Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

She comes over and puts her arm round his shoulders protectively.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he says. “I’m obviously trying to have a row with you. Oh God — can’t I even have a row with you now? What am I supposed to do — have rows with my friends? Or bottle all my aggression up and let it turn into high blood pressure? Aren’t I to have any pleasure in life at all?”

She strokes his hair.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You’re thinking this is all rather comical, aren’t you?”

“A bit,” she says gently.

“Funny that I can always tell what you’re thinking, isn’t it? I can read you like a book — some book I’ve read six times already. That’s one of the things I like about her . I never have the slightest idea what she’s thinking. I never know what she’s going to do next. It’s such a relief! It gives me some slight interest in life.”

She kisses his ear. He sighs.

“Why are you behaving so aggressively?” he demands. “Why are you making a scene like this? You’re not… you’re not jealous , are you? You must realize that I’ve got it all worked out in my head so that this doesn’t have any bearing on you at all.”

“I assumed you’d got it worked out somehow,” she murmurs.

“Of course I have. I’ve got a clear understanding inside my head that this business is taking place before I ever met you.”

She picks up his hand and kisses the knuckles.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not jealous.”

“Yes, you are,” he replies. “I know when you’re jealous. Don’t deceive yourself. God, no wonder I’m driven to go out and have affairs! Jealous scenes every time I come home….”

She rubs his knuckles silently, gazing at the lights below them.

“You are jealous,” he says, looking at her closely. “Aren’t you? Or aren ’t you? You aren’t , are you? You don’t care a damn! It doesn’t matter tuppence to you whether I go off and have affairs with other people or not …!”

Later, in bed, she puts her head on his shoulder and in a very small voice apologizes. The whole scene was her fault, she sees that now. He puts his arms round her, and insists that he was partly to blame as well. His generosity moves them both. Meltingly they eat at each other, like two carnivorous ice-creams.

So when he sees Rose staring at him with her dark, serious eyes among the crowd on the staircases in the interval (this is at a concert) he doesn’t hesitate for a moment, but goes straight up to her.

“Excuse me,” he says, “but do you know if they’re going to play the violin concerto with the original cadenzas?”

“What?” says Rose, frowning.

“Would you like some coffee?” asks Howard. He has just noticed they are serving coffee on the next floor up.

“I’m looking for someone,” says Rose.

“I feel like a coffee myself.”

“Don’t they always play Mozart’s cadenzas?”

“You could look for them while you’re drinking the coffee.”

She looks round desperately, tugging at her hair.

“I’ll come with you while you have your coffee,” she says.

They walk upstairs to the coffee counter. Howard is so pleased with himself he feels he can say anything.

“Didn’t I do that well?” he cries. “Has anyone ever come up to you and introduced himself like that?”

Howard meets Phil Schaffer in various pubs, down there in the sea of lights — Phil knows the city intimately already — and they walk round for hours, talking and yawning and doing joky things. They go to amusement arcades, and start a poetry magazine, and buy pornographic books, and release long streamers of lavatory paper from the top of the Pan-Am building to see whose will be carried farther by the wind as it falls. Phil makes every dark doorway seem an entrance to a sinister underworld, every advertisement and book title a revelation of the absurd. Their regular promenading grounds are the streets that abound with dirty bookshops and prostitutes and Chinese restaurants. They are both nineteen at the time, and if there’s anything in the world that’s sweeter than being nineteen when you’re thirty-seven, it’s being nineteen in a street full of whores and dirty bookshops and Chinese restaurants.

As they go about the city they search for God. They know he won’t be in any of the obvious places — that wouldn’t be his style at all. He won’t have his name on the door. He’ll be ex-directory, lurking behind some apparently innocent front, like the head of an intelligence agency.

One day they find him. They are looking through the directory board in the foyer of the RCA building, reading aloud to each other all the names of firms they find ridiculous (“How about this? Cock o’ the North Erection Company.” “ What ?” “Sorry — Construction Company. Hey, what goes on in this one, though? Toplady and Partners!” “Disgusting!”) when they discover a firm on the sixteenth floor called Geo. Dewey (Optical) Ltd. Phil whistles, and looks at Howard with raised eyebrows.

“What?” says Howard.

“G.D.O.” says Phil.

“I don’t get it.”

“Anagram.”

“Fantastic!”

They go up to the sixteenth floor at once, not at all sure what they are going to do. But as they hesitate outside the door marked Geo. Dewey (Optical) Ltd., a man comes out. He is wearing a tweed cap and an ancient blue trench-coat . He has a slight limp .

Phil raises his eyebrows in Howard’s direction at once.

They spring into the next lift, catch sight of him again in the lobby, and trail him for miles, on underground trains and buses, out into sparse unfinished housing estates among the vague terrains on the outskirts of the city, elaborating increasingly fantastic and boring explanations of his destination and business, until, mercifully, they lose him, and can return to the dirty bookshops and Chinese restaurants.

“Have you ever thought why it gets dark each evening?” asks Phil one day, as they leave one coffee bar where nothing is happening, and walk to another, to find out if anything is happening there.

“What do you mean?” replies Howard. “The world’s turning round!”

“But why is the world turning round? Who’s turning it?”

“Not … Geo. Dewey (Optical) Ltd.?”

“Of course. Think what would happen to the electric-light industry if it didn’t get dark every night. And the entertainments industry. And gambling, and girls. Would you be surprised if I told you that the seven major shareholders in GEC, Westinghouse, Con Edison, NBC, and CBS, are Mr. El, Mr. Elohim, and Mr. Adonai, YHWH Inc., Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Shaddai Holdings, and Zebaot International?”

Howard puts a significant look on his face while he thinks. Then some faint memory stirs.

“But aren’t they the Seven Names of God?” he asks.

“Right! Seven aliases, and he’s got the moon and stars sewn up as well!”

Whores, dirty bookshops, Chinese restaurants — and the whole scene manipulated by the invisible wires of this all-powerful secret monopoly!

Fan tas tic!

“But you must know!” says Howard to Felicity, walking up and down the living room and clutching an amazed hand to his forehead.

“Well, I don’t,” says Felicity evenly, peering closely at her sewing.

“They must have told you at school!”

“No.”

“Oh, come on! You’re just trying to shock me. You’re just trying to amuse me — to set it up for me so that I can walk up and down the room gasping and shouting ‘I don’t believe it!’ ”