Ricky stayed behind, his thoughts locked in black anger. All that energy, all that life, stuffed into a bounding ape who hadn’t the first notion of what to do with it. Intolerable.
She built a fire because it was cool on summer nights, up this high, and she knew he was susceptible to the cold. They watched Doctor Who, caped and capped like Sherlock Holmes, take on a giant rat (that is, a regular sized rat in a small metal tube seen very closely by the camera) in the sewers of Victorian London.
“My God,” Dorothea said, “it’s such nonsense, but it’s actually literate. Those are lines the actors are speaking, not comic-strip captions. Doesn’t it make you homesick?”
“Not a bit,” Ricky said. “The most popular television show in England isn’t Doctor Who, it’s Dallas, didn’t you know that?”
“Doesn’t anything make you homesick?” she persisted gently. When he did not reply she added, “Was that another letter from your sister yesterday?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t want to talk about this, that was obvious. But it needed talking about. “She wants you to come home, doesn’t she.”
“Of course she does. She is a perfectly conventional creature, and convention has it that one comes home to die. Therefore, I must come home.”
Apprehensive about the answer but determined to get one, she said, “Are you considering going?”
“Would you like me to?” he said, not looking at her.
“Maybe you should, regardless of what I’d like. You tell me not to hide here, Ricky, but am I the only one who’s hiding?”
Pause. He watched the flames. She had difficulty imagining herself sitting here watching the flames alone, with him gone away out of her house. The fire spat. Now he looked at her with his wide blue gaze.
“You mean that I am?”
“Yes, with every good reason, but I don’t think you can do it forever. I don’t think you should. Do you realize that you never talk about yourself? I mean your life, your travels, your family, your childhood. You came to my house like a man without a past, and you live here totally concentrated on the moment — the dreams, or whatever we’re doing — as if you were a ghost yourself. Already. And you’re not; that’s the point.”
She stopped, but he said nothing. She forced herself to go on.
“You have family, Ricky, and friends, and I don’t know who else, people you haven’t seen in years but who probably need to see you, people maybe you need to see. Everyone has those people clustered in their lives. I can’t believe that you don’t. If you have time before you die, you try to see them and settle things with them, say what needs to be said, or write them long letters, or think about them. You don’t just toss your whole past away like a worn-out sock and sink yourself in somebody else’s problems.”
“How do you know what I think about?” he said.
“I know what you talk about: art, music, the country up here, what you see around you from day to day. The dogs. Me, my dreams, my life. Are you going to tell me that all that is a smoke-screen and that behind it you’re thinking about your own affairs?”
He sipped juice from the glass on the table at his elbow. He slowly uncrossed his legs and crossed them again, but he did not answer.
Dorothea looked into the fire. Well, you’ve started this, you might as well get along to the end of it. You don’t want to go through this strain and tension for nothing.
“I feel as if I’m — unlawfully detaining you, do you understand?” she said. “When there are other matters belonging to you alone that need your attention, now of all times. I feel like a thief, when I see those letters from your sister. There must be others too, people must be trying to get in touch with you while they still can.” She swallowed and said more softly, “You accused me not long ago of hoarding myself. But I feel as if I’m hoarding you.”
“Well, don’t,” he said brusquely. “To start, you’ve got the thing wrong-end-to. It isn’t that I’m avoiding some sort of death-bed accounting by meddling in your life. It’s that when I look back, there’s really very little to examine. In a sense I’m using your dream-dilemma to fill a void, do you see? Not as a distraction but as a replacement.
“I suppose the truth is, I am a sort of ghost, a leftover from another era, and I always have been. In the last century I’d have gone looking for the sources of the Nile and the true North Pole, that sort of thing. I had the income and the education and the itch to be moving. But all those places are found now, and I haven’t the time or the qualifications for space travel.
“Besides, in all honesty, I’m spoiled. Those explorers I hark back to didn’t come out of a world of central heating, jet liners, trans-oceanic telephones, and tape-cassettes of Verdi operas, you know.”
She had to smile. “You make yourself sound like a fraud. I’ve read those pieces you did for the Guardian.”
“And you were taken in, weren’t you? That was my cover. But in reality I’ve simply wondered through the world, the way you’d walk through your favorite old museum and nod to the pictures and the sculptures that you knew. Think of me not witnessing earth-shaking events but drifting, just drifting, only pausing to shake hands, drink little cups of sweet tea or palm wine or whatever with little wizened women and dried-up little chaps with hands like brown spiders, or sleek young men or stout blonde women with aprons on. It doesn’t matter what you talk about, or if you even can understand each other’s language. It’s just the greeting, the spending of time together, and moving on again.
“Writing was an excuse. And the traveling was all the same, do you see? So there’s nothing much to think about in the way that you mean.”
Mars came up and put his chin on Dorothea’s knee, gazing soulfully up at her face in hopes of an evening stroll. She stroked the sleekness of his head, feeling the delicate shape of the skull underneath. If I say the wrong thing now, she thought, it’s going to be just you and me and Brillo, kid.
