5

He was awake and it was still dark.

He had just had the nightmare, the old dream he had hoped was buried forever.

This is just perfect, he thought. The one night he really needed to have a good sleep. It was almost enough to make him wish for the old Seconal and tequila nightcaps he used to gulp. Today was going to be impossible. Asquith was coming. Bell was coming. And Scamp was coming—he had nearly forgotten that. They were coming to shoot footage for a television special.

He sat up, sweating.

Maria was beside him in the darkness, still asleep, but she, too, stirred. She whispered without waking, and he could not hear what she was saying. She tossed, and spoke again. She was warning someone, or begging him. He made out a single word: no.

Then he could hear a phrase, a sub-vocalized prayer. “Don’t hurt me.”

Christ—who would want to hurt such a lovely woman? He knew so little about this bride of a few months. Who had caused her to suffer in the past? Whoever it was, he would like to kill him. He himself needed Maria as he needed oxygen.

His own boyhood had been so ordinary. So sunlit and logical, the newspaper route and the howling, spitting mating of cats under the bedroom window. A loving but distant father, a smart and secretive brother: a childhood. But hadn’t people been kind, really? The neighbors had always said good morning, out spraying dog dirt and leathered toad skins down their concrete driveways. His childhood had been safe and full of common mysteries, the run-over cat, the Kentucky Blue Wonders lifting the white, bare bean husk into the sun at the head of each sprout, a helmet, a trophy.

One very frightening thing had happened: a man had died on the front lawn. He had been watering his lawn when he turned blue, impossible, perfect blue, and collapsed. Hamilton, five years old and on his way from the bus stop, had watched as the Cadillac ambulance sirened its way up the street. The sheets of the stretcher had been so white in the sunlight, so crisp and neat. Even as a grown man Speke had suffered nightmares of this blue man turning his head to look right at him, and then slowly, jerkily, trying to get up to walk toward where he stood.

The effort was what always ended the nightmare. The blue man never actually climbed to his feet. It seemed that Speke’s sense of what was real and what was impossible counseled even his dream life, an invisible editor. One of his therapists had been charmed by the phrase “reality principle,” and had praised him for knowing exactly what was real. “That’s rare,” the therapist had beamed, “in imaginative people like yourself.” Asquith had always kidded him about the “blue man dreams,” and confessed that he himself never dreamed at all.

The memory of the dream was vivid, but it had that quicksilver quality that made it something impossible to cup and hold in the consciousness. He remembered the gleaming brass nozzle clearly, one of those nozzles that adjusted to make a fine aura of spray or a tight, hard lance of water. The dream had a sour quality, a cast of light that made him wince.

He did not want to move.

No, don’t get up yet, he told himself. Stay here with Maria, staring into the almost perfect dark. At least you can hear her breathing—that’s some solace.

Why of all the days under the sun was Asquith coming today?

It was as though the man had thought: what day would be the worst day for me to slither from my grave? And somehow, using some sense of timing only such madmen must have, Asquith had chosen the very worst day, and had managed to deceive him to the point that Speke had not talked him into a day a week from now, or a distant city a month away.

He rested his hand on her hip. Her slip of a figure delighted him. He would do anything to protect her, and keep secure her faith in him.

Some day he would tell her the secret pet name he had for her. It was a silly name, but it was the way he thought of her: my Little White Mouse. Embarrassing—a man of letters should be able to come up with something better than that, and so he had kept it secret.

Her brunette pubic hair contrasted with her skin to make it appear nearly spectral. The thought of her now did not arouse him so much as make him want to lie beside her like this forever. Why was he lying here, thinking of her as someone who was long-departed? But she did have that sense of belonging not so much to another world as to no world at all, a creature separated from daily events. It was easy to imagine Maria as though he could see her only in his memory, as though she were long absent.

He crept from the bed carefully, so he would not disturb her sleep. He would look like a smashed bag of garbage when the cameras rolled. Scamp would bring that makeup whiz, though, and Bell would see bags under his eyes as a sign that he was a rumpled genius.

