Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

by John Irving

  Sometimes Fred thought that, if he'd only had dreams of his own, he wouldn't have had to act out his terrible love affairs with someone almost once a year.

  For weeks after the settlement he couldn't sleep in the bed they'd shared for 10 years. Gail settled for cash and Nigel. Fred kept the house. He slept on the couch, bothered by restless nights of blurry discomfort -- too disjointed for dreams. He thrashed on the couch, his groaning disturbed the dog (he had settled for the dog, too), and his mouth in the morning was the mouth of a hangover -- though he hadn't been drinking. One night he imagined he was throwing up in a car; the passenger in the car was Mrs. Beal, and she was beating him with her purse while he retched and spilled over the steering wheel. "Get us home! Get us home!" Mrs. Beal cried at him. Fred didn't know then, of course, that he was having Mr. Beal's dream. Mr. Beal had passed out on Fred and Gail's couch many times; he had no doubt had that terrible dream there and had left it behind for the next troubled sleeper.

  Fred simply gave up on the couch and sought the slim, hard bed in Nigel's room -- a child's captain's bed, with little drawers built under it for underwear and six-guns. The couch had given Fred a backache, but he was not ready to resume his life in the bed he'd shared with Gail.

  The first night he slept in Nigel's bed he understood what strange ability he suddenly possessed -- or what a strange ability had suddenly possessed him. He had a nine-year-old's dream -- Nigel's dream. It was not frightening to Fred, but Fred knew it must have been pure terror for Nigel. In a field Fred-as-Nigel was trapped by a large snake. The snake was immediately comic to Fred-as-Fred, because it was finned like a serpent and breathed fire. The snake struck repeatedly at Fred-as-Nigel's chest; he was so stunned he couldn't scream. Far across the field Fred saw Fred the way Nigel would have seen him. "Dad!" Fred-as-Nigel whispered. But the real Fred was standing over a smoldering fire pit; they had just had a barbecue, apparently. Fred was pissing into the pit -- a strong steam of urine rising around him -- and he didn't hear his son crying.

  In the morning Fred decided that the dreams of nine-year-olds were obvious and trite. He had no fear of further dreams when he sought his own bed that night; at least, while he slept with Gail, he had never had a dream in that bed -- and although Gail had been a steady dreamer, Fred hadn't had any of her dreams in that bed before. But sleeping alone is different from sleeping with someone else.

  He crept into the cold bed in the room reft of the curtains Gail had sewn. Of course he had one of Gail's dreams. He was looking in a floor-length mirror, but he was seeing Gail. She was naked, and for only a second he thought he was having a dream of his own -- possibly missing her, an erotic memory, a desirous agonizing for her to return. But the Gail in the mirror was not a Gail he had ever seen. She was old, ugly, and seeing her nakedness was like seeing a laceration you wished someone would quickly close. She was sobbing, her hands soaring beside her like gulls -- holding up this and that garment, each more of a violation to her color and her features than the last. The clothes piled up at her feet and she finally sagged down on them, hiding her face from herself; in the mirror, the bumped vertebrae along her backbone looked to him (to her) like some back-alley staircase they had once discovered on their honeymoon in Austria. In an onion-domed village, this alley was the only dirty, suspicious path they had found. And the staircase, which crooked out of sight, had struck them both as ominous; it was the only way out of the alley, unless they retraced their steps, and Gail had suddenly said, "Let's go back." He immediately agreed. But before they turned away, an old woman reeled around the topmost part of the staircase and, appearing to lose her balance, fell heavily down the stairs. She'd been carrying some things: carrots, a bag of gnarled potatoes and a live goose whose paddle-feet were hobbled together. The woman struck her face when she fell and lay with her eyes open and her black dress bunched above her knees. The carrots spread like a bouquet on her flat, still chest. The potatoes were everywhere. And the goose, still hobbled, gabbled and struggled to fly. Fred, without once touching the woman, went straight to the goose, although -- excepting dogs and cats -- he had never touched a live animal before. He tried to untie the leather thong that bound the goose's feet together, but he was clumsy and the goose hissed at him and pecked him fiercely, painfully, on the cheek. He dropped the bird and ran after Gail, who was running out of the alley the way they had come.

