Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  BEFORE MEETING Nick, I’d never asked anyone to help me out on my collecting missions for the shop. Even Sam seldom accompanied me. But occasionally, if Nick had a spare hour or two, I’d take him on a hunt for new inventory. Whenever he went with me, we’d find something unusual to add to my stock.

  Even Sam. That phrase came to me often at the start of my affair with Nick. Even Sam hadn’t shown such excitement at the sight of spiked heels; even Sam hadn’t lapped at me greedily, like a single-minded cat, every time we went to bed. But even Nick couldn’t carry away with him, each time he left, the solitude that would surround me afterward, as I lay amidst sheets damp with his sweet saltiness. That solitude—saturated, effulgent, like early-morning air after a night of rainfall—was wholly familiar to me. I’d known it since childhood. To me it was fragranced, and its scent was so singular, so fully mine, not even my father could have identified it.

  Looking back, I see Nick and myself playing a kind of hide-and-seek: the hiding, sex; the seeking, its solace. Yet though we did give and take our pleasures, I didn’t find him, nor was I found. The game wouldn’t work that way.

  STUART CALLED me just as I was climbing into bed, reminding me that we needed to enact a recently made deal. I was supposed to hand over to him a small box of old books (mostly plays, along with a few works of criticism), which one of my clients had given me before moving to Europe.

  As it happened, I’d come into a mini-treasure. My unwitting benefactor hadn’t realized that among the dozen or so books in the box were several rare titles. He also hadn’t left a forwarding address. Spoils of war, said Stuart when I told him. He’d offered to sell the books and split the profits with me. Several of his customers were potential takers, he said, and he’d tap them right away.

  We agreed to meet at ten-thirty the following morning for the box handoff. Stuart wished me pleasant dreams. Hanging up, I flashed onto the cartwheeling man from my first dream, the one set in St. Petersburg. I could see his sinuous form and masked face, yet I couldn’t get the bell in my memory to ring.

  AT THE appointed hour, Stuart and I met up at a café midway between our shops and ordered our usual snack of milky coffee and brioche.

  Stuart babbled for a while about a party he and Carl had recently attended. Listening to his witty account, I felt a rush of gratitude that we’d managed to stay close for so long. That I had, still, a best friend. He and I had endured tense times, patches of mutual anger and disappointment, but we’d pulled through; I could observe whatever conflicts arose now through a lens of surety. Having failed to master the art of close friendship with anyone else, I felt fortunate to experience with this man a quiet trust in trust itself.

  He circled my left wrist with his long fingers. Pulling my hand toward him, he leaned over to examine the bandage covering my thumb.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “An injury, or some new fad in adornment? Maybe there’s a tattoo under here?” He poked gently at the Band-Aid. “Unserious, I presume. And how did we do this to ourselves?”

  “It’s healing up nicely, thank you.”

  “Not an answer to my question.”

  “Food prep,” I said. Any mention of sardines would prompt a sarcastic lecturette about eating too healthily.

  “Don’t tell me,” Stuart went on. “You whacked your thumb on a day-old granola bar?”

  “You’re the hypochondriac,” I said. “If you ate better, you’d have fewer complaints, real or imaginary.”

  He performed an exaggerated shrug, the tips of his shoulders nearly touching his earlobes. “Oh wel-l-l-l,” he sang, splaying his hands. “At least I’ll be able to tell Saint Peter I enjoyed my last meal. Unlike some people who’re so damn renunciatory . . .”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Change of subject,” I said. “Do you ever dream about your father?”

  “My father?” Across his face flitted a fast shadow, some rogue emotion. “Very seldom. I dream about a lot of other relatives, though. Including my mother, and both my grandparents, and even my second cousin Wendy, whom I haven’t seen since I was, oh, maybe ten. So that should tell you something, though I’m not sure what.”

  He swabbed butter on the remaining half of his brioche and popped it efficiently into his mouth.

  “Do you wish you dreamed about your father?” I asked.

  He shook his head vehemently, then swallowed before answering. “God, no! There’s limited time for dreaming—why waste it on him?”

  Stuart’s father had walked out on the family when Stuart was six, leaving an irate mother and an even angrier son. His reaction to my question didn’t surprise me.

  “But that’s not a choice, is it?” I asked.

  Stuart pondered this. “You know,” he responded finally, “I used to think dreams just happened, and you couldn’t assert any control over them, couldn’t alter their content. But then I read about lucid dreaming—that’s when you’re dreaming and you realize it while you’re actually inside the dream, you know? And you can change the progress of the dream as it’s happening. It’s fascinating. We’re tinkering much more often than we’re aware of, but at the unconscious level, not with our waking minds.” He shook his head. “Who knows, maybe I’m dreaming about my father every night.” This thought seemed to displease him. “Why’d you ask?” he added.

  “I dreamed about my own father last night,” I said. “Second time in a row, in fact. Very strange. In last night’s dream, it was as though I’d conflated you and him. Jordan was a juggler. He was onstage, juggling perfume bottles, and he broke them all. Deliberately.”

