Dreamer

by Daniel Quinn

  She asked, “Whose life are you going to head?”

  “My own.”

  “Don’t play games. Are you going to lead Richard Iles’s life or Greg Donner’s?”

  “I don’t know anything about Richard Iles’s life.”

  “Very true,” Agnes said. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “You don’t know anything about Richard Iles’s life, and therefore . . . what?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re trying to make me say, Agnes.”

  “Where were you thinking of settling, if I may ask?”

  “Well . . . Chicago.”

  “Okay. I’ll ask it again. Whose life are you going to lead?”

  “And I’ll answer it again. My own.”

  “And out of all the cities on earth, living your own life, you want to be in Chicago.”

  “That’s right. I like Chicago.”

  “You do.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’ve lived there?”

  He was opening his mouth to say, “You know I have,” when he stopped and glared at her.

  “You’ve lived there?” she repeated.

  “All right, Agnes. What do you want me to say? That I want to live in Seattle? I’ve never lived in Seattle either.”

  “But you have lived in Chicago, haven’t you? How else could you know that you like it?”

  “Okay. I think I’ll like it.”

  “Based on what? Your reading? What you’ve seen in movies?”

  “Knock it off, Agnes.”

  “You knock it off. You think you’ll like it based on your dream experiences as Greg Donner. That’s whose life you’re going to lead, isn’t it?”

  Unable to think of any reply, he got up and stalked out, his back rigid with indignation.

  There was (he was sure) some profound injustice in Agnes’s approach to this thing, but by the time his next appointment rolled around he hadn’t found a way to articulate it. Being unable to fling it in her face (as he’d hoped to do), he settled for informing her, rather coldly, that he wanted to make arrangements to leave as soon as possible.

  After a few minutes, during which she simply sat and stared at him, he said, “Well?”

  “I’m thinking, Richard.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “My obligations.”

  “Go on.”

  “We’ve never talked about it explicitly, but I assume you realize that you were legally committed to this institution. Your wife signed a piece of paper committing your welfare to us, making us answerable to her. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since that time there’s been a change. I didn’t think it would matter to you and didn’t want to bother you with it, but now I guess I’d better. After talking to you, Ginny evidently decided it wasn’t appropriate for us to be answerable to her alone. She wanted to share the responsibility with someone in your immediate family, namely your uncle, Bruce Iles. In the circumstances, I have to agree that this makes sense.”

  Greg frowned. “Go on.”

  “What we now have is a piece of paper that makes the two of them jointly responsible for committing you to this institution and that makes us answerable to both of them.”

  “Shit,” Greg said.

  “Not at all—at least from your point of view.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “I told you I was considering my obligations. If you’ll think about it, you’ll see that they’re a little different now. If I was answerable only to your wife, I’d have to discuss your request for release with her; I’d have to tell her that, since what you have in mind is to settle in Chicago—out of contact with either her or me—I’d strongly recommend against it at this point. I’m sure she’d take that recommendation. But the fact that I’m now answerable to your uncle as well changes all this. Since your uncle lives in Chicago, part of my argument against your release is diminished.”

  “I don’t quite see what you’re saying.”

  “In discussing the matter with your uncle, I’d have to point out that, though I’m opposed to releasing you now, I’d be less opposed if I had his assurance that he’d keep an eye on you. If he gave me that assurance, I’d then have to call your wife and tell her so. Under these circumstances, she might very well direct me to release you.”

  “In spite of your reservations.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In other words, if I’m prepared to insist on it, I can probably get out of here.”

  Agnes nodded.

  “But you really think it’s a mistake.”

  “Yes, I do. I think you intend to go to Chicago and recreate the fantasy of your dreams.”

  “How can I persuade you that that’s not my intention?”

  “Let’s say that nothing you’ve said so far persuades me to the contrary.”

