An Orphanage of Dreams Read online

  Ducks

  They sent the ducks down the line and I stamped them. They were not ducks of course, not even toy ducks. And stamping also, there was no stamping. Everyone called it “stamping ducks” and I went along. I try to get along with people generally and have learned from experience not to call something one thing when they are calling it another, even if that is not what it is. It’s just words. So I went along with the others and we all said they were ducks. It was easy work, even though I was thinking in the back of my mind that they weren’t really ducks. I stood across from Tony and we stamped them. Down the line other people were doing the same. Most of the ones that reached us had been stamped already, but we stamped them anyway. To fight off boredom we played games. Tony stamped mine and I stamped his. We competed to see who could stamp the hardest. Sometimes we let one go by and then ran after it and stamped it. It was my first day. “Simple,” the foreman said. “Here’s a duck” (it wasn’t a duck). He picked up a mallet and stamped it. “Now you do it,” he said. I watched Tony until I got the knack of it. “Look, it’s a duck,” he said to me, and he grabbed one by its “neck” and shook it in my face. He was convinced they didn’t suffer, or only suffered a little. Tony was a good sort, older than me, and years at the job had worn him down. “Another duck, another dollar,” he would say when he hung up his mallet at the end of the day, even though it was not a dollar and they weren’t ducks.

  Cigarettes

  My landlady stands in the doorway, one hand braced on the jamb, breathless from climbing the two flights of stairs to my room. She’s come up to bum a cigarette. It’s the same old story. Her doctor convinces her to kick the habit, scares the shit out of her, sends her home full of virtuous resolve. All she can talk about for the rest of the day is how she’s finally quit smoking, how this time she really means it. The next morning, stepping into the kitchen, the first thing I see is her coffee cup on the counter, a couple of soggy butts disintegrating in the saucer. “It’s not worth it,” she says. “Next time I decide to stop, you need to tell me it’s not worth it.” I know how she feels, so I refrain from wisecracks and just hand her one. She lights it, takes a long drag, and sighs. The smoke drifts from her mouth and nostrils. “Shit,” she says. I twist my chair around to face her, tip it back against the desk, and light my own. We smoke awhile, not talking. We are two-packs-a-day smokers, the landlady and me. Same for her brother, Clement, who has a separate apartment in the basement but spends most of his time upstairs in the kitchen or in the living room in front of the TV smoking. Clement rolls his own. It’s a house of smoke. One of us is always at it. Sometimes we are all three smoking at once, and the smoke gets thick as fog. There is a sticky film on all the windows. The landlady says there is no point wiping it off. There are not that many real smokers left. We are the last of a dying breed, Clement says. We stick together even though we don’t have much to say to each other. They don’t let you smoke in restaurants or bars anymore, so we never go out at night. Starting next year we can’t even smoke in the parks. I remember when you could smoke in movie theaters. Same with friends. Nobody gives parties where you can smoke anymore, and if you drop in for a chat, they want you to stand outside in the rain to smoke, or in the freezing cold. Thrift shops are full of ashtrays that nobody wants anymore. If people have ashtrays, it’s to hold paper clips and the like. So we spend a lot of time together—me, Clement, and the landlady, hip to hip on her little sofa, watching television and smoking. Of the three of us, Clement is the expert smoker. He can blow rings, one after the other. I can blow a ring now and then, but success is haphazard, and the rings are raggedy, not perfect Os like Clement’s. He can’t explain how he does it, says it’s just a knack. I’m not upset that I don’t have the knack. In my view blowing rings is not an important part of smoking. I told Clement he could piss off with his rings. I visited France when I was young, lived there for almost a year. France was a smoker’s paradise in those days, but I was so down-and-out I had to buy the cheapest cigarettes. They were called Parisiennes. They came in packages of four and were so loosely packed you had to hold them horizontal while you smoked or the tobacco would fall out. The bums, who were most of the customers for those cigarettes, called them P4s. I was in France for so long without cash that I was calling them P4s too. Nowadays the three of us spend most of our money on cigarettes. My daughter won’t come to my place. Tipped back in the chair, facing my landlady, whom I don’t particularly like, the two of us not exchanging a word, just smoking—that’s as good as it gets. My daughter says she can’t get the smell of cigarettes out of her clothes, even after several washings. I can’t make her understand.

  Sky

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherized upon a table.

  T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

  I stayed in the car in the driveway while she ran back to the house for a sweater. She ran, I noticed, heavily. Had she not actually been running—and she was running—I might have described her as plodding back to the house. She doesn’t run on her toes as she once did. She runs on the flats of her feet. She doesn’t, I reflected, run trippingly. Were she not five foot two, I might have said lumbered. It takes a certain avoirdupois to lumber, though, and while she has definitely put on a few in recent years, I think it is still O.K. to speak of her as smallish.

