Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

“What?”

“I know, Sylvie,” said Hannah, putting a hand on my knee. “I wasn’t sure if I should tell you, but I thought — in the long run, you know… I thought it’d help you move on.”

“Who is she?”

“It’s a boy.”

“The mother,” I said.

“Oh.” Hannah nodded, inhaling. “Apparently, he met her in upstate New York, when he and Keller were working at that college — the one near Canada?”

“Was she a researcher? Or a student?”

“No, no. I think she worked in the town. Sarah something? Works as a receptionist in a dental office — or maybe it’s a chiropractor, I can’t remember. Anyway, he met her there and stayed. Mike visited them on a business trip last year — drove up from Albany. She’s nice, he said. Laughs a lot. Gabe seems happy.”

I nodded and walked to the window. I couldn’t bear the weight of her gaze. When she left for the restaurant that evening, I waited only minutes before going into her closet. I found the shoe box beneath a stack of winter sweaters, Gabe’s envelope on the bottom. I couldn’t wait to bring it to my room; I sat down against the closet wall, Hannah’s white work shirts grazing my knees, and ripped the envelope open. I wouldn’t admit it, but I hoped to find a plea — Gabe begging me to come back to him, moving on only when he received the silence of my answer.

I tore open the top of the envelope. Inside were two paintbrushes. The wooden handles were caked in color, but the bristles had been newly cleaned. They were my favorite brushes, ones I’d had since Mills. Gabe had wrapped them in lined paper, and when I unfolded the page, I saw he had scrawled something inside it.

I hope you’re still painting, Sylve, and that you’re not covering them up anymore. I never wanted you to.

Love,

Gabe

P.S. I’m so sorry.

I put it on the floor of Hannah’s closet with the brushes on top, my throat constricting. I was about to throw the envelope away when I noticed that something else was crumpled at the bottom. It was a glossier piece of paper, folded and unfolded so many times that it was now as soft as fabric. When I smoothed it open, I saw that it had been ripped from Mills’s fall 1999 alumni quarterly. Gabe had circled a photo that took up half the page. Such Great Heights , read the caption beneath: The class of ’99 watches an eclipse.

And there we were: David Horikawa making an ill-fated tower of apples, Michael Fritz balancing his tray on his head, Hannah pointing to the moon with her head thrown back. I was kneeling beside her, following her hand. Only Gabe sat apart from the larger group. He was leaning back on his arms, several feet behind us, and he wasn’t looking at the sky. He was looking at me.

In the pit of my stomach, I felt a low swirl of mourning. If I could arc back through time and begin again, winding the spool of thread back to that hill and the gaping blackness of the sky — if I could change what I’d said when Gabe asked me to come with him, what would I do? I pictured the gate to Keller’s garden, the bloom of the doubled flower, the whole ache of possibility. And I knew that I still would have followed him.

•••

To my surprise, the guy from the club called that weekend. His name was Jesse. He lived on Polk Street, and he wanted to take me to dinner. I borrowed and belted one of Hannah’s floral dresses — at seventy-eight degrees, San Francisco was in the middle of a heat wave — and took the train to the city. Like a giant steel caterpillar, it wound through the lit world of the Castro: past the brightly colored banners and the men in leather, the neon signs of stores with names like Does Your Mother Know, and uphill, into the muted and staggering streets by Randall Park. I got off at Alamo Square — lights threading through trees, the smell of sweat and barbecue ember — and walked to the seafood bistro he’d chosen. He was already there, an open menu on his plate, his chin resting in one hand.

Jesse: a cherub’s curly, close-cropped hair, a small space between his two front teeth. When he smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkled like cellophane. He grew up in the Hudson Valley, the only child of parents who owned an outdoor theater company, and ran as far away as he could: all the way to law school in California, where he’d never have to sweep another stage or play Mustardseed—“Five lines, yellow tights”—when there weren’t any child actors available. I worried that he was too normal for me, but when I told him I’d spent most of my twenties doing experimental dream research, he looked up from his mussels and grinned.

“Few weeks ago?” he said. “I had this dream that I lived on a sex farm run by Carol Burnett.”

“A sex farm?”

“And here I thought you were going to give me shit about Carol Burnett.”

“We’ll get there,” I said, my laughter a release; I hadn’t realized how nervous I was. “But really — what is a sex farm?”

“Not a clue. In the dream, of course, it was clear as day — sorry, couldn’t resist — but when I woke up? Damned if I could tell you.”

He rode home with me on BART, even though I told him I wouldn’t let him stay over. (“I gave you the wrong impression, that night at the club,” I said as we hurtled through the pitch-black underground, our hands in our own laps. “I usually don’t step on a guy’s feet until at least the third date.”) But when we climbed into bed, our bodies tenting the sheets, it was he who buttoned the top of Hannah’s dress back up and suggested we just sleep.

Gabe has a child , I said to myself. Gabe has a son. Beside me, Jesse’s breath was deep and slow, his body exquisitely unfamiliar. I pictured Gabe’s bulldog jaw, his broad palms, in miniature — pictured a baby with someone else’s nose and a troll tuft of hair on Gabe’s shoulders, reaching for the ceiling as they walked. The two of them building a house of Lincoln Logs or splashing in the tub, surrounded by rubber creatures and soap scum. I knew he would tend to the kid with the same dedication he did our research. He would stay up late reading parenting books; he would teach the boy to spot poison ivy, to catch bugs in jars, to turn over stones. He would point to the busy, roiling worlds beneath them: the ants seaming the mud, the dogged wildflowers, here a newt. He would take the tender, green body in both hands and hold it up to the light, for however long it would stay there.

To the east of Martha’s Vineyard lies the small incorporated island of Chappaquiddick, accessible only by way of a three-car ferry. Technically a part of Edgartown, Chappaquiddick feels separate, wilder and less traveled than its mainland counterpart. The roads are mostly unpaved, and the houses are farther apart. Dune grass and poison ivy braid along its coast. In the relative absence of human life, the beaches have flourished: they crawl with hermit crabs and ticks, the water full of foot-long, iridescent bluefish. Perhaps people were scared off by the Chappaquiddick incident of July 18, 1969, when Senator Ted Kennedy drove off Dike Bridge into the rocky water below — where his only passenger, a teacher named Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.

Digital modes of tracking and detection have made it more difficult for someone like Keller to live off the map. I found him on Instant Checkmate, a website that gives paid subscribers access to the phone number and address of anyone in the United States. With Keller’s equal appetites for intrigue and solitude, I was not surprised to find him on this island. His house is in the northwest corner of a large, grassy knoll. A woman bicycles down the road as I sit in the car, the engine idle. When she passes, the street is empty.