Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

And this: A tinkle of Christmas bells. Our hands on a glass door, breaths drifting through the air like parachutes. Inside, we took our gloves off and raked our cold red fingers through the candy aisle. It was the twenty-four-hour gas station on Williamson, blocks from our houses. We were attached at the neck, a thick black scarf of Thom’s wound around both of us at once. I blew the fringe out of my mouth. He chose a Twix. Why do you always get to pick? I asked. Last time it was the—

Snatches. Half memories: pathetic, wispy things. Often, they’d leave off like this, in the middle of a sentence. But it didn’t really matter how I finished the sentence. What mattered was that now I could remember I’d said it.

It occurred to me now that I’d never told him good-bye.

“Do you want to sit down?” I asked.

Thom paused. Then he set his briefcase down and shook off his coat, hanging it on the back of the chair beside me.

“I only have a few minutes,” he said, sitting down. “I have a meeting.”

“Where do you teach?”

He looked at me quizzically. “Teach?”

“I just — I assumed you were a professor.”

“Ah.” He laughed shortly. “No, I don’t teach. Had to give up the old Romanticism when Jan was born. Grad students don’t make very much money. Neither do professors, for that matter — not unless you get lucky. I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I was never going to finish that dissertation, anyway.”

We sat side by side, looking out at the street. Men in suits and sharp-heeled women passed interchangeably in front of us. There must have been two feet of space between our chairs.

“Jan,” I said. “Is that your son?”

“I hope so.” There was a glint of his old puckishness, a lightbulb swinging in the dark. “He’s my oldest. Then there are the twins.”

He rooted around in his pocket and came up with a battered leather wallet, flicking it open. Inside a clear sleeve was a family photo, taken against a marbled studio background. Thom sat in a stiff-backed chair with a child on his lap. The boy looked to be four or five, with fiery red hair and a solemn gaze that matched his father’s. Janna sat beside them, wearing a puff-sleeved floral dress and a canary-yellow, off-kilter hat. Her hair was cropped short, and it was a pale, diluted blond — what must have been her natural color. At her feet were twins, a boy and a girl, both in suspenders and shorts. Their hair was white-blond and cowlicky, and they had familiar smiles: catlike, toothy, the incisors crooked and sharp.

“Henrik and Inger,” said Thom, pointing. “Hooligans, those two.”

I didn’t ask about Janna, but neither did he ask about Gabe. He put the photo away.

“How did you end up here?” I asked — I couldn’t help myself. “I never thought I’d see you in a place like this.”

“A place like what?” he asked, one eyebrow arched.

“I don’t know — like this .” I waved a hand, looking around at the people reading newspapers at single-person tables or eating the miniature pickles that came free with each sandwich. “It’s so — corporate.”

“Snob. Have you tried the chicken tandoori?”

“I have, in fact,” I said, gesturing to my empty paper plate, where orange oil had melted into in psychedelic pools.

But the routine had become tired. It took an extraordinary amount of effort to make our conversation appear so effortless, to conceal the strain it took to ignore the subjects that stood so persistently between us.

“No,” said Thom. “The story’s not very exciting, I’m afraid. When Janna got pregnant, we both decided it would be best if I left the university. My cousin found me a copywriting job here. I’ve been in pharma ever since — that’s pharmaceuticals to you outsiders. Basically, I write the little black script at the end of commercials and magazine ads, the stuff that reminds you not to take your antidepressant while operating heavy machinery or drinking like Dylan Thomas. It’s a rare trade — requires years of apprenticeship. You may have seen my work in last month’s issue of Cosmopolitan .”

“I’m sorry you had to leave the PhD,” I said again. I felt embarrassed and guilty, as though it were my fault.

“Let’s face it. I didn’t know what I was doing.” He turned to me, his eyes level with mine. “Did you?”

“Know what I was doing?”

He nodded. The door opened, and a chill passed between us, ruffling the hair on Thom’s forehead.

“With me,” he said.

It was too late to withdraw. In ten minutes, Thom would leave the deli, and I would probably never see him again. If I wanted to ask him anything, I knew I had to do it now.

“In a sense,” I said. “Did you know I was asleep?”

Thom flinched. He looked down and began to smooth a crease in his pants with both hands.

“You were woozy, sometimes. You got confused. Goofy. But so did I — it was three o’clock in the morning. I didn’t expect you to act the way you did during the day. I just chalked it up to the hour. The way we were together.”

“How were we?”

“I don’t know. Uninhibited. Sometimes we fell asleep together. Other times we just laughed. We were always laughing.”

His ears were pink, his eyes shifting.

“You knew,” I said. “You did.”

Once the words were out, I could tell I was right. A flush climbed his throat. He still wouldn’t look at me.

“I don’t want to do this now,” he said, his voice low.

“Oh, Thom, be honest. Please — just tell me the truth.”

“Why?” His voice was hoarse, and there was something in his face I didn’t recognize — dread or shame or thinly veiled panic. “Do you really want to know? What’ll it do for you? For either of us? The truth’s a bitch, Sylvie. Always has been. Better to let her lie.”

“Better for who? It’s already done. I know you don’t owe me anything, and maybe you’re angry at me. We fucked up, Thom, but we fucked up together. If there’s anything left — if there’s one last thing you’ll do for me—”

My face was hot. It was humiliating, this groveling. And even as I asked him, I knew he was probably right. What was the point of knowledge, won so late and given over so reluctantly? What could I do with it? I was about to tell him to leave it when Thom shook his head, in wonder or in resignation.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

He ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it down where it had blown aside.

“There was this night,” he said. “What was it — November? A few days before Thanksgiving, past midnight, and I was working in the living room. It was excruciating. The dissertation wasn’t coming, and I felt like a fucking fraud. I couldn’t breathe. I went outside to feel fresh air in my lungs. That’s when I saw you.

“You were walking around your backyard. No shoes on, these funny little shorts, an old T-shirt despite the cold. I asked if you were okay. You came toward me like a hologram — you were swaying, and your eyes flickered. But every so often, they sharpened, and you looked at me like you really saw me. I didn’t know what to make of it. I thought you were on drugs, which was funny at first — I thought, Goddamn, Sylvie, you? You seemed so square. But you were making me nervous. I told you to go inside, get back to bed, but you didn’t want to. You were so damn stubborn that I finally just hopped the fence. You were shivering; I walked you to the door with my arms around your shoulders. I kept worrying that Gabe would see us, or Janna — that somebody would ask me what the hell we were doing. But nobody saw us. Nobody asked.”

It was one thirty now, and the lunch rush was thinning. Several of the deli employees were taking their break, crowded into a nearby booth with plates from the buffet. They laughed rowdily; one of them threw a grape into another’s mouth.