An Orphanage of Dreams Read online

  20. A Twist of Fate

  One bright summer morning, a man carrying a loaf of bread walks up the Rue Gassendi. At the corner of the Rue Daguerre, a young woman carrying a dozen ripe plums in a canvas sack falls in behind him. The plums are the small yellow ones known as mirabelles. She eats a plum as she walks, bending forward at the waist so as not to get plum juice on her clothes. The man shifts the loaf from his left hand to his right. He has not turned his head and noticed the woman walking behind him eating a plum. The woman has not noticed the man in front of her carrying a loaf of bread, first in one hand, then in the other. At the Avenue du Maine the man turns left, while the woman continues across the avenue and on up the street, which at that point is called the Rue des Plantes.

  21. Rumors of Justice: Two Cases

  I.

  The judge asks, “Does the accused wish to make a statement?” The accused is disheveled, wild-eyed. He reaches in his pocket, pulls out a tightly folded paper, opens it with difficulty, and begins to read. His hands shake, his voice is barely audible. The men and women in the jury box lean forward, attentive. This goes on for several minutes before they realize that he is talking in a foreign language.

  II.

  Same situation. The accused takes a crumpled paper from his pocket, unfolds it, and begins to read in a firm, confident voice. He reviews the charges against him and then, with circumspection and diligence, attempts to undermine them point by point. The jurors stare into space, pare fingernails, glance at the clock, whisper.

  22. The Machine

  It’s the same machine. They’ve just painted it a different color. The gauges are new, but the basic function is unchanged. We break it out of the crate and, after moving the lathe into the other room, set it up next to the old one. We all want to work at the new machine. When I get home, Steve is drinking again. We have franks and potatoes for supper. The light falling from heaven is stronger than it used to be. Steve says ten, maybe twelve years, and it will all be over. Management will decide who gets the new machine. Once there were bus trips that lasted for days, when Steve and I would get down in little towns and stand by the bus smoking. We would watch the people going up and down in the little towns, and they looked contented and wholesome and we would talk about staying. Management has still not decided. The machine just sits there. The others pretend they don’t care. I get home from work and Steve is standing across the street by the drainage pond. Someone has taken a red marker and written Zelda’s name on the new machine. She says good-morning, and I can tell she is on top of the world. She throws the lever and grins. Steve announces there are ducks on the pond, where before there were only gulls. He is finding signs everywhere, but to me the ducks don’t matter. If they had given me the new machine, I would be on top of the world. One of us has to keep her feet on the ground.

  The Songwriter

  There was a novelist who wanted to write a song. He wanted it to be a beautiful song like “Summertime” or “La Vie en Rose,” a song for the ages, as the saying goes. The novelist had a decent singing voice, knew hundreds of songs by heart, had only to think of a lyric in order to hear it sung in his head, but he was not a musician, he was not even a poet. He wanted to write his song in prose, and his prose did not sing, it was harsh, satiric, and bitter. The best reviewers and critics, praising his novels, used words like brutal, fierce, and merciless, but the novelist hated every sentence he wrote. He completed many novels over the years, he had a coterie of devoted fans, but most people judged his books too harsh and bitter, and he lived out his life in poverty and died of a disease that like his prose was merciless and brutal. In his final weeks, when the pain was enormous and unrelenting, he refused the drugs the doctors urged upon him. He was a strong man without faith of any kind, and true to his life and art he was determined to greet death with a clear mind and eyes wide open. His last hours arrived, the friends and followers who had been keeping a deathwatch gathered at his bedside, shadowy forms that he could only dimly perceive. A gauzy film clouded his vision. He tried to rub it from his eyes but was not able to lift his hand. He closed his eyes. He could not hear the voices of those still trying to reach him, he saw only blackness. For what seemed to him hours he heard only the hollow sound of his own labored breathing. And then came the song, a single long intricate sentence of unspeakable beauty, the pain melted away, and a great happiness filled him. He opened his eyes wide, and staring at the faces by his bed, recited the song in a loud, strong voice, he said it over and over, it was so beautiful, he was handing it to them, his friends, his family, this precious thing, this great beauty. His voice was weak. He was breathing his very last breaths. The sitters came closer, they leaned over him, they strained to make out the words. His voice quavered, it was hoarse and less than a whisper, it rose and fell back and rose again, as if reaching for some final ineffable syllable, but it formed no words that any of them could understand.