“This is just what I mean,” she began slowly. “Don’t misunderstand me, Ricky, but I think maybe you should be saying these things to — someone else. Maybe to several people, who are all waiting for you to come and speak to them in the way that you’re speaking to me now — people with a better right than mine to hear you.”
“No one has a better right.”
“But your own people —”
“The right you mean is mine to confer, and ‘my own people’ are the people whose hands I shake, whose tea I drink, and to whom I choose to speak or not to speak. If you can’t accept that, you have only to show me the door. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to be cutting.”
“Ricky, I have to ask this: why did you come here?”
“I came because you drew me, not by conscious wish but by physical act. It’s the wall, don’t you know that? The thing is magical.”
“You’re not serious!” Because she knew he was, she was afraid. Although what of? She could not think what it was, but she recognized that inward flutter of fear.
“Don’t you know that art is magic?” he said severely.
“Metaphorically, of course, but I don’t know anything about — well, real magic, if there is such a thing.”
“There is,” he said grimly. “Magic brought me — your magic, the wall’s magic. What keeps me here is my own choice, and your concurrence, and the work you’ve given me to do: this ghost. Or perhaps you’ve brought the ghost and me here to solve each other. What do you think?”
She did not know what to think. She leaned forward and held out her cold hands to the warmth of the fire.
So it’s a lump, you great bloody fool, Ricky thought; just what it appears to be, just as you’ve known all along must happen sooner or later.
He drove with savage concentration, leaning forward with his forearms tensed round the wheel, his eyes glaring at the road back to Dorothea’s. They had told him at the hospice that indeed the cancer had spread. The white, painless intrusion in his lower belly marked the pace stepping up.
He had
spent the morning discussing again with them all the possibilities, had not been given any pigswill about a cure. Surgery, chemicals, radiation — he knew the drill. A great deal of misery in exchange for a little more time.
Time weak and sick as a dying dog. To hell with that.
His vision was so blurred that he could hardly see. He pulled to the side of the road and wept. Then he took out his handkerchief, mopped his face dry, and sat back in the seat to try to think. He kept the car door open for the breeze.
I’d almost forgotten the actual end. Didn’t want to remember what the doctors said; don’t want to now. I’m not ready to reflect on how the body shuts down. Toward the end the guts leave off churning out dung, so you don’t get nagged to eat. Your bladder leaks punily down a tube. A kind of living petrifaction sets in. They say they can control the pain even when it gets bad, as if that means anything. Liar, he charged himself, shuddering. It means a great deal.
Here I’ve been chasing after Dorothea’s dreams as if I had all the time in the world. What am I doing here? She was right to ask, of course she was! And all that drivel I gave her as an answer — Christ, how embarrassing! What do I shirk that needs doing whilst I potter about in Dorothea’s life? Must be mad. The damned disease has eaten my brain.
Dorothea will be alive, dreaming her dreams, and I’ll be dead, dead, dead. Dead as Danton, dead as Robespierre, dead as Bonaparte and all the other historic figures I’ve been telling her about, and why not? They are dead and therefore eminently suitable topics for my conversation. When I am dead, shall Dorothea dream of me?
Not likely; I’m not the right period.
Dorothea had got home before him from her morning’s errands in town. Her truck was parked on the shaded side of the front yard. He could see her in the front room by the window. She was looking through that fat leather sack of a purse that she carried, absorbed in finding whatever it was she sought.
He sighed, got out of the car, and entered the house.
Well, of course she knew the verdict without asking, and so she didn’t ask but spared them both that. Told him furiously how annoyed she was to have lost the business card of the people who were going to come trim the dead branches in her cottonwood trees before one fell and brained someone. Would have to get a new purse in which things didn’t get lost so easily, God damn this one.
He knew what her anger was for — for him, for his news that didn’t need telling. What right had she to be angry, when he was the dying one? Couldn’t she see how her anger irritated him, couldn’t she control herself for Heaven’s sake?
“I’ll be leaving soon,” he said abruptly. Leave, go, get the devil out of here, with my rotting body that’s turning my nature to bile. She shouldn’t have to put up with that (but she would if she were my true friend, if she loved me, damn her).
“But you said the other night —” Her dismay and evident pain gratified him, and then he was revolted at his own pleasure in it. He could barely look at her as she went on quietly, “I’m sorry. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” he growled. “I can still bloody think a bit, I can still decide about staying or leaving.”
“It’s not because of this art class coming up next week, is it? I could always cancel, Mary would understand. She’s an old friend.”
“Do what you like,” he said, turning away to avoid her touching him, the touch that would melt his intention. “I’m going to pack. Thank you for your hospitality. I hope I’ve been of some help with the dreams. I’ll leave in the morning.”
He slammed his bedroom door and sank down on his bed, suddenly strengthless. The worst of it was that he could not remember anything that truly required his attention elsewhere. Not one thing.
The judge wrote, dipping ink from the bronze well in the shape of a draped woman, half-kneeling under the weight of the ink-filled jar on her shoulder.
Dorothea woke with her skull buzzing. She sat up, scrunching her eyes shut and shaking her head from side to side. She had a sharp cramp under one shoulder blade.
