“Don’t you see? A man named Hoffmann falls in love with a beautiful dancer named Olympia, and although people have warned him that she’s an automaton, he ignores them, seeing her through the lens of his infatuation. At last she captures him in her frenzy, whirling him round and round until”—here Nicole broke off, seemingly unwilling or unable to continue the story. “What does this sound like, if not your obsession with Olympia? Don’t you see?”
I chose my words carefully, swabbing the sweat from my cheeks and forehead with a handkerchief. “You mean the story Hunter is telling—and the story of the opera—are really about me?”
“Or you’re about them.”
I smiled reassuringly, as I always did in such situations, in order to show that I meant no rejection or disapproval. But I was beginning to feel desperate for the session to end. “Well,” I asked, “how does the story end?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “You’ll have to find that out for yourself.”
So many times during that crucial period I wanted to snap my fingers and say: “Listen up! Time for a reality check! People can’t remember past lives or experiences that happened to somebody else. Ideas aren’t transmitted through crystals or viruses, and real people’s lives aren’t recapitulations of operas or literary texts.” That’s what any sensible person would have done. But when you’re a psychiatrist you can’t behave like a sensible person. You have to go with the flow, keep the patient talking, encourage her to take you on an all-inclusive tour of the world she’s constructed for herself. Once you’re in that world you can guide her toward the light—at least in theory. In the real world such a suspension of disbelief can be dangerous, especially when the therapist has issues of his own. Had I been able to talk to Dr. Neuberger, everything might have turned out differently.
The problem, I thought at the time, was that the person leading the flight from reality was Olympia, who wasn’t my patient. Nicole tried to warn me about the path we were headed down. I thought my skepticism, my professional training, my adamant disdain for supernatural explanations of any kind would protect me. And in a sense they did: I never for one minute believed in any of Olympia’s New Age nonsense. There was a perfectly sensible explanation for everything that happened. Hunter had obviously seen or read about the same opera that Nicole heard on the radio. The resemblances to my life were mere coincidences, fancifully embroidered by Nicole like the influence of the ubiquitous Hoffmann. And there were even a number of more sinister possibilities: Nicole claimed that Peter Bartolli had sent Olympia to seduce me into this dangerous exercise, and it had crossed my mind that all the events of the past few weeks might have been an elaborate charade orchestrated by Bartolli for some purpose known only to himself. Thus my own thoughts, under the pressure of trying to grasp the unknown, veered off into fantasy and speculation. The nightmares, the headaches, and now the sudden attacks of sweating I had been experiencing, came to me like visitations from another world. Reality would eventually rear its ugly head, but by then it would be too late.
Chapter 11
It was just after noon when Dubin arrived at Casimir Ostrovsky’s apartment building on Central Park West. The doorman, who looked like a Third World strongman in military attire, seemed to recognize in Dubin a fellow impostor. A contemptuous smile stole across his pitted face when Dubin asked for Ostrovsky.
“Fifteen,” he said and turned away.
Ostrovsky greeted Dubin politely but skeptically. He wore an ascot and a navy blazer and spoke with the faintest trace of a Russian accent. He looked about sixty years old and his clear blue eyes were passionate and proud. Dubin followed him into a spacious living room overlooking the park. “I can give you five minutes,” Ostrovsky said. “I hate New York magazine, by the way.”
“So do I. It’s a rag.”
“I’m surprised they would want to print an article about Maria Morgan and my ill-fated production of Hoffmann.”
“It was my idea.”
Ostrovsky poured two glasses of white wine and they sat down facing each other on leather armchairs. “From the minute I met Maria I knew I wanted her to sing Hoffmann,” he said. “She had this fantastical streak, maybe a little bit of a split personality, that enabled her to throw herself into the three soprano roles as if they were the same role, which obviously they are.”
“Obviously.”
“She steeped herself in the role until she became possessed by it. And I always wondered which character she was when she killed herself. Was she the automaton, the virgin or the whore?”
The telephone rang and Ostrovsky glided away toward the kitchen as he murmured into the receiver. He closed the kitchen door behind him and Dubin could hear his voice rise to a whine, but apart from a few sharp words he said nothing Dubin could understand. The living room was informed by a neat masculine hand, its back wall occupied by built-in bookshelves filled with bound musical scores, its side walls hung with framed drawings and photographs on operatic themes. In the light from the picture windows overlooking Central Park stood a white Yamaha grand piano with its lid discreetly raised a few inches.
"Would you like some more wine?"
Dubin said no but Ostrovsky poured himself another glass and sat back down on the leather chair. "Where were we?" he asked, his eyes a little more lively than when he'd left the room.
"Your production of Hoffmann."
"Right." He took a sip of his wine. "It never happened, of course. When Maria died the whole project fell apart—the rest of us were too distraught to continue that season—and we were never able to get it up and running again. Which of course is exactly what might have been expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s been a curse on that opera from the moment of its conception. It destroyed Maria and I knew there would be other victims if I persisted with my plans.”
Dubin watched him carefully. “Possibly yourself.”
“Quite possibly myself.”
