Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

In putting on a show of resistance, then, what had I been showing? Perhaps I meant to exert what I thought was my will, to prove I was governed by forces more logical, more solitary, than gravity or magnetism — the earth’s magic tricks. My friends would be attending the public school; therefore, I would be happy there. It was a simple equation, and like most simple equations, it probably would have been true. It would have fulfilled me, I think. But I made the decision to fulfill something else; or, as it happened, the decision made me.

When I told David that I was leaving — leaving both him and the university — he blinked at me not with sadness or anger but with absolute surprise. For a moment, I was disappointed that he didn’t react more strongly. Perhaps he had intended to break up with me, too, and was startled when I beat him to it. But if that were true, wouldn’t he have also looked relieved? There was such wonder in his face, such astonishment; it was as though I had vanished, and in my place was someone he had never seen before.

The morning after Jamie’s session, I woke to thick, aggressive rain. It was nine o’clock, but it felt much earlier. The sky was a matte, slate blue, and I knew I hadn’t slept enough. Gabe was dozing with a peacefulness that irritated me, his arms curled to his chest. I pulled on an old pair of sweats and went downstairs to work in what he had dubbed my Oval Office. I couldn’t concentrate: I was still disturbed by what had happened the night before and angry that Gabe hadn’t stood up for me in front of Keller. When he woke up, I wanted to bring it up again. But when I checked on him at eleven, he was still in bed. I decided I would wake him at noon, and in the meantime, I went outside to the porch.

The rain had stopped. Instead, a faint mist hung in the air. It made the world look static and grainy, like an old photograph. I sat down on the couch the former tenants had left. Time had softened the nubbly fabric, and its deep brown color hid any stains. I must have closed my eyes, because I felt myself wafting in and out of consciousness. Every so often, I would come to, feeling the couch beneath me, and then I would slip away again.

“Sleepy Sylvie,” said a voice, too high to be Gabe’s. The couch gathered substance beneath me. When I opened my eyes, I saw a shadowy figure on the other side of the porch screen. Thom.

Though I knew I was awake, the quality of the light made him look like an old movie actor. I thought he was smiling at me, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Hello, you.” Thom poked his head in the door, and his features sharpened. “Didn’t mean to wake you — my apologies. Mind if I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, pushing myself into a seated position. He ducked his head beneath the door frame and dropped two large bundles on the wooden floor.

“Got caught in the rain,” he said, leaning against the screen. “I was picking up laundry. I’ll just take a moment — my arms need a rest. Not working today?”

“We had a lab last night, so I’m working from home.”

“Nice job.”

He lifted his head and grinned. His eyes were bright and owl-like behind the thick rims of his glasses, and his bangs were slicked to his forehead.

“And what are you doing today,” I asked, “besides laundry?”

“I teach a freshmen composition course in the evening. And I’ll work on my dissertation.”

He hoisted one of the bags of laundry up on his back and straightened up, tilting his head toward the door.

“Why don’t you come with? You can help me carry the laundry, have something to eat at our place. More fun than sleeping, I’d hope.”

“That sounds like free labor.” I grinned. “What’s in it for me?”

“The pure and stirring pleasure,” said Thom, “of hearing about my dissertation. Lots of people vying to hear more about this project, you know. It’s sure to make me a very attractive job candidate.”

Now I almost felt sorry for him. “What time is it?”

“Noonish.” Thom shook his shirtsleeve back and checked his watch. “Quarter after.”

I craned my head to look in the kitchen, but Gabe still hadn’t come downstairs. I wondered what he would think if he woke up while I was next door, but I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Besides, it would be nice to spend time with another person. So I took one of the bundles and followed Thom from my front porch to his, where hanging chimes made frantic, high-pitched music in the wind.

“Is Janna home?” I asked as we crossed through the kitchen. I hadn’t been to other parts of their house before, but now I saw it was the mirror image of the one I shared with Gabe — the rooms were identically shaped but laid out in opposite formation. In the living room, there were two wooden rocking chairs, a low table stacked with books, and an oval-shaped rug, knit in spiraling shades of pastel yarn. In front of a boarded-up fireplace, someone had set a row of candles on a tray. Along the wall were stencils in colored pencil, framed behind glass. The images were abstract, and they seemed to have been drawn in a quick, jittery hand; the thin lines had a sense of impulse and movement, and I had a strange feeling that the walls were quivering.

“She’s at work,” said Thom. “She has a new pair of clients, filthy rich, who founded some sort of artists’ colony in the Driftless Area. Janna takes care of the grounds, so I take care of the laundry.”

We set the laundry bags down on the floor, the sort of drawstring sacks that may have once held a tent or a sleeping bag. They wavered, tubular and soft-bodied as dummies, before tipping over. A piece of Janna’s underwear, silky and magenta, sprouted from the mouth of the bag I’d carried.

I took a seat in the smaller rocking chair and crossed my legs on its salmon-colored cushion. On the wall closest to me was a small door that our apartment didn’t have.

“Where does that door lead?”

“The basement,” said Thom, sitting down.

“Funny,” I said. “You have a basement, and we have an attic.”

Our attic was a small, cobwebby space accessible only by way of a rickety staircase. Probably it could have been an airy haven of some sort, if we’d put time into cleaning it, but we’d opted to use it for storage. There were piles of canvases and paints, boxes filled with winter clothing and Christmas ornaments.

“It’s where I go to write,” said Thom. “Clears my head to be underground. Nothing to look at, nothing to hear.”

“It isn’t depressing?”

Thom extended his legs and crossed one over the other. He wore a ragged sweater over a starched button-up shirt and a pair of beige slacks, which rode up around his ankles to reveal bones both large and delicate. His legs had the awkward grace of a giraffe, an unwieldy nobility, which made me want to pause in deference as he arranged himself.

“Depressing?” he asked. “It can be, but it also has the opposite effect. Sometimes I have to go to a place where there’s nothing to look at in order to see clearly. The more attractive the outside world, the more difficult it is for me to retreat into my head.”

“And what do you do there? What’s your book about?”

“Keats,” he said. “The poet who wrote the piece I quoted the other night—‘yes, in spite of all, some shape of beauty…’ you remember? He died at twenty-five, but he got more done in those years than most of us could hope to do by eighty. Keats was obsessed with beauty, thought it was the highest form of truth — he was a Romantic, so we can’t blame him — and he rejected the rationalism that was taking hold at the time. Other artists tried to analyze the world, pin it down like a butterfly staked to a board, but old Johnny just wanted to stare. He got itchy around people like Coleridge, who sought knowledge over beauty — people who were incapable, as Keats put it, of being content with half knowledge. In 1817, he wrote to his brothers about it, and he came up with this phrase called negative capability .”