Ricky was sitting on the deep sill of the window with a small black Pueblo pot from the dresser top in his hands. He turned it absently in his fingers as if feeling it for comfort. The light was that of late morning.
She thought, I never sleep this late. Whew, my head — why is Ricky here? Come to say goodbye? In his robe and pajamas?
“Ricky?” she said hoarsely. “Are you all right?”
He carefully set the pot down in the far corner of the sill and got up. “Are you?”
“I think so. What time is it?” Her heart felt literally heavy, as if standing up would be beyond her. Grief feels like this, she thought, like after leaving Jack or when I used to have those awful fights with Claire. “Damn it, I can’t remember any dream at all but I feel really — I can’t exactly explain it. Emptied. Did I say something, at least?”
“In a sense.”
“In a sense?” She read the strain in his face and in the remoteness of his tone. “What sense?”
He brought over a yellow legal pad, one of the ones he had been using for his reading notes. The pages were covered with a methodical, ornate handwriting in pencil; not hers, and not his either. The first page bore a salutation, “Mon cher fils…”
She stared at the writing, too frightened to speak, but excited, too.
“I heard you moving about in here, muttering to yourself as if you were looking for something in the dark,” Ricky said. “I came in and turned on the light. You were out of bed, and your eyes were open. You asked, in French, where your writing paper was. I gave you this pad and a pencil, and I sharpened some others. You sat over there in the chair by the little desk, and you wrote for hours without speaking another word. Then you got up and fell back into bed and slept. You don’t remember?”
“No,” she said. The word made no sound. She cleared her throat.
“I shall never forget. You ought to have seen yourself writing this document. This —” He tapped the pages. “You’d best read it, I think.”
She looked down at the pad, reluctant to read the writing. “Have you?”
He hesitated. “I began to, but it seemed — yours.” He turned his hand helplessly in the air. “Anyway, some of it is beyond me. The French, I mean.”
She forced herself to focus. Her palms sweated and the pad shook slightly in her grip. “ Mon Cher fils, j’ai pensé cependant longtemps sur ton lettre — ” She ran her eye down the first page. “Christ, Ricky, I don’t even know some of these words. How could I have —? We’ll have to use the Larousse, if I can find it.” Triumph burst through her astonishment. She laughed. “God — I did it! I asked for something, and I got it!”
“You asked? What do you mean, you asked?”
“I went to sleep last night thinking, ‘I want something to happen, some break, some enlightenment as to what the dreams mean.’ I was pushing for it, Ricky, with all my will.”
“But why?”
“Because, my dear, if you go I’m left on my own with this crazy dream business. I had to try to get whatever insight I could right away, while you’re still here to look at it with me.”
“You mean you tried to force matters,” he accused.
“Yes,” she said firmly. She felt exhilarated and wanted him to share in the triumph. He had earned it.
All morning they labored over the translation.
“What the hell kind of spelling is that?”
“Obsolete, according to this entry in the dictionary.”
“‘Callous’ is probably a closer meaning, in that sentence.”
“‘Fulling.’ That’s old fashioned dry-cleaning isn’t it?”
“Yes; they used to rub woolen clothing with a clay called ‘fuller’s earth’ to remove stains and smells without shrinkage.”
“‘Bitter as gall.’ Not exactly an original phrase-maker.”
“‘L’Ancien Régime.’ Ricky, you actually saw me write these words in this beautiful old-fashioned hand? You know
what my writing looks like. How could I have produced this?”
“I watched from start to finish.”
Once Ricky went away and returned with a bowl of fruit that he set on a chair. There was no room on the bed, which was covered with sheets of paper. He did not take anything from the bowl to eat, and neither did she.
Still in her nightgown, the one with the drooping hem and the sleeve coming out at the shoulder seam, she sat back and read the translation aloud.
My dear son,
I have thought a long time about your letter. Here is my answer, but first you must understand some matters out of my own past which perhaps throw light on my position. I have not ordinarily spoken of these things, but now the time has come.
To begin with, regardless of the foolish exaggerations to which your great-aunt Marielle is given, I have survived in the world but by the standards of many I cannot be said to have risen. Your grandfather was a landowner in a small way, as well as proprietor of a prosperous fulling-works. I myself traveled far more widely as a boy than I could afford to do now. I was not sent with a lean purse to Paris to be a clerk in the law, like so many of my contemporaries, but on the contrary lived rather well. In those days Paris was smaller, and my aunt and uncle — themselves childless and thus particularly kindly disposed toward me — had a house in a suburb. They would often send me a hamper packed with excellent country food.
I was, in other words, comfortable and happy, but I was never any sort of rich man nor did I keep company with aristocrats. In fact, I was or at least became quite radical in my thinking, thanks to the company I kept in the coffee houses. I read Rousseau and Voltaire and the rest, and I believed.
Do you find this unlikely? Yet it is true. I was not a leader, you understand — it is to this above all that I owe my survival. But I was a good follower. I was solvent, too, always ready to pay the printer and the tavern-keeper and the cost of oil for the lamps by which we studied and debated how to build our dream nation of perfect law and humane justice.