Ellen has a secret but she doesn’t know it. Only Eddie knows her secret. He lies awake at night listening to her talk. In her sleep she dreams, and she talks her dreams.
At first it irritated him because it kept him up. It irritated him because it was the sound of her stress, too, the images of the restaurant seething up at night like the smoke on her clothes, in fragments and jarring words. It made him conscious of the small room, its dampness, its basement walls.
He would light a cigarette, which he isn’t allowed to do, and listen and cough and still she wouldn’t wake up. And as he listened he realized that it wasn’t just the sound of her stress, it wasn’t what he thought at all. Now he listens every night, and thinks, and sleeps when she is at work in the day.
She is telling stories in her sleep. They must be stories she is dreaming, but they don’t have the incoherence of dreams. They are real stories, stories he can follow. She narrates them in a voice that wavers, goes up and down, low and monotone and then suddenly squeaking, as if she is doing different characters. Sometimes she shouts or moans. Sometimes the stories have definite endings, and then she starts moving her body around as if looking for something, until she wakes with a jerk. Sometimes they just trail off.
They are strange, though; they have the unpredictability of dreams, and the metamorphoses and the juxtapositions. She has characters who seem to be from medieval fairy tales — the baker, the squire, the princess, the ruffian — and people from her life: Scottie the bartender, Mr Electrician, the Subwayman. There are policemen and office towers, and murders and tea parties and even wars — there is a feud between two groups called the Motmots and the Nipas; Eddie is not sure who or what they are. The princess discusses them in her garden, a garden which is like the real one outside the high window, the garden that belongs to the people upstairs.
It is amazing how they all link up somehow. They are like rock videos with stories.
Eddie imagines how they would be described if they were published. Someone would suggest drugs, of course: a hallucinatory Brothers Grimm for the modern age. Like Tom Wolfe on acid.
He laughs at this one. He thinks about this as he smokes and listens.
In the mornings she is groggy, distant. She makes coffee and reprimands him for smoking, because she can smell it. He asks her if she remembers her dreams, and she laughs and says no, she never can, she has always thought she doesn’t dream at all. She thinks it’s a hoax, dreaming, that other people just make theirs up. She puts on her waitressing shoes and tells him to go out and do something today, and he tells her he has a meeting with Rick about the recording studio they plan to open, if only they can get the financing. They have met about this before.
When Ellen comes home she is wet; it is raining. Instead of washing it off, the rain has trapped the cigarette smoke to her like adhesive. It is as if the rain itself is liquid smoke. Eddie is not home. She makes herself tea and turns on the television. She doesn’t know when she started doing this: she never watched television while she was at university, or even for years afterwards. For years, when she lived with a theatre troupe, and later, when she lived with a composer named Clarence and was taking dance and pottery classes, she did not have a television at all. Eddie brought the television when he moved in with her. And now, she thinks, she doesn’t read enough. She always thought that reading would help advance her creative career, when she was thinking all the time about what her career was. She still does, from time to time. Eddie enters, banging things and dropping things, and she says, “You’re home early.”
“So are you,” he says, bending over the big box he has dropped. The cardboard leaves have popped open.
“What is that?”
“Oh, it’s a …” He stops talking to fumble with the box, take his coat off; he doesn’t remember starting sentences sometimes. “In the box.”
“Oh, it’s a …” The coat hook comes off the coat rack. “Fucking thing. I hate this fucking thing so much. I’m going to rip the whole fucking thing from —”
Ellen has walked to the box, opened it; there is some kind of machine inside, an old tape recorder with the two big reels. “What’s this?”
“Oh, it’s a reel-to-reel Rick had. I’m borrowing it for a while.”
“Why?”
“Ah. I’m going to try to …” He is trying to plug the dowel back into the hole in the coat rack. “Maybe a little glue would hold it for a while.”
She turns back to the television, sits on the sofa.
“You know,” he says, as if irritated that she is no longer paying attention. “For listening to demos.”
“Whose demos?”
“You know. That people send us. You know. For the record label.”
“Oh.”
“You know. We’re really trying to get started on this. It’s for real.”
“Well that’s great. That’s good.” She thinks about this for a second. He has padded into the kitchenette in his socks. “How will people know, though?”
“Know what?”
“Well, to send you demos. How will they know you’re a recording company?”
