He spent a few minutes with the yellow pages and, finding nothing much to choose among them, dialed a travel agent on Michigan Avenue to book a flight to Nassau for the following morning. Hotel accommodations? Yes, the best, whatever it was. A suite, of course. For one. Richard Iles, I-L-E-S.
Twenty hours later he presented himself at the Eastern Airlines check-in counter, where he exchanged a set of ostrich skin luggage for a ticket, a gate number, and an order to have a nice flight. With thirty minutes to kill, he wandered around the terminal, had a cup of coffee, bought a Jack Higgins novel to read on the plane, and stood studying the arrivals/departures board for omens.
Then, without knowing exactly why, he returned to the check-in counter and told the agent he’d changed his mind, he wasn’t going to Nassau after all. There was a little fuss, but half an hour later he left the terminal with his ostrich skin luggage, got in a cab, and headed back to his apartment.
A light snow was falling, turning the air into a glittering veil over the city.
XXXIV
THERE WAS A LONG PAUSE on the other end of the line, and Bruce said, “I’m beginning to feel like you’re avoiding me.”
It was a difficult charge to deny, since for two months Greg had been dodging Bruce as if he were a process server.
Bruce said, “You understand that I have a certain responsibility toward you.”
“You know, Bruce,” Greg said, “I might look forward to seeing you if you could give your sense of responsibility a rest. I mean, I could use a friend, but I really don’t need a keeper. I’m a grown man and I’ve been out here for five months, and the closest I’ve come to aberrant behavior was to tell a man at Maxim’s that his cigar was bothering me. Believe it or not, he didn’t even call the maitre d’, much less the men in the little white coats. He just apologized and put it out. I don’t start knife fights in bars, I don’t expose myself in public, and I don’t hang around playgrounds with my pockets full of candy. Hell, I don’t even mumble on the bus. If you really want to get together, let’s just go someplace and have a few drinks like ordinary people, and you can tell me what’s happening in your life and I’ll tell you what’s happening in my life. How does that sound?”
Obviously stunned by this tirade, Bruce agreed that it sounded fine, though from his doubtful tone he might have been agreeing to spend a night freebasing cocaine. They made a date to meet at the Tip Top Tap at six that evening.
Greg went determined to Make a Real Effort with Bruce; he even came ten minutes late to give the older man the psychological advantage of choosing the table, having a drink in hand, and being kept waiting. It didn’t help much, and after half an hour of the usual small talk, he decided on a frontal assault.
“Did Dr. Jakes ever tell you how you figured in the Greg Donner dreams?”
“She said something about family snapshots.” He thought for a moment. “She said I’d been ‘recommended’ to you as a link to your family background.”
“Did she tell you where we met? We met at Blinkers.”
“Blinkers?”
“You know the place?”
“I’ve been there,” his uncle admitted cautiously.
“Why do you suppose my subconscious chose that particular spot as our meeting place?”
“I have no idea.”
“Come on, Bruce. It was because at some point in time I formed an opinion about you.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Bruce said, with dignity but not much conviction.
“In the dream, Bruce, you were completely up-front with me, and we got along fine. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“You can’t force someone to be up-front by putting a gun to his head,” Bruce said coldly.
“What gun? Look, I’m just saying that in that dream we weren’t saddled with being an uncle and a nephew, we were just two people who enjoyed each other’s company, and I’d like it to be that way now. Is that putting a gun to your head?”
Bruce glared out over the glittering lights of the city. “What is it you want me to say?”
Greg sighed. “Look, you’ve interested yourself in my life. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“Well, are you really interested, or do you just want me to go on lying to you?”
He frowned. “You’ve been lying to me?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t I lie to you, Bruce? That’s the way you’ve got it set up here. You lie to me and I lie to you. You pretend to be one thing and I pretend to be another.”
“What am I pretending to be?”
“The Upright Uncle.”
“And what are you pretending to be?”
“The Sane and Sensible Nephew. What else?”
“Are you telling me you’re not sane and sensible?”
Greg shook his head. “I’m telling you nothing, Bruce. That’s the agreement as it stands right now. You tell me nothing and I tell you nothing. I can live with it if you can, but don’t expect me to look forward to getting together with you, because I won’t.”
“I see,” Bruce said thoughtfully. “Yes, all right.” He sank back in his chair. “So you’ve guessed the truth about me. What am I supposed to say now?”
“Forget it, Bruce. I’m not interested in wringing admissions from you. I’m just trying to open things up between us so we can talk like ordinary people. Am I the only straight person in the world who knows you’re gay? Aren’t there others?”
“Yes.”
“Well, do you pretend with them that you’re some solemn, prissy expert on what’s sane and sensible and what isn’t?”
“No. Hardly.”
“Then why pretend that with me, for Christ’s sake?”
“I’m sorry. Have I really been solemn and prissy?”
“Unremittingly, Bruce. From the word go.”
Bruce laughed with undisguised embarrassment, and for the first time Greg saw in him something of the charming person he’d known in his dreams.
Later, after a few drinks, they got around to a few confidential admissions.
