Dreamsongs. Volume II

  Cantling grimaced. “That…you’re implying…that’s a distortion. Michelle loved the stories so much, I thought maybe other kids might like them too. It was just an idea. I never did anything about it.”

  “Never?”

  Cantling hesitated. “Look, Bert was my friend as well as my agent. He had a little girl of his own. I showed him the stories once. Once!”

  “I can’t be pregnant,” Leighton said. “I only let him fuck me once. Once!”

  “He didn’t even like them,” Cantling said.

  “Pity,” replied Leighton.

  “You’re laying this on me with a trowel, and I’m not guilty. No, I wasn’t father of the year, but I wasn’t an ogre either. I changed her diaper plenty of times. Before Black Roses, Helen had to work, and I took care of the baby every day, from nine to five.”

  “You hated it when she cried and you had to leave your typewriter.”

  “Yes,” Cantling said. “Yes, I hated being interrupted, I’ve always hated being interrupted, I don’t care if it was Helen or Michelle or my mother or my roommate in college, when I’m writing I don’t like to be interrupted. Is that a fucking capital crime? Does that make me inhuman? When she cried, I went to her. I didn’t like it, I hated it, I resented it, but I went to her.”

  “When you heard her,” said Leighton. “When you weren’t in bed with Cissy, dancing with Miss Aggie, beating up scabs with Frank Corwin, when your head wasn’t full of their voices, yeah, sometimes you heard, and when you heard you went. Congratulations, Cantling.”

  “I taught her to read,” Cantling said. “I read her Treasure Island and Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit and Tom Sawyer, all kinds of things.”

  “All books you wanted to reread anyway,” said Leighton. “Helen did the real teaching, with Dick and Jane.”

  “I hate Dick and Jane!” Cantling shouted.

  “So?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard Cantling said. “You weren’t there. Michelle was there. She loved me, she still loves me. Whenever she got hurt, scraped her knee, or got her nose bloodied, whatever it was, it was me she’d run to, never Helen. She’d come crying to me and I’d hug her and dry her tears and I’d tell her…I used to tell her…” But he couldn’t go on. He was close to tears himself; he could feel them hiding in the corners of his eyes.

  “I know what you used to tell her,” said Barry Leighton in a sad, gentle voice.

  “She remembered it,” Cantling said. “She remembered it all those years. Helen got custody, they moved away, I didn’t see her much, but Michelle always remembered, and when she was all grown up, after Helen was gone and Michelle was on her own, there was this time she got hurt, and I…I…”

  “Yes,” said Leighton. “I know.”

  THE POLICE WERE THE ONES THAT PHONED HIM. DETECTIVE JOYCE Brennan, that was her name, he would never forget that name. “Mister Cantling?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Mister Richard Cantling?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Richard Cantling the writer.” He had gotten strange calls before. “What can I do for you?”

  She identified herself. “You’ll have to come down to the hospital,” she said to him. “It’s your daughter, Mister Cantling. I’m afraid she’s been assaulted.”

  He hated evasion, hated euphemism. Cantling’s characters never passed away, they died; they never broke wind, they farted. And Richard Cantling’s daughter…“Assaulted?” he said. “Do you mean she’s been assaulted or do you mean she’s been raped?”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Raped,” she said at last. “She’s been raped, Mister Cantling.”

  “I’ll be right down,” he said.

  She had in fact been raped repeatedly and brutally. Michelle had been as stubborn as Helen, as stubborn as Cantling himself. She wouldn’t take his money, wouldn’t take his advice, wouldn’t take the help he offered her through his contacts in publishing. She was going to make it on her own. She waitressed in a coffeehouse in the Village, and lived in a large, drafty, and rundown warehouse loft down by the docks. It was a terrible neighborhood, a dangerous neighborhood, and Cantling had told her so a hundred times, but Michelle would not listen. She would not even let him pay to install good locks and a security system. It had been very bad. The man had broken in before dawn on a Friday morning. Michelle was alone. He had ripped the phone from the wall and held her prisoner there through Monday night. Finally one of the busboys from the coffeehouse had gotten worried and come by, and the rapist had left by the fire escape.