Eddie pauses, and she knows the pause is a tense one. “Listen,” he says finally. “I know it’s very easy to make fun when someone is just starting out. And that’s all this is. It’s a start. But I’m pretty serious about it.”
“I’m sorry.” She stands, walks over to him. “I am. I know you are.”
“And so is Rick.”
“I know he is. I’m sorry.” She puts her hands on his shoulders. She does feel guilty.
“You have to start somewhere, you know.”
She hugs him and he stiffens. “Listen, I’m very proud of you, starting this. It’s very brave. I couldn’t —”
“We’re putting the word out, you know? Word will spread around that we’re listening to stuff, and then the stuff will start coming in.”
“That’s terrific.”
She makes tea and they both sit in front of the TV, but she is sad as she steps over the box again, the dusty tape recorder which is obviously old. It belongs in someone’s rec room. Now they are a home recording studio. Good for Eddie. At least he is more innocent than she is.
He is yawning unstoppably. “Haven’t been getting enough sleep,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I wish you would go to see Mister Koo. He gave me some stuff for my ankle that —”
But Eddie has already lumbered to the bed for a nap. He puts the tape recorder on the bedside table, and Ellen doesn’t say anything, even though it covers the whole top and is probably going to fall off, and even if it doesn’t she knows it is going to just sit there forever.
She goes to sleep easily that night, even though he wakes her a couple of times, clicking and fussing with his new machine.
The demo tapes are piling up on the desk by the phone, a desk they were supposed to share but which has become Eddie’s desk. Ellen isn’t sure where the tapes are coming from, or where he quickly files them away to, and she is not keen on the tiny apartment becoming more filled with junk, but she is pleased that he is doing something and says nothing about it. He doesn’t seem to want to talk about it, either; he won’t say if any of the tapes are any good. She takes this as a good sign too, because he has talked too much about all his other projects since the band dissolved, and they have never come to anything.
He is still not sleeping at night, and takes long naps in the day, sometimes even in the mornings. He has bought a second-hand typewriter and is sometimes typing on it when she comes home from work, but he always rips the paper out and stuffs it in a file and won’t show her what he’s doing. Sometimes he types at night, when she is sleeping. She has learned to find the clacking of the keys soothing; it leads her like the rhythmic sound of train wheels into her dreamless sleep where the restaurant doesn’t bother her.
One day she finds him reading a magazine called Writers’ Market.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Just curious.”
“Are you writing stories?”
“Sort of,” he says. “Yeah.”
“Eddie,” she says, sitting beside him. “You know, I thought you were. And I don’t know why you’re so shy about it. I think that’s wonderful. I really do. You never told me you had any interest in writing.” Something about this discovery makes her want to cry.
Eddie is unusually unwilling to discuss his new project. This surprises her, but she has known many creative people and knows that it is sometimes this way, that you can’t discuss something creative while you are working on it, and so she leaves it alone. Still, it is unlike Eddie. It is all so unlike Eddie. Maybe this is why he is so shy about it: he is embarrassed to be unlike himself.
In the next weeks she tries to be as supportive as she can about it. She buys him literary quarterlies and typing paper. He enjoys this attention, and he reads the magazines closely. It’s the first time she’s seen him read anything for longer than ten minutes. He seems genuinely interested. Still, he can’t type when she’s around. He seems to have lost interest in the record label, which is fine with her. She thinks this is more realistic. It makes her excited and fragile at the same time; she’s not sure why.
One day she comes home early and Eddie is not there. Perhaps he is out with Rick. She takes off her coat as slowly as she can, forces herself to put on the kettle before she goes to his desk. A page is in the typewriter; more are scattered around. It is a story, a sort of fantastic one. It is hard to read because Eddie’s typing is so bad; half of each page is misspelled and crossed out. It is mostly description, of a city of sparkling towers, and a little girl who sells herbal tea in a sort of market. Perhaps it is science fiction. She is getting interested in this little girl, who seems familiar to her, as if Eddie has based her on a character she has already read, and half aware of a stomachache she is getting, a thickening in her neck like nausea, when Eddie crashes in, dropping things and banging things, and before she has moved fully away from the desk he says, “Hey.” He strides to the desk and rips the sheet out of the typewriter.