The telephone rang again. This time Ostrovsky stayed in the room as he paced around murmuring into the phone. Something about a meeting or an appointment that involved several other people. On the phone he sounded authoritative, almost dictatorial.
Dubin stared out the window as he waited for Ostrovsky to sit back down. “By the way,” Dubin said, "have you heard of the letter that Offenbach wrote on his deathbed claiming that he was composing a secret version of the opera to foil his wife?"
The question caught Ostrovsky off guard. "How,” he stammered, “how—how did you know about that?"
"All I know is what the Witz catalog said about it. Do you know more?"
He coughed, took a sip of wine, cleared his throat. “I’ve read the letter.”
“Are you the one who bought it?"
“No,” he laughed, a little too quickly. "I wish I could say I was. The buyer—who will remain anonymous—asked me to authenticate it."
Dubin took his time before asking the next question. "Is the letter authentic?"
"Unquestionably.”
“Then—”
“But I think poor Offenbach was a little off his rocker by the time he wrote it and didn’t know what he was saying. I don't think his wife was trying to kill him. She desperately wanted him to live long enough to complete the opera so she could profit from it.”
“What about the secret manuscript?
“There wasn’t any secret manuscript."
"How do you know?"
"The letter went to Wolff, who was also supposed to get the manuscript. If the manuscript existed, it would have come to light at the same time as the letter."
"Unless the wife intercepted it before it ever got to Wolff."
Ostrovsky shrugged. “Anything’s possible.” He looked at his watch. “Now if you don’t mind, I have another appointment."
Dubin stood up and thanked Ostrovsky for the interview. Then, as they stepped toward the door, he asked, "What if I told you I know where the manuscript is?"
"I’d probably say you were lying,” Ostrovsky said as he opened the door, “because obviously you’ve been lying about everything else.”
“You’d be making a mistake,” Dubin said.
"Who are you? You’re obviously not really a writer. You’ve just been pumping me for information and I don’t like it.”
"I used to be a writer. Now I’m living in the real world and I’m trying to make a living. I know where that manuscript is but frankly all I care about is money."
Dubin thought he saw a flicker of something like fear in the Russian blue eyes. “You don’t have anything on me,” Ostrovsky said.
“Not so far. But you’ve given me some leads. Thanks.” Dubin turned and slipped through the door.
Ostrovsky caught his sleeve. “What do you want?”
“Talk to your friend who bought the letter. If he wants to talk to me about the manuscript, you can help get us together.” Dubin pulled away and headed toward the elevator.
“Get out of here!” Ostrovsky hissed.
“I’ll be in touch.”
* * *
Sometimes Nicole felt as if she were destined to become a character in somebody else’s nightmare—or worse yet, a footnote in somebody else’s dissertation. Her own nightmares often centered around her thesis advisor, Professor Henry “Boog” Crawford. He was a leering drunk and a notorious womanizer who infuriated Nicole by peppering her with questions and then interrupting before she could answer. In his younger days he’d been an unsuccessful novelist—with his short white beard and his desk covered with snapshots of fishing in the Florida Keys, it was obvious who he was trying to emulate—and Nicole had no idea what he was doing in Literary Theory, a subject he professed to despise. At the end of the previous year, Nicole’s advisor had fled the department for a job at Berkeley, leaving Crawford, whom everyone avoided, as the only professor willing to take on new students. He treated her with an avuncular familiarity and insisted on holding their meetings at the Morro Castle, a shabby watering hole a couple blocks from campus that conjured up the faded glory of Havana under the ancien régime.
“‘Authors as Characters, Characters as Authors,’” Crawford read aloud from the title page of her thesis proposal, gulping a mouthful of expensive tequila from a shot glass. “‘The Semiotics of Authorship in Literary Romance.’ I like the title.”
“Thank you. I—”
“It sounds like it means something.” He slapped the proposal down on the table and laughed. “Even if it doesn’t!” Then he threw back the rest of his tequila and leaned forward confidentially. “You know, you’re halfway there if you have a good title.”
“I know that.” Nicole took a sip of her beer. “I gave it quite a bit of thought, and—”
“But what the hell is it about?”
She felt her face burning and it wasn’t from the alcohol. “Well, you see—”
“Isn’t this idea—the idea of authors becoming characters in their own fictions—isn’t it a little old by now? I mean, for Christ’s sake, they all are, aren’t they?”
“They’re all what?”
“Characters.” He slapped the table again, only now he wasn’t laughing. The waiter came running to bring him another tequila. “In what they write. Aren’t they all characters whether they say so or not? Sometimes they’re the only character.”
“Of course. But—”
“You know, in all that post-modernist crap.”
“But you see”—she held up her forefinger to silence him before he could interrupt again—“this is a little different. It’s about authors becoming characters in what somebody else writes, and then meeting up with the characters they created themselves in their own works.”
Crawford eyed her skeptically. “Come again?”
“In the Dumas story I was telling you about, the young Hoffmann arrives in Paris during the Reign of Terror—he’s only eighteen years old—and meets up with some of the characters he’d write about years later, who were presumably based on people he hadn’t even met yet.”
“How could he do that?”