  When they let him see her, her face was a huge purple bruise. She had burn marks all over her, where the man had used his cigarette, and three of her ribs were broken. She was far beyond hysteria. She screamed when they tried to touch her; doctors, nurses, it didn’t matter, she screamed as soon as they got near. But she let Cantling sit on the edge of the bed, and take her in his arms, and hold her. She cried for hours, cried until there were no more tears in her. Once she called him “Daddy,” in a choked sob. It was the only word she spoke; she seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Finally they tranquilized her to get her to sleep.

  Michelle was in the hospital for two weeks, in a deep state of shock. Her hysteria waned day by day, and she finally became docile, so they were able to fluff her pillows and lead her to the bathroom. But she still would not, or could not, speak. The psychologist told Cantling that she might never speak again. “I don’t accept that,” he said. He arranged Michelle’s discharge. Simultaneously he decided to get them both out of this filthy hellhole of a city. She had always loved big old spooky houses, he remembered, and she used to love the water, the sea, the river, the lake. Cantling consulted realtors, considered a big place on the coast of Maine, and finally settled on an old steamboat gothic mansion high on the bluffs of Perrot, Iowa. He supervised every detail of the move.

  Little by little, recovery began.

  She was like a small child again, curious, restless, full of sudden energy. She did not talk, but she explored everything, went everywhere. In spring she spent hours up on the widow’s walk, watching the big towboats go by on the Mississippi far below. Every evening they would walk together on the bluffs, and she would hold his hand. One day she turned and kissed him suddenly, impulsively, on his cheek. “I love you, Daddy,” she said, and she ran away from him, and as Cantling watched her run, he saw a lovely, wounded woman in her mid-twenties, and saw too the gangling, coltish tomboy she had been.

  The dam was broken after that day. Michelle began to talk again. Short, childlike sentences at first, full of childish fears and childish naïveté. But she matured rapidly, and in no time at all she was talking politics with him, talking books, talking art. They had many a fine conversation on their evening walks. She never talked about the rape, though; never once, not so much as a word.

  In six months she was cooking, writing letters to friends back in New York, helping with the household chores, doing lovely things in the garden. In eight months she had started to paint again. That was very good for her; now she seemed to blossom daily, to grow more and more radiant. Richard Cantling didn’t really understand the abstractions his daughter liked to paint, he preferred representational art, and best of all he loved the self-portrait she had done for him when she was still an art major in college. But he could feel the pain in these new canvases of hers, he could sense that she was engaged in an exorcism of sorts, trying to squeeze the pus from some wound deep inside, and he approved. His writing had been a balm for his own wounds more than once. He envied her now, in a way. Richard Cantling had not written a word for more than three years. The crashing commercial failure of Byeline, his best novel, had left him blocked and impotent. He’d thought perhaps the change of scene might restore him as well as Michelle, but that had been a vain hope. At least one of them was busy.

  Finally, late one night after Cantling had gone to bed, his door opened and Michelle came quietly into his bedroom and sa
t on the edge of his bed. She was barefoot, dressed in a flannel nightgown covered with tiny pink flowers. “Daddy,” she said, in a slurred voice.

  Cantling had woken when the door opened. He sat up and smiled for her. “Hi,” he said. “You’ve been drinking.”

  Michelle nodded. “I’m going back,” she said. “Needed some courage, so’s I could tell you.”

  “Going back?” Cantling said. “You don’t mean to New York? You can’t be serious!”

  “I got to,” she said. “Don’t be mad. I’m better now.”

  “Stay here. Stay with me. New York is uninhabitable, Michelle.”

  “I don’t want to go back. It scares me. But I got to. My friends are there. My work is there. My life is back there, Daddy. My friend Jimmy, you remember Jimmy, he’s art director for this little paperback house, he can get me some cover assignments, he says. He wrote. I won’t have to wait tables anymore.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Richard Cantling said. “How can you go back to that damned city after what happened to you there?”