“I couldn’t help it,” she says. “It was just sitting there. You shouldn’t leave it out if —”
“You’re home early.” He is gathering up papers, straightening them in a folder. He hasn’t taken his coat off.
“Sorry. I didn’t read much. What I did read I thought was marvellous. It’s wonderful. You should send them out.” She sits on the sofa because she is still reeling from a sick feeling, as if her insides were hollowing out and going cold. Her head begins to pound.
“I don’t know why you’re so hostile about it. We all have …” She closes her eyes against her headache. “I wish more people would realize that they have stories to tell. I think we all …” She can’t go on because her throat is lumpy, as if she is going to cry. She gets up. She doesn’t know why she is feeling so crazy these days. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t believe what she’s telling Eddie; she doesn’t believe it herself.
“I was going to go out and get us falafel for dinner.” She has to get out and cry in the street so he won’t see her. If she cries for no reason like this he gets upset.
After dinner they watch TV and she is calmer, although she is thinking about his story. Her desire to read more about the little girl in the marketplace is physical; she can’t keep still. She hasn’t brought it up because she knows he won’t let her.
She is still thinking about it when they go to bed. She thinks that if she can stay awake until he falls asleep then she can creep to the desk and read the rest without waking him. So they both lie awake. She tries talking. “Is it a novel or short stories?” she says. “You can at least tell me that.”
“Sort of short stories,” he says. “Aren’t you sleepy?”
“No. Are you?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Sorry. I’ll shut up then. Goodnight.”
A minute later she says, “What do you mean, sort of?”
“What?”
“Sort of short stories. What does that mean?”
He sighs dramatically. “They’re kind of related.”
“They’re linked.”
“Oh. Cool. That’s interesting. It’s a good gimmick. Are you thinking about who you’re going to send them to?”
He pauses a long time before answering quietly, “Yes.”
“Good,” she says, equally quietly. “Then let’s do it. I’ll help you. I’ll send out the letters, do the typing, whatever. I’m good at that. I did a lot of temping.”
He thinks about this in silence and then says, “Don’t you have to be up early?”
She says, “Yeah. Sorry. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
She listens to him breathing and shifting around. Her thoughts are coming more confusedly now. She has pictures of a city with glittering towers, and then suddenly feels nausea. She wants to sleep. She knows she has to stay awake, outlast him. Now he is fidgeting with his tape recorder again, clicking buttons. “Put that thing away,” she murmurs. “You’re not going to do any work with it now.”
“No,” he whispers. “I didn’t mean to keep you up. Go to sleep.”
“You go to sleep.”
“Shh.” He puts the machine back on the bedside table and is quiet.
Ellen waits, struggling against the images that move. When she feels herself sinking, she moves her body.
Finally she hears his breathing slow and thicken. His body has gone slack. She touches the back of his neck and he does not move. Carefully, she slips out of the bed. She shakes off sleep. She puts on her housecoat and steps into the living room in the darkness, her hands stretched out in front of her like radar. She trips on magazines and still he does not wake.
She stands at his desk and switches on the tin lamp. She opens drawers until she finds the folder. She opens it to the description of the city, the little girl.
Ellen squints against the appalling typing. She is not surprised at this. Nor is she surprised by the style, which is colloquial; it is as if Eddie is telling the story to someone in a bar. She is pleased by this: at least he is not trying anything too literary. And she is impressed by how natural it sounds. (It was Clarence who told her about colloquial speech, and that it was not easy to make things sound colloquial.) It is perhaps not terribly original. She can’t shake the feeling of cliché, as if she has read similar stories. Although she knows she hasn’t.
She is hardly aware that her stomachache has returned. She notices it as she reads about a princess, high in an office tower, who is looking out over the city. The princess’s name is Eloise. As she reads this name, the nausea tugs at her so suddenly she has to sit down. Eloise sounds irritatingly derivative to her; she has read it in another story somewhere.
This upsets her so much she feels weepy again, and then crazy and stupid again. She checked her pills early in the day and found she was almost at the end of her cycle, which would explain it. She is craving a cigarette, which is particularly strange since she quit three years ago, and it rarely takes her like this any more. Perhaps she is just envious of Eddie, his writing.
She tried writing, in university, in a creative writing class, but she found the mutual criticism sessions stressful; no one encouraged her to continue.