  “Jugglers,” Stuart said sternly, “are not mimes. Jugglers are a bunch of prima donnas. I’ve seen them throw tantrums and squeal like babies when they’re rehearsing. Somebody sneezes, and they fuck up, and then they yell, Oh my God, you just ruined my whole routine! Can’t stand jugglers. Silly little show-offs.” He agitated his coffee with his spoon.

  I let him compose himself before continuing. “It was quite weird, this dream,” I said. “I mean, all those perfume bottles shattered on the floor. And they were empty, too.”

  “Well, think how your dream would’ve smelled if they’d all been full!”

  I had to laugh. “Hadn’t considered that,” I said. “But what stayed with me, when I woke up, was how frustrated my father was. It was hard for him to design bottles, actually. He never liked the packaging side of the business.”

  Stuart flagged our waitress, who produced a check. He paid, left a generous tip, pocketed his change, and stood up. “Most of your dreams don’t involve people you know personally, do they? Which is why I like hearing them—they’re so inventive! You know, I loathe it when people throw a bunch of glib psychobabble at their dreams—‘Oh, this one was definitely about my submerged libidinal feelings for my dog . . .’ Why’d you say you dreamed about your father, by the way? Maybe you were dreaming about me?”

  “Trust me,” I said. “This was definitely about Jordan.”

  He widened his eyes in fake disbelief. “Fine. I’m not hurt.”

  As we left the café, Stuart took my hand and swung it broadly. At the corner of Washington Square, we paused. Stuart was about to head north, I was going west.

  “Well?” Still holding my hand, he gave it a little squeeze. “What’d you find out about him?”

  “About Jordan? I’m not sure that’s the question,” I said. “I’d like to know what the dream’s saying about me. There I was, in the audience, watching him, and I actually climbed onstage so I could see what he was juggling. I even asked him to stop so I could take a closer look at the bottles.”

  Releasing my hand, Stuart licked and then twirled one finger in the air as if testing the direction of the breeze. Using the same finger, he reached over and lightly chucked the tip of my chin.

  “Very interesting,” he said. “You’re a spectator but also an actor. The one under the spell and the one creating the spell . . .”

  “That’s a bit complicated, buddy.”

>   “Oh, I think not. Not for you.” He tapped me on the temple. “You need to remember more of your dream. Usually some missing piece lurks right at the edge of memory. Some detail that’s being suppressed. When I first wake up, I often can’t recall anything I’ve dreamed, but then it shows up later, when I least expect it. Like, Oh no, not that! Don’t wanna think about that!”Clamping one hand around his throat and the other over his eyes, he made a strangled noise.

  “I know the feeling,” I said.

  He grinned and turned away, waving. “Bye, darlin’. Be good. Thanks for the theater invite—see you Wednesday! I’ll meet you at that bar in Fort Greene beforehand, right? Oh, by the way, did you talk with Danny?”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you about it at some point. After I check in with Sam.”

  Stuart shielded his eyes.

  “Cut it out,” I said. “And tell Carl I’m sorry he can’t make it to BAM.” On Wednesdays, Backstage Books stayed open late. Carl had volunteered to stay at the store so Stuart could attend the production.

  “I shall tell him,” said Stuart. “But don’t feel too sorry for him. Last week I spelled him so he could dine with his sister—not the nice one, the witch, the one I detest! See what a good mate I am? Oh, and next time you speak with Danny, tell her I’ll give her a check for both tickets. Ciao!”

  He hadn’t gone far up the block—I could still see his back—when the scent of chocolate came, not to my nose but to memory. The missing piece, I nearly called out but didn’t. Odd, I thought, to be recalling that scent, so bound up with memories of my father’s death. And for Jordan to arrive so vividly in a dream of mine, when he’d been offstage for so long.

  AS I was opening my shop, the phone began ringing. I caught it just before the answering machine picked up.

  “Cam.” It was Danny, sounding purposeful. “I’ve been thinking—are you alone, have you got customers?—I wanted to ask you a favor. Would you go to Ithaca with me next weekend?”

  “Ithaca?” Thinking she was referring to either a play or a restaurant, I tried to remember whether I’d heard of either one. Nothing came to mind.

  “You know, upstate. Where Cornell University is—where Mom used to live. I’d like to drive up there and do a little research.”

  “At the university?”

  “No. I’d like to talk with someone who lives there.”

  “Oh,” I said, confused; my inner warning lights hadn’t begun to flash. “Like a friend from college or something?”

  She hesitated a beat before answering. “I’d like to talk with Billy Deveare’s sister.”

  The lights started blinking now. I put down my bag and key ring and sat at my desk. “His sister?”

  “Yeah. When I was cleaning out Mom’s desk, I found something tucked at the back of a drawerful of stuff—mostly junk, which is why you and I missed it the first time around. It’s an invoice from the hospital where I was born. For a procedure Mom underwent a year before my birth. A little less than a year, actually—like about nine months. She was artificially inseminated, Cam.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, though I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t.

  “Nope. The sperm donor isn’t named on the invoice—I guess that’s to protect his privacy. But since Billy’s on my birth certificate as my father, he’s obviously the one.”

