Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  “I figured we’d leave a note on Minnie’s door telling her you’d be late tomorrow.”

  “No,” said Rainie. “I’ll be there on time.”

  “It’s after midnight.”

  “I’ve slept less and done more the next day. But I hate to have you have to drive me.”

  “So what would you do, walk?”

  I’d sleep in your bed, Rainie said silently. I’d get up in the morning and we’d make breakfast together, and we’d eat it together, and then when the kids got up we’d fix another breakfast for them, and they’d laugh with us and be glad to see us. And we’d smile at each other and remember the sweetness in the dark, the secret that the children would never understand until twenty, thirty years from now. The secret that I’m only beginning to understand tonight.

  “Thanks, I’ll ride,” said Rainie.

  “Dad’s out seeing to the dog. He worries that the dog gets too cold on nights like this.”

  “What, does he heat the doghouse?”

  “Yes, he does,” said Douglas. “He keeps bricks just inside the fireplace and then when he puts the fire out at night he wraps the hot bricks in a cloth and carries them outside and puts them in the doghouse.”

  “Does the dog appreciate it?”

  “He sleeps inside with the bricks. He wags his tail. I guess he does.” Douglas’s bread was gone. She reached up and wiped the honey off his chin with her finger, then licked her finger clean.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  But she could hear more in his voice than he meant to say. She could hear that faint tremble in his voice, the hesitation, the uncertainty. He could have interpreted her gesture as motherly. He could have taken it as a sisterly act. But he did not. Instead he was taking it the way she meant it, and yet he wasn’t sure that she really meant it that way.

  “Better go,” he said. “Morning comes awful early.”

  They bundled up and went outside. They met Grandpa coming around the front of the house. “Night,” Grandpa said.

  “Night,” said Rainie. “It was good talking to you.”

  “My pleasure entirely,” he said. He sounded perfectly cheerful, which surprised her. Why should it surprise her?

  Because I’m planning to do what he warned me not to do, thought Rainie. I’m planning to sleep with Douglas Spaulding tonight. He’s mine if I want him, and I want him. Not forever, but tonight, this sweet lonely night when my music came back to me in his house, sitting on his bed, playing his guitar. Jaynanne can spare me this one night, out of all her happiness. There’ll be no pain for anyone, and joy for him and me, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t care what anyone says.

  She got in his car and sat beside him, watching the fog of his breath in the cold air as he started the engine. She never took her eyes off him, seeing how the light changed when the headlights came on inside the garage, how it changed again as he leaned over the backseat, guiding the car in reverse down the driveway. He pressed a button and the garage door closed after them.

  No one else was on the road. No one else seemed even to exist—all the houses were dark and still, and the tires crunching on snow were the only noise besides the engine, besides their breathing.

  He tried to cover what was happening with chat. “Good game tonight, wasn’t it?”

  “Mm-hm,” she said.

  “Fun,” he said. “Crazy bunch of guys. We act like children, I know it.”

  “I like children,” she said.

  “In fact, my kids are more mature than I am when I’m with those guys.”

  She remembered speaking to them tonight, their faces so sleepy. “I woke them, I’m afraid. I was playing your guitar. That’s a bad habit of mine, intruding in people’s houses. Sort of an invited burglar or something.”

  “I heard you playing,” he said.

  “Clear downstairs? I thought I was quieter than that.”

  “Steel strings,” he said. “And the vents are all open in the winter. Sound carries. It was beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was—beautiful,” he said again, as if he had searched for another word and couldn’t think of one. “It was the kind of music I’ve always longed for in my home, but I’ve never been good enough on the guitar to play like that myself.”

  “You keep it in tune.”

  “If I don’t the dog barks.”

  She laughed, and he smiled in return. She couldn’t stop looking at him. The heater was on now, so his breath didn’t make a fog. The streetlights brightened his face; then it fell dark again. He’s not that handsome. I’d never have looked at him twice if I’d met him in LA or New York. He would have been just another accountant there. So many bright lights in the city, how can someone like this ever shine there? But here, in the snow, in this small town, I can see the truth. That this is the true light, the one that all those neon lights and strobes and spots and halogens are trying to imitate but never can.

  They pulled up in front of her apartment. He switched off his lights. The dark turned bright again almost immediately, as the snow reflected streetlights and moonlight.

  I can’t sleep with this man, thought Rainie. I don’t deserve him. I made my choice many years ago, and a man like him is forever out of reach. Sleeping with him would be another self-deception, like so many I’ve indulged in before. He’d still be Jaynanne’s husband and Dougie’s and Rose’s father and I’d still be a stranger, an intruder. If I sleep with him tonight I’d have to leave town tomorrow, not because I care what anybody thinks, not because anybody’d even know, but because I couldn’t stand it, to have come so close and still not belong here. This is forbidden fruit. If I ate of it, I’d know too much, I’d see how naked I am in my own life, my old life.

  He opened his car door.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t need to help me out.”

  But he was already walking around the car, opening her door. He gave her a hand getting out. The snow squeaked under their feet.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said. “I can get up the stairs OK.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just don’t like dropping people off without seeing them safe inside.”