She can’t read any more, and moves to the sofa where she curls into a ball and lets herself cry a little. She feels better after this, and sleepy. She can’t move.
Eddie wakes up. He has been dreaming of bands, loud rehearsals with amps that keep cutting out. He wakes with a jerk and says, “Shit,” out loud, because he remembers that he was trying to stay awake, that he never set up the reel-to-reel, and then he realizes that Ellen is not in bed. He sits up and he hears her talking from the living room.
He stands and walks into the living room the same way she did, with his hands as paths through the darkness. He finds her asleep on the couch and talking. She is moving as she talks, arching her back and kicking her bare feet. Her fists are clenched. Her nightdress has risen around her waist; her pubic hair looks stark and ugly. He does not touch her. He sits and listens.
It is violent, this story. There is rain and sleet, and Princess Eloise has turned mean; she is shouting at someone in a caustic and condescending way, a servant or maid. Eddie leans close to listen for the maid’s name; it keeps getting slurred.
Eddie goes to his desk, where the lamp is still on. His blotchy pages are scattered all over. Some are thrown on the floor.
He sorts them, puts them back in the file. He goes to Ellen and picks her up. He carries her back to bed. She does not wake. He does not tape her tonight.
They say nothing at breakfast. Ellen looks grey; her face sags. Eddie is thinking that she should wash her hair more often and she says, “Eddie, I’m sorry I read your story.” She is speaking with effort, as if she is still tired. “But I’m not sorry. I’ve been thinking about it all the time. And I think it’s good. I think it’s really good.”
Eddie says nothing.
“And I want to help you. I’m going to get you published.”
Eddie is chewing on the inside of his cheek and frowning. “I don’t know —”
“Why don’t you want me to help you?”
Eddie says slowly, “I don’t know if you want to help me publish these stories.”
“Why not? Because you think I’m jealous?”
“No.” He shakes his head firmly. “No.”
“Then why?”
He takes a long time before replying, “I don’t know.”
“Well that’s not good enough.” She stands and collects their cups decisively.
Over the next weeks she reads all his stories in the evenings, despite the sick feeling she has, the flu or whatever it is she has picked up. Eddie watches TV, frowning. She retypes them all and corrects the spelling. She also suggests titles, as Eddie says he is no good at titles. She smiles at this, because she finds it very easy to choose a title for each story. The title just comes to her.
Sometimes she fixes the grammar, but she does not change the style, rarely dares change a word unless it is incorrectly spelled. She is very respectful of artists. She types the cover letters and chooses the magazines and sends them out.
Four weeks later, a small quarterly called Coelacanth Apartments sends him an eager letter. Ellen has researched this journal carefully: it is run by students at the left-wing university in the suburbs, and it has a reputation for violent sex stories. They would like to publish Eddie’s story “The Metal Snake,” and they will pay him one hundred dollars for it. The magazine will appear in three months. “The Metal Snake” was the very first story she sent out.
Eddie is less excited about this than he should be, Ellen thinks. They go out for Thai food and he seems distracted and worried and not overjoyed as she would be. Perhaps he finds the possibility of rejection stressful; she knows she would. She can’t eat much because of her stomach problem. Perhaps she is stressed, too.
So she soothes him and sends out more stories.
Three more are quickly accepted, one by a conservative international quarterly called Quod Libet. Ellen has to explain to him how significant this is. They agonize together over the wording of the “bio note” which will appear at the back of the journal. Eddie is insistent that the name of his first band, the Shards, be mentioned, as well as the fact that their video once appeared on MTV. He is starting to be impressed by himself.
Random, the art magazine, picks up one, and Haze picks up another. These are good because they are both monthlies, and they pay much more than the quarterlies. Eddie buys himself a secondhand computer and a printer with the first cheque; a navy cashmere sports jacket with the second. Ellen loves the jacket; she almost cries just touching it.
By the time they appear in print, Eddie has a new stack of stories to retype. Ellen is tired, spending all her time at the restaurant or at home in front of the computer. A literary agent who read the story in Coelacanth calls, asking for Eddie. She wants to know if he has enough stories for a book, as she’s on her way to a publishing trade fair in Berlin. Eddie hands the phone to Ellen, who takes down the address.
