The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

Rather than arriving late, as I had thought I would, I was the first guest. My mother, who was staying with Inga, hadn’t yet emerged from the bedroom, and Sonia, too, was still in hiding. The loft was lit with candles. I smelled roasting lamb, basil, burnt matches, and my sister’s perfume. Trying to push Mr. T. out of my mind, I told myself I would check on him in the morning.

  My sister was in her diva mode, dressed in a tight-fitting silk jacket and narrow pants, her hair pulled up, her mouth red. I told her that all she needed was a cigarette holder to complete the picture.

  “Gave it up, remember?”

  With a mischievous smile, Inga raised her thumb and began to enumerate the guests, lifting a finger for each: “You and your mysterious Shakespeare heroine; Mamma, Sonia, me; Henry Morris, professor of American literature, NYU, knew Max a little, recovering after painful divorce from mad Mary. He’s a wee bit stiff, but very smart. In fact, I like him a lot. We’ve had a date.” Inga winked at me, then thrust up the thumb of her other hand to keep on counting, “My friend Leo Hertzberg, yet another professor, but a retired one, from art history at Columbia, lives on Greene Street, sees poorly, but he’s very interesting and extremely kind. I met him through my friend, Lazlo Finkelman. I’ve been reading Pascal to him every week for an hour or so, and then we have tea. His great sadness is that his only child, a boy, died when he was eleven. Matthew’s drawings are all over his apartment.” She glanced at me. “And I invited Burton.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. “After that incident in the park you won’t talk about?”

  Inga’s smile vanished. “Well, that’s why I did it. I found him in the telephone book and called.”

  I wasn’t able to continue the conversation because we were interrupted by the buzzer, and seconds later Miranda arrived. To say “Miranda looked beautiful that night” would be unjust. When I saw her come through the door, I felt choked with admiration. She was wearing a white sweater that exposed her shoulders, black pants, and gold loops in her ears, but it was her long slender neck and arms and gleaming eyes that crushed me, not to speak of the way she held herself. Her straight back and slightly elevated chin communicated an ineffable mixture of confidence and pride. Inga immediately engaged her in conversation. My mother and Sonia emerged from the back of the loft, arm in arm, both dressed up for the occasion, although in Sonia’s case that meant a loose dress paired with motorcycle boots.

  It wasn’t the first time in New York City that a motley group of the divorced, widowed, bereft, or merely solitary gathered for a meal, but despite the fact that Inga had any number of friends who came in pairs, she hadn’t included a single married couple on her guest list. It was an evening for our mother, whose mind didn’t leave our father for long in that first year after his death, and Inga may have thought that the sight of intimate couples, old or young, might be painful. I knew that my sister regarded the dinner party as a ritual, organized around the idea that talk is a form of play. Like children at recess, the players must make an effort to resist the rough stuff and maintain respectful limits. She also felt that the combination of personalities was crucial to its success or failure, and so I paid close attention to the two strangers I was introduced to that evening.

  Leo Hertzberg was a middle-sized man with thinning gray hair, a beard, a small paunch, and glasses that hid his eyes. He steered himself carefully into the room with a cane. When he reached Inga, the two pecked each other twice, and after the kisses I overheard him say to her in a low voice, “Can you look me over to make sure nothing’s out of place?”

  Inga placed both hands on his shoulders, glanced down at his blue shirt, nondescript tie, gray sports jacket, and somewhat rumpled trousers, and said, “You look dashing. No tweaking necessary.”

  The man smiled then and shook his head as if to say, Although I take pleasure in the compliment, I know it isn’t true.

  The first thing I noticed about Henry Morris was his eyes. After looking at him for a while, I understood that he blinked less often than most people, a trait that was slightly disconcerting. The man was only a couple of inches shorter than I am, strikingly handsome, and I guessed a few years younger than my sister. When he shook my hand, he looked at me directly, his gaze cool but not unfriendly. His grip, however, was strong, almost combative, and I sensed that he might be one of those men who instinctively treat all other men as rivals. But it was what I witnessed a couple of minutes later that gave me pause. Morris was talking to Inga in the kitchen, and she was laughing at something he had said. As she turned away to pick up a plate of hors d’oeuvres, I watched him place his fingers around the upper part of her right arm and begin to squeeze it, exerting increasing pressure, or so it seemed to me. Inga stopped laughing and turned to look at him, her expression sober and compliant, her eyes shining. Then, with a small smile, she gently put her hand over his and made him release her. Their erotic connection was palpable, and I gathered that Inga’s use of the word “date” had been a euphemism.

