Dan Wakefield - Home Free

Maybe it would help if they talked more.

Maybe that’s why he went and told her his dream.

“Had the damndest dream,” he said. “You know how some are so real you wake up believing them?”

“Mmmm,” she said, idly looking at department store ads. “What was it?”

“I dreamed we had a baby,” Gene said. “A girl. We were trying to think up a name and—”

Lou let the page she was holding fall.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

“My dream?”

“I don’t want to hear about having babies. We discussed that a long time ago. We agreed about that way back in Urbana.”

“We did?”

“You’re goddam right we did.”

“I thought we agreed about marriage. Not doing it. That doesn’t have anything to do with having kids. People have kids all the time now without getting married.”

“ Kids! Now there’s more than one? How many do you have in mind? Cheaper by the dozen? The little old woman who lived in a shoe?”

“I just said ‘kids’ in general. I only meant one.”

“Then you meant one too many!”

“Babe, it was just a dream. I was telling you a dream I had.”

“Some dream. I can see it now. Snot and cereal.”

“It wasn’t that way.”

“But that’s the way it is. In real life. Not in dreams.”

“OK, OK, sorry I mentioned it.”

“So am I,” she said.

She got dressed and went out for a walk.

A few weeks after the trip to find Home the first snow fell.

Back when summer was over and everyone had got together again they all had agreed to gather at Barnes’s place to celebrate the first snow, whenever it was. That was the time they had the great bash last year, with the magic stew and all, the first big snow, so it seemed like a good idea to do it again.

The snow came early, and didn’t seem the same.

Instead of just being beautiful it seemed to be causing a hassle for everyone.

Barnes and Nell had dinner at Felicia’s in the North End, and as if it wasn’t bad enough having to stand on the stairs forty minutes to wait for a table, when they got out they couldn’t find any cabs because of the snow and had to walk back home. Barnes was grumpy, blowing his nose a lot and drinking straight bourbon to try to kill the cold he was getting. Nell was mute, not even doing her bubble gum.

Lou had been late getting home and Gene hadn’t cooked, not knowing whether she’d want anything, so they just started drinking as soon as she showed and Gene got out a can of sardines and a discolored hunk of cheddar and some Triscuits. That was dinner. By the time they got to Barnes’s they were already sort of smashed.

Flash came late, cursing the snow because Logan was closed and his scheduled Braniff baby would probably land in Detroit tonight instead of his bed.

Thomas’s milk truck had skidded on the ice while he was trailing a beautiful girl and he not only busted a fender against a fireplug, he lost track of the girl. Probably never find her again, lost, gone forever, probably she was the one he’d always been looking for.

“Where’s the music?” Gene asked.

“Not on,” said Barnes. “Nell?”

She sighed, stood up, and stacked on a random bunch of records, not bothering to see what they were.

Thomas rolled a couple of joints and started them around the room.

“Why don’t we do something?” Barnes said.

“About what?” asked Lou.

“Not about anything. To have something to do.”

“If we made a fire,” said Thomas, “we could be sitting by the fire. That’d be doing something.”

“Only one log left,” Barnes said. “And the Sunday Times .”

“Magi-logs,” Thomas said. “Someone could go out and buy a couple magi-logs.”

“Who?” asked Barnes.

“Anyone,” Thomas said.

No one did.

Flash took a big toke off a joint and said, “They’ll ruin everything.”

“Who?” asked Lou.

“Fuckin new basketball league. ABA.”

“What’s wrong with em?” Gene asked.

“Playin the game with a goddam beach ball.”

“They do?”

“Might as well. It looks like it. Goddam basketball painted red white and blue. Jazzy new uniforms, all kinda colors. Pretty soon it won’t be a sport it’ll be a fuckin circus.”

“It’s progress,” Barnes said.

“Progress, my ass. Won’t have athletes anymore. Have clowns. That’s what the public wants. Let em have it. To hell with tradition. Look at the hard time curling is having. You know why?”

“People lack vision,” said Barnes.

“Besides that. It’s a traditional sport. Centuries old. People don’t dig that now, they wanna go see some clowns throwing a beach ball around.”

“If this was Home,” Thomas said, “the St. Bernard could come around and give us a hit from the brandy keg.”

“There’s some in the kitchen,” Nell said.

“That’s not the same,” Thomas said, “as having the St. Bernard bring the keg around.”

“Well, I’m no St. Bernard,” Nell said.

“Jesus, Nell,” Barnes said, “just cause you’re pissed at me you don’t have to take it out on everybody.”

“OK, Mr. Good Humor Man.”

“Hey, Barnes,” Gene said, hoping to head off him and Nell, “you looked anymore?”

“For what?”

“Home.”

“Yeh.”

“Where?”

“Vermont.”

“What happened?”

“Nothin.”

“How?”

“I believed an ad in the paper. Said ‘castle on lake.’ Went up to see it. What the hell. Forty grand for a castle on lake.”

“What was it?”

“Cinder-block house on swamp.”

Lou got up and made a mean batch of martinis.

Gene drank one out of a highball glass, full.

“Where’s the sun?” Thomas asked.

“Gone down, man,” Gene said. “Winter now. Dude goes down early.”

“I mean the music. That sun.”

Gene crawled over to the records and put on Abbey Road . They listened, in silence, to “Here Comes the Sun.” No one got up to dance. The song seemed out of place, like playing “Jingle Bells” at the beach.

When it was over Gene took it off and piled on four other sides, the first ones on the stack.

Thomas made a fire With the one log and the Sunday Times .

Gene scooted over to where Lou was lying and looking at the ceiling.

“What you see, babe?”

“Shadows.”

“Oh.”

He lay down to look at them himself, wondering if he could find some message in the way they waved and flickered, the rhythm of their dance. He didn’t know what Lou saw in them and wasn’t sure he wanted to know. She was several inches and several worlds away from him. He could feel the huge distance between them, the empty gap.

“Hey, play it again,” said Barnes.

“What?” Gene asked.

“Whatever it was.”

Gene went back and put the last song on again. It was “Helplessly Hoping” on the Marrakesh Express of Crosby, Stills and Nash. They had all heard it hundreds of times, it was one of their standards, but it never fit before, as it fit now the feeling of the room and the people in it, who didn’t know if they heard hello or goodbye and even whether they’d be together, like him and Lou.

Helpless to do much else.

In the shadows on the ceiling—he could see, with the music—her Harlequin hovering.

Him.

Everyone seemed to get silent drunk, sullen drunk.

“Shit,” said Lou. “I’m outa cigarettes.”

“Got a Kent,” said Barnes.

Lou shook her head, irritated.

“Luckies,” she said. “I’ll go get some.”

Flash stood up and stretched.

“I’ll come,” he said. “Need the air.”