘fame is creeping upon you.’ No, no, I’m sorry, I’ve said it wrong, trying to be clever. I mean only that with your enchantment with this work over, the stream of your life is already carrying you on. You need to be at liberty to go with it. You would only feel badly that you couldn’t attend to me as you wished to, or you’d neglect the new opportunities coming to you and then I would feel badly.

  “Oh, in God’s name, Dorothea, don’t fight me, help me! I don’t know how to do this, I don’t even know for certain that I’m right. It doesn’t make you wise to have cancer, you know. I’m the man I was before, but there’s this disease eating my life. Help me.”

  Anger and tears half choked her. She stepped away from him quickly because she wanted to hit him, seize him, bind him to her forever.

  “Oh, you bastard,” she groaned.

  He shrugged apologetically. “What can I say? Except that you were right. You are right. I do have matters to attend to, people to see, goodbyes to make. I thought about this in the hospice, when they kept me those few days after Roberto. But first I needed — I needed you —” He was blushing painfully, a deep red bloom shading his sallow skin. “I needed to act, to accomplish something, even if only in the life of your dreams. I was fairly sure that I wasn’t quite dead yet — but I needed confirmation.

  “Well, I’ve got it. But I’m not going to hide here with you from everything else. You are a brave person. The spectacle of such faint-heartedness would disgust you. You wouldn’t love me any more, Dorothea. Or if you did, I shouldn’t deserve it. And I couldn’t bear that.”

  She could stand still no longer. “You God-damned English,” she raged, striding up and down before him with her fists clenched at her sides. “You are so damned articulate. You say it so well. Do you think that makes any God-damned difference?”

  “Shall we go back now?” he said.

  She grabbed the glue-pot up from the sand, ignoring the twinge this gave her injured side. “We’re not done talking about this,” she warned.

  Walking back to the truck in the late light he held her arm, his hand resting as lightly as a leaf of old paper. Her fury melted. She recognized an ending when she saw one. She drove them home with the water sliding ceaselessly from her eyes and drying on her cheeks.

  They had offered Ricky a wheelchair, but he preferred to walk while he could. At the other end of the journey, after sitting so long, he suspected that he would need that sort of aid. Meanwhile, he sat down across from Dorothea in the coffee-shop booth, propped his elbows on the scarred table-top, and wondered how far it was to Gate B-Eight.

  He wore a lightweight suit and carried his nylon flight bag. Inside he had packed his shearling slippers, Dorothea’s departure present to him. They were for the plane, and, knowing how chilly the air conditioning could be, he intended to use them. But he was damned if he would go shuffling round the airport in slippers beforehand like some Methuselah from an old-age home.

  Dorothea looked tired. More than likely she had slept no better than he had. He ordered coffee for them both from a smiling waitress with red tints in her hair. Then he and Dorothea returned to the subject of their conversation: the police. Ricky had dutifully checked in with them, or rather checked out, before completing his travel plans.

  Not worth more than a passing remark, perhaps, but he wanted to hear her speak while he still could, regardless of the topic. He doubted he would write to her, preferred it that way actually. Make an end here, and she would play her part. Curious how this dying business conferred certain leadership responsibilities.

  “I would say,” he remarked, “that your police handled me with a decidedly light touch. I think I frightened them; hardly surprising, given the state I was in when they found me. At the hospice a young officer whose nose kept twitching like a rabbit’s wrote down my answers to his questions. I suspect he’d heard that people with cancer stink horribly. He was trying to pick up the scent to see how awful it was, as you’d poke your tongue at a sore tooth to discover how badly it hurts.”

  “Ugh, Ricky,” she protested, but she giggled.

  He laughed too, a soft “haw” of derision, pleased to have amused her. Yet they hurt, these live moments: bright-edged reminders of all he was losing, the costs of this farewell.

  A silent farewell for the moment. She stirred her coffee, one hand to her forehead, her fingers slanted to hide her eyes from him.

  He took a square sugar-packet from the bowl on the table to play with, tapping first one point on the table-top and then another. It was really best for him to go, but he could not bring himself to explain fully. It had to do with that night and the morning after, of which he seldom spoke.