  Dispatches from the Commune

  1.

  Charles was in the yurt and would not come out. He had crept in at night when everyone thought he was sleeping. Despite the crooked smile and useless right arm, he could still surprise them. At supper the next evening, all eyes were on the empty chair. Jill, who was standing at the window, said, “He’s still in there,” and everyone felt glum. Beth carried a plate of food out to the yurt. She knocked on the door. “Go away,” said a voice. Returning to the house, Beth reported that Charles sounded “subdued.” In later testimony, she changed that to “muffled.” She left the plate on the ground by the door and the next morning it was empty. They wondered what he was thinking about in there. They imagined him seated in the dark gnawing on a chop bone.

  2.

  Every night, one of them went out to the yurt and left a plate of food on the ground, and every morning, when they looked out, the food was gone. One morning at breakfast, Beth came in from the yard carrying the plate, empty as usual, and Warren said, “Raccoons,” and everyone’s heart sank. The next night, Steve went out and put his ear against the side of the yurt. “He’s chewing,” he whispered. He tapped on the wall of the yurt and the chewing stopped. “He’s eating. That’s a good sign,” Lily said, and they all brightened, until Monica reminded them that she had eaten like a horse right up to the day she had swallowed a whole bottle of pills after supper and they had had to pump her stomach out.

  3.

  “He went in there to send us a message,” Rachel said, and they all agreed, though no one could think what the message was. Warren, who was interested in Zen, said, “Maybe it’s the message of no message,” and everyone nodded. They couldn’t imagine what Charles was thinking, and that took them aback. In fact they had never known what he was thinking, even on his best days, but they only realized this after he went into the yurt because that was such a surprising thing to do. Charles, everyone agreed, was a closed book. “Enigmatic,” Beth added, trying to be helpful. “He played his cards close to his chest,” Marek put in, and they all glared, because that was the wrong tone.

  4.

  Charles had seemed such a reliable, predictable person. He had never done anything surprising before except for having a stroke, though Rachel said that this didn’t count since he had been even more surprised than they were, and Lily said that it shouldn’t have surprised anybody who saw how he ate. They had missed the warning signs, and now they blamed themselves. They all agreed that they ought to have known something was wrong when he dropped the flag ceremony. Beth recalled seeing him alone in the yard listlessly throwing rocks at the chickens. Ronald remembered the morning he had found him in the hammock reading The Brothers Karamazov. Everyone agreed that this was not like the Charles they knew.

  5.

  The flag ceremony had been such a comfort to him after the stroke. Everything he did was predictable until he went into the yurt, and the ceremony had come off every day like clockwork, Charles out in the yard at sunrise with the bugle. Though nobody else was fond of the flag, which they all agreed stood for thing
s they could not approve of, they admired the way he had worked the rope with just his left arm and his teeth. Standing at the base of the pole, he had watched the flag unfurling in the morning sun. “There she blows,” he would say every time in the most chipper way imaginable. They were supposed to stand at attention, but they just glared and slouched or refused even to come out of the house. It was the flag ceremony that had turned them against Charles.

  6.

  With Charles in the yurt, life was easier for them all. It was a relief not to have him popping up when you wanted to be alone, making irrelevant comments while you were trying to think, insisting on games after supper, and saying, “Roger that,” when you asked him to take the trash out. It was only now that they realized how tired they were of his war stories. Weeks went by, and they didn’t talk about Charles as much as before. Sometimes when they were having lunch at the big table under the oak, someone might, in the midst of the revelry, glance over at the yurt, and that would remind everybody that he was crouching in the darkness there, and the conversation would flag while they adjusted. The idea that he was listening to their laughter frightened them a little. They slept with windows and doors locked, not to be surprised again. He was still in there when the police came. They pointed their guns at the yurt and Charles crawled out. His hair was full of dirt and leaves, and he wore an expression none of them could read.

