The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  In fact, in those weeks, the dream came closer. Names appeared, the fanciful names of dream locations and dream people. In her sleep, she heard the tolling of the bell at Saint Sepulchre, the bell that rang when a man had gone to hell. There was a band of actors ruled by a Lord Strange—once she’d ridden a black-maned horse to see the actors; she’d worn a velvet mask. And there was None-such Palace, where she’d sat at the feet of a queen and played an ivory flute. The queen had worn a cloak of silver lace, embroidered with enormous spiders; she was Cynthia, Sovereign of the Moon, and she had a toothache that swelled her face. All the nobles came with broths and potions, but nothing could ease her pain.

  There was something Emilia had to do. (Emilia was Kate’s dream name.) There was a quest or a message to deliver—Emilia had no time to spare in the dream. But Emilia could never wake up. Only Kate could wake up, wake up in New York, and that was neither here nor there. It was fiddling while Rome burned.

  So Kate woke in New York and was meant to get up. She was meant to forget her dream, wash it off in the shower. She was meant to get a job.

  She would think: If I’d truly loved Nick, I could wake. She would think: If Nick were truly good. She would think: If he loved me. She would also think that other people had recurring dreams, and it didn’t have to mean anything. She thought this but didn’t believe it. She believed in the dream.

  And after all, belief was a beautiful thing. That was the trouble with atheists (Kate thought); they might be right, but their unbelief was utilitarian, bleak, like a Brutalist building. Nobody wanted to live there. No one could want them to be right.

  She believed. And in the real night of New York, she would walk along the river and look at the moon. It was blank and real. A rock. It had no Cynthia who danced in the chilly air of None-such Palace, no argent queen whose spiders fluttered in the lunar air; no girl who sat on a floor strewn with straw and meadow flowers, in a wash of embroidered skirts, and played an ivory flute.

  In the meantime, she didn’t have a job. She hadn’t finished college. Her life went nowhere. Still, there was nothing to be done, Kate thought. The dream was just what had happened to her. It was one of those things where the best you could do was to hide it from other people.

  5

  The first few weeks of being in love: what magic had meant to him when he was a child, what he’d wanted when he’d dreamed about riding a dragon. Everything was that different. Just Kate’s face looking up and seeing him. He’d walk across a dive bar to her smile and then her hand in his that made his body ignite with pleasure. He felt it in his feet. On the wall behind her, a framed vintage advertisement for the Tour de France was blessed, was alive and significant. Sexual. Nothing could be this good again, and already the scrambling vertigo of that. Of clinging to this thin moment that wouldn’t cling back.

  The fear when he glanced at her casually and felt nothing. The relief when she smiled and was amazing again.

  Or she might just leave you.

  Ben had a job at an energy-industry journal, a job he downplayed and treated as a stopgap embarrassment but secretly liked. He rewrote press releases. He had spats with his editor and drank ten coffees. He attended conferences in Pittsburgh that were an ocean of suits in a Holiday Inn, where, at a certain hour of night, the suits started daring each other to look up strip clubs in the Yellow Pages. It was rote, it was soulless: a comfortable nothing, like going to an office to play cards all day.

  What was important now: it was a job you could leave at five.

  Kate was never doing anything. He picked her up at Sabine’s, and they walked all through New York, creating a personal geography of train stations where they’d kissed and bars where they’d had breakthrough conversations, all through those last summer days that delicately chilled, became serious, became the first bright days of autumn. Everywhere, they were the couple in love. They were stars, cocooned, invulnerable; would be laughing happily on a jam-packed subway platform, in its tropical reek and heat, while the F train just didn’t come and the other travelers endured a stifled misery that Ben now couldn’t even imagine. How had that stuff ever mattered to him?

