CHAPTER THREE
• 1 •
I dreamed of him that night, after I wrote the second chapter of what had happened. The first time I ever dreamed of him. We were flying over the city. Not in a flyer, but on the wings of angels out of an old religious picture. I could feel the beat of the wings through my body as they opened and closed. It was effortless and lovely to fly, to watch him fly just ahead of me. We passed over the broken girders and our shadows fell on the ground among the orange foliage of the autumn weeds. It’s supposed to be a sexual dream to dream of flight. Maybe it was. But it didn’t seem to be.
When I woke, it was early morning, just like the dream, and I looked out of the window at the orange twining the girders, where our shadows had fallen. Beyond the subsidence was a blue ghost of the city I could just see, cone-shaped blocks all in a line, and the distant column of the Delux Hyperia Building. The view wasn’t ugly or dismal anymore. The sun was shining on it. In five years, if they left the subsidence alone, a young wood of weed trees might be growing there. The sky was blue as Silver’s shirt had been.
Dazed by the dream and the sunlight and the autumn weeds, I went into the bathroom and ran hot water, though it was expensive. I showered and dressed, and brushed my hair. My hair looked different. And my face. My hair, I guessed, was fading out of tint and needed molecular restructuring or the bronze tone would all go, but I’d sold my hairdresser unit. I could go to a beauty parlor, and get a color match and molecular restructure done, but it might not be the exact shade. Anyway, it would cost a lot. I’d have to revert to being dull brown, or whatever it was I’d been that hadn’t suited me on my coloressence charting. My face though, what had happened to that? I turned three quarters on and saw that my flesh had hollowed slightly. I had cheekbones, high and slender but unmistakably there. I looked older, and peculiarly younger, too. I leaned close to the spotted glass, and my eyes became one eye, flecked with green and yellow.
I put the Casa Bianca P.O.D. check in a sling purse over my shoulder, and went out and down the cracked cement stairs.
I couldn’t tell what I felt, but I didn’t feel as I had. The street turned into a run-down boulevard with an elderly elevated running overhead, the lines long unused, and rusting. I bought a bun and an apple and a plastic cup of tea at a food counter, and ate and drank as I waited for the city center bus. By daylight, I knew my way about far better than I’d thought, even here. Of course, I’d sometimes been in ramshackle areas, always with other people, always a tourist, but still enough to have a few scraps of knowledge.
The blue sky made the sidewalk interesting. People moved about, ran, argued, and steam came out of food shops. Flowers spilled from the elevated.
I’d always known the city. I had no reason to be afraid of it, even now. And my jeans looked shabby because I’d slept in them on the hairy old couch, shabby enough not to attract attention. The shirt would get shabby.
“Bus late again,” one woman said to another behind me, in the verbal shorthand of the usual. “Thought of walking to South for the flyer, but it’s too much money.”
“Mechanical failure at the depot,” said the other woman. “They don’t service regularly downtown, that’s the trouble. City center runs, that’s fine. But out here, we can walk all the way.”
Then they muttered together, and I knew they were talking about me, and I went hot and cold with nervous fear. Then I caught the word “actress” spoken with pity, scorn and interest. I was startled, to have myself compared to exotic Egyptia, even on the streets of the poor. Glad, also. To be an actress from this end of town meant I was struggling, too. They wouldn’t hate me. I was a symbol of possibility, and anyway would probably starve.
The bus finally came. I got off at Beech and went into the Magnum Bank, and cashed the check.
Actress. They thought I was an actress, just like Copper.
Then a flyer came, and I took it from force of habit, regretting it as I paid the coins. I was being so meanly careful of money, and then lapsing in unnecessary extravagance, and it was all a proof that I couldn’t deal with the situation, but I wasn’t going to think of it just now. Or of my mother. Or Clovis, or Egyptia, or even of him.
I got off at Racine, and walked over the New River Bridge, to Clovis’s apartment block.
As I came to the outside of his door every bone in my body seemed suddenly to turn to fluid, but I spoke to the door, anyway, asking to come in.
Maybe he, they, were out. Or—busy. And the door wouldn’t open.
The door didn’t open and didn’t open, and then it did.
I walked in, holding my purse in front of me like a sort of shield, and not looking around at the living area with its couches and pillows and tasteful decor. No one was there.
Snakes fought each other in my stomach, but I ignored them. I sat down on the couch with black cushions, and stared across at the window where I’d said “I love you” to his reflection in the glass, and he’d seen me and known.
After a few minutes, Clovis came through from the main bedroom in a dark blue three-piece suit, as if he were going out. He appeared elegant and casual, as he always does, but as soon as he looked at me, he blushed. I’d never seen the adult Clovis blush, a wave of painful color, hitting the inside of his skin so fast the pulses jumped in his temples. I remembered again, he’s seventeen. And I started to blush in sympathy, but I wouldn’t look down, and it was Clovis who turned his back and walked over to the drinks dispenser.
“Hallo, Jane. What’ll you drink?”
“I don’t want a drink. I’ve brought your money.”
“Dear me, and I was hoping to get the pound of flesh.”
He turned around with something in a glass, drinking it, cool again.
I got up, opened my purse, and counted out the large-unit notes on a table in front of him. It took quite a long while. He watched, sipping the drink from time to time, and there was lace on his shirt sleeves, like the Renaissance shirt Silver had worn on the Grand Stairway.
When I stopped, he said,
“He isn’t here, you know.”
“I know.” I had known, too. Nerves or not, I’d have sensed if he were there, that near me. “Now please just tell me what you spent on Egyptia. Did you buy her the fur coat?”
“No. She bought it herself on her delay account.”
“Do you want the money for the lunch you bought her?”
“No, Jane,” said Clovis. “Jane, it really could have waited.”