  “That’s why I have to go back,” Michelle insisted. “That guy, what he did…what he did to me…” Her voice caught in her throat. She drew in her breath, got hold of herself. “If I don’t go back, it’s like he ran me out of town, took my whole life away from me, my friends, my art, everything. I can’t let him get away with that, can’t let him scare me off. I got to go back and take up what’s mine, prove that I’m not afraid.”

  Richard Cantling looked at his daughter helplessly. He reached out, gently touched her long, soft hair. She had finally said something that made sense in his terms. He would do the same thing, he knew. “I understand,” he said. “It’s going to be lonely here without you, but I understand, I do.”

  “I’m scared,” Michelle said. “I bought plane tickets. For tomorrow.”

  “So soon?”

  “I want to do it quickly, before I lose my nerve,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared. Not even…not even when it was happening. Funny, huh?”

  “No,” said Cantling. “It makes sense.”

  “Daddy, hold me,” Michelle said. She pressed herself into his arms.

  He hugged her and felt her body tremble.

  “You’re shaking,” he said.

  She wouldn’t let go of him. “You remember, when I was real little, I used to have those nightmares, and I’d come bawling into your bedroom in the middle of the night and crawl into bed between you and Mommy.”

  Cantling smiled. “I remember,” he said.

  “I want to stay here tonight,” Michelle said, hugging him even more tightly. “Tomorrow I’ll be back there, alone. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Can I, Daddy?”

  Cantling disengaged gently, looked her in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded; a tiny, quick, shy nod. A child’s nod.

  He threw back the covers and she crept in next to him. “Don’t go away,” she said. “Don’t even go to the bathroom, okay? Just stay right here with me.”

  “I’m here,” he said. He put his arms around her, and Michelle curled up under the covers with her head on his shoulder. They lay together that way for a long time. He could feel her heart beating inside her chest. It was a soothing sound; soon Cantling began to drift back to sleep.

  “Daddy?” she whispered against his chest.

  He opened his eyes. “Michelle?”

  “Daddy, I have to get rid of it. It’s inside me and it’s poison. I don’t want to take it back with me. I have to get rid of it.”

  Cantling stroked her hair, long slow steady motions, saying nothing.

  “When I was little, you remember, whenever I fell down or got in a fight, I’d come running to you, all teary, and show you my booboo. That’s what I used to call it when I got hurt, remember, I’d say I had a booboo.”

  “I remember,” Cantling said.

  “And you, you’d always hug me and you’d say, ‘Show me where it hurts,’ and I would and you’d kiss it and make it better, you remember that? Show me where it hurts?”

  Cantling nodded. “Yes,” he said softly.

  Michelle was crying quietly. He could feel the wetness soaking through the top of his pajamas. “I can’t take it back with me, Daddy. I want to show you where it hurts. Please. Please.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Go on.”

  She started at the beginning, in a halting whisper.

  When dawn light broke through the bedroom windows, she was still talking. They never slept. She cried a lot, screamed once or twice, shivered frequently despite the weight of the blankets; Richard Cantling never let go of her, not once, not for a single moment. She showed him where it hurt.

  BARRY LEIGHTON SIGHED. “IT WAS A FAR, FAR BETTER THING YOU did than you had ever done,” he said. “Now if you’d only gone off to that far, far better rest right then and there, that very moment, everything would have been fine.” He shook his head. “You never did know when to write Thirty, Cantling.”

  “Why?” Cantling demanded. “You’re a good man, Leighton, tell me. Why is this happening? Why?”

  The reporter shrugged. He was beginning to fade now. “That was the W that always gave me the most trouble,” he said wearily. “Pick the story, and let me loose, and I could tell you the who and the what and the when and the where and even the how. But the why…ah, Cantling, you’re the novelist, the whys are your province, not mine. The only Y that I ever really got on speaking terms with was the one goes with MCA.”

  Like the Cheshire cat, his smile lingered long after the rest of him was gone. Richard Cantling sat staring at the empty chair, at the abandoned tumbler, watching the whiskey-soaked ice cubes melt slowly.

