The Last Dreamer

by Barbara Solomon Josselsohn

  Maybe disappointment was inevitable as time passed and opportunities naturally shrank, she thought. Life could never be as thrilling as it was when they were both first starting out. But if disappointment was the normal course of things, wouldn’t she prefer to face it with someone she loved at her side? The answer was yes, and she knew that meant that she had to give her marriage a shot. She and Marc had to commit themselves to talking things out, over and over if that’s what it took, to try to find common ground and reclaim the love that brought them together in the first place. Instead, over these last few months, she had pulled away from him and held a grudge, she had lied and snuck around, and she had walked away from a promise she had made to him. He had behaved badly, too, there was no doubt about that. But she had also secretly forged a relationship with another guy and flown across the country to be with him, knowing that there was attraction on both sides. That was the most horrendous thing of all.

  At four a.m. she woke up, sweating. She wanted to go home. She wanted to make sure that home was still there for her. That Marc would be willing to work with her to make things better. She truly had no idea what he might do when she walked into the house. She imagined him flinging her suitcase out the door and telling her in a quiet, tense voice to get out. Marc didn’t get mad often, but she’d seen just yesterday how intensely angry he could get. He had told her to go fuck herself. She was still surprised he had actually said it.

  She reached for the remote and switched on the TV, hoping to make the time go faster. The light shot out from the screen in bright rays, and she had to squint for several seconds before her eyes adjusted. The “E” channel was on, and she caught the end of a segment about Ansel Elgort, the young star from the movie The Fault in Our Stars. Iliana grimaced as she watched. Another teen idol. Just what she needed.

  Turning the TV off, she got up and took a long shower, scrubbing herself twice with soap and washing her hair twice, too. The drain at the bottom of the shower looked green with rust, and as she brushed her teeth, she noticed that some of the grout between the sink and wall was black with either grime or mold. Her stomach was bubbly and her arms felt heavy and weak. She put on the jeans and T-shirt she had planned to take the red-eye in. She packed up her shoes and toiletries and put her notebooks on top.

  At five thirty, she gathered her bags and left the room. She figured she could get a cup of coffee in the lobby and then head right to the airport. Jeff had gotten her booked on a one o’clock flight, but maybe she could get on an earlier one. She desperately wanted to get out of the hotel before Jeff and Terry came down for breakfast. She was scared that they’d humiliate her, that they’d call her a stalker so that all the people in the lobby would turn and stare. Maybe a security guard in the lobby would overhear them and would grab her elbow and escort her roughly out of the building, warning her to never come back or she’d be arrested. At least if she left early, she’d have a chance to escape quietly. If she was lucky, Jeff would have decided to sleep a little later.

  She scanned the lobby as she stepped off the elevator. There was no sign of Jeff or Terry. The lobby was mostly empty, in fact; nearly all the people were hotel employees, going about the kinds of after-hours jobs that most guests never saw them do, emptying trash cans and polishing the floor. Two men with squeegees nodded politely toward her as they expertly swiped the large sliding doors.

  At the front desk, a young woman in a crisp gray suit bade her good morning and asked if she had had a pleasant stay as she retrieved her bill from the computer. She then asked Iliana to wait a moment and went to confer with a man in the doorway of an office behind her. Iliana felt a rush of panic. What if Jeff had made a police complaint after he left her room last night? What if the clerk had been instructed to notify her boss when Iliana tried to check out, so they could call a patrol car? Could it be that she actually had done something that she could be arrested for? She felt her cheeks redden and her legs get weak. She considered running past the squeegee guys and out into a cab. But no, the clerk returned and told her to have a good day.

  Forcing herself to take deep breaths and try to relax, Iliana walked to the front of the hotel, conscious of every step. She wheeled her overnight bag to the bellman and asked him to call her a cab. As he went outside into the light of early morning, she bought a cup of coffee from a smiling, young clerk at a kiosk. A few people rushed by her in pairs or groups, talking in animated tones about business deals. She could hear isolated words and phrases—shipping dates, backlogs, deadlines, receivables.

  Iliana realized that she had become used to traveling with her family, encouraging the kids to watch their step, hold on to the railing, stick together, look at the fountains, see the tall buildings. She had forgotten how lonely it could be, even in the middle of big cities, to be traveling alone. Looking down at her coffee, she decided she really wasn’t in the mood for it. She was walking to a trashcan near the elevator bank to throw out the cup when a set of elevator doors opened. She looked up, startled. Inside were Jeff and Terry.

  Iliana gasped when she saw them, and they looked stunned, too, so that the elevator doors started to close before they got out. Jeff reached out a hand, and the doors reopened. The two stepped out and stood opposite her. There was no one else nearby. She didn’t know how angry Jeff was or what he was capable of doing. She was scared he might smack her into the marble wall nearby, or blast her verbally, calling her a crazy bitch or something uglier.