  “You’d walk Tom to the door?”

  “So I’m a sexist reactionary,” he said. “I can’t help it, I was raised that way. Always see the woman safely to the door.”

  “There aren’t many rapists out on a night like this,” said Rainie.

  Ignoring her arguments, he followed her up the stairs and waited while she got the key out and unlocked the deadbolt and the knob. She knew that he’d ask to come inside. Knew that he’d try to kiss her. Well, she’d tell him no. Not because Minnie and Grandpa told her to, but because she had her own kind of integrity. Sleeping with him would be a lie she was telling to herself, and she wouldn’t do it.

  But he didn’t try to kiss her. He stepped back as she pushed open the door and gave a little half-wave with his gloved hand and said, “Thanks.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For bringing your music into my house tonight.”

  “Thanks,” she said. It touched her that it seemed to mean so much to him. “Sorry I woke your kids.”

  He shook his head. “I never would have asked you to play. But I hoped. Isn’t that stupid? I tuned my guitar for you, and then I hid it upstairs, and you found it anyway. Karma, right?”

  It took a moment for her to realize what it meant, him saying that. In this town she had never touched a musical instrument or even told anybody that she played guitar. So why did he know to tune it for her?

  “I’m such a fool,” she whispered. “I thought my disguise was so perfect.”

  “I love your music,” he said. “Since I heard the first note of it. Your songs have been at the heart of all the best moments of my life.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You’ve done it before,” he said. “Dropped out. Lived under an assumed name. Right? It took a while for me to realize why you looked so famil
iar. I kept coming back in to the café until finally I was sure. When you talked to me that day, you know, when you chewed me out, your voice—I had just listened to your live album that morning. I was pretty sure then. And tonight when you played, then I really knew. I wasn’t going to say anything, but I had to thank you . . . for the music. Not just tonight, all of it. I’m sorry. I won’t bother you again.”

  She was barely hearing him, though; her mind had snagged on the phrase he said before: Her songs had been at the heart of all the best moments of his life. It made her weak in the knees, those words. Because it meant that she was part of this, after all. Through her music. Her songs had all her longings in them, everything she’d ever known or felt or wished for, and he had brought those songs into his life, had brought her into his home. Of course Dougie thought she sounded like his dad’s records—they had grown up hearing her songs. She did belong there in that house. He had probably known her music before he even knew his wife.

  And now he was going to turn away and go on down the stairs and out to his car and leave her here alone and she couldn’t let him go, not now, not now. She reached out and caught his arm; he stopped on the next-to-top step and that put them at the same level, and she kissed him. Kissed him and clung to him, kissed him and tasted the honey in his mouth. His arms closed around her. It was maddening to have their thick winter coats between them. She reached down, still kissing him, and fumbled to unbutton her coat, then his; she stepped inside his coat as if it were his bedroom. She pressed herself against him and felt his desire, the heat of his body.

  At last the endless kiss ended, but only because she was ready to take him inside her room, to share with him what she knew he needed from her. She stepped up into her doorway and turned to lead him in.

  He was rebuttoning his coat.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t go now.”

  He shook his head and kept fastening the buttons. He was slow and clumsy, with his gloves on.

  “You want me, Douglas Spaulding, and I need you more than you know.”

  He smiled, a shy, embarrassed smile. “Some fantasies can’t come true,” he said.

  “I’m not fantasizing you, Douglas Spaulding.”

  “I’m fantasizing you,” he answered.

  “I’m real,” she said. “You want me.”

  “I do,” he said. “I want you very much.”

  “Then have me, and let me have you. For one night. Like the music. You’ve had my music with you all these years. I want the memory of your love with me. Who could begrudge us that?”

  “Nobody would begrudge us anything.”

  “Then stay with me.”

  “It’s not me you love,” said Douglas, “and it’s not my love you want.”

  “No?”

  “It’s my life you love, and my life you want.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I want your life inside me.”

  “I know,” he said. “I understand. I wanted this life, too. The difference between us is that I wanted it so much I did the things you have to do to get it. I set aside my career ambitions. I moved away from the city, from the center of things. I turned inward, toward my children, toward my wife. That’s how you get the life I have.”

  Against her will, there were tears in her eyes. Feeling him slip away she wanted him all the more. “So you have it, and you won’t share, is that it?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t give it to you.”

  “Because you’re afraid of losing it yourself. Afraid of what all these small-minded people in this two-bit town will think.”

  “No, Rainie Pinyon, I’m not afraid of what they’ll think of me, I’m afraid of what I’ll know about myself. Right now, standing here, I’m the kind of man who keeps his promises. An hour from now, leaving here, I’d never be that kind of man again. It’s the man who keeps his promises who gets the kind of life I have. Even if nothing else changed, I’d know that I was not that man anymore, and so everything would be changed. It would all be dust and ashes in my heart.”