  Now in the mirror Gail had gone to sleep on the pile of her unloved clothes on the floor. That was the way Fred had found her the night he came home from his first infidelity.

  He woke up from her dream in the bed alone. He had understood, before, that she had hated him for his infidelity, but this was the first time he realized that his infidelity had made her hate herself.

  Was there no place in his own house he could sleep without someone else's dream? Where was it possible to develop a dream of his own? There was another couch, in the TV room, but the dog -- an old male Labrador -- usually slept there. "Bear?" he called. "Here, Bear." Nigel had named the dog "Bear." But then Fred remembered how often he had seen Bear in the fits of his own dreams -- woofing in his sleep, his hackles raised, his webbed feet running in place, his pink hard-on slapping his belly -- and he thought that surely he had not sunk so low as to submit to dreams of rabbit-chasing, fighting the neighborhood Weimaraner, humping the Beals' sad bloodhound bitch. Of course, baby-sitters had slept on that couch, and might he not expect some savory dream of theirs? Was it worth risking one of Bear's dreams for some sweet impression of that lacy little Janey Hobbs?

  Pondering dog hair and recalling many unattractive baby-sitters, Fred fell asleep in a chair -- a dreamless chair; he was lucky. He was learning that his newfound miracle-ability was a gift that was as harrowing as it was exciting. It's frequently true that we have offered to us much of the insecurity of sleeping with strangers, and little of the pleasure.

  When his father died, he spent a week with his mother. To Fred's horror, she slept on the couch and offered him the master bedroom with its vastly historical bed. Fred could sympathize with his mother's reluctance to sleep there, but the bed and its potential for epic dreaming terrified him. His parents had always lived in this house, had always -- since he could remember -- slept on that bed. Both his mother and father had been dancers -- slim, graceful people even in their retirement. Fred could remember their morning exercises, slow and yogalike movements on the sun-room rug, often to Mozart. Fred viewed their old bed with dread. What embarrassing dreams, and whose, would enmesh him there?

  He could tell, with some relief, that it was his mother's dream. Like most people, Fred sought rules in the chaos, and he thought he had found one: impossible to dream a dead person's dream. At least his mother was alive. But Fred had expected some elderly sentiment for his father, some fond remembrance, which he imagined old people had; he was not prepared for the lustiness of his mother's dream. He saw his father gamboling in the shower, soapy in the underarms and soapy and erect below. This was not an especially young dream, either; his father was already old, the hair white on his chest, his breasts distended in that old man's way -- like the pouches appearing around a young girl's nipples. Fred dreamed his mother's hot, wet affection for the goatishness he'd never seen in his father. Appalled at their inventive, agile, even acrobatic lovemaking, Fred woke with a sense of his own dull sexuality, his clumsy straightforwardness. It was Fred's first sex dream as a woman; he felt so stupid to be learning now -- a man in his thirties, and from his mother -- precisely how women liked to be touched. He had dreamed how his mother came. How she quite cheerfully worked at it.

  Too embarrassed to look in her eyes in the morning, Fred felt ashamed that he had not bothered to imagine this of her -- that he'd assumed too little of her, and too little of Gail. Fred was still condescending enough, in the way a son is to his mother, to assume that if his mother's appetite was so rich, his wife's would surely have been richer. That this was perhaps not the case didn't occur to him.

  He was sadly aware that
his mother could not make herself do the morning exercises alone, and in the week he stayed with her -- an unlikely comfort he felt himself to be -- she seemed to be growing stiffer, less athletic, even gaining weight. He wanted to offer to accompany her in the exercises; to insist that she continue her good physical habits, but he had seen her other physical habits and his inferiority had left him speechless.

  He was also bewildered to find that his instincts as a voyeur were actually stronger than his instincts as a proper son. Though he knew he would suffer his mother's erotic memories each night, he would not abandon the bed for what he thought to be the dreamless floor. Had he slept there he would have encountered at least one of his father's dreams from the occasional nights that his father had slept on the floor. He would have disproven his easy theory that dead persons' dreams don't transfer to the living. His mother's dreams were simply stronger than his father's, so her dreams dominated the bed. Fred could, for example, have discovered his father's real feelings for his Aunt Blanche on the floor. But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.

