Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

Gabe took another gulp of wine.

“I won’t miss her,” he said.

“No. Me neither.”

Gabe put his glass on the ground. Then he placed his hand on my knee. He kept it there as I looked at him, then began to move it up my thigh. He undid the button at the top of my jeans and slid the zipper down, rested his hand on the soft, tender skin below my belly. For seconds, we eyed each other.

Then one of us moved, and we stopped thinking. Perhaps this was what we had wanted — the end of thinking — and what suspension: it was as if we shared one set of lungs, one pulse, one thick and muscular heart. His body, older now, was only half-familiar. It felt more, I could tell; like my body, his was somehow both more confident and more vulnerable than it used to be.

After, we lay on the living room rug, warm and panting. Rain flicked through the open window. Otherwise, the block was silent; it felt like nobody lived in Fort Bragg but us. But I wasn’t lonely anymore.

“What took you so long?” I whispered.

“Me?” asked Gabe. “I’ve been waiting for you this whole time.”

•••

We spent two years in Fort Bragg: biding our time, building our arguments, feeding our research until it grew strong like an organism. Keller may have been skittish, but he still craved institutional validation. After we had enough material to make a convincing case, he applied for a position as a visiting researcher at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. Gabe and I were at his house, cleaning up after a late dinner, when news of his acceptance came by e-mail. Keller laughed, in surprise or in vindication, his face an inch from the computer screen and filled with undisguised glee. For years he had kept his research protected, whittling it little by little. Now he could strip the tarp off the statue, leaving the Pacific Ocean and the salt air and the little blue cottage as if he had never really loved them to begin with.

Like all good liars, I took pride in my ability to deceive and thought it seamless. I painted my canvases black with a zealous attention to detail, allowing no trace of the original painting to shine through. Those covered-up paintings were works in themselves, as layered and intentional as what was underneath. There was only one painting I’d forgotten to black out: the one I had been working on when Thom called, on Christmas night. I’d shoved it behind the other four dark canvases and left it there.

One afternoon in January, I came inside after scraping ice off the porch, an old shovel in hand, when I noticed that Gabe wasn’t in the kitchen where I’d left him. With the specialized intuition of the paranoid, which told me that the only possible outcome was the one I most feared, I knew he was in the attic.

I pounded up the stairs and pushed open the door. He stood at the window, light striking his cheekbones. The four black paintings were scattered on the ground like fallen soldiers. In Gabe’s hands was the painting of Thom.

“You didn’t tell me you were doing this,” he said without looking up at me.

“It’s a new project.”

“I see.”

He held the painting up to the light. My stomach tumbled, for I knew what it showed: Thom and me on the floor of the attic, our bodies making angles as we rocked together. But I had painted it the way I always did my dreams — narrative on top of narrative, the same scene sketched over as more of it came back to me — and now the lines were dizzying, almost indecipherable. Gabe squinted at it, straining to tease out the piece’s meaning. A test: how well had I hidden it away?

“What is it?” he asked, finally.

“I don’t know. I was just messing around. Playing with color and lines.”

But maybe I had wanted him to find the painting; maybe it was I who was testing him. How much do you know about me, Gabe? How far will you go to know it? He hadn’t put the painting down; he was staring at the lower left corner, where I had painted Thom’s cast-off glasses. The glinting little lenses, the black temples folded shut.

“Those glasses look familiar,” he said.

“Really?” I blinked. “Huh.”

He put the painting down on the ground and brushed his hands on his pants. When he looked up again, his face was fixed.

“They’re Thom’s,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

I thought I had won, but now I saw I was wrong. Gabe was feigning disinterest, something he only bothered to do when he was supremely, painfully interested. He wouldn’t give up without a fight.

“Why funny?”

Gabe ignored this. I crouched and began to clean up the foam peanuts that had fallen out of a large, tipped-over box. He was silent, watching me.

“Is Thom really that interesting to you?”

“That’s a ridiculous question. First of all, Thom doesn’t have a monopoly on black-rimmed glasses. And secondly, they’re only a small part of the painting.”

“Right. I forgot to mention the crazy lines zigzagging all over the place. And the two naked bodies.” He laughed hollowly. “I’m not blind.”

“Gabe.” I released a long breath. “It was a dream, okay? I had this weird dream about Thom, and it freaked me out. I came up here to process it.”

“A dream. So you’re still remembering them.”

“I guess so. Parts of them, anyway.” I crossed my arms. “I thought you’d be happy I’m painting again.”

“You’re changing the subject. And you’re defensive.”

“Of course I’m defensive. You’re acting like I’ve done something wrong, like I’ve betrayed you, but I can’t help what I dream. And don’t I have the right to — to artistic freedom?”

I was bluffing; in truth, I felt just as guilty as Gabe thought I was. But he believed me, or he wanted to — I could see it in his face. His jaw softened, and he exhaled.

“I’m sorry.” He shook his head, ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know you can’t help it.”

He walked out of the attic; his shoulder brushed mine as he passed me, and then I heard his heavy, quick footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, the screen door gasped open, rattled shut. He had left.

In my first year at Berkeley, I took a psychology course that focused on love. Most interesting to me was the section on communication between couples. I learned that even the slightest change of facial expression in one partner, a raised eyebrow or a curled lip, can be enough to trigger an increase in the heart rate and adrenaline of the other. Even more striking was the fact that couples begin to look alike as they age: their faces are quite literally shaped by shared experience. It was clear that couples speak with their bodies, not just their voices; that the body is confused in its allegiances; and that, sometimes, the body betrays the mind of its owner in order to communicate something to the partner — an insurgent rushing across party lines with a letter in hand.

I should have been relieved when the conversation was over, but I wasn’t. Gabe’s unease had amplified my own alarm, for I could no longer deny that my dreams were beginning to bulge into my days. Time was no longer fastened to my life; it had become unsewn, a hanging hem, a sibling whose days had once been braided with mine but had since moved on. I tumbled into morning feeling disoriented and incongruous, like a nocturnal creature blinking in the harsh, wrong light of dawn. Sometimes my muscles were sore, my breath short, as if I’d clenched them through the night. At other times, a faint, ebbing pleasure washed through my body.

My dreams of Thom had grown richer and more detailed, and they had a sensory, physical weight that stayed with me when I woke up: Thom’s scissored legs around me, warm and long, sparsely patched with hair; the knobs and hollows of his face pressed against mine, soft eye sockets, ridge of nose, as he whispered something to me — a song— For there’s a change in the weather, a change in the sea. My walk will be diff’rent, my talk and my name… It was an old big-band song from the 1940s, a Benny Goodman song, and where had I heard it before? For it to occur in my dream, I knew, I had to have heard it somewhere. But when I played the song online, in the office with the door shut, it reminded me of Thom, only Thom, nothing more.