The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  Claire is on the other side of the kitchen island with her laptop open, an old black T-shirt sagging down her left shoulder, a turquoise bra strap exposed. Until now, she’s been quietly at work. She no longer takes classes, but when she did, they had titles like “Advanced Topics in Sub-Subatomic Forces.” Thanks to a graduate fellowship, she spends most days on the top floor of the physics building thinking about a theoretical particle called the daisy. The daisy is a candidate for the smallest particle in the universe, but no one has devised a way to observe or prove one. Doing so would probably require recreating the conditions of the Big Bang, which everyone seems to agree would be a bad idea. The wider academic community has not fully embraced Daisy Theory, as it’s called. Claire’s advisor came up with it, and, like him, Claire believes the mysterious particle is forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two.

  “I haven’t mentioned him until now because”—she scratches her chin with her chipped electric blue fingernail—“I was embarrassed, I guess.”

  “Just tell me,” he says, wanting this over with quickly.

  “All right, here it is. I’m kind of married.”

  “Kind of?” He doesn’t understand. Typically, one is or isn’t married. Does she mean that she’s separated from someone and failed to ever mention it? Or did she marry some mysterious person on the sly? Or is this a new and clever update on the same old fight about time and priorities? She’s married to her research and he just needs to get that through his head?

  “No, what I mean to say is, sometimes at night when I dream, I dream I have a husband.”

  “A dream marriage,” he says. “Okay.” He kills the burner under the pan and scrapes the potatoes onto the plates where the green beans have gone cold.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking. Does this bother you? You’re not the man in the dream.”

  “Just so I’m clear,” he says. “This isn’t you telling me that you’re cheating on me?”

  “I’m not cheating on you. Not unless you count dreams as cheating. Do you?”

  Walker can’t help but wonder if this is some sort of test. Could he have muttered some other woman’s name in his sleep? Although he sometimes dreams about sex, in the morning the details of the dream encounters are usually hazy and impressionistic, with floating parts that don’t connect to any specific face. He doesn’t mention this now. A dream marriage, if that’s really what this is about, should probably not bother him.

  “So it doesn’t concern you that I’m in love with someone else in my dreams?” she asks.

  “You didn’t mention love.”

  “Well, I married him, didn’t I?”

  “Do I know the guy? Have I met him? Please don’t tell me it’s your advisor.” Whenever she talks about needing more time for her research, Walker knows, that includes more time alone with her advisor.

  She reaches across the island for Walker’s hand, a gesture that makes him suspect he’s about to get more bad news.

  “It’s not my advisor,” she says. “My husband’s name is Alan Gass.”

  Alan Gass only exists in her dream, she explains. He is an ophthalmologist, a tall man with bright blue eyes and a lightly bearded face. His favorite meal in the world is barbecue biscuits. He is allergic to shellfish. Years ago he played college football, but he’s put on a little weight since those days. On Saturdays he plays golf, but professes to hate what he calls clubhouse culture. He just likes the wind in his hair, the taste of a cold beer on the back nine. Claire has been married to him for almost a decade.

  “Wow,” Walker says. “You have incredibly detailed dreams.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They’re super-realistic. Sometimes I dream that we’re just eating dinner together, kind of like this. We tell each other about our day. Or we don’t talk at all. We’ve known each other so long, silence is okay at this point, you know?”

  Walker takes a bite of the potatoes. Claire hasn’t shut her laptop.

  “You writing Alan an email over there?” he asks and expects a full assault of noncommutative geometry, U-waves, big gravity. But when she turns the screen, he discovers that she’s looking at a website with pictures of celebrities eating messy sandwiches and picking out shampoo at the drugstore.

  “So is Alan Gass better looking than me?”

  “Silly duck,” she says, a recurring joke about his out-turned feet. She shuts the laptop and comes around the island. “Silly duck with big sexy glasses.” She plucks the glasses from his face. “Silly duck with snazzy shoes.” She taps his black shoes with her socked feet. “Silly duck with perfect duck lips.” She kisses him.