  But the worst he did was shake his finger at her. “Now you stay away from me,” he said, speaking more loudly than he needed to. “Do you hear me? I will call the police. I will file a report against you, do you understand?” The speech sounded rehearsed. Maybe he had come up with this script last night. Fine, she thought. Let him frame her as a lunatic, if then he’d leave her alone. It was no skin off her nose to let him relive his glory days as a stalked performer for one more morning.

  “No problem,” she said, starting to walk away.

  “I can make life very difficult for you. I know you have a husband and children,” he said, following her, raising his voice still more. Evidently his performance wasn’t done. Iliana turned back. Jeff looked smug, enjoying the attention he was drawing from the hotel staffers. He wanted to publicly embarrass her, and it was working. A few businessmen who had come out of a nearby elevator were looking over, as were some women walking through the front doors. The squeegee guys had stopped working and were stealing sideways glances over, too. Terry was rocking back and forth on his feet uncomfortably. His eyes were long, droopy ovals.

  “Listen,” Iliana said in a low, angry voice. “We both were somewhere we shouldn’t have been last night—”

  “I should expect it by now, and God knows I should be flattered,” Jeff said as he walked past her, ostensibly talking to Terry but clearly playing to the people in the lobby. “I guess it comes with the territory, but sometimes you just wish these fans would get a life.”

  He put on his sunglasses and shook back his hair, a move that would have seemed more useful back when his locks were long and shaggy. The lobby was filling up more, and several people were looking at Jeff and whispering, as though they couldn’t quite put their finger on who he was.

  Watching him with a mixture of anger at how he had embarrassed her and relief that he hadn’t done anything worse, Iliana felt a light tap on her shoulder. She turned and saw Terry right next to her, his forehead sweating, the buttons of his checked shirt straining over his belly.

  “Terry, I—” she said, starting to apologize.

  “I’ll make sure he leaves you alone,” he said quietly, then walked off to join Jeff. Iliana felt her eyes fill. It was hard to believe that this poor sick guy, whose life had essentially collapsed after the Dreamers, was feeling sorry for her.

  She arrived at the airport to find that all the earlier flights were booked, so she wandered around the gift shops and snack bars until her one o’clock flight w
as finally called.

  Back in New York, it was cold and drizzly, and the traffic on the Grand Central Parkway was stop-and-go all the way to the Whitestone Bridge. She tried to lean her head back and close her eyes, but the vinyl upholstery felt sticky and uncomfortable, and the taxi’s fitful starts and stops jerked her shoulders and head first one way, then the other. The shocks on the car were practically nonexistent, and her low-grade headache turned into a burst of sharp pain each time the car slammed into a pothole, which seemed to happen every two or three minutes.

  She was anxious to get home, but scared, too. Scared of what would happen with Marc. Scared that they’d never get past this week. She didn’t want to lose him, she didn’t want to break up her family. She wanted to find a way that she and he could move on together.

  By the time she arrived home, it was almost midnight. The lights in the front of the house were all out. After she paid the taxi driver, she made her way to the front door, wryly thinking as she entered how relieved she was that the locks had not been changed and her key still worked. She hauled her bag past the door and took a few steps into the living room. She was about to collapse into a chair when she noticed that something was different. There was a strange smell in the room, sort of woody, like furniture—no, it was a little lemony, too, like furniture polish. She turned on one of the table lamps, looked around, and gasped. There in the corner was a small cherry writing desk with pewter drawer handles and a roll-down top.

  It was just like the desk her parents had given her for her twelfth birthday.

  Chapter 21

  “What’s the matter?” Marc said dully from behind her. “Don’t you like it?”

  Iliana turned around. By the dim light of the lamp, she could see him walking down the stairs. He was wearing his jeans and a white dress shirt, the top buttons unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled up. Her Marc. Maybe things would be okay after all.

  “You bought me a desk?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I bought you a desk,” he answered, rubbing one eye. “I heard you wanted it.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Jodi,” he said, reaching the landing. His hair looked mussed, as though he’d been sleeping. He was barefoot. “She dropped by on Tuesday evening to make sure I had gotten home in time to give the kids dinner. She said you fell in love with it when you saw it at the antiques store near the coffee shop.”

  “It was seven thousand dollars,” she said. “You bought it for me?”

  He lifted his cheek in a kind of smirk. “Of course, I called and paid for it before you told me you decided to stay in LA an extra day.”

  She saw the smirk as an overture, and she smiled back a little. “And you sure used some choice words to tell me how you felt about that,” she said.

  He backed up and sat down on the sofa. “I was so mad at you,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that mad in my life. But there was something you said on the phone that I kept hearing over again in my head. I told you that if you didn’t go to the Connors thing it would hurt my chances of getting promoted, and you asked why your attendance there mattered more than what I did with the swimwear contract. And of course it doesn’t.”

