Хлоя Бенджамин - The Anatomy of Dreams

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

He had lifted his biscotti and now put it down in surprise. The saucer rattled lightly on the table.

“Sylvie,” he said.

I hadn’t realized how furious I was until I started speaking.

“Coming to Berkeley, following me around, meeting me at the lamppost? Specifically coming to the beach, my beach, only to swim away from me—and now you’re here, at the only coffee shop I ever go to, pretending to eat a biscotti —”

“What’s wrong with eating a biscotti?”

“Nobody,” I said, “goes to a coffee shop just to eat a biscotti.”

The people at neighboring tables had turned to look. One of them was a professorial-looking man in a corduroy coat. On his table was a biscotti in a small dish. Gabe looked at him pointedly before turning back to me.

“Besides,” he said, in his pleasant way, “it isn’t your beach, Sylvie. And I wasn’t swimming away from you. I was swimming away from some hysterical guy who looked like he wanted to drown me.”

“That was my boyfriend.”

“Was?”

It was Gabe, all right. The same dogged insistence, the same lopsided grin.

“Is,” I said. “But you knew that.”

“What gives you that impression?”

“I just have a feeling.”

Gabe stared at me quizzically. “What was that you said about a lamppost?”

“Two nights ago. I saw you through the window, and we met at the end of the block. You asked me if I knew I was—”

But I left off there. Gabe’s face was filled with a wondering kind of confusion.

“I had a dream about you,” I said shortly.

“You did?”

I could tell he was flattered, and I immediately regretted it.

“Forget it.”

“You’ve always been intuitive.”

“It’s nothing.”

I was leaning forward, my hand on his table, and now I straightened up. I needed time to think, to sort out what had happened that summer and how much of it had been real. So Gabe had been at the beach, but I really had been sleepwalking on the night I walked out of the apartment to meet him. Why would he lie to me about one incident and admit the other?

“Sylvie.”

I turned around again. Gabe’s voice was quieter, stripped of its charm.

“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”

I wasn’t sure if I did. Despite how much I missed him, I knew there was a cost to being with Gabe, that other things came with him. Other parts of myself rose to the surface, like fish on a line; other edges of life had their coverings pulled back. But I was too angry to leave him just yet. I had caught him, and I wanted my questions answered before I let him go.

We left the café and took the street that led toward campus. I think I was in shock. Physically, he looked like any other undergrad, but there was something about the way he observed the students that marked him as an outsider. He asked me what it was like to go to college—where I lived, how the dorms were different from the ones at Mills, what my major was.

“Psychology?” he asked. “That’s perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“Perfect for you. You’ve always wanted to figure people out—and you’re good at it, Sylve.”

I flinched when he used my nickname. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“You figured me out.”

“No, I didn’t. You left before I could. And you’ve never told me why.”

We walked into campus through East Gate and made our way along University Drive. It was emptier than usual in the summer, but there were still clumps of students reading on towels or throwing Frisbees, their shadows winging through the grass.

“It’s a long story,” said Gabe. “And a messy one. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

It was clear he had come here to tell me this story, but also that he felt he needed permission. Whether it was out of courtesy or guilt, I wasn’t sure. But he waited until I nodded to continue.

“I came to Mills for ninth grade, just like you.” He glanced at me as we passed Hearst Mining Circle, the elegant three doors of the Memorial Mining Building. “I was on scholarship—maybe you figured this out. At the time, my dad was living in Florida. He didn’t pay child support, and my mom’s health was so bad that I think the school took pity on me. I always wondered, at least. I didn’t have terrific grades.”

He kept his eyes on the road, but I stared at him as he talked. The feeling of his body so close to mine was so uncanny I couldn’t help it.

“Anyway, I was always looking for ways to make a little extra money. I loved Mills; I considered it my home. My tuition was covered, but I imagined I’d repay the school eventually—I’d make a big donation, cover the tuition of another student, maybe fund a new computer lab. You know how it was with the computers in the library—there was always a line out the door.

“So I started taking these odd jobs. I’d do whatever anybody wanted. For a while I gave haircuts in the Moberly Common Room. They didn’t mind so long as I cleaned up afterward. I started a group that played poker on Sunday afternoons, but I got too worried we’d be found out. And I worked night shifts in the dining hall.”

“I know.”

“Please be patient with me,” he said. “I know nothing makes sense yet.”

There was genuine appeal in his face. I kept us going straight, rather than turning off one of the side paths that would take us farther into the web of buildings.

“In our junior year, Mr. Keller approached me. I’d been a smart-ass that day in psych, and he asked me to stay after class. I thought I was going to get in trouble. But he sat me down on the other side of his desk, and he told me my problem was that I had too much energy.”

“I remember that.” I stopped. “We’d been studying—early childhood development, was it? We all figured you were going to get in trouble. I stopped on the hill as we were walking back to the dorms. I tried to look in the window.”

“I saw you,” said Gabe. “And I thought, That’s Sylvie, she would do such a thing . You were always loyal, even before we were together.”

He started walking again, and I followed him.

“You told us you were fired, that you’d lost your job at the dining hall.”

“I was. But that wasn’t the full story. Keller gave me this whole spiel—said I reminded him of himself at my age, that I needed something to pour myself into. I tuned out a bit until he mentioned the pay. Twenty dollars an hour for such menial work: data entry, mailings, things I could do in my sleep. I thought he was joking until he had me sign a confidentiality agreement.”

“So it was true,” I said. “Keller’s research assistants.”

Gabe nodded. “He said he chose one or two students each semester, students who showed promise and seemed trustworthy, but he didn’t want the word getting around. That was fine with me—I already tried to keep my scholarship as quiet as possible, and I would’ve been an obvious target if anyone had known about this.”

“Was Will Washburn his assistant?” I asked. I remembered the time that Keller had come upon us standing on the library stairs, when Will had been excluded from the larger group.

“The year before me.” Gabe tore a twig from the dangling branch of a nearby tree and chucked it in front of us. “So I went to talk to him before I gave Keller an answer. Asked him what it was like, how much money he made, whether he was skeeved out by the confidentiality agreement. Honestly, I was kind of offended to think that Keller had put me in the same camp as Will Washburn—you know how Will was, always throwing some fit—but what I noticed that day was that he’d really calmed down. A thoroughly useful experience —that was how Will described it. He said he’d made tons of money and Keller had already written a personal recommendation on his behalf to someone on Princeton’s admissions committee.”