  He sighed and spent a moment in thought. “Look, you once said that the Greg Donner dreams were a kind of wish fulfillment on Richard Iles’s part. They represented what he wished he’d done with his life. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, they also represent what I want to do with my life. What am I supposed to do, Agnes? Stop wanting what I want? Will you let me go with your blessings if I tell you I want to go to Zurich and become an apprentice cuckoo clock maker?”

  Agnes chuckled. “I’d be more inclined to do so, yes, because I’d feel reasonably sure you weren’t following some deeply hidden agenda that was going to get you into trouble.”

  “You think I’m following some deeply hidden agenda?”

  “I think you may be, yes.”

  “And what’s on this deeply hidden agenda, Agnes?”

  “That’s precisely the point, Richard. I can’t know what’s on it, because—if it’s there—it’s hidden, even from you.”

  Grappling with this amorphous phantom, Greg found his face growing hot. “This is why psychiatrists never lose an argument, Agnes. There’s no way on God’s earth I can ever prove I’m not following a hidden agenda—even if I sit here for a century.”

  “I know that perfectly well, Richard,” she said with an unruffled smile. “This is why I’m prepared to suppress my misgivings and let you have a shot at doing what you want—provided your uncle agrees to keep an eye on you. Under those circumstances, I couldn’t reasonably refuse.”

  “Well, great,” he snapped, getting to his feet. “Are you going to call him or shall I?”

  “I’ll call him. Today.”

  “Thank you. Will I have a chance to talk to him?”

  “Certainly. I’m not going to rush this, Richard. I’m going to ask him to pay us a visit so we can discuss the whole thing.”

  “Shit.”

  “Richard, your uncle is a physician himself. If he’s going to take on a responsibility, I’m sure he’ll want to know exactly what it entails. What’s the sudden urgency?”

  “There wasn’t one before. You’ve made me feel like an errant schoolboy being released from the reformatory.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think of it that way at all, believe me. It’s just that I have an important obligation here and want to discharge it in a responsible fashion.”

  “Yeah, I know. But let’s get it over with. Okay?”

  “Richard, I’d better warn you. I’m going to argue against your release—but I promise you I won’t delay it by a minute if I can help it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Five days later Greg and Bruce Iles occupied adjoining seats on an afternoon flight to Chicago.

  Their reunion hadn’t been as awkward as Greg had expected. Bruce seemed to grasp the situation more firmly than Ginny had and treated it with casual good humor. As with Ginny, the Bruce of real life was subtly different from the Bruce of his dreams. The pale and rather wistful good looks were the same, but Bruce Iles carried with him an air of disappointment and bitterness that had never hovered around the gentle, courtly Bruce Eddison. If Br
uce Iles was gay (as Greg assumed), he would never admit it to Greg—and Greg would never ask. Greg might have counted Bruce Eddison as a friend—Bruce Iles, never; he took his unclehood a little too seriously.

  At their conference, as Agnes explained her misgivings, Bruce had listened with so much professional detachment and sympathy that Greg began to despair. When Greg’s turn came, however, Bruce had readily (and smilingly) acknowledged the force of his simple counterargument: if you locked up everyone until they proved they weren’t following a hidden agenda, the streets would be empty. In the end, he settled it all very easily, with a question directed to Greg: “If I ever become convinced that you’re not handling your life in a sane, sensible way, will you accept that judgment? Will you agree to come back here for treatment without making a fuss?”

  “Absolutely,” Greg said.

  Because, after all, he had no other intention than to handle his life in a completely sane and sensible way.

  XXXII

  IT WASN’T A CHATTY PLANE RIDE, but this was more Greg’s choice than Bruce’s. Bruce said he must have a lot of questions about the family lost somewhere in the recesses of Richard Iles’s memory, but in fact he didn’t. His biological parents were people he didn’t know, would never know, and felt no need to know. He learned that, after their death in an auto accident in 1966, he and Bruce had been close for a time, and Bruce had served as a surrogate father during his high school years. Greg didn’t want to hear about it and was too distracted by his plans for the immediate future to pretend otherwise.

