As October gave way to the stark skies of November, its spindly, barren trees, I was surprised to find a cream envelope beneath the porch door of our house: perfectly square, licked shut, with a calligraphic scrawl—G + S—in black ink. I opened it in the kitchen while Gabe slept off the late study we’d monitored the night before.
Greetings, pals—
Janna and I’d be delighted if you’d treat us to your presence(s) on the eve of 25 November. We’ll give thanks, we’ll drink copious amounts of liquor, and, Janna willing, we’ll eat the appropriate troughs of food, American and otherwise. Come in your finest around the hour of five, post meridiem—and bring something to contribute, you lazy fucks.
Hugs—
T.
I read the letter twice in a row with a seeping feeling of delight. It had been years since I’d had a proper Thanksgiving meal—not since I lived with my family. Gabe and I had a halfhearted tradition of eating dinner at an ethnic restaurant, though I’d never really been sure whether we did it out of protest or laziness. Thom’s letter made me feel normal. We were the sort of young people who had neighbors, had friends; we would go to their house for Thanksgiving, and we would fall asleep, along with the bulk of the country, at the pathetic hour of seven thirty or eight, bloated and sewn-in as stuffed animals.
I decided to make a sweet potato dish, something roasted that I was sure I couldn’t mess up. After picking up the ingredients in town, I stopped at the Goodwill on State Street. Keller paid us fairly well—even better now that we worked for the university—but I was my mother’s daughter, and most of it went into savings. Usually, I was attracted to clothes in muted colors, though perhaps attracted is the wrong word; it was more that I knew these were the styles that suited me and I had resigned myself to our partnership. Today, though, I wanted something different. I brought home a suede skirt in a rich and dusty orange and paired it with a low-backed black top; as I closed the bedroom window, cool air brushed my spine. When I added the little gold hoops Gabe had given me for my twenty-third birthday and a pair of bronze heels, I felt almost unlike myself.
“You look great,” said Gabe, in a tone I tried not to take for surprise, as he came downstairs to meet me. He had dressed up, too: he wore a starched navy shirt and a skinny green tie with his Chucks.
“So do you,” I said. Had he gotten a haircut, or was the structure of his face always so clear—the sharp jaw, the deep-set and crinkled hazel eyes?
As we crossed the lawn to Thomas and Janna’s house—a bottle of wine in Gabe’s hand, the sweet potato dish in mine—we could have been any young couple. We rang the doorbell and waited on the porch, Gabe’s sneaker tapping the planks.
Janna opened it. Her hair was newly streaked with purple and pulled into a bun, so that the stripes collected in a clean knot at her crown. She wore an orange dress, too, but hers was the neon color of construction signs. It ended in a feathery skirt at her hips. Beneath it she wore sheer brown tights and no shoes.
“Oh, look!” she said, clapping. “You’re the same color as your potatoes!”
I looked down; it was true. She kissed Gabe twice, once on each cheek.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “I’ve got to attend to the table, but Thomas will get you a drink.”
With this she whirled out of the kitchen, and Thom sauntered in from the living room. The oven was releasing small curls of smoke. Thom paused in front of it and stared quizzically at its dials before turning to us.
“Hello, friends,” he said. “What can I get you? Wine? Martini? Gin and tonic?”
“Gin and tonic, please, sir,” said Gabe.
“Sylvie.” Thom grinned, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. “You match your potatoes.”
“I know,” I said. “Janna mentioned—”
“Extra,” said Janna, sweeping back into the kitchen, a butter knife in one hand. “Silly me—I set the table for five.”
She sniffed and turned, with razorlike precision, to the oven.
“The oven, Thomas,” she said. “The oven is smoking, darling.”
She turned off the heat at the same time as she opened the silverware drawer next to it. After dropping the extra knife, she slid her hand into a bright blue mitt and pulled out a tray of beautiful, scallop-edged orange cups with little mounds of sweet potato inside.
“Oh,” I said. “If I’d known you were making sweet potatoes, I wouldn’t have brought them. But yours are gorgeous. How did you make them?”