  At a certain point he had clawed his way so far out somewhere from his agonized body that only the threads of pain themselves had held him. When he had been brought back from that dimension and found that he was not to die after all, not just yet, something in him had remained suspended, waiting. He probed sometimes after the memory of that sensation of stretching away thinner and thinner into a different air.

  He did not want to die; far from it. But with his heightened sense of the nearness of death he found himself always on the alert for its approach. He had come too close to Dorothea to settle now for that distraction between them.

  Too bad, though, that he would miss the unveiling in the desert. He wondered what Claire’s art-people would see, feel, and say when they stood before the wall. They would not stand unmoved, he was certain of that. Whatever they saw, it would not be exactly what he had seen, that original magnificence shared only by himself, angry Roberto who had changed it, and Dorothea. He took a degree of satisfaction from this, and was glad Dorothea could not read his mind and see it there. Her absorption in what she was doing now gave her sun-browned, fine-boned face a stillness and focus that intrigued him. She had taken out a felt-tipped pen and was doodling on her napkin.

  He said, “What have you drawn? It looks like a figure from some Renaissance fresco.”

  She turned the napkin and showed him a sketch of a woman, draped in the style of classical artistic convention, bent under a vessel she carried on her shoulder.

  “She’s a statuette,” Dorothea said. “A bronze figure, perhaps eight inches high, with ink in that bowl she’s shouldering. This is the inkwell I used in my dream, when I wrote the judge’s letter.”

  Something about the drawing bothered Ricky. “Well-used, by the look of it. Did you mean for this bit of her robe to be broken off like that?”

  “That’s how it was in the dream,” she said, leaning closer and twisting her neck to see better. “Lord, when I think of the detail work I put into those dreams! Anything for verisimilitude.”

  “May I keep this?” he said.

  “Of course,” she answered, low-voiced. “I wish I had something better to give you.”

  He folded the napkin carefully and tucked it into his pocket.

  “Poor ghost,” she murmured. “Who was haunting who, anyway? If he actually made the connection at all — that I am a later version of him — it must have been absolutely terrifying for him. Not that I was particularly flattered, myself. He was short, did I tell you that? And a little scruffy-looking, too, with a five o’clock shadow. I was confirmed in my long-held opinion that the last thing I’d ever want to be is a man. No offense.”

  “None taken,” he said. “For my part, I can’t say I’ve ever been attracted by the thought of being a woman. But I can see the point of having to be each sex, in various lifetimes, so that nothing vital to the species’ experience is omitted from one’s curriculum.”
>
  “What about animals? Coming back as members of other species?”

  “No,” he said gravely. “Can’t see you as a llama. There wouldn’t be enough to learn, I should think, not for the kinds of situations we human beings get into. What would the experience of even the wisest Andean llama have had to offer you on the subject of Roberto and his conflict with the law? Precious little, don’t you think?”

  “Assuming,” she said, “that the major purpose of coming back —”

  “If we do come back.”

  “— and of remembering —”

  “If we do remember.”

  “— is educational.”

  “Can’t think of any other point to it, off-hand.”

  “No, that makes sense to me too. Although I still have moments,” she said, leaning nearer so that the booted and sprawling lunchers in the next booth couldn’t hear, “when I think we must both be crazy.”

  And I still have moments when I know it’s all a drama we dreamed up between us to give me an excuse to stay with you, and to try to ease my fear, he thought. Steam dawdled over the cup in front of him. He forced himself to speak lightly.

  “No, no, my dear; crazy would have been you recognizing me as Danton himself, or beastly little Robespierre, and maybe as Lancelot to your Guinevere — a whole convoy of exalted lives lived together from the Stone Age onward.”

  “Don’t be greedy. We’ve done all right here. Shhh.” She reached over to take his hand. He saw that on the back of hers, under the skin, were a few of the age marks that sprinkled his own hands.

  “We did,” he said. “Better than all right, actually. So don’t cry, Dorothea.” He dug in his pockets for a clean handkerchief to offer.

  “Oh, shut up, will you,” she grumbled, dabbing quickly at her eyes with her shirt cuff. “People are allowed to cry in airports.” But she accepted the handkerchief, and gave her nose an emphatic blow. One of the men in the next booth was staring at them.

  Ricky said, “Was that my plane they just announced? I never can hear what they say over those damned bleating speakers.”