  They parted at the airport, since Greg’s destination was downtown and Bruce’s was Glenview, where he lived. Greg promised to call when he was settled and agreed that getting together soon for dinner was a fine idea; privately, he hoped his uncle wasn’t going to start thinking of himself as a probation officer.

  A few minutes later the city skyline rose up before him on the horizon and his heart rose up to greet it.

  Greg’s suite at the Drake was magnificent, and he felt a little underdressed in it. That was something he planned to remedy the following day. He was by now no longer embarrassed by Richard Iles’s fortune; he felt he’d earned it in the ordeal of becoming Richard Iles, in shouldering this stranger’s future. He couldn’t conceive of ever needing to touch the principal; his ready assets, this quarter’s earnings, represented an infant for-tune in itself.

  Over the next week he managed to unburden himself of a sizable part of it in half a dozen Michigan Avenue men’s shops, where his visits came to be anticipated as an awesome phenomenon of nature; he was a walking gusher of money. With his hotel closets jammed with suits and shoes, his bureau drawers overflowing with shirts and silk underwear, and more of everything on order (all of this to be handmade), he abandoned the men’s shops for the galleries. These he prowled more cautiously, merely doing a preliminary reconnaissance. He nodded mutely over old master drawings, an early Kandinsky, a breathtaking Hans Hofmann, a charming Degas bronze, a luscious small Monet—but left them all alone for now. He needed a place to live first.

  In what he’d come to think of as his “second dream,” he and Ginny had lived just around the corner from the Drake in one of the older, smaller lakefront buildings that had always put him in mind of the classic apartment houses of Paris. The building was there, much as he remembered it, but he didn’t go in to inquire about vacancies; he was pleased to note that he wasn’t tempted to.

  He was no longer in the mood for Old World Elegance; he wanted something modern, sleek, and open, and so he went to the John Hancock Center and leased an enormous corner apartment with Olympian views of the lake and city. After that, he took himself and a floor plan to an interior designer, who agreed that, with a budget of sixty thousand dollars (not to include fine art acquisitions), they could put together a reasonably smashing living space in the Milanese style; after two weeks of shopping together, Greg was giddily exhausted and fifteen thousand over budget. It was all in place by the middle of December, and he moved in just a week before Christmas. The next day he visited an antiques dealer who specialized in toys, and in the midst of thousands of dolls, banks, fire engines, hansom cabs, nodders, roly-polies, cannons, and puzzles finally found something he liked, a classy gray Hubley trimotor airplane from the late twenties that he had sent to Agnes Tillford to add to her collection. With this, he considered his Christmas shopping done; he’d reconciled himself to the fact that Ginny was out of his life, and he didn’t quite see himself exchanging gifts with his uncle.

  He and Bruce had met twice for dinner, relentlessly polite affairs; Greg tried delicately to point out that, unencumbered by a family relationship in his dreams, the two of them had been something very like friends. His uncle chose to construe this as an interesting gloss on the nature of dreams, and Greg decided to let it go.

  Three days before Christmas, when he felt finally settled, he called Bruce and invited him over for a drink. He was puzzled by his uncle’s reaction to the apartment. Walking into the living room, he stopped, obviously stunned, and muttered, “Good lord.”

  Greg looked around quickly, hoping it all looked reasonably sane and sensible. It did, at least to him. It was extreme, perhaps even a bit weird, with its severe lines and masses in black and white, but—

  “Did it come this way?” Bruce asked.

  Greg laughed and confessed that he’d done it with his own little checkbook.

  Once again Bruce said, “Good lord.”

  It was then that Greg recognized what he was seeing in his uncle’s face. To his astonishment, it was envy—not over what Greg had assembled here (he obviously detested it) but over the sheer size of the expenditure needed to assemble it. The realization was dismaying, because it had never occurred to him that a physician (and an unmarried one at that) could be anything but wealthy himself. Embarrassed for both of them, Greg invited him to sit down and hurried off to the kitchen to make drinks.

  They chatted halfheartedly through a dismal hour and Bruce at last departed with a feeble “Merry Christmas,” which Greg returned with an equal feebleness, reflecting that Richard Iles detested Christmas as much as Greg Donner had.