  Fred was learning something about dreams, but there was more that he was missing. Why, for instance, did he usually dream historical dreams? -- that is, dreams which are really memories, or exaggerated memories of real events in our past, or secondhand dreams. There are other kinds of dreams -- dreams of things that haven't happened. Fred did not know much about those. He didn't even consider that the dreams he was having could be his own -- that they were simply as close to him as he dared to approach.

  He returned to his divorced home, no longer intrepid. He was a man who'd glimpsed in himself a wound of terminal vulnerability. There are many unintentionally cruel talents that the world, indiscriminately, hands out to us. Whether we can use these gifts we never asked for is not the world's concern.

  Other People's Dreams (1976)

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  Here is another short story that spent a number of years in my bottommost drawer; every few months, I would take it out and revise it -- then I would put it away again. After six years of this abuse, the story -- what was left of it -- was anthologized in a collection called Last Night's Stranger: One Night Stands & Other Staples of Modern Life, edited by Pat Rotter (A & W Publishers, New York, 1982). Other People's Dreams" ended up in good company -- also in that collection were stories by Raymond Carver, Hilma Wolitzer, Richard Ford, Gail Godwin, Richard Selzer, Don Hendrie, Jr., John L'Heureux, David Huddle, Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Coover -- but the story, for such a little thing, drove me crazy.

  I went through a series of first sentences, all of which eventually became the end lines of paragraphs deeper in the story. These false beginnings were all statements of one sort or another. "Sleeping alone is different from sleeping with someone else" was the first first sentence. It was replaced, for a short while, by "It's frequently true that we have offered to us much of the insecurity of sleeping with strangers, and little of the pleasure." (These statements were so self-evident that they seemed more tolerable when buried in the story.) Another was "We are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries." (For a while, "Unearned Discoveries" was the title of the story.) And my last effort to begin the story became, after six years, the end of the story instead. "There are many unintentionally cruel talents that the world, indiscriminately, hands out to us. Whether we can use these gifts we never asked for is not the world's concern." (These sentences had earlier been cut from "The Pension Grillparzer," where they were companions to the line about the death of the man who could only walk on his hands, which I kept: "The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.")

  And I see now that my "terminal" theme, which extended throughout the writing of The World According to Garp, is repeated here. "He was a man who'd glimpsed in himself a wound of terminal vulnerability." It's funny how this jumps out at me now -- it didn't then. In addition to terminal patients and terminal cases, and even terminal trees, here's a poor guy whose vulnerability is terminal, too. (I don't know where all of this doomsaying came from.)

  WEARY KINGDOM

  Minna Barrett, 55, looks precisely as old as she is, and her figure suggests nothing of what she might have looked like "in her time." One would only assume that always she looked this way, slightly oblong, gently rounded, not puritanical but almost asexual. A pleasant old maid since grammar school, neat and silent; a not overly stern face, a not overly harsh mouth, but a total composure, which now, at 55, reflects the history of her many indifferences and the conservative going of her own way.

  Minna has her own room in a dormitory of Fairchild Junior College for Young Women, where she is the matron of the dormitory's small dining hall, in charge of the small kitchen crew, responsible for the appropriate dress of the girls at mealtime. Minna's room has a private entrance and a private bath, is shaded in the mornings by the elms of the campus, and is several blocks from Boston Common -- not too far for her to walk on a nice day. This room is remarkably uncluttered, remarkable because it's a very small room, which shows very little of the nine years she has lived there. Not that there is, or should be, a great deal to show; it is only as permanent a residence as any other place Minna has lived since she left home. This room has a television and Minna stays up at night, watching the movies. She never watches the regular programs; she reads until the news at 11:00. She likes biographies, prefers these to autobiographies, because someone's account of his own life embarrasses her in a way she doesn't understand. She is partial to the biographies of women, although she does read Ian Fleming. Once at a party for the alumnae and trustees of the school, a lady in a soft lavender suit, who wanted, she said, to meet all of the school's personnel, found out about Minna's interest in biographies. The lavender lady recommended a book by Gertrude Stein, which Minna bought and never finished. It wasn't anything Minna would have called a biography, but she wasn't offended by it. She just felt that nothing ever happened.