  He stands and wraps his arms around her waist. A former high school volleyball star, Claire is a few inches taller than Walker, and even more so right now with her blond hair held up with sticks. He doesn’t mind her height, but whenever they ride an escalator together, he claims the higher step to see what it’s like.

  Admittedly, her dream is a strange one—so visceral, so coherent, so consistent—but he can see no reason why Alan Gass should come between them. After imagining a real affair, he can’t help but feel a little relieved. It isn’t as though she is actually married and actually in love with an actual ophthalmologist. What counts is that the real Claire—the waking Claire, the part of her that matters—wants Walker and only Walker, and that is the case, is it not? She says that it is most definitely the case. She kisses him, tugs his hand to her cheek. She is relieved, she says, that he finally knows her secret, a secret she’s never told anyone, not even her parents. What a weight off her shoulders. Anything he wants to ask, he can ask. She will hide nothing from him.

  Over the next few weeks, new details emerge. Claire’s dreams began when she was in high school. He grew up Baptist in a small town and doesn’t drink. Walker can’t help but wonder at the subtle differences between himself and Alan. Walker grew up Episcopalian and drinks a glass of wine every night. Alan regularly wears suits. Walker prefers tight dark jeans and designer T-shirts. Alan volunteers at a free medical clinic. Walker can’t remember the last time he volunteered for anything.

  But Walker tries not to dwell on Alan Gass.

  Walker is the artistic director at a theater downtown. He met Claire there when she volunteered to help at the box office one semester. He was in that particular production. It was a French play about a ghost that wreaks havoc on a town by inhabiting prominent citizens and causing them to behave strangely. The town believes the ghost is that of a young woman who recently drowned herself because of a broken heart. The townspeople set out to find her body, thinking that will satisfy her, but it does not. The ghost responds by inhabiting the town mayor and hurling the man off a tall building. To try to appease the ghost, the townspeople gang up on the man responsible for the woman’s broken heart. They tie weights around his ankles and drop him in the ocean. But that doesn’t solve the problem. This man also returns as a ghost and gets his revenge. It was a gruesome play. Walker played the second ghost. Despite the white gunky makeup, Claire thought he was handsome.

  Alan Gass is a ghost, and Walker knows you cannot fight ghosts. They are insidious. You can’t punch a ghost or write it a drunk email. You can only pretend the ghost is not there, hope it loses interest, evaporates, does whatever it is that ghosts do when they disappear completely.

  They are sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. Claire’s university is hosting a conference. Her advisor, in his forties, tall and boyish with a mane of black curls, is on the stage. Daisy Theory is under attack, he warns, from all sides.

  Planets, hearts, even the parts of our brains responsible for dreams—everything in the universe is made of daisy particles. The daisies come together to form larger particles by interlocking in a chain formation. No one is entirely sure what holds the chains together, but Claire’s advisor imagines them like the daisy garlands that children wear as crowns. In theory a daisy chain could pop in and out of existence, just
like the individual daisy. In theory your entire body—since every atom in it is nothing but a complex collection of daisies—could also pop in and out of existence.

  “Isn’t that amazing?” he asks the crowd.

  On the top of the program, Walker doodles two flowers and gives them arms and legs, hands to hold. The figures are like cave paintings. Me, man. You, woman. This, love. He writes, Want to be in my chain gang? and passes the program to Claire. She smiles and grabs the pen. She draws a penis on one stick figure and breasts on the other. They have to avoid eye contact or they’ll lose it.

  After the lecture, a handful of people gather in a small white room with mahogany tables, where they quietly sip red wine in groups of two and three. Claire’s advisor meanders over with a barely suppressed grin on his face.

  “And?”

  “Brilliant,” Claire says.