  XXXIII

  CHRISTMAS WAS A LONG, LONG DAY. He slept late, dressed slowly, had brunch at the Drake, went to a matinée, and came out depressed that it was still bright day. Back in his apartment he settled down with a fat family saga he’d saved specially for that purpose.

  Turning the last page at 8:30, he changed clothes and took a taxi to the Ambassador East, telling himself firmly that there was no reason in the world why a lone diner shouldn’t have as much fun at the Pump Room on Christmas as on any other day. Whole platoons of captains, waiters, sous-waiters, and sommeliers took turns trying to cheer him up, and he had a thoroughly miserable time.

  Falling into bed at midnight, he reminded himself that, if nothing else, it would at least be another ten months before Bing Crosby started moaning again for sleigh bells in the snow.

  He woke up with a feeling of glad relief, knowing that the city had by now risen from its hushed trance and was once again open for business, he got dressed and, without pausing for breakfast, went to an Oak Street gallery and purchased a pre-Columbian terra-cotta figure he’d had his eye on. Returning, he installed it on the top shelf of a glass and chrome étagère in the living room and studied it with an interest he could never have felt over something inside a museum case; this one was his. It represented a dignitary of the Zapotec culture, from around the time of Christ. Wearing something rather like a diaper, a tall stovepipe hat, a heavy necklace, and a handsome pair of boots, he looked to Greg like a magistrate in a satiric mode. He stood with his legs well apart and his hands thrown up in dismay, his face a mask of horrified astonishment, as if he’d just come upon someone peeing on the altar. Whatever else he acquired, Greg had the feeling this would remain his favorite.

  By the end of January, there was nothing heft to buy. He’d spent an agreeable week reassembling the library that had vanished w
ith his dreams. He’d spent another week ordering films for his VCR. He’d spent three in the galleries, bringing home posters by Cassandre and Toulouse-Lautrec, a magnificent figurehead from an eighteenth-century ship, a small primitive portrait of a sea captain from the same period, and paintings by Adolph Gottlieb, Dado, Ernst Fuchs, Jules Ohitski, and, incongruously, Maxfield Parrish.

  At the end of the entry hall was stationed an object of which Greg was especially fond: a death cart that had been used in the rather sinister Easter processions of the Penitentes of northern New Mexico. Perched in the cart was a stylized human skeleton, life-size, brandishing a hatchet in one hand and a huge knife in the other, leaning forward as if eager to strike, its emaciated face set in a perpetual shriek of rage. He’d been told that, in the Penitente tradition, this figure was a woman, and he’d dubbed her Matilda. It was plain from her eyes that she saw nothing of what was going on around her in this world; what lived in her eyes were visions of another world entirely: the world of nightmare. And so Greg thought her an appropriate talisman for Richard Iles.

  When it was all in place, he took a solemn, silent tour of his own apartment, pausing for minutes before each piece. Then he made himself a drink and stood at the vast east windows, looking out over the lake and puzzling over his sudden depression. He realized now that he should have been prepared for it; finishing an exciting project always has to be paid for with a letdown. Worse, he’d foolishly jammed a year’s enjoyable occupation into two months and now had nothing to look forward to. And with no one to share them with, his fabulous apartment and its fabulous contents might as well be a suite in an expensive hotel. Richard Iles, whose name was on the lease and on all the receipts, was too insubstantial a person to possess anything. He needed someone who could ratify his existence by saying, “This is ours.”

  By imperceptible degrees he found himself thinking of Ginny, and he sighed, remembering that just a few weeks ago he’d imagined he was reconciled to losing her. He plainly wasn’t. In a sense, everything he’d done here from the very beginning had been with Ginny in mind, with the wordless expectation that this bold new statement about himself would force her to revise her estimate of him. He had—as Agnes had predicted—been following a hidden agenda, and it wasn’t even a very bright one. Anyone can spend money; Ginny wouldn’t be impressed by that.