“Easy,” said Janna, licking a bit of potato off her ring finger. “You cut the oranges in half and scrape out the insides. Fill them with mashed potatoes, throw the pulp in the trash.”
She wiped her hands on a towel and looked at us brightly.
“Hungry?” she asked.
•••
I don’t remember much about dinner, only that we were woozy with drink by the end of it: first the gin and tonics, then two bottles of rich red wine, a post-dinner espresso splashed with bourbon. The moon rose baldly into the sky; Gabe took off one of his shoes and threw it behind his head, where it collided with an antique mirror that cracked into a delicate, spidery web and, Janna claimed, looked better now than it had before. At some point, we collapsed on the couch in their living room, a tangle of legs. I looked for the Keats book, the mossy old tome that Thom had shown me weeks before, but it was gone. Thom was singing something—Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever . . . Did I imagine that at some point, Janna’s head rested against my chest? I don’t know how or why it would have happened, but I remember the warm sun of her skull, the streaks of hair that spread across my shoulders like purple kelp, her spindly fingers picking at the fabric of the couch.
It must have been one or two in the morning when we stumbled out the back door to their yard. It was a gorgeous night, unexpectedly warm. I can still see Thom running back to us, gazelle-like, all legs—he’d gone somewhere and returned with boxes of bang snaps. We threw them at the ground and yelped when they exploded too close to our feet. Gabe and I kissed pressed against the fence, dense and urgent, his hands beneath my shirt. How long had it been since we had kissed like that? And then he was gone, and I was sitting with Thom beneath the juniper tree in their backyard, a tree with a thick, warped trunk like a dish towel being wrung.
If my memories up until this point are imagistic and uncertain, here they sharpen. Here I remember not only sensory details—the leathery leaves and sharp little sticks beneath my legs; grass stains on the lap of my dress; Thom’s sweet alcoholic scent—but whole stretches of conversation. Where were Gabe and Janna? I don’t remember caring; I leaned against the juniper, its trunk kneading my back.
“. . . the first man I ever loved,” Thom said, his nose bulbous and jagged in the blue light. “Platonically, I mean—but I did love him. I admired him so much I felt my identity bleeding into his, little by little. Have you ever had a teacher like that?”
“No,” I said, whether or not it was true. An owl cooed in the distance.
“No? Ah,” said Thom. “Well, he was my first poetry professor. My first real professor. And Janna was his pet.”
“He liked her poetry?”
“He liked—well.” He laughed, high and breathless. “You’re a dear, Sylvie—you know that, don’t you? You’re a very sweet girl. But inside you there’s a sour center. And that’s why I like you.”
Why that flattered me I can’t say now. It was the alcohol, I think—the scent of the muddied leaves, Thom’s voice sure as an incantation.
“Not that I’m exempt,” he said. “I’m as dirty as they come. And I’m disgusted by it now. But, you know—I was so damn idealistic then. The art! That’s what I thought was most important. He was the writer-in-residence at our college. I’d never met a man who was brilliant in the ways he was brilliant. And I thought I could access him, if I was with her.”
“
You only started dating Janna to get close to—your professor?” It struck me as funny; I laughed, and soon Thom was wheezing with me, knocking his head against the fence. But like a summer storm, Thom’s laughter passed as suddenly as it had arrived, and once more he was confidential, solemn.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll say it. I wanted to get to him. But when I stopped thinking that way—when I fell for her, and her only, nothing more—I experienced the most incredible purity. Do you believe in purity?”
I felt a tickle on my arm. Two ants were crawling toward the inside of my elbow. I brushed them to one side; they landed on Thom’s pant leg, though he didn’t notice.
“I’m a changed man, Sylvie.” He ran a hand through his messy reddish hair, swift and shaky. “I’ve repented, believe me. I’ve changed”—and we both took swigs of our drinks as the sky began to turn pink. The wineglasses had all been dirtied, and we were drinking out of jam jars. I had never been so drunk. My mind spun and spun, a top inside my skull. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in bed, still in my orange dress, Gabe’s heavy thigh cast over mine; I was peeling back the curtains by our bed, a white November sun high in the sky.
