Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  But with Ricky here…

  She realized with a small shock that though she was willing to show him the record of her dreams, she shied away from the idea of showing him the wall.

  They sat together in the shade of tall trees in an enclosed patio, eating pinion brittle from Senior Murphy’s candy shop. This was one of the oldest blocks in Santa Fe, all little shops now around the green interior courtyard. She was thinking about a box of rusted iron hooks of various sizes, not enough of them to make their own stratum on the wall, which she had collected but not yet used. The trouble was some of them were too bulky to fix securely, too damned dimensional.

  They had been talking about Santa Fe, about how far it was from the rest of the world. Ricky, as always, brought news of that rest of the world — famine, oppression, corruption, dirty little border wars, the usual patchwork of wretched modern history — in stinging detail from which she turned away. Partly to divert him from a caustic account of a summary execution he had inadvertently witnessed in some benighted desert province, she had begun defending this part of the country as having its own horrors, thank you. The murders of hippies by angry Hispanic farmers whose stream and only water supply the intruders had merrily and ignorantly fouled, a priest kidnapped and found killed out on the mesa, the great prison riot of fairly recent memory, the latest rape-murder of someone’s little girl…

  “The big sky country,” she said, “is no Paradise. People will knife and shoot each other in the parking lots of bars, and bodies do keep turning up dumped in the country to dry up and blow away, although they don’t, of course. But the scale is domestic, crude, and seldom political in the world’s sense of that word.”

  “You’d never guess it,” he murmured with irony, “looking at all these placid, god-fearing people of the soil.”

  “All these lost-looking tourists, you mean,” she snorted. “I don’t really like Santa Fe and I don’t come here often. Only, in fact, when I have guests. It’s pretty, after all, at least here in the center where the old architectural style has been preserved, bastardized, whatever you care to call it.

  “But the place is so — well, you can see: even before the season gets into full swing, rich, or comparatively rich, visitors more or less take over the town. Their presence, their interests, drive up prices, jam the restaurants and the parking lots, transform the place even physically — the new hotels, the pharmacy turned ice-cream parlor — into a machine for serving them instead of the people who live here. There are locals who won’t go downtown at all till the tourist season is over.”

  Ricky shrugged faintly. “Modern colonialism in one of its guises, with a racist element, no doubt?”

  “Yes,” she said. “With the Indians and the Hispanics on the receiving end, as you might guess. But I don’t really know much about any of it, Ricky, only what I read in the papers. I’m a newcomer myself, remember, an outsider by origin, and I’ve chosen not to try to become a local. Not to pretend. Living out in the country, beyond the edge of town — and not even this town that’s the center of things, but a more peripheral town — that’s my privacy, my solitude, my peace.”

  “Your studio,” he corrected. “Your work, which I must not keep you from, much as I enjoy taking the local tour with you. I can’t keep you on holiday forever.”

  Tell him now, show him when you get back this afternoon: show him what you chose for, when you chose against plunging into local issues. Instead she heard herself say in an evasive tone that made her cringe, “I’m not painting, Ricky.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I heard you tell that to George, but I thought you were just putting him off.”

  She shook her head, thinking, why is this so hard to talk about?

  “When did you stop, if I may ask?”

  “A little while before Nathan left — about two years after we settled in Taos together.” Better. Talking about Nathan seemed to restore her normal voice.

  Ricky sat with one thin arm draped along the back of the bench between them, a line drawing of a man in a cotton turtleneck that bagged on his stick-frame. “What happened?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she answered truthfully, offering more candy from the white bag: delicious, sinful stuff! She was grateful for this shift of the conversation onto accustomed ground (she’d been over all this with her gallery, with Claire, with many others besides George). “Coming here began the process. At first I thought a new setting would stimulate something fresh in me. I was fed up with doing all those damn bridge-paintings — you remember my first pictures when I started out in New York, the ones that stunned me more than anybody by doing so well? I wanted something more ‘authentic.’ I hoped I might find it here, and Nathan encouraged me. The idea was to shake those bridges, which had become my signature-image and could so easily become my prison, at least commercially speaking. But it didn’t work. I petered out. I stopped.”

  He studied her with those remarkable blue eyes, ignoring utterly the tourists ambling past talking camera-talk. “But then what in the world have you been doing with yourself?”

  Dangerous ground again, but she felt ready to handle it this time. Infusion of sugar registering, probably. “Well, we had the bookstore, of course. After Nathan left, I kept it going. I only sold it last year, and I still go in and help out with stock and things once a week as part of the deal. And because I like to.”

  “Nice for you,” he said, digging in the candy bag, spider-fingered, as she held it out for him. “And I suppose there’s a very active artistic community, lots of coming and going, lots of demands on your time, especially after this ‘retrospective’ George was going on about. After all, this whole area is supposed to be an artists’ colony, isn’t it? Plenty of socializing and company for you.”

  “Not exactly,” she said lightly. “I mean, yes, it exists, but no, I don’t get involved much. I’m a private person, Ricky. Even in New York I was that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember. You were shy. I suppose I thought if you’re not painting, you’d welcome more social diversion than usual. Isn’t it painful for you, having your talents just lie there, unexercised?”