  Thirty seconds later, the two of them are lost in daisy revelry. “We’re stretching math to the breaking point,” he says. “It’s almost un-math. One and one aren’t two, but onetyone.” He has his hand on Claire’s elbow. He’s cupping her elbow. He’s propping it up. If he lets it go, her elbow might go crashing to the floor like a satellite from space. But when he walks away again, at last, Walker is pleased that her elbow stays put at her side.

  “He’s got a thing for you,” Walker says.

  “Let’s not go into that again.”

  “Not that I can blame him.”

  “Even if he did,” she says, “it’s not like I’ve got one for him.”

  On the way home, because of construction on the bridge, they have to take a detour through another neighborhood. Though Claire knows these streets better than Walker does, against her advice, he takes a left turn. The road dead-ends in front of an old farmhouse, its giant gray shutters flapping in the wind like moth wings. It is early summer, perfectly warm, and they have the windows rolled down. He backs their Jeep into the driveway, the gravel popping under the tires. Another car has turned onto the street behind them. They pass the car on their way back to the main road. It is a pearly gray Lexus. The driver’s face is obscured by lights across the glass, but Walker can see that he has a military haircut, the gray lines sharp around his ears, the seatbelt tight against a white Oxford shirt. But his features are blurred. He could be anyone. Walker waits until they are back on the main street before asking what he wants to ask. Has she ever wondered if Alan is really out there somewhere? That’s he not just a dream? What if he’s real and dreams he’s married to a woman named Claire?

  “Very funny,” she says. “I don’t think so.”

  “You should ask him. What do you normally talk about?”

  “The usual stuff. Books, movies. What to fix for dinner.”

  “So in the dream, you’re definitely still you?”

  “Who else would I be?”

  “Anyone. A prairie wife, a criminal, whatever. One time I dreamed I was the king of Europe.”

  “There is no king of Europe.”

  “Right, but the point is, some people dream about being someone else. And apparently you don’t. You’re you, and Alan is Alan.”

  She shrugs. They’ve reached the house. He parks the car along the curb, lined with tall shapely pear trees, the wilted white blossoms pressed flat into the short sidewalk that leads to the front door. Claire inherited the house from her great-aunt. Her parents were both engineering professors at the university. She went away for college but came back for graduate school. Inside, Walker leans over Claire’s blue bicycle and flips the light switch on the wall.

  “Okay I have to ask,” he says, dropping his satchel on the hardwood floor. “Do you have sex with Alan in your dreams?”

  She is ahead of him, halfway up the stairs.

  “He’s my husband,” she says.

  Walker knows that Claire has been with other men. He thinks about this fact as little as possible, though he knows that before him there was another student in her department, and before that a Swedish guy named Jens who actually proposed, and before them, a couple of post-college mistakes, a baseball player named Eric, and a backseat high school fling. She never mentioned Alan in the list.

  “How often?”

  “Do you really want to do this?”

  “Just tell me once, and then we won’t have to talk about it again.”

  She’s pasting their toothbrushes.

  “If you must know, probably a few times a week. But it doesn’t often happen in the dream itself. It’s kind of offstage action, you know? For instance, the other night, we were on our way to a friend’s house for dinner, and the car ride took up the entire dream. But I knew what I’d done over the course of that day. I’d run some errands, picked up the dry cleaning. Baked strawberry brownies for dinner. The dessert was on my lap in the car.”

  “I can’t get over how detailed these dreams are,” he says. “I hardly remember anything from mine.”

  They both spit into the sink.

  “Do you remember me in your dreams?” he asks. “Does it ever feel like cheating when you’re with him?”

  “Don’t get weird on me. They’re just dreams. I’m not cheating on anyone. You or him.”

  They turn off the lights and climb into bed. She tickles his back until he flips over. She’s naked. He wiggles out of his boxers, shoves them to his feet.

