Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  Now, staring at the bed, his mouth went dry. He was experiencing an actual physical wrench, as if some inner organ had burst within him. The image he’d always held of Alyssia was crashing down, shattering into a thousand irreparable pieces.

  “I can’t bear anyone around when I’m like that.” Her murmur was flat, apathetic.

  “Juanita says it’s not connected with the pregnancy.”

  “I can’t catch my breath, that’s all.”

  “Hon, what I saw was distinctly worse than mild hyperventilation.”

  “It’s called an anxiety attack. It happens to me at work.”

  “Is that why you sometimes go dashing from the set?”

  “How can I let people see me?”

  “Right now you’re not working,” he pointed out.

  “The thing’s been getting worse and worse since I heard about Hap.”

  “Why didn’t you ever mention these attacks to me?” he asked, unable to repress the thought of how little of his own emotional landscape he had shared with her.

  “Everything connected to them seems weak, shameful.”

  “What about a shrink?”

  “I tried one, years ago. It didn’t help. Later I tried a psychologist. For a while she did me some good.”

  “You need some type of therapy now.”

  “What good would it do? Hap’s dead. He’s dead. . . .” Her head sank back in the heaped pillows and she appeared yet more friable.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Barry took her lax hand. “Hon, he was a unique person. Honorable, clean, decent. All my life I tried to emulate him.”

  She withdrew her hand. “Did you?”

  Barry’s lips creased downward as the tears he’d not yet been able to shed for Hap pooled in his sinuses. “I did love and admire him . . . but always I envied him, sometimes unbearably. Long before I ever met you, I saw him with the monster’s green eyes. Not because he was rich, a Wasp, but because he was immeasurably decent and generous and brave. After you and he. . . . I felt so unworthy. How dare I compete with somebody like him? I . . . I thought the baby was his.”

  “So did he.”

  Barry heard the confession, yet his tears for his dead cousin continued flowing.

  The remainder of that afternoon he felt as if his brain were floating several inches above his skull, a peculiar sensation he attributed to lack of sleep. Whatever the reason, he was able for the first time to accept the truth about his relationship to Alyssia.

  His crusade to stay married to her had been a ridiculous mistake. They didn’t belong together.

  Yet paradoxically, his tenderness toward her had never been greater.

  He sat next to the bed, lighting pipe after pipe as he told her how it had bolstered his poor, weak ego to be her husband, and how grateful he was that she had earned their living at the beginning—he even admitted his shame that she had done housework. He told her he had admired her courage ever since the first day of their marriage, when she had faced down the motel manager. He said if it weren’t for her, he would have drunk himself into the grave. He told her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and he cherished her flesh insofar as he was able—“I must be lacking in androgen.”

  When a reply was called for she would nod torpidly, as if speech were beyond her strength. Her unresponsiveness did not slow his confessions.

  Nothing could have silenced him.

  He was unwinding the spool of their marriage.

  He asked Juanita to bring his dinner up to the bedroom. Alyssia dipped her spoon in the cream soup, a dutiful gesture that she soon ceased. He ate hungrily. He was finishing the wedge of brie when Alyssia gasped. The awful racked breathing started again.

  “Go away!” she panted shrilly.

  “Hon, you need a doctor—”

  “No! Get out!”

  Hurrying to the kitchen, he summoned Juanita, then waited on the top step, a vicious draft whirling away his pipe smoke.

  His usual mode when faced with unpleasant decisions was avoidance, but as a carryover from his recent beatific state he accepted that it was up to him to take charge. Alyssia can’t stay here, isolated in the country with only me and an illiterate servant to take care of her, he thought. She ought to be under medical supervision.

  He went to dial the Tours number on the card that he’d glimpsed on the telephone ledge.

  In less than an hour Dr. Fauchery arrived. After he examined his famous new patient, he drew Barry downstairs. He spoke no English. Enunciating slowly and loudly for the American, he voiced Barry’s own belief that it was imperative that Madame Cordiner spend the remainder of her term at his private lying-in facilities.