She has taken up smoking. She doesn’t know why, or even when exactly it started again. She is proud of Eddie, she knows she is; still his success is somehow stressful. Perhaps it is the hours she is working. She has trouble rising from the blackness in the mornings, and when she does she still feels tired. She has been drinking Mister Koo’s bitter tea for her stomach problem, but she has decided to see a Western doctor as well; she won’t admit this to her friend Julie, who put her on to Mister Koo. She is eating less and losing weight.
Eddie’s agent Vanna is doing more of her work for her. Vanna sells a book of his stories to Gloosecap House, a good publisher, not too commercial but not too small, a serious one. Eddie wants to call the collection Dreams, but Vanna thinks this is a little fey and obvious; she suggests The Crystal Age, after one of the stories called “The Crystal Garden.” Ellen thinks that Dreams is a perfect title, and if anything The Crystal Age is more fey, but she can’t explain this clearly enough to Vanna.
Vanna is good: she makes sure everybody hears about the deal, and it is reported on before the book is even out, in Reams and Reams, the publishing industry magazine.
It is only when the monthly city magazine, Edge, hears about this book that Eddie becomes actually famous. A young editor at Edge named Julian read “The Crystal Garden” in Quod Libet and loved it. When he reads that Eddie has a book deal, he knows that he must make it clear that he was on to this guy before everyone else was. The editor bets a lot on Eddie, in a kind of pre-emptive strike: he convinces the editor-in-chief of Eddie’s imminent celebrity, of Eddie’s appeal to their young urban readers, which there are never enough of; he speaks of gritty fantasy and magic realism for North America, of street-level literature and folklore in a technological age. Nobody is doing serialized fiction any more; why not? It gets readers hooked and encourages subscriptions. The young editor tells the story of the crowds lining the docks in nineteenth-century America, waiting for the arrival of the ships bearing Dickens’s next chapter. Why not?
The editor-in-chief is intimidated by any talk of cybervision and young people, and gives his assent. The young editor calls Vanna and offers Eddie a serial. A story every month, with recurring characters in each, like a kind of soap opera.
Eddie is finally excited; he speaks with more confidence about his writing. He accepts the offer with the ease of a craftsman who expects business; in his dealings with Edge he is majestically cool. Ellen is less excited: it just means more typing for her. Still, the money is good. The thought occurs to her that eventually this hobby of Eddie’s may permit her to leave the restaurant.
She is feeling so sick these days that she sometimes asks Julie to take a shift or two for her. She has had blood tests and ultrasounds and barium swallows that all returned normal. She is sitting at home one day in her housecoat, smoking, and she turns on the TV because she knows Eddie is being interviewed that afternoon on a daytime talk show.
Eddie is slouched in his chair, wearing his navy cashmere jacket. He has cut his hair short, at her insistence, and he looks handsome. The host of the show is a woman in her forties; she is bubbling all over him. He is having a hard time answering her questions: he pauses for long seconds before answering, and then comes out with some wisecrack about how he doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even know why he is there. He is grinning, so it is obviously a joke; the host finds it charming. She keeps coming back to the idea of “working-class imagination,” as that is the role Eddie has been happy with in his previous interviews.
He is not really of working-class origin, Ellen knows, but he has never been very good with language, and it works out to the same thing. It is an easy way of explaining it. She has stopped wondering about where Eddie comes up with his fantastic ideas; Eddie doesn’t seem to know, and she knows it often works that way. The ideas just come to you; that is Eddie’s gift.
The host is asking him about Princess Eloise — she just loves this character. Every time Ellen hears the name Eloise, she feels another wriggle of nausea. She lights another cigarette.
“The princess,” Eddie is saying with much concentration, “is in charge of her own destiny.”
Ellen stands up, stumbling forward, and runs to the bathroom. She falls to her knees and vomits into the toilet repeatedly. Then she sits on the floor, hugging her knees and shivering.
Eddie comes home to find her in bed, pale. She tells him she was sick. He makes her eat some soup. She falls asleep early.
Soon she is dreaming and talking. He sits beside her on the bed and listens but does not tape her because the narrative is too violent and incoherent; there is sex and swearing. Ellen sweats and writhes. The princess is being shrewish again. Now she is ugly, too: she has cut all her hair off. She is mocking someone again, swearing and threatening. This time Eddie can hear the name clearly. It is the name of a new character in the stories. The princess is shouting at someone called Ellen.