  Burton arrived last. The rest of us were sitting with drinks near the front of the loft. When Inga opened the door for him, my friend looked bulkier than usual, as if he had overdressed for the spring night. As soon as he entered the room, he thrust forward a bouquet of flowers covered in plastic that he held in two hands, and began to apologize profusely for his lateness. As I studied his body more closely, I began to suspect that he had improvised some kind of sweat-catcher under his suit, a suspicion that was confirmed when Inga took the flowers from him and I heard a distinct rustling sound in the vicinity of his underarms. But it was his face that worried me. His expression when his eyes met Inga’s was so unguarded, so plainly adoring, it brought to mind not a man in love, but a dog mooning at the sight of his mistress. My heart sank.

  The conversation meandered that evening from the war in Iraq to the vicissitudes of memory and the character of dreams. The wine was poured freely, and exactly how we got from one topic to another is unclear, but I know that by the time we were seated and ingesting the lamb, I had discovered that Henry Morris was writing a book on Max—a large particular Inga had left out of her description of him—that he was vociferously opposed to the war, and also that he sliced and chewed his meat with a precision and delicacy that struck me as fastidious.

  Burton’s handkerchief seemed to have a life of its own that evening. Like a white flag, it unfurled itself, wiped and dabbed the face of my friend, and then vanished into its owner’s waiting breast pocket. Burton looked elated, a combination, I suspect, of wine and proximity to the beloved, because when he smiled, which was often, his lips had a loose and flabby quality I hadn’t seen before. He discoursed on some topic to Inga at the other end of the table as my sister, her cheeks flushed, nodded enthusiastically. My mother had a tête-à-tête with Leo Hertzberg, of which I heard snatches. He said, “After we left Berlin, my parents found an apartment in Hampstead. I remember it looked small and dirty to me, and I didn’t like the way it smelled.” “I was living outside Oslo during the occupation,” my mother said quietly. “After the war, like a lot of Norwegian girls, I went to England and worked as domestic help. I was with a family in Henley-on-Thames for a year. Then I went back to university.” Miranda was more at ease than I had ever seen her. She smiled more, used her hands more when she talked, and I thought to myself that whatever burdens were weighing on her, she had at least momentarily forgotten them. She was seated next to me at the table, and the presence of her body so close to mine seemed to activate my peripheral nerves. I could almost feel them tingling. She was wearing perfume, and I had a strong desire to press my nose to the hollow behind her ear and inhale the scent. Miranda spoke to me and Henry about the early Russian Constructivists and their book designs, a subject I knew nothing about, but then the conversation moved to the use of color for emotional effects, and Miranda said that a certain shade of pale turquoise made her shudder—as if she were getting sick with the flu. I brought up synesthesia then, and a man I had read about who would involuntarily see a colo
r whenever he met someone. “I think he saw green for a withdrawn person, for example.” “But colors always have feelings,” Sonia said. “Red is completely different from blue.”

  Our talk was broken off by an exclamation from Inga. “You mean you’re bringing together classical memory systems and neuroscience! That’s wonderful!” Burton gave Inga a triumphant grin. His handkerchief leapt out of his pocket, snapped to attention, and made contact with his wineglass, which promptly flew off the table and shattered on the floor. Despite immediate protests from Inga, Henry’s remark “What a trajectory,” and Sonia’s spontaneous applause, Burton, with a mortified expression on his face, threw his lumpy self onto the floor and, as his mysterious undergarment crackled, began picking up the glass.

  The incident of the broken wineglass marked a change in the evening. The eight of us settled into the living room. After asking permission, Morris smoked a cigar, and Burton, rather surprisingly, joined him. Cognac made the rounds, and the once tall candles shining in the room flickered low in the breeze from the open windows, their burning wicks hazy behind the rising smoke.

  “Still,” my mother was saying to Leo Hertzberg, a faint smile on her face, “there are many things in life that we don’t understand, things that happen without any explanation at all.”

