Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“Thomas,” I said. “Is that the man who lives here?”

Janna nodded. She put her spidery fingers on either side of the mug and began to rotate it.

“My husband,” she said. “He’s in academia, like you — the English department. He’s a Romanticist, studying for his PhD.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was studying the Romantics or if she meant to imply that university work was a romantic gesture in itself, a comment that had to be directed in part at me. Then and even months later, it was difficult for me to gauge Janna’s slyness, to sift it out of what was sincere.

“And you?” she asked. “I’ve seen someone else coming out of your house. Is he your husband? The short man?”

“My boyfriend.”

I was irritated by then. I finished off my lemonade, ready to make an excuse about work. But Janna leaned forward in her chair and began to tell me about her courtship with Thomas — how they met in college when he was studying poetry and she was in botany; back then, she said, she thought she might be a field researcher. Something delicate in the bright sheen of her eyes, her quick, pale hands, stopped me from resenting her.

The tattoo on her arm was a plant, black and white, with slanted flowers and sharp leaves. It traveled from her palm to her elbow. Her skin seemed too thin to withstand such inkiness. But most disturbing was the piercing on the back of her neck, which I only saw when she turned: two balls spaced an inch or so apart without a bar. I couldn’t tell how they’d been inserted, and that was what unnerved me. Keller had shaken my notions of privacy, and though I was now tied to his work, it made me fiercely protective of my core. There was something about the piercing in Janna’s neck that seemed invasive, even if she had chosen it. That was what struck me: her allowance of invasion, her desire for it.

•••

As it turned out, Gabe spoke to Thomas the next day. He told me that night while we did our exercises. In Fort Bragg, we had begun to feel the physical toll of our lifestyle, in which we were either sleeping or observing the sleep of others. Our lower backs ached; our knees popped. Because our work schedule was so irregular, it didn’t make sense to join a gym, so Gabe suggested we use DVDs. We rented stacks of them from the library, our tote bags clattering on the walk home. Today, we were using 8 Minute Abs with 8 Minute Buns .

“I went over to the neighbors’ house yesterday,” I said. “The woman invited me — Janna.”

Gabe grunted. When we finished our sit-ups, we sat up and took a sip of water.

“Funny,” he said. “I met the guy this morning. At the Laundromat.”

We started bicycle crunches.

“You didn’t mention that,” I said.

“It was a little strange, to be honest. He sat down next to me by the dryers. I thought he recognized me, but he didn’t say anything. He took out all these books. And then”—we stood for lunges—“when I was leaving, he asked if I would wait for him, so we could walk back together.”

“So you talked then?”

“Not much. He mentioned the weather — asked did I think it was humid. I said I did. He was sort of looking around like this.”

Gabe dropped his shoulders so his neck was long and his chin lifted, like a prairie dog. He turned his head from side to side, as if searching for someone in a crowd.

“Well, the woman wasn’t any less awkward,” I said, though it occurred to me that awkward was the wrong word. It was more that she made me feel uneasy — as if she didn’t understand how to do small talk or wasn’t playing by the rules.

“The weirdest part,” said Gabe, squatting, “was that when we got here, he suggested the four of us get together for dinner. He said his wife had thought of it.”

“Really? I didn’t think she liked me very much.”

“Why not?”

The tape ended. Gabe turned off the TV, and we flopped to the floor, our stomachs rising and falling in unison.

“It was just a feeling I had.”

But the more I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure I was right. The next morning, I slipped a note under their door inviting them to eat with us that night, and despite what Gabe had told me, I was still surprised when they accepted.

•••

Kraft macaroni, tomato soup, cream of mushroom casserole: these were all things that my mother had made when I was growing up and that seemed painfully unsuitable now. Gabe cooked more often than I did, in part because he enjoyed it but mostly because I had not inherited certain womanly qualities from my mother, who did not have them to give me. I had never known how to bake scones or how to bounce an infant to keep it from crying. When Gabe approached me in college, I was becoming acutely aware of the differences between me and other girls, and the idea of Keller’s work — so divorced from typical gendered life, divorced even from typical human life — felt like a blessedly alternate universe.

Now, for the first time in years, I felt real social anxiety. I wanted to prove I could play hostess. So I told Gabe I would cook and found a recipe for skewered chicken, the breasts slippery as silk in my hands. I set the table with my grandmother’s red tablecloth and a small vase, which Gabe filled with daisies he picked along the train tracks.

Janna had called to say they’d be by at seven thirty. But it was eight when our doorbell rang, and the chicken had almost gone cold. Gabe and I had dressed up — he wore a button-up shirt with his jeans, and I had on a knee-length navy skirt — but Janna and Thomas looked like exotic birds in our entryway. She wore a short, canary-yellow dress, he a three-piece herringbone suit that looked much too hot for the late summer weather.

“I’m Janna,” she said, turning toward Gabe. “And this is Thomas.”

After I began to call him Thom, I found it odd she never did. I still remember the way she introduced him that day, as if it was her duty to preserve something old-fashioned and noble in him.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas. He shook my hand, his grip boyishly enthusiastic; he nodded his head at the same time, the fuzzy strawberry-blond hair flapping up and down on his forehead. He wore a bow tie at his neck, and that, combined with his freckles and glasses, made him look like a character in a newspaper comic. But behind the glasses, his eyes were a deeply concentrated brown. They anchored his energy, like a mooring dropped in busy water.

“For you,” said Janna, holding out a porcelain dish, fuchsia, with plastic wrap on top. “Blueberry soup, for dessert — something my mother used to make. Mustikkakeitto , in Finnish.”

The words had a staccato beauty. In her high, lilting voice, they sounded sharp and delicate as glass shards.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the bowl. The liquid inside was a deep magenta stain. Gabe reached for Janna’s hand.

“Gabe,” he said. His smile broke open as easily as it did with Keller’s patients, and he held Janna’s hand in a firm grip, then Thomas’s.

“Quite nice of you to have us over,” said Thomas, flattening the front of his vest with his palms and looking around at our walls, which were bare. “It occurred to us too late that we should have hosted you. But here we are, and we brought Janna’s soup. Though now I wish we had something better — a housewarming plant or something, yeah? Bit bare in here, unless that’s how you like it?”

“Don’t be rude,” said Janna. “Thomas says the first thing that comes to his mind, and usually the first thing isn’t the best. They’ve just moved in, they haven’t got time to get the place decorated. It was that way for us, too, in the beginning — everything packed away in boxes and boxes.”