Eddie stands up and lights himself a cigarette. He sits on the sofa in darkness. He knows he has to think hard about this. He has been putting it off but he knows he has to do it. He meant to tell Ellen at the beginning but then it got out of hand. It would be hard to explain now. But he can’t stand to see her sick. It is spooking him, he thinks, I am spooked. He thinks that when he first started this he wanted Ellen to be the star. But he knew — he had a hunch — that she wouldn’t be able to do it if she knew what she was doing. You can’t dream consciously, he knows that. What was he supposed to do, say okay, now dream, go? He knows that wouldn’t have worked. Ellen isn’t good at pressure.
He was going to tell her once it got going, show her how much talent she had locked up inside her. He doesn’t know how it got so out of hand. It was never meant to make her sick. It was never meant to ruin her life. He wants everything to go back to how it was before, before he had to do all these interviews. The interviews are freaking him out, too. He doesn’t know what to say, and they seem to love it. It freaks him out that Ellen is watching him at home; he knows it bothers her and she doesn’t know why.
Ellen’s voice is humming in the background. Now she is imitating a police siren. Eddie grits his teeth. He decides he needs some time to think about this, some time alone. He decides to take the next day off; he won’t transcribe tapes, even though Ellen will be out of the apartment. He needs to get back to the way things were. He’ll go find Rick tomorrow, maybe spend some time with him at Helium the way he used to. He needs to think this out.
Ellen utters a little shriek, and he jumps. Boy, he thinks. I am spooked.
In the morning Ellen is still feeling sick. She calls Julie and convinces her to take her shift. She is so filled with love and gratitude to Julie for taking her shift that she almost cries. Julie is always like this. Ellen wishes she were more like Julie.
Eddie seems sad, too. He announces he needs a break, says he’s not going to work today. He says he’s going to go find Rick, talk about some new demo tapes he has. Ellen doesn’t question this. She’s too tired to wonder about it. She thinks Eddie probably just doesn’t want to spend the day cooped up with her in the apartment, and she doesn’t blame him. She knows she is being a drag these days.
She watches TV for most of the morning and smokes uncontrollably, although she knows it makes her sicker. She realizes she is in a rut, something bad is happening to her. She should get help, snap out of it.
She sits up and stubs out her cigarette and says, “Snap out of it.”
She looks around the apartment and realizes it is filthy. It is covered with papers and magazines. She has not noticed this for weeks.
She switches off the TV and stands. If she gets dressed and cleans up, it will be a start. She dresses painfully; the nausea has turned into something like cramps.
She begins stacking papers and folding clothes. It makes her feel a little better. She hauls out the vacuum cleaner and sucks up runways of dust. She is imposing order, she thinks.
She comes to Eddie’s desk and hesitates. It is a disaster, as usual; it’s just a big recycling bin. She can’t touch it, of course; she knows this. But she knows that he won’t notice if she moves the old Coke can and the dirty cereal bowl and the rag that could be a sock. She can’t help it. The more she moves, the more junk she finds — old Lego pieces, things that he couldn’t possibly need — and the more she wants to clean.
She stacks papers into files. There is no room on the desk for them, so she opens a drawer. It is full of paper. She opens another drawer and finds the old reel-to-reel tape recorder in it. She had thought this was in the garage. She didn’t know he still used it. In another drawer are the stacks of tapes.
She knows that this is dangerous.
She pulls out the tape recorder and one of the tapes, at random. The tapes all have labels on them now: dates. Some of the dates are quite recent.
It takes her a few minutes to figure out how to thread the tape, partly because it is complicated and partly because her fingers shake from all the cigarettes.
She clicks the rotary dial to Play and she hears hiss and banging, then a soft voice. As soon as she hears the voice she knows the story it is telling. It is not a story she has typed yet, but she knows it, she can tell the rest of it.
She stops the machine after two minutes.
She knows her own voice.
She sits in silence for a long time. Her stomach is calm. Her eyes are wide open. She stares at the wall. She realizes now that she has, in fact, understood all along.
She thinks of all the stories she has typed, tries to remember them in order. She thinks of all of Eddie’s incoherent explanations. How she has always known what was going to happen next. She has always known.