“Well, because Dumas was writing the story, you see, about fifty years later.”
Crawford handed the proposal back to her—unread—and flashed his most ingratiating smile. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but what the hell? When it comes to dissertation topics, Christ!—none of them make any sense, do they?”
“I think—”
“By the way: What the hell is semiotics?”
Nicole had a great deal of work to do before she could even visualize the outlines of her dissertation. It had all started with Hoffmann, the writer, as fictionalized by Dumas, and a little research explained the link between Dumas and Offenbach, the composer. Dumas’s tale had been serialized at the height of the Hoffmann craze in Paris, and the next year a play was produced along similar lines, with Hoffmann among characters of his own creation. That was the play Offenbach spent twenty years turning into The Tales of Hoffmann. Nicole desperately needed to see a complete performance of the opera. As always, Miss Whipple had just the thing: a video—three day rental, $2.00 fine for each day overdue—of the 1951 film version directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Moira Shearer as the first of Hoffmann’s three ill-fated loves. Nicole checked out the video and took it home, and that night as she sat in her easy chair munching popcorn she was enthralled by its beauty, frightened by its surrealistic imagery—and shocked by its resonance with certain themes she’d been discussing with her therapist.
Nicole had a secret that she had kept since she was fourteen years old. That fall she was sent away to boarding school about forty miles from her home in Ballanchree on the northwest coast of Ireland. Her father owned a prosperous farm, with pastures that rolled out to the sea cliffs and a sawmill and feed store in town that put everyone in his debt. There was no one in the county who wasn’t afraid of him and his temper, least of all Nicole’s mother, who had trained her daughters in the twin arts of evasion and obedience.
When Nicole heard the news and was suddenly called back from school, all she could see was her little brother, brown-haired Sean, age 10, at the bottom of a cliff, looking straight up at her. Two black eyes. A swollen mouth. Bruised and broken, hungry water swirling beneath him. Dead. They brought him up wrapped in the rug from the front hall and hid him in a box. No one was allowed to see him. Rushing home from school, crying on the bus. Ballyshannon, Kilcar, Carrick, endless muddy trek through the rain, crying. No one can see him, the coffin is sealed. Father drunk as usual, sullen, staying away. Mother brisk, businesslike, as if she was afraid to cry. Houseful of women, neighbors, cousins, aunts. The unctuous Father Meagh, trying to sound consoling. Nausea, anger, pain. Crying face down on the pillow in the cold room.
The funeral was on Friday morning and the whole town turned out in their black raincoats and hats. The closed wooden coffin rested on a low scaffold in front of the altar. After the Gospel reading Father Meagh stood behind the coffin and gestured over it mechanically. “In times of sorrow,” he began, “many people ask: How could God allow this to happen? And the answer is always the same: God is not responsible for this. Like everything else that is evil, this is the Devil’s work.” He gazed over the congregation as if expecting to see Satan crouching in the back pew. “God gave us the bountiful earth, with its meadows and streams, its mountains and valleys—and yes, its rocks and treacherous cliffs—and the freedom to decide how we would use these gifts for our own human purposes. But only through the intervention of the Devil did evil come into the world...”
Nicole closed her ears and her mind to the rest of Father Meagh’s homily. It was in English, of course—the Devil’s tongue, as her grandmother would have said—and maybe that was the reason it made so little sense. It seemed to be all in code, an indictment of the Devil in his own carefully chosen words. Nicole sat between her mother and her father, who measured his approval of the sermon with a series of somber nods, and as the pries
t went on she felt her mind closing to her parents and to Ballanchree and everything it had ever meant to her. She stopped crying and when it came time for communion she stayed in the pew. She could sense her mother’s confusion and her father’s anger but there was nothing they could do. That afternoon, when the last of the nauseating meals had been eaten and the cousins and the aunts were starting to drift away, she slipped out of the house without saying goodbye and walked into town through the rain to catch the bus back to her school.
At school she accepted the condolences of her teachers but told them nothing of what had happened at Ballanchree. They took her silence for grieving and assumed that she was adjusting well to the tragedy. But at her next confession she surprised even Father Ahearn, who for many years had made a pastime of coaxing descriptions of their sins from adolescent girls.
“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” she began.
“And how have you sinned, child? Did you touch yourself?”
“I don’t know the name for it, father.”
“Then do your best to describe it.”
“Does the Devil really exist?” she asked.
“Yes, child. The Devil exists, just as surely as you and I. That is the teaching of the Church.”
“Then is it a sin not to believe in the Devil?”
“It is a heresy, yes, and therefore a sin. In the Middle Ages, men were burned for denying the existence of the Devil.”
“Then that is the sin I wish to confess.”
Father Ahearn imposed a small penance and arranged for Nicole to come to his office in the rectory the next day. She dreaded the stone silence of the rectory and its dim halls and she was determined not to repent. But she knew Father Ahearn would be hard to resist. He was a cheerful, pasty-faced Dominican who could talk anyone out of being a sinner. “There has to be a Devil, don’t you see?” Father Ahearn told her, smiling amiably. “Because if there’s no Devil, then where would evil come from?”
The Rules of Dreaming Page 11