  I felt sure she was thinking of the invisible presence that entered the room on the day my father died.

  Leo nodded. He looked meditative and a little sad, I thought.

  Burton, apparently recovered, lurched in, and suddenly we were all listening. “Mrs. Davidsen,” he said.

  “Marit,” said my mother.

  “Well, thank you. I take that as an honor.” Burton nodded at my mother. “Marit, I couldn’t agree with you more. In my research, well, perhaps not in all my research, but in a good deal of it, certainly, it has become eminently clear that we, that is, not me, but scientists, don’t know about a whole range of human phenomena. Take sleep.” Burton wiped his face. “Nobody knows why we sleep. And dreams. No one knows why we dream. Back in the seventies, seventy-six, to be exact, yes, I can be exact, Daniel Dennett proposed that dreams may not be real, that they aren’t experiences at all, just false memories that flood us when we wake up. Discredited now. Thoroughly. Also the REM theory.”

  “Really?” my mother said politely.

  “Indeed.” The handkerchief dabbed. “There are non-REM dreams, some of them entirely indistinguishable from REM dreams. Allan Hobson”—Burton took a breath and surged on—“ ‘activationsynthesis’ man, par excellence, big in the field, believes that pontine brainstem mechanisms, that’s reptilian brain territory, way back”—the handkerchief flew to Burton’s neck—“cause sleep and dreams. In his model, dream imagery is loaded at random and the forebrain tries to make sense of it. Dreams have no rhyme or reason, according to him, no wishing, no disguises, no Freud. Mark Solms, psychoanalyst, brain researcher, and neurologist, passionately begs to disagree. Heard him speak not long ago. Excellent delivery. Patients with specific forebrain lesions stop dreaming altogether. He believes parts of the forebrain generate dream pictures, that complex cognitive processes are involved, so dreams do have meaning. Memory’s involved, but nobody knows exactly how. Francis Crick, yes, the inimitable DNA Crick, argued that dreams are memory’s garbage disposal, the leftovers, nonsense, if you will, churned up and spewed out in our sleep. David Foulkes thinks that semantic and episodic memories are randomly activated in dreams, but that dreams have predictable features. There’s been a long-standing notion, oh, let me see, at least since Jenkins and Dallenbach in 1924, that when we dream we process and consolidate our memories. Then . . .” Burton’s brain was ticking away. He began to recite. “There was Fishbein and Gutwein, Hars and Hennevin . . .”

  Inga mercifully interrupted the footnotes with an exclamation: “Fishbein and Gutwein! That’s wonderful. Laboratory broth: fish bones and good wine!”

  Burton smiled sheepishly, his forehead wet and gleaming in the candlelight. “Never thought of that. In all events, just as many researchers say they’re wrong, about memory, that is.”

  “I know dreams come from memories,” Sonia said, her face grave.

  I looked at my niece. “There are different kinds of dreams,” I said. “I’ve had patients who have repetitive dreams about a single terrible event. They’re more like reenactments than dream narratives. Your grandfather had them after the war.”

  Sonia’s eyes were large and thoughtful, but she didn’t answer me.

  “In my dreams,” Miranda said, “I mostly live in the same house. It doesn’t resemble anywhere I’ve ever lived. Part of it belongs to me, but then there’s some doubt about the other rooms. They’re all connected, you see, and sometimes I open a door to a whole new room, but who owns it is never clear.” Her expression was pensive. “On the fifth floor there are three small bedrooms I’ve somehow forgotten about. I turn a key that’s in the lock, and then I rediscover them one by one. They’re falling apart, and I need to repair them, but somehow I never do. Do any of you go back to the same places in your dreams, I mean places that don’t exist anywhere else?”

  “I’m not sure,” Inga said. “Usually it’s a house or apartment that’s supposed to be a particular place, but it doesn’t look like itself at all.”

  “Yes, I have that, too,” Miranda said, “but lately I’ve been recording my dreams, and I realize that what happens on the other side is a kind of parallel existence. I have a memory of what’s happened there. There’s a past, present, and future. I return to the same house, but it’s”—Miranda squinted, as if to help herself remember—“it’s like the rules of living are different. And the view from the window changes. Sometimes it’s the United States, sometimes Jamaica. I’ve been drawing my dreams, and they might be strange, but they’re not nonsensical.”

