Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  3

  Love is not love until love’s vulnerable.

  She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.

  A small bird flew in circles where we stood;

  The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.

  All who remember, doubt. Who calls that strange?

  I tossed a stone, and listened to its plunge.

  She knew the grammar of least motion, she

  Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.

  4

  She held her body steady in the wind;

  Our shadows met, and slowly swung around;

  She turned the field into a glittering sea;

  I played in flame and water like a boy

  And I swayed out beyond the white seafoam;

  Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.

  In that last while, eternity’s confine,

  I came to love, I came into my own.

  (1955)

  ★

  William Maxwell – an editor at The New Yorker for some forty years as well as a distinguished author in his own right – explained the short stories he labelled his ‘improvisations’ thus: ‘I wrote them to please my wife, over a great many years. When we were first married, after we had gone to bed I would tell her a story in the dark. They came from I had no idea where. Sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of a story and she would shake me and say, “What happened next?” and I would struggle up through layers of oblivion and tell her.’

  All the days and nights

  by William Maxwell

  Once upon a time there was a man who asked himself, ‘Where have all the days and nights of my life gone?’ He was not a young man, or the thought would never have crossed his mind, but neither was he white-haired and bent and dependent on a walker or a cane, and by any reasonable standards one would have to say that his life had been more fortunate than most. He was in excellent health, he had a loving wife, and children and friends, and no financial worries, and an old dog who never failed to welcome him when he came home. But something had taken him by surprise, and it was this: Without actually thinking about it, he had meant to live each day to the full – as he had – and still not let go of it. This was not as foolish as it sounds, because he didn’t feel his age. Or rather, he felt seventeen sometimes, and sometimes seven or eight, and sometimes sixty-four, which is what he actually was, and sometimes forty, and sometimes a hundred, depending on whether he was tired or had had enough sleep or on the company he was in or if the place he was in was a place he had been before, and so on. He could think about the past, and did, more than most people, through much of his adult life, and until recently this had sufficed. But now he had a sense of the departure from him not merely of the major events of his life, his marriage, the birth of his children, the death of his mother and father, but of an endless succession of days that were only different from one another insofar as they were subject to accident or chance. And what it felt like was that he had overdrawn his account at the bank or been spending his capital, instead of living comfortably on the income from it.

  He found himself doing things that, if he hadn’t had the excuse of absentmindedness, would have been simply without rational explanation: for example, he would stand and look around at the clutter in the attic, not with any idea of introducing order but merely taking in what was there; or opening closet doors in rooms he himself did not ordinarily ever go into. Finally he spoke to his wife about it, for he wondered if she felt the same way.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘When you go to sleep at night you let go of the day completely?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As a rule, he fell asleep immediately and she had to read a while, and even after the light was out she turned and turned and sometimes he knew, even though she didn’t move, that she was not asleep yet. If he had taken longer to fall asleep would he also have been able to let go of the – but he knew in his heart that the answer was no, he wouldn’t. And even now when he felt that he was about to leave a large part of his life (and therefore a large part of himself) behind, he couldn’t accept it as inevitable and part of growing old. What you do not accept you do not allow to happen, even if you have to have recourse to magic. And so one afternoon he set out, without a word to anybody, to find all the days and nights of his life. When he did not come home by dinnertime, his wife grew worried, telephoned to friends, and finally to the police, who referred her to the Missing Persons Bureau. A description of him – height, color of eyes, color of hair, clothing, scar on the back of his right hand, etc. – was broadcast on the local radio station and the state police were alerted. What began as a counting of days became a counting of weeks. Six months passed, and the family lawyer urged that, because of one financial problem and another, the man’s wife consider taking steps to have him pronounced legally dead. This she refused to do, and a year from the day he disappeared, he walked into the house, looking much older, and his first words were ‘I’m too tired to talk about it.’ He made them a drink and ate a good dinner, and went to bed at the usual time, without having asked a single question about her, about how she had managed without him, not offering a word of apology to her for the suffering he had caused her. He fell asleep immediately, as usual, and she put the light out.

  I will never forgive him, she said to herself, as long as I live. And when he curled around her, she moved away from him, without waking him and lay on the far side of the bed. And tried to go to sleep and couldn’t, and so when he spoke, even though it was hardly louder than a whisper, she heard what he said. What he said was ‘They’re all there. All the days and all the nights of our life. I don’t expect you to believe me,’ he went on, ‘but—’

  To his surprise she turned over and said, ‘I do believe you,’ and so he was able to tell her about it.