  Damn it, what was he probing for? It was none of his business, what she did with her talents, such as they were! “I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “Talent generally gets as much exercise as it’s worth. Want to walk a little? I know where we can get some decent beer.”

  “In a minute,” he said, not stirring. He was watching some fat tourist children rooting among the flower plantings at the base of the central fountain. “Any of that lovely stuff left?”

  She shook the last fragments of candy into his palm.

  “I see,” he observed, “it was Claire, in the dream the other night. You’re sure it was her?”

  “It was her voice. I didn’t actually see her.”

  “Are you and your children close these days, may I ask?”

  “Not especially. But we get along; we’re even fond of each other. Claire’s the hardest one for me. She’s so…demanding — of herself, of me, of everyone. She writes me scolding letters, charging me with ducking my responsibilities as a ‘prominent woman artist,’ a public role-model for other gifted women.”

  “And you reply?”

  “That I haven’t got time for all that stuff because my job is art, not politics. Anyway, what she means, I think, is that I walked out on the family; I ducked being her role-model in the way that she wanted me to be.”

  “Ah,” Ricky murmured. “The eternal cry of the artist’s child — you never put me first! Complicated here by the fact that of course you did actually walk away, for the sake of your career.”

  She licked the last sweetness from her fingers. “Come on, Ricky, do you buy that crap too? I know that’s the story, but you should know better. Well, maybe not, maybe I never made it plain enough. I didn’t leave until they were grown, all three of them. Before that I was an amateur, and afterward, I was lucky. A lucky dabbler without background or a decent education in art
. You know why my friends in New York were all Nathan’s friends, all poets, writers, musicians, anything but painters? Because I knew the painters would see right through me in a second, that’s why. They’d all been studying with Albers and Kline while I was making prints in my garage after the kids went to bed, using an old press I’d picked up at a barn auction!”

  Ricky crooked a dubious eyebrow. “And this retrospective?”

  She laughed. “Oh, somebody resurrected some of those damned arches of mine and included them in a group show called ‘Treasure Trove’ about women artists who’d been undeservedly passed over by the art-buying public. Somehow everybody in the show got labeled a ‘major influence,’ myself included. It’s all a lot of nonsense. Claire makes much of it, the way George does in his way, and she wants me to do the same. I won’t.”

  “But you think it’s really childish resentment left over from the break-up of her family?”

  “She’s the only one who reproaches me. I think daughters are more sensitive to these things than sons. Sometimes I suspect that men take alienation for granted. They expect it.”

  Not the most tactful thing to say, perhaps, to a man who was rather pointedly not going home to his own kindred, even in extremis; but he had led the conversation onto this ground, and he had troubles a lot worse than a gauche remark from her. Her poor friend, who managed to sit there looking not at all poor but poised, collected, aristocratic as a wading bird at rest.

  “I should think,” he said, “that whatever the connection with Claire, the violence in the dreams comes from some other source, and I’m very puzzled as to what that might be. All that blood and gore… What have you been reading lately?”

  She grinned. “Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner.”

  “Have you got a secret taste for splatter-flicks?”

  “Not a chance. A good visual memory can be a curse if you’re not careful with it. I’m fussy about what I let my eyes look at.”

  “Any history of nightmares?”

  She shook her head. “Not since childhood. I was never even really scared of the dark, maybe because my mother used to come and sit with me if I woke up. She’d sing me Viennese songs, most of them off-color: girls going into the woods to pick strawberries and coming back pregnant, that kind of thing. She had a beautiful voice.”

  “My people didn’t believe in coddling children,” Ricky said wryly. “I took my lead soldiers to bed with me for company, and there was an old claw-hammer that I kept under my pillow in case of monsters.”

  She had a strong impulse to say to him, there’s something I want you to see, let’s go home,= and I’ll take you down the arroyo and show you a surprise…so you won’t worry about me so much. So you’ll know that dreams or no dreams, I’m functioning where it matters — in my work.

  Instead she said, “How about that beer?”

  Not yet, then. Maybe tomorrow.

  It’s because it’s not finished, you never liked to show work in progress, it’s too vulnerable.

  He cooked that night when they got back, making a much more elaborate dinner than she normally made for herself. She had gotten into the habit of eating simply, like many people who eat alone. He was lavish with the spices, and though he scarcely ate anything himself, he watched her devour his masterpiece with evident pleasure.

  They talked about the old days back east, friends they had in common. How in the tall bay-windowed living room of a Greenwich Village apartment during one memorable party, a well-known female concert-pianist, a friend of the host’s, had worked over the poor old upright with great exuberance, declaring at length with gusto as she banged shut the lid, “Well, that’s that!” And so it had been, as far as the piano was concerned. Next morning it was found that six of the wooden hammers inside had been snapped right off their stems.

  Dorothea put on some music, starting with the Mozart clarinet quintet that always made her skin creep with a kind of holy joy. Ricky made a fire on the hearth. They talked late into the night. It was a lovely, lazy evening. At the end of it, she still had said nothing to him of the wall.