  And back to Sabine’s—it was always there. Ben’s apartment was too grim; it had linoleum in the bedroom. Kate had a place—a shared house in Brooklyn—but somebody’s brother was staying in her bedroom, and anyway, Kate didn’t like bedrooms; they made her feel like a doll that had been put in a drawer. So it was Sabine’s rooftop, where Kate was always stroking the endangered grass motherhennishly, worried that it missed the Andes, that it wouldn’t like the local rain. When there was local rain, they went indoors to the uncle’s library, where Kate was in the habit of sleeping on a sheepskin rug; it had a semicircle of rosy smudges where Kate’s lipstick had come off on the wool. With the addition of Ben, she brought a futon out, and they had sex for hours beneath the books that filled the walls to the ceiling, books that seemed to solemnly think their thousand stories in the gloom beyond the light of the reading lamp, while Ben and Kate didn’t think but moaned and felt and were animals in that light.

  Outside the library door, it was politics. Sabine was the sort of rich girl who bankrolled left-wing political movements: squatters’ rights and prison reform and open borders and just plain communism. Her apartment was a churn of left-wing activists and local politicians, of reporters whose stories Sabine dictated and moneyed friends who wrote her checks, of squatters and ex-convicts and refugees who came to her apartment in threadbare legations to second-guess everything she did. Often they stayed the night, and there were always staffers from Albany staying, who stank the place out with their cigarettes and shouted at the breakfast table, stabbing the air with a fork to make their points. There was also a shifting population of mail-order brides and miscellaneous penniless riffraff, plus Martin the New Zealander garden designer, who’d been grandfathered into the apartment as a condition of Sabine’s own tenancy.

  Every weekend, there was a party where these same people appeared in different clothes. There was one intimate party where everyone sat on the floor and told stories about times they’d been depressed; there was one uproarious party where the mail-order brides danced in bikini tops and a stringer from La Prensa put her foot through one of the African drums. One Saturday, there was an unplanned party because people kept turning up with wine, hoping there might be a party they hadn’t heard about. At one presidential debate–watching party, a drunken state assemblyman told Sabine he wanted to leave his wife for her, and when Sabine turned him down, he locked himself in a bathroom and shaved his head.

  Kate knew everyone. They knew Kate. Half the men carried a torch for her; women dragged her into bedrooms to tell her secrets. Ben was hers, so he was instantly A-list, included in kitchen powwows and treated to coke and offered jobs at the Jersey City mayor’s office. It went to his head. He took sides. He cared. He became a fork-waving shouter at breakfast. He donated twenty-dollar bills and marched and went out knocking on doors in the Bronx. Just being in Sabine’s crowd made him feel like a soldier in the good war; he was no longer just Ben for himself, but an invincible Ben for all mankind.

  And after all, it was the year 2000—Chen’s Year, the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspaper like opening a gift; a year of mass protests at which the same violin-playing blind girl would always appear and play the same Irish air; the year Les Girafes occupied the embassy of Germany and flew the anarchist flag and the Jolly Roger from its broken windows; that best-ever year when Ben was first in love.

  And began to spy utopia. In bars and taquerías, in the inebriate dark of a much-used bed, on the rooftop, above/among the starry opulence of Upper Manhattan, he believed what Kate believed and was always (in his mind) in a wine haze, dancing in a jostling swarm of mail-order brides and political hacks, while the world became the something else of dreams, of books, of Kate.

  The first wrong note came in the Debendranath Talk—the talk Ben had to have with all new people, in which he e
xplained his first name was Debendranath, not Benjamin, as people assumed. It was at an early party, where Ben and Kate had crept off to be alone. They were hiding in a bedroom and smoking a joint there like (Kate said) two teenagers about to be dramatically caught smoking a joint by their strict parents.

  Then he told her about being named Debendranath (“You see, it is basically Rumpelstiltskin”) and Kate said she liked multisyllabic names, and it was nothing to a person who spoke Hungarian, and repeated, “Debendranath. Debendranath. Debendranath,” making Ben laugh from stoned inconsequence.