  “And the drawings you make look like the dreams?” Inga said. “When you’re finished, you feel that they’re accurate?”

  Miranda leaned forward and gestured with her right hand. “No,” she said. “Not accurate in the way you mean. I begin with the rough drawings I do after I wake up and then I fill them in bit by bit, finding my way forward to make sure it doesn’t feel wrong.”

  “I’ve had the most curious dreams about my body,” my mother said, “that it’s deformed.”

  “Me, too,” Miranda said, “that I’ve become a monster.”

  I thought of the female monster I had seen in her drawing—its immense mouth and fang-like teeth: a wolf woman.

  “I’ve often dreamt that I have extra eyes,” Inga said. “One or two more on my forehead or at the back of my head. That’s monstrous, but in the dream, I just feel kind of unsettled.”

  “Before I’m really asleep,” Miranda said, “I often see horrible creatures that keep changing their shape. I find them fascinating. I wonder where they come from.”

  “Hypnagogic hallucinations,” Burton said.

  “So that’s what they’re called. You’d think they’d have a better name.” Miranda looked thoughtful.

  “I get chased all the time,” Sonia said. “I’m surprised I don’t wake up exhausted from all that running at night.”

  “In my dreams now,” Leo said quietly, “my vision is just as faded as when I’m awake. I dream in a blur with sounds and words and touch, and I run, too, from Nazi soldiers who have found their way to Greene Street and are banging on the door.”

  “The truth is,” Henry said, “I rarely remember my dreams.” He snapped his fingers. “They just disappear.”

  “You have to wake up slowly,” Miranda said, “and make notes—or draw.”

  Henry put his arm on the back of the sofa behind Inga and moved it close to her neck. I watched my mother scrutinize the gesture.

  “You’re an analyst, Erik,” Henry said. “You must interpret dreams. What’s your position on all this? Do you follow the orthodox Freudian line?”

  “Well,” I said, asking myself whether there had been a hint of hostility in his voic
e, “a lot has happened in psychoanalysis since Freud. We know that Freud was right that most of what the brain does is unconscious. He didn’t invent that idea, of course—you have to at least give credit to Helmholtz—but still, it wasn’t so long ago that many scientists rejected the very possibility. I’ve come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we’re awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It’s essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings in psychotherapy are subjective. There’s a lot of research that confirms that dream content reflects the dreamer’s emotional conflicts.”

  “Hartmann,” Burton chimed in.

  “Yes,” I said. “By telling a dream, a patient is exploring some deeply emotional part of himself and creating meaning through associations within a remembered story. The nonsense theory of dreaming that Burton cited doesn’t explain why dreams are narratives.”

  “Max used dream structures in his novels,” said Morris, turning to Inga. “Sudden shifts and transformations. I’m thinking of A Man at Home. Horace wakes up, goes to work, comes home, has dinner, kisses his children goodnight, makes love to his wife, and the next day, he wakes up and they’re gone. The house is empty except for the bed he’s sleeping in. Nothing’s there.”

  “Reading Max’s work,” Inga said slowly, “is like seeing him again in a dream.” Her voice broke on the word him. “You know how you meet someone, but then the face is all wrong, and it’s somebody else.” Inga’s hands began to shake. My mother gave her daughter a concerned look. Burton’s handkerchief vanished between his palms, and Sonia turned her head to the window. It’s something about Dad. Henry Morris, however, kept his steady eyes fixed on my sister’s face.

  “Don’t worry,” Inga said, grabbing her thighs with her hands. “I’m okay. It will pass.” She made a wincing smile. “I think everybody feels that dreams are important in some way. The Egyptians believed in universal dream symbols. The Greeks thought dreams were divine messages; Artemidorus wrote the Oneirocritica, a kind of dictionary of dream interpretation. Mohammed dreamed most of the Koran, and on and on.” Inga lowered her voice. “Last night, I dreamed I was home in the old house where we grew up. You, Mamma, and you, Erik, were there, and it all looked just as it was. We were in the living room, and suddenly Pappa was standing there, true to life, not at all different. But he didn’t have his walker or the oxygen. I knew he was dead, and then he disappeared. In the dream, I said to myself, ‘I’ve seen my father’s ghost.’ ”