  • • •

  “I am not going, and that’s that!” Alyssia walked agitatedly up and back the length of the bedroom.

  Barry was already in bed. Weariness had hit him like a blow. Yawning, he said, “Hon, be reasonable.”

  “You had to call the quack! Now the two of you have decided I need locking up.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Barry said in the calmest tone he could muster. “He explained to me that many of his patients who live outside of Tours come to stay at the clinic before their due date. He’s thinking of the baby.”

  She began to cry. Woozily he got up and went to her—had her shoulders always been this slight?—leading her to her side of the bed.

  When the lights were out, she whispered in a tear-clogged voice, “You’re right. I can’t risk the baby. But I don’t want any nurses, Barry.”

  “Who’ll look after you?”

  “Juanita.”

  He rolled onto his side. It seemed reasonable enough that she wouldn’t want strangers seeing Alyssia del Mar in her weakness, possibly selling the story to a gossip sheet.

  “Let me see what I can arrange,” he said, and fell asleep.

  • • •

  After breakfast the following day the three of them drove to Tours. The lying-in clinic was a commodious private house near the cathédrale. The rooms were booked months in advance, but a comtesse had delivered her fourth son before she could leave her country estate, so the second-floor suite was vacant. The airy bedroom came with a small, adjacent sitting room where a cradle could be installed with a private nurse.

  That same morning, Dr. Fauchery ushered up Dr. Plon, a goateed psychiatrist. Plon stayed, talking to Alyssia in formal English for about an hour, witnessing an attack. He then retired to consult with the obstetrician. An ardent convert to drug therapy, Plon wanted to use pharmaceuticals to alleviate her hyperventilation, but Fauchery flatly refused this course until after the delivery. The two physicians compromised on a minimal dosage of Librium.

  Barry, who had taken a room at the Trois-Rivières Méridien, could see no benefit whatsoever from the tranquilizer. Alyssia’s attacks came as frequently and were equally severe.

  • • •

  The third day after Alyssia’s arrival, April 30, a balmy sun shone on Tours. Dr. Fauchery, making his morning rounds, coaxed Alyssia to sit by the open window of her small sitting room. She was in the armchair when Barry visited. Juanita took his hyacinths and daffodils to arrange, tactfully leaving them alone.

  A strand of black hair blew over Alyssia’s forehead. She didn’t push it away. “I’ve been thinking,” she said in a dulled tone.

  “About what, hon?”

  She sighed. “Us. It’s over, Barry.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “We’ve been tenacious for twenty-odd years. Nobody can say we didn’t try.”

  After a long pause, she said, “The baby? What are we going to do about the baby?”

  “That’s the prime consideration, of course.”

  “I won’t be much of a mother.”

  “You’re going through a traumatic phase,” he said.

  She gave him a bleak look.

  “Hon, eventually you’ll get over Hap.”

  “I won’t, Barry. Not ever. And the attacks—what about the attacks? I’m bad news
for a baby.”

  A sparrow came to perch in the tender new greenery of the Virginia creeper outside the window. Barry gazed at the drab little bird and for the first time thought about fatherhood.

  Oh, he had daydreamed often about the child, invariably visualizing it as male, seeing him a gleeful toddler being hoisted onto the merry-go-round at Santa Monica Pier; a small boy sharing peanuts at Dodger Stadium. (Barry disliked every type of sporting event, and found baseball an indescribable snore, but his mental imagery discounted this.) His most cherished projection, however, was of a tall adolescent rising to his feet in boisterous applause as he, Barry Cordiner, picked up his National Book Award.

  Now, though, in the soft French sunlight, for the first time he faced the realities. Unless Spy hit, and he could afford servants, he would be in for dirty diapers, two A.M. feedings, vomiting, car-pooling, as well as backtalk, drug involvement and teenage sex.

  “Don’t downgrade yourself,” he said earnestly. “You’ll be a marvelous mother. Erda personified.”

