ON BRIGHT MORNINGS, THE sun sliding along her bedroom window stamps the wood floor with a dappled pattern that resembles large scattered petals. Or a magnified fragment of Chinese calligraphy. If she had the extraordinary powers of Ts’ang Chieh, an ancient Chinese sage credited with inventing written characters, she might be able to read something in the sun’s design. Legend tells us that Ts’ang Chieh modeled his characters after patterns in nature: the constellations of the night sky, the designs on tortoise shells, animal tracks, tree branches silhouetted against the sky. But though Renata is a pretty good linguist herself, her talents don’t go that far. Anyway, this morning the pattern hadn’t appeared yet—it was too early.
She lay on her stomach and Jack held on to her as he always did, a leg and arm flung over her, his head buried near her shoulder. She liked being weighed down. He was gripping tight, fast asleep, then his body suddenly stiffened and shook in spasms. Christ, she thought, he’s going to come in his sleep like a teenaged boy. And all over her. The nerve, a grown man, and dragging her along out of habit. If it really was her he was pumping in his sleep, who knows? She was mistaken. This was no kind of pleasure. Jack’s leg stiffened again, as if he were pressing down on the brake of a car, and he gave a few low moans, no, more like whimpers of fright. Near her head on the pillow, the fingers of his right hand made jerking movements, like plucking staccato notes on the strings of a bass fiddle. He gripped her tighter. She thought of waking him from his nightmare to save him from whatever was threatening, a collision maybe, but decided not to. People have a right to their dreams, even the bad ones. Maybe the dream was important, maybe it was delivering a shred of crucial information. Then again, Jack never analyzed his dreams. Once in a great while he would report one. So what do you think it means? he’d say. What do you think, she’d answer, as the therapists do. He didn’t mind that, just shrugged. Renata, on the contrary, liked tinkering with puzzles; she saw all sorts of dire meanings in his dreams but never suggested them. People have a right to their ignorance, too.
She left him to his fate. When she next opened her eyes he was watching her. There were mornings when she woke feeling amorphous, shapeless, selfless, and he could tell, though he couldn’t tell why; then he would rub and stroke her body all over, like a mother bear licking her cub into shape. And as he stroked she would take on the familiar shape of the day before. This wasn’t one of those mornings. Today it was Jack, usually so serene and balanced, who seemed lost, stranded on the trail between dream and waking.
“Is it over?” she asked. “You had a bad dream. You were shaking.”
“Was that it? I woke up with a terrible feeling. That must be why.”
“What was it? Is the stuff on my walls freaking you out?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
The floor showed its pattern of dappled light. It would be a very bright day. All the days had been bright lately, a blessing from the gods of weather. She took his hand and brought it to her stomach and pressed it down. “I thought you were fucking someone in your sleep. Me, maybe. So?”
He looked over at the clock. “I can’t. I wish I could, but I have a meeting at nine-thirty and I’ve got to stop at my place first.” They were sleeping at Renata’s apartment because Jack had found an excellent parking space nearby, no small consideration in Brooklyn Heights. Most nights they spend together, they’re at Jack’s place a few blocks away. He doesn’t care for hers, too weird, he says. Meaning the stuff on the walls. Her clippings, her lists. He doesn’t like obsessions, though he likes her.
“Suit yourself.” And she moved his hand away.
“That’s what I need at my place, a suit, actually.”
She groaned, as she was supposed to do. He makes such quips on purpose, to hear her groan. They indulge each other, Renata and Jack. They have their little games, their routines. Like Reality Tourism, Jack’s game. For the traveler who’s been everywhere: consider two invigorating weeks in Attica. Too much time sitting at a desk? Try a week’s stint at a sweatshop. Or Renata’s game, Redundancy, also known as Twin Titles. Kingshighway Boulevard. Perennial Classics. The real-estate ads are a good source. Summit Heights. Chateau Estates. She keeps a list. They have to be real, with data on where they were first sighted. The first time they slept together, Jack suggested Maison de la Casa, which he claimed was a new continental restaurant in Chelsea, but she wasn’t fooled.
“Tonight, then?” he said. “Will it keep?”
“Whatever.” Again on purpose. Jack dislikes that word. She doesn’t like it much herself.
His cell phone, near at hand on the night table, bleeped, and he cursed as he waited for the message: “Jack, I just wanted to let you know I’ll be late, sorry I forgot to tell you yesterday. I have to get Julio to day care myself because my mother and sister are in Puerto Rico for a few days. Anyway, in case you get in first I wanted you—”
“Carmen? I’m here. No, that’s okay. I’m glad you called. Look, since you’ll be right around there could you stop off at the Port Authority, I’m not sure which floor, the nineties I think, you can check in the lobby, and pick up those homelessness statistics? They promised to fax them but God knows when....Thanks....No, take your time.”
“Carmen,” he explained when he hung up. His stellar assistant.
“I figured that out,” said Renata.
He dressed and bent to kiss her good-bye. “Don’t forget to vote,” he murmured, his hand lingering on her breast. “Primary Day, remember?” She called him an anarchist, but he was such a good citizen.
He was gone. A man not given to quick fucks. Everything he does is done with care and attention. A fine quality, but it has its drawbacks.
Not worth fretting about, though. The restless warmth inside would ebb away soon enough. Not worth sinking into the doldrums. The expression made her smile. Her friend and library colleague, Linda, a storehouse of arcane facts, told her about the doldrums last week at lunch.
“That old guy with the long yellow beard and the one earring, you know who I mean, who keeps hanging out at the Answer Lady desk? He told me he was in the doldrums, so I said he might like to know that the Doldrums are an actual place around 800 miles south of Hawaii. It’s an area that’s always covered with big dark clouds and almost no wind to drive them away. He liked that. I keep my customers happy. I see you like it too.”
No doldrums today. Not a cloud in the sky. She was having lunch with Linda again—who knows what she might learn? She’d vote on the way home, not because she was a good citizen but because Jack would check up. Voting to please a lover—surely not what the Founding Fathers intended.
Before she left, she looked, as always, at the panels of Chinese calligraphy on the walls. The illustrations were small; the calligraphy dominated. The one she liked best had no illustration at all. It was from a letter written almost a thousand years ago by a local magistrate, advising a new colleague about how to govern. “A good magistrate must follow the people’s wishes and help to spread a civilizing influence. He must clear his eyes and listen intently, so that he and his subjects may together be molded by the spirit and transformed.”
She had studied the calligraphy hangings so long and so steadily that often she fell into dreamy wishful thinking and invented translations that resembled news bulletins. For the letter to the magistrate, she would imagine, “The child was found unharmed in the early evening, playing in a sandbox not far from the merry-go-round where she disappeared.” Other times it read, “The perpetrators were apprehended in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and charged with kidnapping. The child was returned safely to her aunt in New York City.” An alternate version of reality, the “what if” theory of history applied on the small scale.
That morning, the bad dream morning, Primary Day, the blessed weather morning, was when the sky burst into flame and paper rained down. No one voted.
But first—for isn’t it natural to want to delay a disaster, to pretend for a while that it never happened?—what is a reclusive librarian sworn to solitude, or at least to emotional celibacy, doing in bed with someone she loves? Or is pretty sure she loves.