Besides, he had always wondered what sort of older man he would make. Would he be one of the baggy, bulky ones? Or would he grow gaunt and skeletal, one of those old guys who are all ear and chin? Today, maybe, he would start to find out.

He stared at the decanter of scotch, but made no move. In the old days he had always started his day off with a taste, red wine and bread, like an Elizabethan.

He had longed to have a biographer some day, someone to whom he could tell the story of his life. There was so much to tell, and so much to embellish. He wanted someone good, someone who could etch it into history.

Such a man was coming at last. He paced, disturbed by the approach of the man who would transform him from a playwriting celebrity, his face beside the Fritos and M&Ms at Safeway, into a modern day—but here he faltered.

A modern day what? Oscar Wilde? Not with my flat wit. A modern day Doctor Johnson? Hardly, sir, I haven’t the tongue for it. Maybe he could emulate John Huston, all snarl and charm, or dig up the boxing gloves and do a knockoff of Hemingway and Mailer. He had to pretend to be something, or somebody. By himself, without an act, what was he?

Christ, where were the beta blockers that quack doled out to him in the days when he had been Speke the wreck? He yanked the desk drawer and pawed through match books from Zurich, Milan, from every place on earth, and he hadn’t smoked for months.

The years before Maria had been tough. At least some of the details were hard to remember. Those years had left a smear of images: both phones ringing at once, him battling to refuse deletions in First Cut.

Both the song that gave the album its name and the album itself had been in “desperate need of a remix.” Remix, he had said, and die. That refusal had been brilliant, since “First Cut Reprise” and “Big Bucks” both subsequently starburst at number one. His brother had even found it in an alley in Moscow, in what he had called “a really putrid-sounding bootleg.” Still, his brother had grudgingly admitted, this was market penetration.

He had been known as a professional but a very ill-tempered man on the phone. Who wouldn’t be grumpy, talking to people who never identified themselves and who all sounded alike? “Ham, listen, we got just a little problem with the broken bottles in the second act. The union says someone’s gonna get hurt—I mean real glass. They have these sugar bottles—” All the while him thinking, puzzling, seething, and finally asking in what he thought was the mildest voice in the entire world, a voice right out of the Mother Teresa Finishing School, with the other phone bleating in his ear, “Please tell me who is this please.” But it came out with a roar, not meek and mild at all and there was a long and very embarrassing conversation in which it turned out that between the pleases Speke had used the f-word to the most important human being on the East Coast. Although they did, in the end, use real empty Smirnoff bottles. The play was still running in eight major cities. People did get cut. The audiences loved it.

Without Sarah he would have gone up in smoke. Many times she had cut him off in the middle of a call to handle the call herself, and salvage with her warm honey voice what Speke had been about to wreck.

He couldn’t, on this worst of all mornings, find a single pill. An aspirin. One. And absolutely nothing else.

I’ll have to make short work of Asquith. Tell him how great he looks, take him over to the Outer Office, and—

Then Speke had no pictures in his head. When had he ever been able to control anything Asquith said or did? The man actually used to play with guns. Why hadn’t a twelve-bore at some point whisked away just a little portion of the old cranial vault? Everyone else seemed to shoot themselves, that is, every other drug addict who fooled with guns. It wasn’t right—it was unholy that someone who was addicted to six major poisons at once could still be alive.

It would be wonderful to see Asquith again, he reminded himself. They would have a nice long talk about writing songs in North Beach, using that cheap little Panasonic that, for some reason, tended to eat tapes, gobbling them into knots, a night’s work turned into plastic confetti.

Will I disappoint Asquith, he wondered, and seem too sleek, too complacent? Maybe I’ve lost my edge.

There was a distant clatter. Clara would be up and about, attacking flour in the kitchen in the process of making her blueberry muffins. Life couldn’t really be terrible, he told himself, if a kind woman was up making muffins.

It was going to be great to see Asquith again. They would indeed have a nice talk, but it would be in the Outer Office, far from the house.

First he would find out what it was Asquith wanted, before he would let the man into these walls, before he would let the old friend into the sanctuary, the world he wanted to keep safe.