She sits for most of the afternoon, almost without blinking. Eddie’s stories are hers. She does not even smoke.
She doesn’t know what to do about it. The thought of confronting Eddie exhausts her. She doesn’t know what good it would do. For a while she considers pretending she has not understood, going on as before. Eddie is better at interviews than she would be, anyway.
When she is hungry she gets up and calls Julie at work. She is not crying; she is very calm and clear. Julie says she’s off in an hour and will call her back.
This doesn’t help. Ellen knows what Julie will advise: to confront him, sue the bastard, take your stories back. But Ellen is not good at fights. She has to think about it for a while. It always takes her a while to muster anger when she has been hurt. It is a different phase. She has to hide first.
She feels tired and lies down but can’t sleep. After an hour she begins to feel it, the anger: it is like a prickling in her limbs. She can’t lie still.
She gets up and calls a locksmith. She is going to change the locks before Eddie comes home. At least she can think about it alone.
The lawyer tells her it’s a difficult case. Eddie did in fact type the stories out; Ellen had never made an effort to do so. And she can’t prove that her voice on the tapes is not just her reading out Eddie’s stories, should Eddie choose to deny everything. The lawyer says he will take her case, but she should be aware that she has a fight on her hands.
“Tell me about it,” says Ellen. “I’m having a fight on my hands just getting legal aid. There’s a waiting list, did you know? It was a fight just to get the forms.”
“Ah,” says the lawyer. He sits back and looks out the window. “Yes, I know.”
Ellen sits with a pen and a pad of paper. Eddie took the computer when he moved his stuff out. She could never write at a computer anyway. She writes down the names of the characters she remembers. She stares up to the little window above the fridge, the only one in this end of the apartment. It is level with the ground, the asphalt of the driveway that runs down the side of the house. She sees snowboots passing. She tries to concentrate. She has a few pictures in her head, but she doesn’t know if they are from reading Eddie’s stories or if they are memories of dreams. She still thinks of them as Eddie’s stories.
Julie has relented on the lawsuit, allowed her to give up. Ellen was never very big on revenge. Julie counselled her to keep a pad of paper and a pen by her bed, to write down her dreams the moment she wakes; it is a well-known method.
Ellen wakes from the blackness and remembers nothing. She picks up the pad and doodles.
She calls Eddie at Rick’s, where he is staying, and asks for the reel-to-reel. He does not argue or ask why she needs it. Eddie has been very quiet since he stopped publishing. He leaves the tape recorder and some blank tape in between her front doors; he does not ring the bell.
She is nervous the first night she tries it. She wears a flannel nightdress, drinks chamomile tea before bed. She props the microphone on a book, on Eddie’s empty pillow. She wonders how he used to do it. She threads a tape that should last three hours, sets it to record, closes her eyes.
The tape machine hisses. Something grinds as the wheels turn. She opens her eyes and looks at the square of artificial light in the window up by the ceiling. She knows she will not sleep for hours, and so she turns the machine off.
She does not sleep for hours. She tries not to move, as if lying in wait for the images. She dozes off from time to time, and when she wakes with a start she reaches over and switches the machine on again. Then she can hear it listening to her.
She wakes in the morning in silence. The machine is off. She remembers fragments of dreams, being late and lost in the labyrinthine and crowded passages of an ocean liner which is bound for the wrong destination. This agitates her, as she never remembers her dreams. She gets up, makes coffee, trying to calm herself before listening to the tape.
When she finally sits and rewinds it, her heart is pounding. She listens to the whole thing: it is mostly silent, except for a few moments of speech which makes no sense. It is gibberish, random phrases, just like everyone else’s sleep-talking. She listens to the very end but hears nothing coherent.
She tells herself she shouldn’t be upset. Once she gets into the routine of it she will relax enough to dream properly. She does some yoga to calm down. She cries anyway.
Two weeks pass and she has given up on the tape. She works as many shifts as she can without collapsing, and spends the rest of the time in the apartment. She can’t sleep. She knows she is sleeping a little every night, but it is not restful sleep. She can’t dream. The tape has recorded nothing. She has had so little sleep that she can’t concentrate. She is watching TV and smoking too much. Julie has told her frankly she is worried about her. Ellen has stopped answering the phone because she is sick of Julie’s efforts to get her to go out, to the Y or to the Gelateria, to go rollerblading with her. Ellen can only see all this as idiotic. She is crying too much to go out anyway.