Much as he had in Greg’s dream, Bruce admitted he wasn’t a very good or very successful doctor; in fact, he said, he wasn’t much good at anything, and secretly fantasied being an English squire tramping his grounds in shabby old tweeds. Greg in turn admitted he was far from being ready to break entirely with the remembered life of Greg Donner. Puzzled, Bruce asked why.
“I suppose because I’m far from being over Ginny. She was mine in that dream, and I just don’t want to let her go.”
Bruce nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. I didn’t know the two of you well. But in the beginning you were . . . a golden couple.”
Greg winced and changed the subject.
After telling the waiter to bring a check, he asked if Bruce would like to come with him to the annual design awards show the following month.
“Why?” Bruce asked.
“Well, you might like it.” he laughed. “I suppose actually I was thinking there are a lot of attractive designers to meet.”
“I’m not in need of meeting any attractive designers, thank you. But why are you going?”
“A sentimental journey, I guess. That’s where I met Ginny. In my dream, I mean.”
Bruce frowned. “Is that wise?”
“Mooning around in scenes of my fantasies? Probably not.”
“I don’t think it’s something to joke about. It sounds like just the sort of thing Dr. Jakes was worried about.”
Greg shrugged, laid a hundred dollar bill across the check, and stood up.
“Here, part of that’s mine,” Bruce protested.
“You can get the next one.”
“But aren’t you going to wait for your change?”
Greg said, “It’s only forty dollars. Let’s go.”
A strange look swept across Bruce’s face like a puff of wind on the surface of a pond. Then in an instant it was gone, and he silently followed Greg to the elevator. A hundred other sensations
were competing for Greg’s attention at the time, and he was scarcely aware of having seen it. A few minutes later, however, after they’d said good night and Greg was walking toward the Hancock Center, he remembered the look and thought about it. A trick of the light? An involuntary response to a twinge of pain?
He wasn’t prepared to believe it was what it appeared to be: a look of pure, seething hatred.
The worry was swept away by a sudden smile. He’d just thought of something else he wanted to own.
XXXV
BY THE TIME THE DESIGN AWARDS SHOW rolled around, Greg wasn’t sure he wanted to attend after all. He wasn’t reluctant because of any scruple that he might be trying to re-create the fantasy of his dream; rather it was just the opposite. He was reluctant because he knew he would fail to re-create that fantasy. He would go, mope around the exhibits for an hour, and leave as much an outsider as he’d arrived. The experience could only underscore his irrelevance to the world, his isolation from all meaningful activity, his estrangement from the family of man. The past month had been bad enough. This would probably only make it worse.
After his evening with Bruce, he’d spent an enjoyable week shopping for a word processing system. It was no strain in the end to decide on a Sony, a dedicated word processor that would enable him to put a book-length manuscript on a single disk small enough to carry in a shirt pocket. All he needed after that was a book-length manuscript.
In his last, disastrous meeting with Ginny at Griffin’s Lodge, she’d told him that Richard Iles had tried rather pathetically to make himself into a fiction writer. Greg had protested that he knew he wasn’t a fiction writer, that he wouldn’t waste a minute on it. Now, with an infinity of minutes to waste, he had decided to prove himself wrong. He felt sure he had an advantage over Richard Iles. Richard Iles had failed (Greg decided) because he was writing in desperation, was trying too hard, thinking of it as his only way to escape a life he hated. Greg, not working under any such pressure, could afford to relax and take his time. And so, relaxed and taking his time, Greg had begun casting around for an idea for a novel.
Relaxed and taking his time, his mind remained a blank for a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. He told himself that getting the idea was the hard part, that even successful novelists went idealess for years; it didn’t cheer him up.
And now, on the evening of the design show, he would have felt more like joining that throng of busy, productive people if he’d been able to say, “I’m busy and productive too. I’m working on a novel.”
Just in case he found someone to say it to.
In a year, he’d forgotten just how assaultive such a gathering could be to the senses. He’d made the mistake of coming early, when the crowd was at its most clamorous, and amplified voices whacked down on him from every surface like the laughter broadcast in a carnival funhouse. Light dazzled from a thousand miniature floodlights, rippled across plastic showcases, flashed from glass-fronted exhibits. Here and there some of the more bizarre of the season’s high fashion monstrosities blossomed with an air of curious menace, like carnivorous plants in a field of daisies.
Greg found a spot well out of the way and stood taking it all in, swirling a puddle of bourbon and two ice cubes around in a plastic glass and scanning the crowd for familiar faces he knew wouldn’t be there. After a while he became aware that his face was fixed in a meaningless grin, and he made it go away. He finished his drink, went to the bar for another, returned to his place, and wondered what the hell he was doing there.
It wasn’t an entirely rhetorical question. He’d kept his eye out for the date of the show and had noted it on his calendar. He’d looked forward to it. In his mind, he’d argued with Agnes about it and won. He’d had a haircut, bathed, shaved, and dressed for it. And here he was. What was supposed to happen next?
He thought about it for a bit and smiled; it wasn’t very mysterious after all. He was like a man who goes out in a thunderstorm, climbs a hill, and stands under the tallest tree he can find: he was trying to attract the lightning bolt. That being the case, he thought wryly, it was a bit pointless to stand there sheltered from the storm.