  Thespa

  Sitting here I can see Thespa’s cup, the cup from which Thespa drank coffee. I would like to say that I see a smudge of lipstick on the rim, though Thespa was not wearing lipstick. If I were to get up from the chair and go sit on the sofa, I would be where she sat while she drank the coffee. There is still a slight indentation in the cushion where Thespa sat. She is slim, but she is a womanly slim, and her buttocks have made a larger indentation than mine would, I believe, were I to sit there, though I am taller than Thespa. When I kissed her, back when I did that, she would tilt her head up to bring her mouth against mine, because I am taller. There has been a time, during the worst of it, when I closed my eyes and imagined kissing Thespa. Sitting where Thespa sat, were I to do that, getting up from the leather chair in which I am sitting, have been sitting for hours, and going over to the sofa, I could find out if she has left a little coffee in her cup, verify what I know already even without getting up from my chair, that she has not finished her coffee, because Thespa never finishes anything. She leaves behind, as relics of her passages, crusts of sandwiches, half-read novels, curdled milk, fizzed-out cola, starving cats, unsigned checks, unkept promises, inchoate projects, and questions hanging in the air like a last whiff of perfume. Were I to go over and sit there, sit next to where she sat, and place my hand on the sofa beside me, in the indentation where she sat, I might imagine still feeling the warmth of Thespa, though it has been hours since she sat there, and the fabric would be harsh and cold, like the absence of Thespa, and I would lift the cup and drink the last swallow of her coffee, which would taste of her breath.

  By going over and sitting where Thespa sat, I would disturb a fly that is walking on the little piece of cake she has left on the plate next to her cup, a fragment of a small ingot-shaped lemon poppy-seed cake that I bought this morning at the bakery where I buy bread on Mondays and Thursdays. In the kitchen, conscious of Thespa waiting on the sofa to hear what I had to say, hands folded in her lap the way she always sits when she does not intend to listen, feeling her waiting as a kind of judgment upon me, as if only a fool would drag out this moment with coffee and cake, I sliced two small pieces from the cake and put them on matching white plates that I carried in with the two coffees on a lacquered wooden tray that is now on the floor next to the table on which the nearly empty cup and plate are sitting.

  It is a rattan table with a glass top. The trees on the hill outside the tall window are reflected upside down in the glass. There are clouds as well, puffy white clouds moving softly across the surface of the glass, as they move across the surface of the sky. They must be upside down as well, though that does not seem to matter. Had I looked at the tabletop earlier, I might have seen Thespa there, walking away under the trees, upside down as if she were walking on the ceiling. It has always been like that, Thespa walking away across the ceiling of my world, though I never thought of phrasing it that way until now.

  If I were to get up from the chair and go out the door and stand under the trees, I would be reflected upside down in the table as well. If someone were to come in while I was still standing there under the trees, a policeman, perhaps, summoned by neighbors, or the landlord wondering why the rent has not been paid, and sit where I am now sitting, he or she would see the empty cup and plate on the table, the lacquered tray on the floor, the small indentation in the sofa cushion, and a man upside down beneath the trees, weeping, but he (or she) would not know what to make of it, would not be able to supply the thoughts that belong to those things. Only Thespa can do that. If Thespa had come back while I was standing where she had stood, where she had paused a moment under the trees to look back at the house before turning again and walking briskly away, and had sat in the chair where I am sitting now, she would gather the objects, the cup, the plate, the lacquered tray, into her thoughts, the way she used to, in the evening, gather her book, her comb, her phone, her toothbrush, her shawl into her arms before climbing the stairs to bed.

  It is almost dark now. The coffee table, the cup, the saucer are dimly visible. The fly is not walking on the cake crumbs anymore, and it is not on the windowpane. If I got up and went over, I might find it floating in the sweet brown puddle Thespa has left at the bottom of her cup, and where the fly, its wings wet and sticky, unable to climb the slippery wall of the cup, swam as long as it could before drowning.