  HE DID NOT REMEMBER FALLING ASLEEP. HE SPENT THE NIGHT IN the chair, and woke stiff and achy and cold. His dreams had been dark and shapeless and full of fear. He had slept well into the afternoon; half the day was gone. He made himself a tasteless breakfast in a kind of fog. He seemed distant from his own body, and every motion was slow and clumsy. When the coffee was ready, he poured a cup, picked it up, dropped it. The mug broke into a dozen pieces. Cantling stared down at it stupidly, watching rivulets of hot brown liquid run between the tiles. He did not have the energy to clean it up. He got a fresh mug, poured more coffee, managed to get down a few swallows.

  The bacon was too salty; the eggs were runny, disgusting. Cantling pushed the meal away half-eaten, and drank more of the black, bitter coffee. He felt hungover, but he knew that booze was not the problem.

  Today, he thought. It will end today, one way or the other. She will not go back. Byeline was his eighth novel, the next to the last. Today the final portrait would arrive. A character from his ninth novel, his last novel. And then it would be over.

  Or maybe just beginning.

  How much did Michelle hate him? How badly had he wronged her? Cantling’s hand shook; coffee slopped over the top of the mug, burning his fingers. He winced, cried out. Pain was so inarticulate. Burning. He thought of smoldering cigarettes, their tips like small red eyes. His stomach heaved. Cantling lurched to his feet, rushed to the bathroom. He got there just in time, gave his breakfast to the bowl. Afterwards he was too weak to move. He lay slumped against the cold white porcelain, his head swimming. He imagined somebody coming up behind him, taking him by the hair, forcing his face down into the water, flushing, flushing, laughing all the while, saying dirty, dirty, I’ll get you clean, you’re so dirty, flushing, flushing so the toilet ran and ran, holding his face down so the water and the vomit filled his mouth, his nostrils, until he could hardly breathe, until the world was almost black, until it was almost over, and then up again, laughing while he sucked in air, and then pushing him down again, flushing again, and again and again and again. But it was only his imagination. There was no one there. No one. Cantling was alone in the bathroom.

  He forced himself to stand. In the mirror his face was gray and ancient, his hair filthy and unkempt. Behind him, leeri
ng over his shoulder, was another face. A man’s face, pale and drawn, with black hair parted in the middle and slicked back. Behind a pair of small round glasses were eyes the color of dirty ice, eyes that moved constantly, frenetically, wild animals caught in a trap. They would chew off their own limbs to be free, those eyes. Cantling blinked and the face was gone. He turned on the cold tap, plunged his cupped hands under the stream, splashed water on his face. He could feel the stubble of his beard. He needed to shave. But there wasn’t time, it wasn’t important, he had to…he had to…

  He had to do something. Get out of there. Get away, get to someplace safe, somewhere his children couldn’t find him.

  But there was nowhere safe, he knew.

  He had to reach Michelle, talk to her, explain, plead. She loved him. She would forgive him, she had to. She would call it off, she would tell him what to do.

  Frantic, Cantling rushed back to the living room, snatched up the phone. He couldn’t remember Michelle’s number. He searched around, found his address book, flipped through it wildly. There, there; he punched in the numbers.

  The phone rang four times. Then someone picked it up.

  “Michelle—” he started.

  “Hi,” she said. “This is Michelle Cantling, but I’m not in right now. If you’ll leave your name and number when you hear the tone, I’ll get back to you, unless you’re selling something.”

  The beep sounded. “Michelle, are you there?” Cantling said. “I know you hide behind the machine sometimes, when you don’t want to talk. It’s me. Please pick up. Please.”

  Nothing.

  “Call me back, then,” he said. He wanted to get it all in; his words tumbled over each other in their haste to get out. “I, you, you can’t do it, please, let me explain, I never meant, I never meant, please…” There was the beep again, and then a dial tone. Cantling stared at the phone, hung up slowly. She would call him back. She had to, she was his daughter, they loved each other, she had to give him the chance to explain. Of course, he had tried to explain before.