  This developed into the Parents Conversation, and Ben was taken aback to learn Kate thought of her parents as her best friends. Just loved them, zero problems, and went to have lunch with them every Sunday. They read newspapers together and ate Hungarian pastries and complained about contemporary art. Kate’s mother was a professor of Hungarian, and her father was an artist, specializing in works on paper—just like Kate. And Ben’s parents?

  Then Ben had to confess he didn’t like his parents. Well, everybody hated his mother. It was possible to pity Ben’s mother, who’d spent half her life in mental institutions being hated by psychiatrists, but no one liked her. She was an extreme narcissist. If you weren’t admiring her, she saw you as a persecutor and railed at you or threatened suicide. Even her sisters in Kolkata wouldn’t speak to her, an astonishing feat if you knew Bengali families. Ben’s father was okay. Or if he hadn’t been so oppressed by Swati (Ben’s mother), he would be okay. Ben could hardly meet Kate’s eye while saying this: everyone knew that men with terrible mothers grew up hating women.

  Kate apparently didn’t know this, however, and reacted perfectly strangely by wondering aloud if there was any way to break up Ben’s parents’ marriage.

  “If we did, my mother would kill herself,” Ben said, annoyed. “That’s why my dad doesn’t leave.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He wouldn’t say that to me. Come on.”

  “But what if she did kill herself? Would that really be worse?”

  “Wow.”

  “No, but if she’d killed herself years ago, wouldn’t you be happier now?”

  “You really don’t understand what it’s like to have bad parents, do you?”

  Kate frowned. Her face intensified, he wasn’t sure how. A bad moment, when he thought Kate might be a narcissist and felt an acrophobic nausea. But her black eyes softened suddenly. It was as if she were about to cry, but instead she blushed and crossed her arms against herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being an idiot. Sometimes I say really awful things.”

  There was nothing so wrong with that conversation. They’d both been wasted and Kate had apologized. In fact, whenever Ben thought about it, his worry would slowly evaporate. But when he didn’t think about it, it niggled and made him need to think about it again. At last, he labeled it “the anomaly” and tried to put it out of his mind.

  The next strange thing happened at the party where Ben first met Oksana, the Ukrainian mail-order bride.

  He’d heard a lot about Oksana, partly because she was the one who ran the organization that rescued mail-order brides but also because she took her clothes off at parties. Therefore, at all Sabine’s parties, men and lesbians would ask hopefully, “Is the naked girl coming?” and even some women and gay men would ask pruriently, “Is the naked girl here?” Then everyone would talk about how it changed the atmosphere to have a naked woman at a party, until someone mentioned the mail-order bride organization and someone else said, “I always forget that. I always just think of her as Naked Girl.”

  Because she was naked, Ben immediately recognized her. He watched her come into the room with a peculiar shock, because he’d been envisioning her as a centerfold type, even though he’d been told time and again she had an ordinary body. She did. She was flat chested, bottom heavy—duck shaped—and her skin was anemically white. Even her lips were off-white. At first glance, she seemed to have no nipples at all. Her hair was also pale, white blond, and so messy he assumed it was a feminist statement.

  Oksana crossed the room, and no one stared, but everyone parted before her. She went to a bookcase and studied the spines. A man appeared at her side and talked, but she opened a book and leafed through the pages until he gave up and went away. Ben would have thought she wasn’t interested in parties, except that she had a sprinkling of purple glitter across her broad white buttocks.

  Soon after, Sabine introduced her to Ben. Oksana had in the meantime put on one of the house’s signature cashmere bathrobes, presumably because it was October and chilly. There was a new man standing with her, proprietorially standing; he seemed to be angrily in love with her. This was one of Sabine’s moneyed cousins, meaty and blond, with a yachting tan.

  At first, Sabine was talking about her open borders organization and the crucial period coming up, for which she needed to fund new hires. No one listened, and yet it was clear the yacht man was going to write a check. Oksana smoked a cigarette, drawing Ben’s attention to the fact that her lips were chapped and her teeth a little yellow.