  I could also just leave the cup and the crumbs for other flies, for the maid who will come in two days and clean them up. She will come in and go directly to the kitchen, where she will take off her coat and drape it over one of the four chairs in there. She will go around the house gathering up the cups and glasses and carry them into the kitchen and sweep up the shattered glass in there. She will pick up the clothes Thespa has left scattered in the bedroom and bathroom and throw them in the hamper in the bathroom. She will do the dishes and vacuum. She will arrange the four chairs in the kitchen neatly at the four sides of the table before putting on her coat and leaving.

  Wallflower

  He had never learned to play anything, not a Jew’s harp, not a ukulele, he couldn’t carry even a simple tune, and the funny thing was, he didn’t know this at first. Every morning in second grade, after the teacher had called the roll, they stood in the aisles next to their desks, placed their hands over their hearts, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and after that they sang “God Bless America,” and he sang along with the others. He loved “God Bless America,” he belted it out, and it sounded good to him then. He danced as well, in junior high, when they started having dances, and he was a terrible dancer. He moved the wrong way at the wrong time, stepped on toes, or collided with his partner, and after a while he decided that he didn’t care for dancing. He would still get dressed up for parties, but once there he would hang out in the kitchen and talk with other boys. Sometimes he would stand by the dance floor and snap his fingers to the rhythm of a song, to show that he was having a good time, but he was often unsure—unsure of the rhythm and unsure that he was having a good time. A glance shot in his direction would fill him with anxiety, and he would push his hands deep into his pockets. Gradually he came to see that there was something wrong inside him, a failure of perception, a kind of blindness within him. His seemed to lack access to the vital and mysterious code that let others move effortlessly to music, and this lack, this blindness, made him incorrigibly gauche and awkward, and he was aware of that now, and he stopped going to dances and stopped singing in public unless he was drunk with friends. Later he wouldn’t sing even then, he would just sit quietly by, bobbing his head and grinning. He would have given ten years of his life to b
e able to play an instrument, he would have done that happily, to be able sit on his front porch and pick out a tune on a guitar. He wanted to be the guy in the old movies who sits at a piano, hands dancing over the keys, while attractive young people crowd around, adoring him. The thing was, the really tragic thing was, he wasn’t tone deaf. He was deeply moved by music. Brahms and Tchaikovsky brought him to tears, Mahler was so painful he sometimes couldn’t go on listening and had to get up and shut it off. The tragic thing was he didn’t know anybody who listened to that kind of music anymore, he had no one he could talk to about it. There had to be music inside him, if he had feelings like that, he was sure it was inside him, locked up in there, and he couldn’t understand why it would not come out. Sometimes he thought maybe that was because he didn’t have enough confidence, didn’t truly believe in himself. He had played baseball as a kid, he had loved baseball, but he wasn’t very good at it and they always stuck him in the outfield. If a fly ball came his way, he would say to himself, I’m gonna miss it, I know I’m gonna miss it, even as he was running toward it he would be saying that, he couldn’t help it, and then he actually would miss it. Sometimes he sang in the car if he was out on the highway but never in town where people in other cars might hear him. Now and then there was a song he knew on the radio and he would sing along with it. It didn’t sound so bad to him then, and he thought maybe that was because he was alone and not bothered by a lack of confidence. Same with girls. It was the eyes on him that made him feel so awkward. He couldn’t just go up to a girl and start talking to her at a party. The only time he managed to do this was at a costume party one New Year’s Eve, when he was dressed up as a bear. Talking to this pretty girl there, he forgot about the awkward person he was, he felt he was just this friendly, outgoing bear, and he could tell she really liked him. Concealed in the bear suit, he even danced with her, and his awkwardness seemed just part of his bear act. They met again later a couple of times, but it didn’t work out. He could see she was bored, and the harder he tried to be entertaining, the worse things got. He couldn’t get the bear personality back without the suit.