  ‘Think of it as being like a starry night, where every single star is itself a night with its own stars. Or like a book with pages you can turn, and that you can go back and read over again, and also skip ahead to see what’s coming. Only it isn’t a book. Or a starry night. Think of it as a house, with an infinite number of rooms that you can wander through, one after another after another. And each room is a whole day from morning to evening, with everything that happened, and each day is connected to the one before and the one that comes after, like bars of music. Think of it as a string quartet. And as none of those things. And as nowhere. And right here. And right now.’

  A tear ran down the side of her face and he knew it, in the dark, and took her in his arms. ‘The reason I didn’t miss you,’ he said, ‘is that we were never separated. You were there. And the children. And this house. And the dogs and the cats and the neighbors, and all our friends, and even what was happening yesterday when I wasn’t here. What I can’t describe is how it happened. I went out for a walk and left the road and cut across Ned Blackburn’s field, and suddenly the light seemed strange – and when I looked up, the sky wasn’t just air, it was of a brilliance that seemed to come from thousands and thousands of little mirrors and I felt lightheaded and my heart began to pound and—’

  She waited for him to go on and when he didn’t, she thought he was trying to say something that was too difficult to put into words. And then she heard his soft regular breathing and realized he was asleep.

  In the morning I will hear the rest of it, she thought, and fell asleep herself, much sooner than she usually did. But in the morning he didn’t remember a thing he had told her, and she had great trouble making him understand that he had ever been away.

  (1988)

  We have a lot of things for which to thank the Ancient Greeks. Although perhaps the alarm clock is not one of them.

  Plato rigged a water organ to blast him awake before dawn lectures (far be it from me, but he would in fact have been better off waiting a few more hours anyway, to allow his brain and those of his charges more time to spark back fully).

  The contraptions of the inventor Ctesibius, who effectively invented pneumatics, included
a clepsydra (water clock) that was timed to trumpet loudly, by compressed air squeezing through a beating reed.

  Mechanical alarm clocks first cuckooed in the early fifteenth century.

  We shouldn’t need an alarm clock, though, nor the sprightly cock’s crowings or the morning lark’s chirrups. No, our dewy brain should naturally propel our body into motion, in beat with our body clock. As long as our sleep patterns are balanced.

  That’s not to say that resurgence into waking life is easy. Any resurfacing requires an equalizing and decompression. Sleep is no different. Even ants stretch and yawn upon waking up.

  All of us fall victim to a period of sleep inertia, as the brain and body reacclimatize to waking life. Judgements are impaired exponentially (rendering Rip Van Winkle’s quicksilver awakening veritably Herculean). Just as hypnagogic hallucinations can herald sleep’s arrival, so can hypnopompic hallucinations clarion its departure. In this aftermath, our prodigal senses flare back up: hearing, touch, smell, taste – absent during our dreams – reunite with vision. Even if we have slept long and well, the blood has thickened, its pressure is still low, and muscle tone has been deafened. We have been slowed.

  Due to all these adjustments, the crescendo to get going, to launch back into the swing of things, can be taxing. Indeed, the human heart is statistically much more likely to stop beating, to short-circuit into cardiac arrest, during the first few hours of the day (say, between 9 A.M. and 11 A.M.) than at any other time.

  Conversely, after an hour or so of such readjustment, our brains are at their most alert – during those very hours that our hearts are at their most vulnerable.

  Although the years float by, and morning arrives on the heels of night faster by the day, the horizon is immutable. For as we stretch and elongate out of the foetal crouch, pushing away the folds of our warm, comforting covers, each dawn represents a tiny renaissance.

  Morning Song

  by Sylvia Plath

  Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

  The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

  Took its place among the elements.

  Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

  In a drafty museum, your nakedness

  Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

  I’m no more your mother

  Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

  Effacement at the wind’s hand.

  All night your moth-breath

  Flickers among the fat pink roses. I wake to listen:

  A far sea moves in my ear.

  One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

  In my Victorian nightgown.

  Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

  Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

  Your handful of notes;

  The clear vowels rise like balloons.

  (1961)

  ★

  The headstone of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s grave, in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is emblazoned with an epitaph that vaults a spring into the step:

  ‘WALK ON AIR AGAINST YOUR BETTER JUDGEMENT’

  Heaney referenced the line (from his poem ‘The Gravel Walks’) – in all its spacewalking splendour – when accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He commenced his address, entitled ‘Crediting Poetry’, by telling a story and evoking his childhood.

  In the 1940s, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural County Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course – rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house – but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically and in utter silence.

  For all this talk of hermetic hibernation, in this next poem, ‘The Rescue’, Heaney conjures a coming-together. Romance and reverie flood the soul – into rebirth.

  The Rescue

  by Seamus Heaney

  In drifts of sleep I came upon you

  Buried to your waist in snow.

  You reached your arms out: I came to

  Like water in a dream of thaw.