Shaking his head, he moved out into the crush. What he was feeling was not a tingle of anticipation but rather a touch of weary self-disgust; never again was he going to let himself be hoodwinked by this tedious romanticism of his.
Half an hour later he was puzzling over a simulation game called Small World, with enough components to furnish a moderately Large World. He wondered how anyone ever figured out how it worked—and then wondered why he was wondering. He shrugged and turned to the next exhibit—and it was then that the lightning bolt fell, and the hair on the back of his neck rose. He closed his eyes and told himself not to be a fool.
It wasn’t Ginny.
It couldn’t be Ginny. Ginny was eight hundred miles away, in her father’s house, where she wanted to be.
He opened his eyes, and she was still there, a few yards down the aisle, turned three-quarters away from him, her hair a flame around the shoulders of a lime-green dress of nubby wool. Moving of their own volition, his feet took him closer, disclosing by degrees the shape of a cheek, a russet eyebrow, a fine, clearly drawn nose. Then he was beside her looking down. Sensing his presence, she swivelled her head up to give him a look that said, “Yes?”
And of course it wasn’t Ginny; it was only her twin.
“Uh,” he said. “Have you seen my cat?”
Her eyes widened—emerald pools.
“The one that got my tongue,” Greg explained. Her eyes got wider still, and he laughed. “I have to admit that for a moment I thought you were someone else, but now that I’ve met you, sort of . . .” He cleared his throat and tried to gather his wits. “Uh . . . do you come here often?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Are you crazy?”
“Yes, actually I am. But I’m harmless.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“Yes, well, my name is Greg Donner. Whoops. No. For a second there I thought I was someone else too. My name is Richard Iles. Perfectly harmless.”
She gave him a thoughtful look. “Actually I did see a cat, but it didn’t have your tongue. I think it had your whole head.”
“Yes, yes,” Greg agreed, nodding enthusiastically. “That must have been it. I could tell something was wrong. I mean really wrong, not just superficially wrong.”
She lifted an arm to point. “I think it went that way.”
He looked behind him and wondered if it was only by coincidence that she’d pointed back toward the entrance.
“You could help me look,” he said.
“Where would we begin?”
“Well,” he said, thinking furiously. “I know this cat. I mean, I know its habits.”
“Yes?”
“I’m pretty sure it would head for Armando’s.”
“Armando’s. I see. An Italian cat?”
“Well . . . a neutral, actually.”
She laughed. “And suppose it’s not at Armando’s?”
“We could have a couple of drinks and think about it.”
She gave him a perplexed smile. “Are you doing this on a bet or something? You know, ‘Ten dollars says I can whisk that girl off in two minutes flat.’”
“No, no bet. I just never learned to meet girls in a civilized way.”
She laughed again. “I can see that.”
She hesitated for a moment longer and then said okay.
Her name was Carol Hartmann. Incredibly, she was a graphic designer, and she lived in the neighborhood, as Ginny had in his dream. If she’d been more like Ginny as a person, it would have been rather spooky. Even so, it was a bit disorienting to look into a face so like Ginny’s and be denied Ginny’s special presence.
He felt oddly divided during their conversation over drinks and dinner; he was there, keeping up his end, laughing, listening, but he was also standing gravely to one side to measure and compare, taking part with silent observat
ions:
Ginny wouldn’t have said that.
Ginny would have known what I meant.
Ginny wouldn’t have let that pass.
Ginny wouldn’t have bothered to evade that question.
Oddly, it didn’t detract from his enjoyment of the evening. Carol was in some ways easier to be with than Ginny, lacking Ginny’s sharp edges and shadowy depths. But he remained divided as he walked her to her apartment; it was as if a silent companion strolled with them, ignored and superfluous, a little bored with being the odd man out.
They parted at her door, sealing the evening with a kiss that was like an ambiguously worded promissory note.
XXXVI
THE NEXT MORNING GREG AWOKE feeling that he’d proved something—and that he’d turned a corner.
He’d walked out into the thunderstorm, called down the lightning bolt, and survived. Agnes Jakes, if she’d known what he was doing, would have been hysterical. She would have said that, by reenacting his first encounter with Ginny, he was trying to weave a spell that would ensnare him in his ghostly past. She would have been right—if he’d truly mistaken Carol Hartmann for Ginny Winters and fallen in love. But he hadn’t.
Far from weaving a spell, he knew now that he’d broken free of one at last. Whatever else he might do, he would never again return to the places he’d shared with Ginny hoping to evoke some strange magic that would bring her back. He was finished with that foolishness for good, thanks (in large part) to Carol, who had reminded him that it was possible to have a good time with a woman without being madly in love with her. He felt no seismic stirrings of passion toward Carol—and didn’t regret it. He was not in any great rush to find someone who would accept what Ginny had rejected. That could wait, perhaps for a very long time. He had scaled his ambitions down to a more realistic and manageable size. He was, after all, young, attractive, wealthy, and unattached; it was time to start acting like it.