  “You don’t need to worry,” she says and climbs on top of him. He doesn’t need to worry. He knows that. Sort of, he does. She’s moving faster now. He has his hands around her waist, the way she likes. He mutters her name, and, thankfully, she mutters his, Walker, and when it’s over she tugs at his chest hair playfully, smiling. Then she goes into the bathroom. He can hear her peeing. Then she’s back in his arms, nuzzling under his chin, and ten minutes later, she’s asleep.

  He lets his breath fall in line with hers and keeps his arm draped over her side, inhaling the citrus conditioner in her hair. He can feel her heartbeat, soft and far away. Is she with Alan now? He wonders what it must be like for her, this double life, if she closes her eyes in this bed and opens them in the one she shares with Alan. Maybe her life with him mirrors this one. At that very moment, it occurs to Walker, she could be waking up and brushing her teeth all over again, discussing the upcoming day with her husband. She could be straightening his tie, pointing out the spot on his chin he missed while shaving. She could have her warm palm flat on his chest as she kisses him good-bye, the same way she sends off Walker most mornings. The idea of her repeating these private routines with another man, even one who doesn’t technically exist, is almost more unsettling than the thought of her sleeping with him.

  The phone book contains two listings for Alan Gass and one for A. Gass. Walker scribbles down all three on the back of a takeout menu. He carries the takeout menu in his satchel for two days before pulling over on the side of the road one morning before work. The sky is cloudless, and across the street, a long green field unfolds between two wooded lots. A row of ancient transformer towers runs down the middle of the rolling field.

  He dials A. Gass first, and a woman answers. Her voice is so quiet and shaky that she has to repeat herself three times before Walker understands that her husband, Albert Gass, passed away the year before last.

  Walker gets out of the car and flattens the wrinkles in his khakis. The road is not a busy one. He dials the next number, but the Alan Gass who used to live there has moved to Columbia, in South Carolina, or possibly to the other Colombia, the one with the drugs. The man on the phone can’t remember which it was.

  He dials the last number. The phone rings and rings. Walker is about to give up when the voice mail message begins.

  “You’ve reached Alan and Monica,” the man on the line says. “We’re not around to take your call, so leave your name and digits at the beep.” It beeps. Walker hangs up quickly. The tall grass beneath the transformers swishes back and forth. He gets back in the car and starts the engine.

  The address in the phone book leads him to a part of t
own he rarely visits. It isn’t dangerous or run-down. It’s just out of the way. The houses on the street are adjoining, with small grass yards in front. At one corner there is a video store. Walker doesn’t recognize any of the movies in the front window. On the opposite corner, two women smoke cigarettes outside a Piggly Wiggly.

  Alan Gass lives in the middle of the block in a three-story house painted light blue, so light that it’s almost white. To the right of the front door there are three buttons, a white label taped above each. The third button says Gass 3B.

  He pushes the button and stands back. After what feels like an eternity, a small speaker in the wall crackles, then a man comes on the line. He sounds like he might have been asleep.

  “Bobby? That you? You’re early.”

  “I’m not Bobby,” Walker says.

  The line crackles. “Okay, who are you then?”

  “I’m Walker,” he says, as if that will explain everything. “Sorry for just showing up like this, but I think we might know each other through a friend. Do you have a moment to talk? I promise I won’t keep you long.”

  The man doesn’t answer. A buzzer sounds, and the door clicks open. The stairway inside is narrow and long, with a dirty blue carpet runner, smudged with old black gum, shredded at the edges. The door at the top of the stairs is half open.

  “Mr. Gass?” he calls and steps into the room. “Hello?”

  The room is almost as narrow as the staircase. Walker feels like he’s looking down the barrel of a shotgun. The half of the room nearest the door serves as a living area, with a small television against one wall and a futon-couch against the other. At the far end of the hall a single window provides light. The parts of a dismantled computer are scattered across a flimsy table beneath the window. Alan Gass emerges from a room to the right of the desk. Stepping into the light of the window, his tall Art Garfunkel hair is illuminated a wispy golden brown. He looks nothing like the man Claire has described. He cannot be the real Alan Gass.