Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Pearl Myles said, O.K., bad dreams were dreams we asked to be affected by, and though Spence asked her what a sidebar was, she went on: she could care less where dreams came from — a brief journey across our brain from one locale to another during which an infinitesimal "flam" of daylight where the head is thin lets some part escape, and what’s left was a piece of the ideal but it wasn’t where dreams came from that mattered because anyway who really knew about ‘em, they’re scandal-ridden — and she had only her own testimony to go on, but what she could share she could be sure of, and one real effect of some dreams she had had was that she put in a phone call to Mel Mayn, for instance, though upon hearing his blunt, inquiring voice nearly unchanged after thirty years, she just blurted out that her husband who always walked with his hands clasped behind his back had left two years before which was a good thing for them both because they became instantly closer until disaster struck — when why on earth would Mr. Mayn or for that matter his son care about Pearl Myles’s married history though she had said her husband’s departure made her recall that great mother-in-law of Mel Mayn’s who on the day of Brad’s Day in the hall mirror had seemed the pillar of practically everything. But in the few weeks after her husband split, Pearl had first slept like a stone then dreamt like crazy, then commenced changing the house around till she got drawn into the lighting business.

Which erratic period — together with a dream that took her in one night to that mirror but more to the light angling into it from the small-shouldered, tall, strongly sculpted woman with the thickly stream-lined gray hair plaited and neatly and tightly bunned in the back with a small copper feather that could glint through you fearsomely and could keep you from following and maybe make you think she was with you even after she had gone back into the kitchen — brought her to phone Mel Mayn out of the blue and learn that his son Jim had phoned to ask if an unknown old-book dealer who might have pocketed a nineteenth-century Mayn-family diary had had speckled hands.

Spence pointed out that he had speckled hands, speckled with blue and amber dots patterned past ordinary freckling. The Chinese woman came back along the street and went into the shop, and Spence said in his case these bad dreams taught him how to forget, because he remembered everything else, and too much. You have to want for it to come to you, she said; and Spence said that he had not been able to wait — he couldn’t for years. He had to go. He asked if Pearl Myles was all right, and she said everyone was asking this nowadays, even in Minneapolis. Spence could not confirm this, though he had been out there. It was getting to be another Silicon Valley what with all the technological companies but without the valley, he said.

But then the phone call and its cause in the dream of Margaret lighting up that terrible mirror outside the door of the music room where Brad’s choked mourning beat the floor like some artifice or alien custom brought wonderfully back for Pearl so it could pass to old Mel yet stay with her that flimsy kite flying high in her very body four-sided now for perhaps twenty-three months but seen for the first time now with on each side dreams she had had in those days and a kite big enough for the nimbus of Ben Franklin to sit beaming inside and all she could tell Mel was this ancient silliness that she had been in a borrowed bathysphere beached but rolled by a great tide and as the water in windrows of white crests rose and a child inside her pressed upon her bladder (she hoped Spence didn’t mind) this sea-going room proved skeletal at best, its walls but windows and not closed off but striped with light like beams of darkness, so the briny deep was kept from coming in by—

The Trace Window man Spence had to see appeared incredibly on the far side of the street between the foundation and the Chinese shop, and Spence told Pearl he feared for her safety yet didn’t know entirely why.

Until, she went on, the room or light box was picked up and she was carried roughly and well aware the chair she dreamed she was sitting in and having trouble riding was obviously set off (but so what) by all the capital punishment talk then, when the point was that it switched into the next dream she told Mel Mayn where she was at the stove and literally transparent because of salt sweat and could be seen right through like a jellyfish and she was cooking up a pot of chili except her husband, who in case she sat down on his lap was sitting right behind her in part of the dream following her knife chopping peppers, was also in the next aisle under a tilted mirror because he’s a guard and the kitchen is part of this supermarket and just when she’s accused of stealing some of the vegetables she’s cooking up — for him —he is taken away and the earthquake that bursts and splits the ceilings and floors and warps the aisles seems O.K. with the customers and the most natural dimensions for them to slope along and she looked up with some nice ripe vegetables in her hand and saw the guard in the mirror holding up some robbers in the other end of the store and at the instant she learns how to stand she looks down at the warping and buckling and upheaval and it’s South America with dark-scaled armored animal or submarine pushing up everywhere. And Mel Mayn, who wrote such a brief narrow little obituary for his wife it was widely talked about, suddenly said that when she looked back up the guard had escaped, right?

Spence held up a five-dollar bill — a fin, he told the Greek, who nodded and took it, and Spence rose awkwardly from the booth. Pearl continued: Mel said he had had the same dream: escaped prisoner, salt waves, imprisoned child: and now that Pearl had had it, he knew what it meant.

Spence cautiously observed that there had been a model, green and reptilian, of the South American continent in the high school where Pearl had taught. Tears came to her eyes and she was amazed he knew, but shrugged it off. She said she had known then and there (but had not said to Mel) that dreams meant for sure only what you did as a result of them, and—

Your husband had left you by then? said Spence anxiously.

One dream before he left, one after, she was sure, but not the order; and then she did not have to ask Spence who the man was across the street because Spence knew she was thinking it. How about this young friend of Jim’s? she said.

There’s sand on the supermarket floor, a lot of it, said Spence stupidly, and his words curved gently, dumbly to hers: That’s not stupid, that’s right, that’s right, there’s sand; and I knew that the meaning of the dreams was (when no one would tell me which of the vegetables I had stolen), We’re on our own; act accordingly … but Mel Mayn saw them another way.

Spence said he was concerned for Pearl’s safety, didn’t know if it was what she had said or hadn’t. She said she never knew what that word concerned meant. He had to go. Nobody was stopping him, they both felt.

It was because of Mel Mayn that the Chilean economist had phoned Pearl and she was here. This young friend Larry? he had a theory about interhem-ispheric reappearance. .?

Spence stood waiting and the Greek waiter came and stood nearby with some change in his hand.

Well. Mel had told his son; and the next thing—

Which son?

Her old pupil Jim. And the next thing, well a day or two later, this cultivated voice with an accent was talking to her on her kitchen phone in Minneapolis asking her—

But how had the Chilean gotten Pearl’s number?

Wasn’t it easy if he had her name? Couldn’t Spence manage that? though of course he was in the racket.