She has tried putting on the Wavescape CD Julie lent her, and extra-relaxing tea from Mister Koo and hot milk before bed, even though she normally avoids dairy. She wishes she liked alcohol, so she could drink herself into a stupor every night. She has tried buying a bottle of whisky but she could only drink two small glasses before feeling sick. And that night was particularly bad; she didn’t even doze.
She feels she has tried everything. She has considered calling Eddie and asking him to come back.
She does not need to consider this for long, because he comes back uninvited. He just knocks at the door one afternoon. He must have been asking Julie about her, because he knows that she would normally be at work at this time. She lets him in, in silence; she wants to explain to him that she is too tired to express surprise, but she doesn’t even do that.
He tries to hug her and she lets him. She feels sad to smell his cologne; it is fairly recent, this cologne thing, and besides, she bought it for him. He wears a soft leather coat and dark wool trousers, leather boots that look Italian. He’s carrying a laptop computer in a leather case. She says, “You look great.”
“So do you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Can I sit down?”
She shrugs, and they both sit down.
“You look tired,” he says softly. He is leaning forward and looking at her with big earnest eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Thank you for asking,” she says, with sudden tears in her eyes. She doesn’t know whether to scream at him or curl up in his lap.
“How is it going?” he says. “Are you — are you doing your own —”
“No. I can’t sleep.”
“Oh.” There is a silence. “I’m sorry.”
She laughs a little.
“I’m sorry for everything. I mean it.”
“Thank you. It doesn’t matter.”
“Ellen, you look terrible. Is there anything I can —”
“So what are you up to?” She lights a cigarette.
He opens his hands, palms upwards, raises his eyebrows, as if to say where do I start? Indeed, there is too much for him to describe. He is turning down all the requests for new stories, but he has stayed in publishing; he has found that the business agrees with him. He first got involved with the student magazine, Coelacanth, as a business manager. Now he is overseeing their online magazine, and others have approached him to do the same. He is hoping to launch an on-line magazine of his own, more like a sort of shopping catalogue. He has found you can make money at it, that he is good at it. He spreads his hands along the back of the sofa as he speaks, opening his arms wide as if to welcome the world to his breast.
Ellen is glad, honestly glad for him. She says, “That’s great. That’s terrific. It’s so much better for you than …”
“Yeah. I guess.”
She is silent for a second. “Do you miss it at all? Being a …”
“A writer?” He smiles.
“Yes.”
He shrugs. “Yes. Of course I do. I was famous. It was fun. I miss it.”
She nods. Her eyes close. “Eddie. I’m so tired.”
He moves closer to her, puts his arm around her. “I know. I know you are. I want to help.”
She sighs. “Thanks.”
“Ellen. Please. Let me. Let me help you. You need sleep.”
“I know I need sleep.”
“Come here.” He pulls her to him and she does not resist. His shoulder is soft and leather-smelling. He strokes her hair. “Come on. Let me put you to bed.”
She does not resist as he leads her to the bed, lifts her arms above her head to pull off her sweatshirt. He undresses her gently. She is suddenly sleepy. He hands her her flannel nightdress.
She climbs into bed and pulls the duvet up to her chin and whimpers, “Eddie, this is weird. It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
He sits on the edge of the bed and says, “Shhh. You need sleep.”
“I can’t. I can’t sleep.”
“I’ll help you.” He is unzipping the case around his laptop computer.
“What are you doing?” Her eyes are closing. The bed is warm. The duvet is heavy on her.
“Shhh.”
She hears the beep and whirring as the computer powers up. Eddie’s hand is stroking her hair and she feels sleepier than she has all week. She hears the clack of keys. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to do some typing. You go to sleep.”
“No.” The room is moving around her. She sees pictures of the ocean liner, the glittering city, Princess Eloise. Princess Eloise’s face is wounded, or in shock. “No,” she says.
“It’s okay.” His voice is distant.
Ellen may have replied to this, but she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if she is talking or not.
“It’s okay,” comes the voice, over the clicking keys. The keys are the sound of rain or travel. They are all she can hear. She can see the clicks and hear them. They are black and velvet. They are all around her, enveloping her like water, and she is sinking beneath it.