  A smallish, chubby woman pretty well sums her up, I guess. It is the description I would give to the police, anyway, if one day she went grocery shopping and never came home, along with the other bits they would want: medium-length blond hair, hazel eyes, and so forth. “Any distinguishing marks?” they might ask. “No,” I would say. “None.” Of course they would not be able to find her. Described in that way she could be practically anybody. Which is a thing I have begun to notice more often—I mean, how very ordinary she looks. I don’t notice it all the time, just at odd, apparently random moments. This morning in the kitchen, for example, while she was staring into the refrigerator in search of the half-and-half. Another sign, I suppose, of falling out of love.

  We are both approaching fifty—I think I need to say that. She has just turned forty-seven, while I am older by a smattering. She is Adele, my wife of many years, and I am Al. I feel uncomfortable saying it, saying, I mean, my wife of many years. We were on our way over to Paul and Linda’s for supper, already backing out of the driveway when she popped the car door open. “Sweater,” she blurted, and nearly fell out onto the pavement.

  Paul and Linda have a house at the beach, on an island connected to the mainland by a causeway. We go there for supper every other Wednesday. Dining with Paul and Linda is invariably alfresco during the season, just the four of us squaring around a patio table at one end of a long screened porch. That is a soothing place to sit. It is soothing even when they are out there with me, facing me across the table or, afterward, sitting next to me in their wicker rockers. In the lulls in conversation, I can sometimes pick up the dry hissing of the surf beyond the vast expanse of white sand. At other times the wind rushing up from the beach makes an attractive whistling in the screen that drowns out even the creaking of the rockers.

  The Plymouth was idling roughly, as usual, the engine speed climbing, then descending, then climbing again, desperately, like a dying person breathing, making the car wallow from side to side. I kept it alive with deft pats to the gas pedal. There was still no sign of Adele. Tiny needles were pricking my neck and shoulders. I distracted myself by randomly punching the buttons on the radio. The radio was broken, and the buttons did not make anything happen. And that was true generally. Of my life, I mean, it was generally true that the buttons did not make anything happen. Other than what usually happens, of course. Perhaps it would be better to say that there were no more buttons.

  When we dine at Paul and Linda’s, we usually take the same seats at the table. Mine has me staring down at the far end of their extensive porch. They have strung
a new rope hammock there. I am, proximally speaking, facing Paul, but if I lean just slightly to one side I can see around him and get a good view of most of the hammock. Lean to the other side, and there is the rest of it. On windy days I become almost hypnotized watching it sway back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to the point of losing track of what the others are saying, if they are saying anything. Sometimes, if Adele catches me doing this, she rests a hand on my knee, “rests it affectionately” is how it appears, and gives me a sharp pinch when no one is looking.

  We had set out earlier than usual this time, to be there before the full moon was up. But now, with Adele still looking for her sweater, it was anyone’s guess when we would get there. Linda and Adele and even Paul in his devious, backhanded way can still become excited by the moon, and Linda puts a lot of emotional stock in having us comfortably in place when it rises, so we can comment. I cannot for the life of me understand why this matters. At our age we have already seen so many full moons, along with others, gibbous, crescent, and so forth, and yet we continue to comment. She continues to comment, and they continue to comment. As for myself I don’t suppose I have said three words about the moon in as many years. I sit quietly by, I look down at my plate, I stir my food into interesting shapes, while they expound on the moon’s enormous size, its yellow hue, how it relates to the surrounding clouds, if there are any. After that they talk about real estate. Of the four I am the only one not connected in some way with real estate. I am not “in” it, as they say. I am “in” women’s sports clothing.

  I was sure she must have found her sweater by now. The night before, I had picked it up from the hall chair where she had flung it after work and had hung it in plain view in her closet. I remembered doing this because I had used the occasion to line up her shoes, which she leaves every which way on the closet floor. She must have continued on to the kitchen to check that I had unplugged the toaster oven and to refill (again!) Michelangelo’s tray. Though I never in fact forget to unplug the toaster oven, she has to check. Adele worries a lot about going up in flames. I don’t know what that comes from. We are the only people on the block without a gas grill, because she is afraid of burning down the house. So twice a week I sear our New York strip steaks in an iron frying pan, filling the kitchen with greasy smoke that has left a sticky brown film on the ceiling. A few days ago I noticed that it needed repainting, again! Or maybe she had found hairs on the sweater and was standing at the mirror picking them off. Michelangelo is half Persian.

  I switched the engine off, producing the usual weird silence. I glanced over at the yard next door. Simpson was standing there like an oaf, his meaty fist wrapped around a gigantic black fork, next to the shiny apparatus he bought last spring. It looked like a small locomotive. White smoke was oozing from beneath the lid. He waved the fork in my direction, a slow, vague gesture, as if he were conducting an orchestra in his sleep. It was an odd incommensurable moment like a bubble of frozen time, as if everything were planning to stay just like this forever, I sitting in the car, in the weird silence, watching Todd Simpson move his fork back and forth. But then, without a sound, the bubble popped, and I was conscious of how silly I must look sitting alone in my car in the driveway. I leaned across the seat as if searching for something in the glove compartment.