  (1991)

  ★

  The term making a bed stems from the Anglo-Saxons, who would form a bed each night from straw and a sack or two. The Ancient Egyptians (not to mention the Ancient Greeks and Romans) had been, unsurprisingly, way ahead of them, crafting beds as fine as those of Renaissance Europe (just thousands of years previously). Several were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb when it was uncovered in 1922. They dated to the fourteenth century BC.

  Most primates, like us, sleep upstairs (or in higher branches of treetops) – to avoid predators. Pillows are not specific to us humans either (for instance, elephants pile up vegetation on which to lay their heads). We have been using them for millennia. Those Ancient Egyptians even carved headrests of wood or ivory. Ornate, they would be covered in elaborate symbols, designed to fend off malign forces that might trespass the night, such as nightmares or even death.

  Pillow

  by John Updike

  Plump mate to my head, you alone absorb,

  through your cotton skin, the thoughts behind my bone

  skin of skull. When I weep, you grow damp.

  When I turn, you comply. In the dark,

  you are my only friend, the only kiss

  my cheek receives. You are my bowl of dreams.

  Your underside is cool, like a second chance,

  like a little leap into the air when I turn

  you over. Though you would smother me,

  properly applied, you are, like the world

  with its rotating mass, all I have. You accept

  the strange night with me, and are depressed

  when the morning discloses your wrinkles.

  (1993)

  ★

  In this tale, John O’Hara (who had more stories published by The New Yorker than any other author) automatically includes us in a familiar, familial morning routine – we read unthinkingly about Mr Jenssen reading unthinkingly, for example – but then suddenly interrupts proceedings. He provides a rude awakening via another tale to tell. Something happens out of nothing and, as a result, the tale sobers the reader up, like the welcome sting of aftershave in the morning.

  The story also operates on another level. Beneath its good humour and everyday wit, besides the irony of parents packing off their kids to school so that they are freed up to behave childishly – there is real vulnerability, anxiety in the tone but also improbability in the events. ‘The Ideal Man’, especially on a second or third reading, feels increasingly unrealistic. Much as a word repeated over and over – I always choose ‘yoke’ – begins to dissolve itself of meaning and become merely a sound.

  Could it be that the real Jenssen breakfast routine is about to commence and this is all taking place in Walter’s head? Is he still asleep?

  I’m not sure if this is what O’Hara – a chronicler of tender realities – had in mind. He would likely pour scorn on such a fanciful reading of his little tale – and yet I can’t help but find the story’s paranoia and lurching shifts sweetly dreamy.

  The Ideal Man

  by John O’Hara

  Breakfast in the Jenssen home was not much different from breakfast in a couple of hundred thousand homes in the Greater City. Walter Je
nssen had his paper propped up against the vinegar cruet and the sugar bowl. He read expertly, not even taking his eyes off the printed page when he raised his coffee cup to his mouth. Paul Jenssen, seven going on eight, was eating his hot cereal, which had to be sweetened heavily to get him to touch it. Myrna L. Jenssen, Walter’s five-year-old daughter, was scratching her towhead with her left hand while she fed herself with her right. Myrna, too, was expert in her fashion: she would put the spoon in her mouth, slide the cereal off, and bring out the spoon upside down. Elsie Jenssen (Mrs Walter) had stopped eating momentarily the better to explore with her tongue a bicuspid that seriously needed attention. That was the only thing she held against the kids – what having them had done to the teeth. Everybody’d warned her, but she wanted—

  ‘Holy hell!’ exclaimed Walter Jenssen. He slammed down the coffee cup, splashing the contents on the tablecloth.

  ‘What kind of talk is that in front of the children?’ said Elsie.

  ‘In front of the children! A hell of a fine one you are to be worrying about the children,’ said Walter. ‘Just take a look at this. Take a look at it!’ He handed her the paper as though he were stabbing her with it.

  She took the paper. Her eyes roved about the page and stopped. ‘Oh, that? Well, I’d like to know what’s wrong with that. Hereafter I’ll thank you to keep your cursing and swearing—’

  ‘You! You!’ said Walter.

  ‘Myrna, Paul, off to school. Get your coats and hats and bring them in here. Hurry now,’ said Elsie. The children got up and went to the hall. ‘Just hold your temper till the children are where they won’t hear you, with your raving like somebody insane.’ She buttoned Myrna’s coat and made Paul button his and warned him to keep it buttoned and warned Myrna not to let go of Paul’s hand; then she shooed them off with a smile that would have been approved by the Good Housekeeping Institute. But as soon as they were out of the apartment, the smile was gone. ‘All right, you big baboon, go ahead and curse your head off. I’m used to it.’