  When Sabine finished talking, Ben asked Oksana (because he’d always wondered, and he didn’t want to be intimidated into not asking), “Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

  She said, “My clothes are bad. Not good enough for such a party here.”

  The yacht man laughed as if she’d hilariously put Ben in his place, while Oksana looked at her cigarette impartially. Her voice had been eerily sweet and high-pitched, a little reminiscent of the musical saw.

  “You don’t need good clothes here,” Sabine said. “Look around you. My clothes aren’t that great.”

  Oksana shrugged. “So maybe if you’re naked, it’s better.”

  “No,” said Sabine. “That’s what I’m telling you. It’s really kind of gross if you sit on the furniture.”

  “Whoa!” The yacht man clawed the air. “Mee-ow!”

  “Not meow,” Sabine said. “This is physical reality. Cunts and assholes in contact with fabric.”

  “It isn’t always about my body, please,” said Oksana. “I’m actually tired of this.”

  Ben said, thinking to change the subject, “So what do you do, Oksana?”

  She said, “I am a filmmaker.”

  “She’s a great filmmaker,” the yacht man said combatively. “And she runs a great organization. She’s saved a lot of women from impossible situations, abusive situations.” Then he lectured Ben for ten minutes about the mail-order brides Oksana had saved and the documentary films she made, as if he were making the point (Ben thought) that he didn’t only love her because she was naked.

  Something about this performance left Ben feeling shaken and sentimental. He detached himself from them and went looking for Kate.

  He found her in the kitchen with some people who’d unearthed a waffle maker and were trying to remember how to make waffle batter, digging through the cupboards and naming ingredients. For a while, he endured their hubbub and delight, feeling like time was running out. In this interim period, he had the idea and believed in it immediately.

  At last, he dragged Kate away to a bedroom—the garden designer’s bedroom, which had clothes flung everywhere on the floor, so they were treading on a carpet of expensive pants. Ben was standing on some khakis and holding Kate, a familiar but mysterious thrill. Her back was plump and strong beneath his hands. He didn’t know why it felt so great.

  Kate confirmed to him that Oksana was a filmmaker. Had even been one in Ukraine, before. It was why she’d been a mail-order bride; it was too difficult to get films made in Ukraine. “I thought you knew,” said Kate. “She was really poor in Ukraine, but she always made those films. I thought you knew.”

  “I so didn’t know. And Sabine was being awful.”

  “She doesn’t like Oksana. It was probably that.”

  “Oksana seemed okay. A little like a person on heroin, maybe.”

  “She isn’t on heroin. She w
orks about a thousand hours a day. I think Sabine hates her for being so pretentious. Once she broke her own toe to see what it was like.”

  They both looked down at their toes, then saw each other doing it and smiled. Ben said, a little unsteadily, “There was one of those rich guys there who was so obviously in love with her.”

  “I wonder if it was Paul.”

  “I don’t know. It made me think how I’m in love with you.”

  “Oh!” Kate’s hands softened on his back. “And I’m in love with you.”

  There was a pause while they appreciated that. Her black eyes were charged with the pleasure, so wild and outlandish, like a pleasure they were having on Neptune. His was magnified by hers. It went back and forth that way for a while, then he said, “When you were all making waffles … I was thinking we could move in together. I don’t mean my place. We’d get a new place. I want to move out of my place anyway.”

  Then Kate subtly withdrew. Her hands were not quite holding him now; it was as if the embrace were diluted. She was thinking. (And there was the anomaly. A thing—he could have sworn—she decided not to tell him. It had a visage, a taste. It wasn’t good.)

  At last she said, “I can’t pay rent.”

  “No, seriously?” He laughed with relief. “I know you don’t have a job. I know all about it. Was that what was bothering you?”

  She shrugged (that hadn’t been it) but she was warm again. Was how Kate was.

  “It’s okay,” said Ben. “I can take care of rent. It’s fine.”

  “I could get a job. It’s not that I couldn’t get a job. But it would take time.”

  “Or we could just live somewhere cheap. Like Queens.”