  “Oh, Barry. . . .”

  “You’re saying I should have custody?”

  Abruptly she slipped into her agitated mode. Jumping to her feet, she exclaimed, “Of course not! What makes you say that?”

  “This entire conversation.”

  “It never crossed my mind for one instant that I wouldn’t have the baby. How could I not? It’s mine.” She tugged at her fingers. “But it’s awful to be raised by somebody who can’t function as a mother.”

  In spite of her persistent denials, it appeared to him that she was offering justifiable excuses to avoid custody of the baby.

  All at once he recalled his twin’s despairing tone as they’d said goodbye at the Los Angeles Airport. What were her words? What wouldn’t I give to be having this baby!

  62

  That evening he ate at Barrier, Tours’ two star restaurant, which had previously been known as Le Nègre. After the rich terrine, the saumon en papillottes, the delicate white veal, the cheeses and an ethereal raspberry soufflé, he felt in need of a walk, so he strolled along the embankment of the Loire.

  He had been thinking about his unborn child ever since he’d left Alyssia this afternoon. However much he attempted to evade the unpalatable fact, he was accepting that she was in no shape to look after a baby. He, temporarily at least, would be the parent in charge.

  And who was Barry Cordiner to take on the responsibility of a helpless infant?

  He stared disconsolately at the Pont-Napoléon, seeing neither the bridge nor the reflection of its looped lights in the blackness of the river. In a rare moment of total self-honesty, he was seeing exactly who Barry Cordiner was.

  An alcoholic. A hack writer who without his Cordiner connections would never have earned a living. A son who had abdicated his filial responsibilities to Beth. An unfaithful husband whose infidelities seldom reached honest consummation—he pawed women’s breasts and pubic triangles as an act of vengeance toward Alyssia, punishment for making him feel third rate, which he probably was. He had played on her weaknesses to keep her apart from his immensely more worthy cousin. (In his morbid honesty, however, he conceded that here fault lay partially with Alyssia, whose dogged loyalty had always made her his patsy.)

  I can’t look after a baby. It’s impossible.

  His twin, not he, had inherited the genes that constitute a sense of responsibility.

  • • •

  “Beth, it’s Barry.”

  “Where are you? I’ve been beside myself. I called the Norfolk. They said you’d never registered. And that she had checked out.”

  “We’re in Tours. Alyssia’s at a maternity clinic. She’s in rotten shape, Beth.”

  “I knew it! At her age doing that difficult role in Africa, then chasing around—”

  “This has nothing to do with the pregnancy.”

  “Is the baby a breech?”

  “There’s no problem whatsoever with the child.”

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “Uhh, she appears to be, uhh, having what we laymen call a breakdown.”

  “A nervous breakdown?”

  “Yes. Hap’s death has hit her very hard. That’s why she’s at the clinic early.”

  “Was she violent?”

  “The reverse. Most of the time she’s numbed and lethargic, the way people get in deep depression. Also, she has attacks of hyperventilation.”

  “You’re positive the baby hasn’t been brain damaged?”

  “Will you stop harping on the baby? Not being a prenatal expert, I am taking the highest regarded local obstetrician’s opinion that all is well!” After a moment he said, “Sorry I lashed out there, Beth, but I’ve been under an annihilating strain. Alyssia and I have decided to split.”

  “Now?”

  “Our marriage should have been dissolved many years ago.”

  “Yes, I know. But now? When she’s ill? And having a baby?”

  “Yes, the baby.” Drawing a deep breath, he spoke rapidly. “Beth, even the youngest infant has an awareness of its surroundings. It’s unfair to burden the baby with our problems. Could you take over for a while?”

  “What do you mean, take over?”

  “Uhh, could you, uhh, look after the baby until Alyssia’s well?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I said no.”

  His entire life Beth had been a soft touch—had she ever refused him? Their mother had often repeated the tale that in their shared playpen when he demanded a toy Beth would docilely hand it over.