  “You are a selfish bastard and I hate you,” said Rainie. At the moment she said it, she meant it with all her heart. He was forbidding her. He was refusing her. She had offered him real love, her best love, her whole heart. She had allowed herself to need him and he was letting some idiotic notion of honor or something get in the way even though she knew that he wanted her too.

  “Yeah,” he said. He turned and walked down the stairs. She closed the door and stood there with her hand on the knob as she heard him start the car and drive away. It was hot in her apartment, with the heater on, with her coat on. She pulled it off and threw it against the door. She pulled off her sweater, her shoes, all her clothes and threw them against the walls and crawled into bed and cried, the way she used to cry when her mother didn’t let her do what she needed to do. Cried herself to sleep.

  She woke up with the sun shining into her window. She had overslept. She was late for work. She jumped out of bed and got dressed, hurrying. Minnie will be furious. I let her down.

  But by the time she had her clothes on, she knew the truth. She had overslept because in her heart she knew she was done with this place. She had no reason to get up early because working for Minnie Wilcox wasn’t her job anymore. She had found all that she was looking for when she first dropped out and went searching. Her music was back. She had something to sing about again. She could go home.

  She didn’t even pack. Just took her purse with all her credit cards and walked to the post office, which was where the buses stopped. She didn’t care which one—St. Louis, Chicago, Des Moines, Cairo, Indianapolis, any bus that got her to an airport city would do. It turned out to be St. Louis.

  By the time she saw the Gateway Arch she had written a song about feeding the baby of love. It turned out well enough that it got her some decent radio airplay for the first time in years, her first top-forty single since ’75.

  Tried to walk that lonely highway

  Men and women, two by two

  Promising, promising they will be true

  You went your way, I’ll go my way

  Feeling old and talking new

  Whatever happened to you?

  I wonder what happened to you?

  Spoke to someone in the air

  Heard but didn’t heed my prayer

  Couldn’t feed it anyway

  Didn’t have the price to pay

  You got to feed the baby

  Hungry, hungry, hungry baby

  Got to feed the baby of love

  She had her music back again, the only lover that had ever been faithful to her. Even when it tried to leave her, it always came home to her in the end.

  NOTES ON “FEED THE BABY OF LOVE”

  This story was born during the months just before I got married, when I was already living in the apartment Kristine and I were going to share after the wedding. One of my favorite singer-songwriters of all time is Joni Mitchell—her music is still locked into my heart, and her lyrics pop up all the time. During those lonely months before the wedding, I was at a magazine store in downtown Salt Lake City and found a story about Joni Mitchell and read it in the store (yes, in my poverty I was that kind of “customer”).

  In the story I learned that at one point she had dropped out and disappeared; the idea that came into my mind (or was it in the article?) was that she must have needed to get back on the street again, as one of her song lyrics says.

  That night, playing her albums (a stack of about five records on a turntable/record changer—we’re talking the Stone Age here), I jotted the notes for a story about a rock singer who goes, not to the “street,” but to a small town in Utah, where she brings her rock ’n’ roll expectations to a place where people don’t share them. She falls in love with a young Mormon husband who loves her music and her, but at the last minute he can’t be false to his wife, can’t throw away the values that have shaped him into the kind of man this rock singer fell in love with. The idea is that
you can’t have it both ways—you can’t be this person and have that experience.

  I knew perfectly well that this was a seriously old-fashioned story, but it was also a true one. I was about to make some pretty serious covenants with my wife-to-be, which I intended to keep. But . . . I was also going to be pursuing a career (such was my overweening confidence) in which I might meet famous people and encounter the temptations that come to the rich and famous. I was keenly aware of all the Hollywood and New York artistic types who thought that their talent gave them a free ticket to break their word and hurt anyone they wanted to, because, after all, they were “geniuses.” So in a way, this story idea was a reminder to myself that genius excuses nothing. So what if you’re a really talented writer or actor or singer or athlete? If you’re false to your wife, if you can’t keep your word, then you still suck as a human being.

  In other words, I was forewarning and, perhaps, forearming myself. Though none of that was consciously in my mind at the time, I can assure you! I simply thought of it as a cool story idea.

  The trouble is, it was a cool story idea that I wasn’t ready to write. Because I wrote it. It’s a miserable little fragment called “Spider Eyes.” I’m tempted to include it here just so that you can nod your heads and say, Yep, Card’s right, that story is a real toilet-stuffer.

  The problem, I see now, is that I couldn’t write the story because I had never actually been married. I was looking at marriage from the wrong direction. Starry-eyed and naive, I had no idea how hard and how powerful this thing could be. I also had no idea, really, of what the life of a professional artist of any kind could be like, how frightening it was to get up every morning knowing that if you didn’t perform today at least as well as you did yesterday, your career could simply disappear. So the story I wrote then was shallow, empty, nothing, because I was too ignorant about the real world to write it.

  But there it sat, in the back of my mind, waiting.

  Skip a decade. Ender’s Game has been published. I get an invitation from LucasFilm Games to come out to “the ranch” in Marin County and consult with them on some games. They’re paying for the ticket—do you think I’m going to pass this up?