  I was leaning over, my head more or less sideways, when I noticed the sky. I had been staring absently out the windshield for the past five minutes or so without noticing anything particularly odd, so perhaps it was the fact of my eyes being now located one above the other that brought it into focus, the stereoscopy or whatever being slightly deranged in that position. It was not a particularly large piece of sky, compared to something like a desert or beach sky, probably not more than a couple of hundred square feet of it altogether, stretched taut as a trampoline between the two houses, our pale blue ranch and the white bungalow next to it. A few clouds of the cotton-puff variety were floating around in it (on it, actually, since the whole thing was quite flat and, as I said, taut), but not the parade of hippos usual at this time of year nor the long feathery smears from the whipped-cream dispenser we sometimes get when a cold front is coming through. In any case, the impression of oddness did not emanate from the clouds (the impression, I want to say, was quite emphatic on that point) but from the sky itself. I want to say, putting it now as precisely and matter-of-factly as I can, that the sky was extremely horizontal. I had the impression—put now, I admit, rather more breathlessly—that it was lying down.

  “Why are you sprawled across the seat like that?” Adele shouted through the window. She was trying to open the car door. I was still half reclining across the seat, one hand forgotten in the glove compartment, the other grasping the armrest of the door she was struggling to jerk open. “Let me in! Let me in!” I sat up and discovered that I was clutching a map of Maine. She plunked herself down in the passenger seat. She looked straight ahead and noisily expelled a large amount of air. I looked at the map of Maine. I began backing out of the driveway. Simpson waved good-bye with his fork. I waved back. I was holding the map. Adele had something in her lap. It looked like a big bunch of black cloth. I thought I recognized her black angora sweater. One arm of the sweater had escaped the main bunch and was dangling over her thigh. She was wearing spandex jeans, and I noticed how thick her thigh was. Thick and short. Linda has long muscled thighs. Linda is thirty-five and works out every day. Adele never works out. She is forty-seven.

  An hour later we turned off the coastal highway onto a county blacktop. We had entered open country, a pine-and-scrub-oak barren, billboards bigger than house trailers, house trailers on concrete-block pillars, metal garages, collapsing barns. It was the way I remembered.

  We had not spoken since leaving the house. Still clutching her bundle she stared absently at the road ahead.

  “Did you notice,” I said, “the sky is sleeping.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It has fallen asleep at last.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “To us?”

  “Yes.”

  “We will go to Paul and Linda’s and have a few drinks and watch the moon rise. You will get quite drunk and make a fool of yourself, and I will go to bed with Paul.”

  “Does it have to be that way?” I asked.

  “Well, it is hard to imagine it any other way.”

  She shifted uneasily in her seat, adjusting the bundle in her lap. It unfolded slightly. I caught sight of paws.

  “Michelangelo,” I said. “Why have you brought Michelangelo?”

  “From now on it is going to be just me and Michelangelo. I am tired of your lassitude, your phlegm, your quiet obsession with women’s clothes. I am sick of looking at interesting television shows while you sit with your nose in a garment-supply catalog. I feel nauseated when I come home from work and confront your head poking up from the wing chair and think, How like a mouse he is. Have you no spunk? No mettle? No gumption? I have brought Michelangelo because he has spunk pouring out of his ears. It’s going to be me and Michelangelo. And maybe Paul. And maybe Linda. And maybe some other people too, if we can find them.”

  This was what I had expected her to say. After all, for a long time it had been Michelangelo this and Michelangelo that.

  We drove on in silence. I said, “Our life together has been seized by lethargy, by ennui. We move like animals tangled in someone else’s dream. It is like drowning in thick syrup.”

  “Yes. I have noticed. I have felt it in the advertising jingles you send to the radio. They ooze thickly and don’t rhyme anymore.”

  “They never did rhyme.”

  “Perhaps. But they sounded like they rhymed. They were bouncy. It is many a long day since they bounced.”

  “A reflection of the times,” I said. “They reflect the times. The times are without bounce, you cannot have failed to notice that. We have entered a period of inelasticity and lethargy. Though we trick ourselves with delusions of false dribble, the universe is bounceless.”<
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  My words gave her pause. We drove through marshland with bulrushes higher than the car roof. The tires sang a familiar tune on the newly surfaced asphalt.

  She said, “Well. This is the end, I guess.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “This surely is the end. After you sleep with Paul, I will try to sleep with Linda. She will rebuff me cruelly with her wicked left, causing me to stagger drunkenly backward. There will be nothing left for me to do then but fall asleep on the rug in front of the television. Later you will leave Paul in the bedroom and come lie beside me while the television grows mysteriously louder. You will drag yourself over and try to turn it down but the knob will prove too much for you—”

  “Al,” she interrupted, “do you ever have the feeling that our lives are scripted?”

  I glanced over. She was staring at the sky again. “Al,” she said again. There was a new tension in her voice. “It’s not just asleep. It’s anesthetized!”

  I declined to be deflected. “I will drag myself over next to you,” I continued. “You will turn your face toward me. I will notice that the rug has left a pattern of little squares on your cheek. I will reach out and touch them. You will say, ‘Tell me a story about a rabbit.’”