The conversation was so peculiar I almost wondered if I had remembered it wrong. But from the window I could see the juniper tree, wrenched, and when I looked at the lap of my skirt, there were the grass stains, there were the little tears where twigs had snagged the fabric.
•••
The next night, I dreamed I stood alone at an abandoned intersection in a small, plain town. To my left, wheat fields stretched fuzzy and golden; to the right was a boarded-up ice cream shop. The wind lifted my hair, blond and streaked with black. In one hand I held a whirligig that turned with the wind, spinning light. The wind stilled as if in wait, and the whirligig stopped moving. Then a flush of blackbirds rose from the field, arcing through the sky with a thick flapping noise, like the pages of a thousand books being turned. When they cleared, I saw a hot air balloon.
It moved through the sky with a stately elegance, unhurried as a mayor at a small-town parade. Its progress was so slow that I didn’t know it was manned until a figure no bigger than an insect clambered to the rim of the basket and tumbled, flailing, over one side.
It was the first dream I had fully remembered in years. I woke slick with sweat, gasping, and looked for Gabe. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, arms two pointed wings. The clock on my bedside table shone 4:23, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep. So I stepped out into the hall, closing the bedroom door quietly behind me.
My mind was dizzy, caught in the groggy purgatory between sleep and wakefulness, and I was still half-drunk. But I climbed the stairs to the attic and dusted off a clean canvas. Then I carried my paint boxes to the rug in front of the window. Kneeling, I began to mix black and white until I found something that matched the tenor of that pale gray sky.
The dream began to sharpen as I painted it. In shaping the great rainbow bulb of the balloon and its brown thatched basket, I saw the way the figure inside had first leaned out of it, looking down, as if gauging where to land. Why? Because he was harnessed to a parachute, and I remembered it now: a pillowy lavender arc that looked quilted from below, floating toward the ground at the same leisurely pace as the balloon.
I wasn’t paying attention to the way the painting looked. My goal was not the finished product but the accuracy of my recollection. I was painting what I remembered as I remembered it, and the only way to do that was to paint right on top of what I had done only moments before. And so, as the flyer came nearer and nearer to the intersection where I waited with my whirligig, I painted him again and again—because now I was sure that it was a him, that the gangly legs hung from a pale torso brushed with hair as rough and golden as wheat; that up close, he smelled like alcohol and juniper, and if I were to pull up his shirtsleeve—which I would do as soon as he landed—I would find two ants crawling down one arm in slow procession.
I stepped away from the canvas and started at it for the first time as a whole. It was cluttered, kaleidoscopic: the balloon traced over and over, the man’s insect legs stretching toward the ground like an alien craft. My face was messily drawn and stretching apart, covered in whirligigs.
It was nothing I wanted to see again. I took a tube of black paint and squirted it across the canvas. With my widest brush, I swiped the paint from left to right, top to bottom. Light was beginning to inch up the sky, darkness drawing back like a tarp, but I was exhausted. When I returned to bed, Gabe was right where I had left him, as if no time had passed at all. I fell with surprising ease into a simple, passive sleep that must have lasted for hours. The next thing I remember was a soft rapping noise at the door, Gabe’s broad nose poking through, the snuffling noise of his laughter.
“Sylvie,” he whispered. “Sylvie, my God, wake up. It’s already one o’clock.”
•••
I spent the next week in a haze. My sleep was fitful and uneven: too much, or not enough. During the day, it was all I could do to stay awake. I told Gabe and Keller I thought I was coming down with a cold. Keller had me cover shifts at the sleep clinic, where all I had to do was sit bleary eyed at the front desk. At night, I fell asleep immediately, and I woke blank as a baby.