  So she was off to Albuquerque, to get supplies she said, though she was vague about what supplies exactly. Sensing a closed area, he had backed off at once, wondering what supplies she could need that were not available in Taos or Santa Fe. Alone in the quiet of her home, he looked for the hundredth time over the notes on her dreams, on which he had determined to spend enough time to wrest some insight from them, some step forward in the frightening puzzle they made.

  He sat out in the back patio, the notebook pages held down by a full glass of apple juice because a light wind was blowing.

  Serious reading was difficult for him these days. While not a Mickey Finn in its effects, the hospice prescription did tend to take the edge off his concentration. His mind would wander, turning over chips of memory one after another: the topiary lion in Grandfather’s garden; slates falling from a rooftop and shattering on the walk so close that slivers hung from his bare knees, and the blood drops, starting; the way Miss Anstey rustled all the time as she walked, not cloth sounds but paper; the fat little Ho-tei figure, polished red wood with arms stretched to Heaven in lazy joy, standing on the table in his room at Winchester; the lifelong repeats of that moment when he first knew that he was going to cut himself while shaving, and did so — letting his own blood, the very stuff that was now carrying death throughout his body, victor at last; seeing a play in London and knowing that there must be more to Kenya than that — paper palms and wicker furniture and khaki clothing!

  He had enough stored up to go on with forever, if he chose. Would it be an error, to spend his last days foraging in the jumble of his past?

  There were, after all, issues to be addressed. He had a letter from one of those issues in his breast pocket.

  His sister Margaret wanted him to come home. She might have learned of his situation and his whereabouts through any number of chains of gossip; in any event she had run him to earth here. A letter from her, via Nigeria, had caught up with him today.

  She wanted to take care of him, in their parents’ old place. Dark Devon green, streaming rain on window-glass, watery light, and brittle, clever conversation. Christ.

  He loved the high places of the world, and this place of Dorothea’s was a glorious one — a plateau eight thousand feet up, covered in low, thick brush, with a grand stage of a sky full of cloud processions in the afternoons. He would not be here long enough see the full flood of summer tourists let alone the winter ski-crowd, so he enjoyed a comfortable sparseness of human figures in this vast landscape.

  Stop dodging about, you pathetic nit. There was only one figure, Dorothea, jaunty in slacks and boots with her dogs at her side, mistress of her slice of this country. She would keep running out after him to clap a hat on his head, as if he had time to develop skin-cancer from the sun! Give her up for Margaret?

  He had written, of course — one was not a beast — “Dear Maggot, not to worry; the ailing badger has found a warm, dry lair.”

  And so on, as if they were still children together. Well, it was as a child — an imaginative tyrant — that he had loved his sister, not as the prissy, moralistic, high-minded woman she became.

  Having refused her plea for his return, ought he not at least to dwell on her in his thoughts as she once was, indeed honor all that was good in his past by ruminating on it? Not for the first time it occurred to him that much of his strenuous traveling had been done to avoid just that sort of reflection.

  Sitting here on the white wrought-iron chair in Dorothea’s patio, he was traveling still, in a way. He could feel the shrinkage inward. (How could that be, since there must be tumors growing inside and the sensation should be of swelling, of crowded space?) He had grown skillful at gauging just how much strength he had. His periods of feebleness were not steady and unrelenting yet, thank God, but they were bad enough when they came. The body was heading for death and taking him with it.

  He caressed the bony
back of his neck with his palm.

  Not a bad body. He had given it a hell of a time, after all. Frozen and starved and roasted and soaked and desiccated, scraped raw with blowing sand, chewed up by insects, half-poisoned with villainous water and flyblown food, it was a wonder the poor beast had lasted this long.

  And five-star feeds in France, let’s not forget that; wines with more pedigree than his whole family put together; endless Oriental feasts; and the comforts of fine hotels. To offset abstinence in some places, he had allowed himself indulgence in others — for instance, with a brilliant blonde economist in Brussels, an old connection often reaffirmed over the years, to whom he had considered going with his horrible news before his impetus toward Dorothea had become clear. With a doctor’s widow in Wales, although he had known her in the Biblical sense well before her bereavement. Homely as he was, he had not done badly in that department.

  Abstinence and indulgence had probably done the carcass in. Drove it round the bend with too much right-hand, too much left. Now here it was bending the knee to its own tyrant cells run amok. His initial rage at this treachery was long since spent. He had torn up the reams of bitter outpourings that had at first relieved those feelings and had begun to develop a mood of rumination, judgment, a weighing and sorting and searching for patterns.

  But I don’t care about my past, he objected. How could the already-lived past compete with the excitement of exploring Dorothea’s dreams?

  He sipped lemonade and read the latest account. A man sits by a window, hearing the mob below, and he writes and writes and shakes with terror…

  That evening he had an attack of the horrors, brought on by nothing more evocative than feeding the dogs and letting them out for the night, as instructed.

  When he shut the door after them, his solitude struck him with sledge-hammer force. He stood clutching the counter-edge in the kitchen, unable to let go. His consciousness spun in a heavy black vortex of fear. He whimpered and clung there, bent over his clenched, white-knuckled hands, trying desperately to take deep breaths and pull out of it. But every breath made it worse, as if he breathed in the panic with the air.