  He shook his head. “I really screwed up on that Seattle thing. I should have done more with that contract when I first got it. I kept thinking that if you made this great impression at the cocktail party and the Connors thing, it would mitigate the mess I made. Or just make everyone forget about it. But it’s not your responsibility to get me a promotion. And I’m sorry.”

  She walked over and sat down next to him. “I shouldn’t have broken my word at the last minute like that. I’m sorry, too.”

  He leaned over, his elbows on his spread-out knees, his fingers interlaced. “I don’t think I’m getting a promotion, Iliana. Not this year. I think Dan’s going to get it. But not me.”

  She stroked his back. “So you’ll get a promotion next year,” she said. “Or you’ll get a better offer somewhere else. Come on, it’s not the end of the world. You’re a smart, talented lawyer. You’ve got a long career ahead.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “When did everything get so hard? How did it all change? I was one of the top recruits out of law school. When I got to Connors Holdings, they were constantly throwing money at me. Everyone wanted me on their project team. I was a rock star.”

  He sighed. “I guess we’re all rock stars when we’re young. At least in our own minds.”

  She smiled, tilting her head. “You’ll be a rock star again, I know it. I have no worries about you.

  “But speaking of jobs, Marc, I need to tell you that I’m going back to work,” she said. “Not just dabbling with a couple of queries between carpools. For real. It was great being entirely here for you and the kids, but they’re getting older, and the time for that is ending. You’re all going to have to take care of yourselves a little more. I don’t know whether it’s going to be as a freelancer or on staff, but I’m finding a way back into publishing.”

  “I know, I get that,” he told her. “And I’m not surprised. I mean, I was surprised when you went to California even though I said all those things to stop you. But I was impressed, too. That was a bold move, going all the way there to find a unique story.”

  She looked down. “That’s not exactly what I did.”

  “It got me thinking about how it was when you were working. You were good. I was wrong to say you weren’t.”

  He walked over to the desk and began rubbing a spot with his finger, evidently trying to reassure himself that he had noticed a smudge and not an imperfection. “So I take it things went well out there,” he said. “Got a lot to write about?”

  “Not really,” she told him. “I didn’t come back with anything. It was a dead end.”

  He turned around. “Not anything? But you said something was going on. That’s why you stayed the extra day.”

  She looked down, knowing how easy it would be to backpedal, to say she had come back with some good ideas, to nod and deflect his attention when he innocently asked her in the coming days whether she’d been able to get any magazines to bite. But she wasn’t going to dig herself back into that hole. Marc had been honest with her from the moment she walked into the house, talking about his fears and disappointment, how they had made him act the way he had. And they were drawing closer now as a result. She owed him the same honesty. She didn’t want to cause distance between them anymore.

  “Actually, what happened in California is a little more complicated than that,” she said.

  He walked toward her, his hands on his hips. “What does that mean?”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay, it all starts back when you were in Chicago. I emailed Stuart at Business Times to ask for a freelance assignment, but he wouldn’t even talk to me unless I had a good story. A celebrity story. I was so frustrated. What kind of celebrity story could I come up with?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I had seen a rerun of that old show Guitar Dreams, and I found out that one of the guys, Jeff Downs, had this company in New York selling blankets. And I thought it would be a great story, because he used to be a star and millions of girls were in love with him. So I called his office and he agreed to talk to me because he thought I was with the New York Times.”

  “You said you were from the Times?”

  “No, but it was what he believed. So he kept inviting me back. It was the only way I could get him to talk to me.”

  “But why did you— Iliana, what’s wrong with you? This sounds nuts.”

  “It’s not ‘nuts,’” she said, standing up. “It’s what somebody does when they’re feeling desperate.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I interviewed him a few times. And then I went to California. To learn more about his life. Because I thought I could write a book about him.”

  “That’s why you we
nt to California? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I thought you would belittle me. Sort of like what you’re doing right now. I didn’t think you’d understand, and I didn’t want you to ruin it.” She looked down. “Even I didn’t entirely understand what I was doing. But now I do. And once I figured out it was all based on some delusional old dreams I had—that’s when I couldn’t wait to get home.”

  Marc shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t even know what to say. This is crazy. So what’s going on now? Does he still think you’re with the Times?”

  “No, I told him the truth.”

  “And then what happened? Man, he must have been pissed.”

  “Marc, what is wrong with you?” Iliana said. “Why do you care if he was pissed? I’m telling you that this is how bad things were between us. I’m telling you how confused I was!”

  “So you spend all this time with this guy, letting him think you’re someone you’re not, and then you travel all the way across the country, and . . . Wait. Was he with you?” Marc looked at her, hard.

  “Yes.”