  So Minna reads until 11:00, then watches the news and a movie. The kitchen crew comes early in the morning, but Minna doesn't have to be in the dining hall until the girls come in. After breakfast she takes a cup of coffee to her own room, then maybe naps until lunch. Her afternoons, too, are quiet. Some of the girls in the dormitory will visit her at 11:00, to watch the evening news -- there is an entrance to Minna's room from the dormitory corridor. The girls probably come to see the television more than they come to see Minna, although they are very considerate of her and Minna is amused at the varying stages of their undress at this hour. Once they were interested in how long Minna's hair would be if she let it down. She obliged them, unwinding, unfurling the long gray hair -- somewhat stiff, but falling to her hips. The girls were impressed with how thick and healthy it was; one of the girls, with hair almost that long, suggested to Minna that she wear it in a braid. The next evening the girls brought a deep orange ribbon and they braided Minna's hair. Minna was meekly pleased, but she said that she never could wear it that way. She still might be tempted, the girls were so impressed, but it is too much to think of changing her hair from the tightly wrapped bun it has been all these years.

  After the girls leave, after the movie, Minna sits in her bed, thinking of her retirement. The farm where she grew up, in South Byfield, comes back to her mind. If she thinks of it with a certain nostalgia she is not aware of this; she thinks only how much more restful her work at the school is, how much easier than on the farm. Her younger brother lives there now, and in a few years she'll return, to live with her brother's family, taking her tidy nest egg with her, and relinquishing herself and her savings to the care of her brother. It was only last Christmas, when she was visiting his family, that they asked her when she would come to stay for good. By the time she feels it is right for her to come, in another year or so, not all of her brother's children will be grown-up
, and there will be things for her to do. Certainly no one would think of Minna as an imposition.

  She thinks of South Byfield, what past and what future -- after the news, after the movie -- and she feels, now, no resentment toward this present time. She has no memories of a painful loss or separation, or failure. There were friends in South Byfield, whom she simply saw married or who just remained there after she quietly moved the 30 miles to Boston; her mother and father died, almost shyly, but there is nothing that she misses with particular pain. She doesn't think of herself as very anxious to retire, although she does look ahead to being a part of her brother's healthy family. She wouldn't say that she has a lot of friends in Boston, but friends for Minna always have been the pleasant and familiar people connected with the regular episodes of her life; they never have been emotional dependents. Now, for example, there is Flynn, the cook, who is Irish with a large family in South Boston, who complains to Minna of Boston housing, Boston traffic, Boston corruption, Boston this-and-that. Minna knows little of this but she listens attentively to him; in his swearing Flynn reminds her of her father. Minna doesn't swear herself, but she doesn't find Flynn's swearing unpleasant. He has a way of coaxing things that makes her feel as if his swearing really works. The daily battles with the coffee urn are invariably won by Flynn, who after long and dark curses, heavy jostles and violent threats of dismantling the whole thing, emerges the victor; for Minna, Flynn's animated obscenities seem constructive, the way her father would shout the tractor into starting, during the winter months. Minna thinks Flynn is nice.

  Also, there is Mrs. Elwood, a widow, with deeper lines on her face than Minna has -- lines which move like rubber bands when Mrs. Elwood talks, as if her chin were hinged to these lines. Mrs. Elwood is the housemother of the dormitory, and she speaks with a British accent; it is well known that Mrs. Elwood is a Bostonian, but she spent one summer in England, after her graduation from college. Apparently, she had a whale of a time there. Minna tells Mrs. Elwood whenever there's a movie with Alec Guinness on the late show, and Mrs. Elwood comes, discreetly after the news, after her girls have gone back to their rooms. It often takes a good half of the movie for Mrs. Elwood to remember if she's seen this one before.