  I was silent for several moments, trying to decide which of my multiple questions to ask. “Danny, what exactly do you want to find out in Ithaca?” I said at last.

  “I called directory assistance in Ithaca and found a J. Deveare,” she replied. “I dialed the number and a man answered. When I asked if he was related to the late Billy Deveare, he said his wife, Judy, was Billy’s sister. Then he asked why I was calling. I hadn’t given my name or anything, and I didn’t know what to say, so I hung up.”

  She paused. When she resumed, her tone was more urgent. “But I got the street address from an Ithaca phone book, so I know where they live. Cam, I want to go up there and talk with her. I want to find out if she knew her brother had a kid. I want her to describe Billy to me. And their deal. Mom probably told you what she told me: as soon as she learned she was pregnant, she dumped Billy. And then he died. But what if that wasn’t true?”

  “That he died?”

  “No, of course he died. . . . But I want to find out whatever I can about him, Cam. That means starting with the sister.”

  I considered my options. If I were to try talking Danny out of her mission, she’d balk. She was obviously determined to go upstate, with or without me. She wouldn’t shelve her plan for lack of a companion. And actually, there was no good reason Danny shouldn’t go. She’d been told almost nothing about her father. It made sense she’d want to learn more about him at some point. And since the only other person who could’ve described him—Eve—was gone, Danny was justified in believing that a trip to Ithaca was her best shot.

  I CLOSED my eyes. Out of nowhere the masked man from my first dream returned again to my memory. There he was, traveling across the stage with such elastic ease. As soon as he was done, another image arrived, equally unexpected: Eve in her hospital bed, a few hours before her death.

  The memory surged, potent and irresistible. I’d been sitting in a chair drawn up to her bedside. No one else had been in the room; Danny had stepped out to speak with one of the nurses. Eve’s breathing was labored, and a slick gleam coated her skin, across which the septicemia would shortly travel. She’d smelled stale—this woman who’d worn perfume all her life now gave off a spoiled odor.

  After a few minutes alone with her, I’d slipped out of the room and gone to a restroom down the hall, where I’d vomited, wept, and vomited some more. A nurse had fetched me, and I returned to Eve’s room just in time to see the rash spreading over her body—a weirdly beautiful, purplish blooming, like a child’s finger painting of a lilac tree. Danny had begun crying in short, staccato gasps that didn’t cease until Eve herself stopped breathing, an hour later. At that point Danny had fallen completely silent, refusing my moves to hold her, not even allowing me to take her hands in mine. I remembered staring at Danny’s hands, then at her mother’s, then Danny’s again, imagining the difference in their temperatures—Eve’s cooling, her daughter’s warm.

  I OPENED my eyes, aware of the phone at my ear.

  “Cam?” Danny was saying. I had no idea how many times she might have repeated my name.

  “Is it okay if I give you an answer tomorrow?” I asked.

  “All right,” she said, clearly disappointed. She’d expected an immediate yes. “I’ll call you.”

  After hanging up, I looked at my left thumb. While cradling the receiver between my shoulder and jaw, I’d fiddled with the bandage until it was twisted, useless. I pulled it off. Time to let the air heal my little wound.

  I’D CUT myself in the same place on the same thumb, nineteen years earlier. Closing an old manila envelope, I’d slid my thumb across the back, and a brass prong, surprisingly sharp, had slashed me. A bit of blood had soaked into the yellow-brown envelope, leaving a stain. The slit was nasty, definitely more than a paper cut.

  The envelope had been lying among heaps of manila folders and files that filled several large cardboard boxes in Jordan’s attic. When my father died, Stuart had offered to help me with the task of sorting and disposing of his belongings. A few days after Jordan’s cremation, he and I rented a small van and drove out to Frenchtown, New Jersey, where Jordan had lived for the final ten years of his life. There we spent a humid September weekend rummaging through his possessions.

  I’d been surprised to find so much paper. Apart from the usual personal records, Jordan had kept a lot of information on the perfume industry, some of it three or four decades old. I discovered several letters from French colleagues, thanking him for his assistance and urging him to visit again. He’d also maintained numerous files on the theater, crammed with program notes, reviews, and articles about actors, directors, and productions.

 
My father loved theater. I suppose I could say my own love of it came from him, but in a passive, indirect way, not through any conscious incitement. Going to the theater was our only shared pastime, but our tastes were frequently at odds. Still, Jordan had passed along to me an instinctive leaning toward theater as nourishment unattainable anywhere else—not in books, certainly not onscreen.

  Like everything else in his attic, Jordan’s theater files were covered with dust. Flipping through them, I felt a little giddy with sadness, imagining all the hours my father had sat by himself in theaters around the world. Wherever he went—Brazil, Japan, Egypt, Finland—he’d attended stage and musical performances of all kinds. He would have dressed impeccably, wearing his wire-rimmed glasses to catch those sorts of small details that other people miss even after several viewings of a performance.

  As I was stuffing the theater files back into a box, Stuart discovered a smaller carton, labeled “Russia,” tucked behind a steamer trunk filled with yellowed sheets and towels. From it he extracted a handful of manila envelopes and flapped them in front of me.

  “Recognize these?” he asked.