  “Beth, you don’t understand. Alyssia’s in no condition to manage a new infant. I’m only asking you to become custodian until she’s past the worst of her depression.”

  “No. And it’s not fair to ask me.” From the honking sound of a nose being blown, he realized his sister was crying.

  “I’m sorry, Bethie. I should’ve realized. You have your own problems.”

  “Don’t you see? I’d become attached all over again, and then she would take the baby away. It’d break my heart. Again. I can’t do it.”

  Barry replaced the receiver with a shaking hand.

  • • •

  That night Alyssia went into labor. She was run-down physically, and after twenty-five hours, at a point when Dr. Fauchery was readying himself to do a cesarean, she dilated so rapidly that she felt as if she were being torn apart from the rectum. Her agonized cries skittered through the clinic’s corridors as she was wheeled into the well-equipped delivery room. Fauchery was forced to administer gas, then inject a potent mixture of sedatives.

  Within short minutes after Alyssia’s placement on the delivery table, her newborn son was complaining vigorously.

  To Alyssia, however, the drugged labor seemed eternal.

  She was condemned to a murky, Götterdämmerung world where the only brightness was her mother’s crimson blood and the flames consuming Hap’s jeep, a world where the single inhabitant was death.

  63

  When she awoke, Barry was sitting at her bedside.

  “We have a little boy,” he said proudly.

  She was still enmeshed in that nightmare existence, and her glazed eyes fixed on him.

  “A boy?” she whispered, sighing. “He’s dead.”

  “He’s absolutely fine. Healthy as they come. And a real screamer.”

  Her head turned slowly from side to side in denial.

  “Hon, he’s with his nurse in the next room.”

  “He’s dead. . . .”

  Barry went to the little adjoining parlor. To ensure Alyssia’s privacy, Fauchery had brought in an ugly, placid nursing nun from Alsace. At Barry’s request, the white-coiffed sister carried in her cocooned charge, holding him close to his mother’s pillow. The baby moved his mouth, letting out a mewling sound. His nose was temporarily squashed to one side, but otherwise he was pretty and pink—even his fuzz of hair was rosy.

  “It can’t be my baby—my baby’s dead,” Alyssia whim
pered. She began to cry. She cried so long that Fauchery summoned Plon, his goateed psychiatric colleague. Although the anesthesia had not yet worn off, Plon started his treatment.

  • • •

  Barry visited again that evening. The bed was cranked up to a sitting position, and Alyssia sat bolt upright, but her face was lax, as if she were asleep.

  “Hon?” he whispered.

  She peered at him as if he were out of focus.

  He asked, “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” she said in a faded murmur.

  “Seen our boy again?”

  “Did I?”

  “But you know he’s fine?” Barry asked.

  “I think so. Barry, they’ve got me so doped up I can’t tell what’s happening.”

  “Your other doctor”—he couldn’t bring himself to mention the consultant’s specialty—“explained that the birth was extremely traumatic. He prescribed medication for that, and also for your, uhh, breathing difficulty.”

  “I can’t feel or think. It’s like my brain is wrapped in long strands of horrible gray pasta. . . .” Her voice faded entirely.

  “Why don’t you get some sleep,” he said, retreating.

  • • •

  When he visited the following morning, she stared blankly at him, without recognition.

  “Hi, hon,” he said.

  She closed her eyes.

  Juanita hovered outside the door, her worry showing on her broad, pitted face. “Did she know you, Mr. Cordiner?”

  “She didn’t, uhh, pay much attention.”

  “She’s been out of it all morning. Never saying a word. These pills they’re pushing into her—they’re no good.”

  “Since when are you a medical expert?” He spoke vehemently because of his own fears.

  After handing her the flowers—more daffodils—he walked in a dignified pace along the corridor. Downstairs, though, he galloped, racing next door to the house where Fauchery lived and practiced. The dining room served as his waiting room. Every needlepoint chair was occupied, and Barry, under the gaze of a dozen pregnant Tours matrons, banged urgently on the office door.