I thought I was back to my old patterns until a cold Tuesday morning in the beginning of December. I dreamed of Thom; this time, there was no mistaking it. We were in an enclosed, dimly lit space with a desk and one chair, but we huddled on the floor as if in a bunker. Spread across the floor in front of us were old photographs that Thom showed me one by one. A dull, dusty-chained bulb provided a dim shaft of light. An orange cat slipped between us, purring.
I could see myself, but I was apart from myself. Like a ghost, I watched the dream me sitting with Thom on the floor—watched as he lifted the next photograph into the light, which showed a grand brick building on a hill. Below the building was a dusty path, flanked by tree trunks and globe lamps that glowed whitely as moons.
“Alumni House,” said Thom. “It’s this fancy building that was gifted to the college by two filthy-rich sisters—Rose and Blanche something. All the rich alumni could sleep there whenever they were in town, and the place had a restaurant that hosted all sorts of schmoozy, hobnobby events. He used to take Janna there. I wanted so badly to get inside. I used to stand at the bottom of the hill, just taking pictures of the damn thing.”
His face floated toward me with the 3D transparency of a hologram. He reached for me with one hand. I ducked, but I wasn’t fast enough, and he plucked something from my ear. I felt a pock, the hollow release of suction, and he held out his palm. Something fuzzy, black and yellow-spotted, wriggled inside it: a caterpillar. Suddenly, the hand was Gabe’s—I saw his broad, callused palms, his long lifeline. The caterpillar inched its way across his wrist, and I felt nauseous.
“That came—out of me?” I asked. I put my finger in my ear. Empty as a whistle.
“Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” sang Gabe.
I woke at five thirty, my chest heaving, my collarbone slick with sweat. The windows rattled, our curtains slivered apart by the cold air that came through a crack in the pane. I looked at the window, my body turned away from Gabe, as my heart rate came down. Snowflakes clung to the glass like tiny skeletons.
When I turned around, Gabe was propped up on one elbow, staring at me. We looked at each other in silence.
“Bad dream,” I said finally.
Gabe shook his head.
“But you never remember your dreams,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s odd.”
Gabe was staring at me with a bare kind of exhaustion—or was it resignation? He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it.
“Sleepy Sylvie,” he said, inching across the space between us, collecting me into his arms.
PART TWO
NIGHT
11
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2002
When I look back at the rest of that first summer in Snake Hollow, I am tempted to say—as much as I resist this sort of statement—that it was the best time in my life. The thrown-together dinners, Gabe chopping zucchini and eggplant, Keller pouring salt crystals into a pot of bubbling water while flipping strips of pancetta with the many-armed grace of a Hindu god; Keller taking us out to the glass-littered beach at night, striding through the dune grass and salt-marsh hay with boyish enthusiasm—“Look!” he said, “feel something, for God’s sake—get out of yourselves”; or sitting with Gabe on the floor of the library as Keller strode between us—spun through the room, it seemed to me, in my three A.M. haze (When does he sleep? I often wondered)—his voice ricocheting off the walls, the dim lights of the library flickering in his wake.
“We are living in a twenty-four/seven culture,” he said. “Convenience stores are open at all hours of the day. Twenty percent of the working population in developed countries works the night shift. Planes take off and land, universities hold classes, hospitals are staffed, all during the night hours traditionally reserved for sleep. Human beings are more productive than ever before, but they’re also unhappier. They feel oppressed by the limits of their lives: the boredom, the repetition, the fatigue. What if you could use your sleep to do more—to receive all of the traditional regenerative benefits while problem solving, healing, even experiencing alternate worlds?”
He was jittery with enthusiasm, pacing the library like a teenager. Earlier that day, Gabe and I had traveled to Boston to watch Keller give a talk on lucid dreaming. He was even more dynamic than he’d been at Mills, his voice carrying through the auditorium, his limbs shot through with energy; it was as though, like Benjamin Button, he was aging in reverse. “This freedom, hard to imagine within the constraints of waking life,” he boomed, “is astounding, exhilarating, and inspiring. The laws of science and society are abolished. The possibilities are boundless, and the choices are yours. Wouldn’t you be capable of extraordinary things?”