41
ARIANE GOT UP and lit another cigarette. “This is going to sound very strange,” she said. “I began dreaming of the voyage.”
“That doesn’t seem surprising,” I said.
“I don’t mean at night—I mean all the time.”
“Daydreaming.”
“Something more than that. I mean I was thinking about this trip to the point of distraction. You know how people say, ‘You’re in another world.’ Well, I was. I was all at sea.”
“Fantasies are attractive—literally. They draw us toward them, into them. I’ve had a similar experience—in fact, it must have been at just about that time. I found myself drawn into another world, a dreamworld, a fantasy. Let me explain: one cold afternoon in the winter of my sophomore year at Hargrove College—”
“Peter—”
“Just hear me out. I had a dream—while I was dozing over a letter I had received from a high school classmate. In that dream, I was a small boy sitting on a dock, but I wasn’t quite myself, and the circumstances weren’t real.”
“Interesting—”
“I was sitting on a dock where, I knew, there was no dock. I was in a place where I had never been. And I knew it. I had transformed myself into another version of myself, a version that I was making up, rather than recalling—and I was aware of it.”
“You’re interrupting me.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that that was my first real experience of the pleasure of fiction. I had made a character out of myself.”
“Yes! Yes! Okay, that’s right. Yes. Listen: I began altering my real life to enhance my dream life. I was studying, I was working, I was preparing myself, during my real life, just to make my dream life better. Do you see what I mean?”
“Of course. As I was saying—”
“I learned to tie knots—”
“You mean you got my grandfather to teach you to tie knots.”
“Yes. That’s right. And how to navigate. How to use a compass and read the charts. And how to shoot the stars. Celestial navigation.”
“You mean that you sat on the porch, my grandparents’ porch, with my grandfather, looking at the stars, with a rum and Coke in your hand.”
“Yes.”
There was a silence.
After a while I said, “That technique rarely works.”
“Celestial navigation?” she asked.
I laughed. “No—although, in a sense, yes—but I meant trying to influence your dreams, trying to will them to be what you want them to be. There are so many distractions, and so many outside influences. Sometimes it seems to me that our dreams take shape largely by chance—”
“But chance favors the prepared mind,” she said.
“Well, yes—”
“—and so I would find myself—quite to my surprise—walking along the harbor, studying the light on the water, completely lost in it, the better to imagine the light on the Pacific when we crossed the equator.”
Another silence. That distant look. And then a certain smile.
“Well, Peter,” she said, “those were some nice nights on the porch, looking at the northern sky and pretending that we were a few days out of Panama, heading for the Marquesas.”
That smile again, with a challenge in it, as if she wanted me to say the next thing for her. I wasn’t going to. There are things a person has to do for herself.
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” she asked.
I nodded.
She sighed and said, “I fell in love with him.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“Not as a lover, you understand.”
Like the Tar Baby, I just sat and said nothing.
“Not as my lover, anyway.”
No comment from me.
“Are you determined to make this as hard on me as you possibly can?”
Sometimes you have to let people say what they are going to say.
“I guess you are.”
Silence.
“Maybe I did think of him as my lover—but he wasn’t my lover. I might have thought of him as potentially my lover, but—what the hell have I gotten myself into here?”
Sometimes you not only have to let a person say what she has to say, but you have to let her find out what she wants to say.
“Look: what I meant to say, when I walked into this swamp, was that I fell in love with him as your grandmother’s lover.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“I mean that I fell in love with him because of the way he loved your grandmother,” she said through clenched teeth.
I smiled.
She let out a sigh that might have been a sigh of relief or a sigh of exasperation.
“I could have taken the easy way out, you know, and said that I admired him or something like that. But that wasn’t it. I loved the way he loved. I loved the way he loved your grandmother.”
She turned away from me.
“And,” she said, so softly that I had to strain to hear it, “I would have loved to have him love me that way. I wouldn’t have minded it at all.”
I may have stretched, or folded my arms, or hugged myself.
“Are you cold?” she asked me. “Is it cold in here? Do you want a blanket?”
“No,” I said. “No, thanks. I’m not especially cold.”
“I’m cold,” she said.
“I’ll get you a blanket. Where—”
She slid to my end of the sofa and lay against me.
“Hold me,” she said.
Sometimes, you have to do as you’re told.
[to be continued]
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