But I didn’t want to remember that. I wanted this dream, the only way I would ever have him again. I wanted to bury myself in it. His hand on my shoulder, the one that didn’t hurt. His voice as soft as Virginia cotton.
He was telling a story about India, about the farm where he grew up.
“We kept goats for the milk,” Dev said. “I thought I might be a disciple of Pusan, the god of lost animals. The way they looked at me … But one night a wolf got through a bad mend in the fence, killed the dam and all but one of the kids. I found her, the kid. In her mother’s spilled entrails. Gagging and—”
He paused. He withdrew his hand, and I wished that this were a dream where I was given to move, to touch him. “She—” he tried. “She was covered in blood. Not her own.”
I knew what he was thinking. This was a dream, of course I did. Hadn’t I just tried to stop myself from dredging the same memory?
“You didn’t know me when you left Trent—and his girl, oh God, his girl, poor Maryann—not until you were naked in my clawfoot tub, and the water turned pink, because you said, ‘It’s a sunset, Dev.’ And I—”
I dreamed that his breath caught like a fishing line in his chest. I dreamed that he squeezed my hand and kissed my forehead and left me there, to dream alone in that room, without him.
My next three days in the hospital unspooled with steady boredom, occasionally relieved by pain and then painkillers. I sucked morphine like a greedy child, and dreamed strange dreams about Dev. That first one in particular was so odd that for a whole day I thought it might have been real.
He was a stoolie—or a plant, depending on how you looked at it—and I found myself jerking as though newly awake every time I remembered. The Dev of my dream had said that he had been working with the cops from the very beginning. And maybe that was only pain and paranoia, the knife I wielded on myself to pay for the hubris of even dreaming that he would come back to me. But every time that molten knowledge of it burned me through, I thought, Oh, so that’s why. Dev had always held himself apart from us, but he’d never been out of place. Maybe he had only seemed to love me, too.
At that point I asked the nurse for more morphine and tried to forget how to think.
Walter brought chocolates—promptly confiscated—and funny stories about the Pelican. I particularly liked the one about how the dentist got so ossified the night he left me that Dev had to haul him into a taxi. “Over his shoulder like a sack of grain,” Walter said, demonstrating. “Wasn’t too careful, either. I wouldn’t’ve wanted to be Marty’s head the next morning.”
Tamara, he said, had jumped feet first in love with her soldier boy. “Lot of long faces in that club these days. Not that most of them ever had a chance.”
“And Dev?” I asked, not wanting to.
“You know Dev, he’s happy for her. And his heart’s not as broken as he thinks, anyway.”
This sparked enough hope that I asked if Dev had said anything about me, but Walter just shook his head and put his hand on my good shoulder.
We did not discuss Victor, or the woman who shot me, or what Walter might do if I got myself lost again. I did not ask him any of the questions that my rookie cop had forced upon me. After Walter left the doctor made a pointed comment about certain types of visitors and I stared at him until he looked away.
The next day, Walter brought me a letter from Tamara:
Oh Pea, my sweetest Pea, Walter says you’re at some segregated hospital uptown, so I can’t get in unless I pretend to clean your toilet, which, you can imagine, is not something I find myself itching to do. If I’d wanted to scrub toilets I’d have stayed in Virginia! The Pelican is still standing, you’ll be glad to know. I confirmed a real coup of a show next Thursday: a Hungarian sculptor who got out just before Hitler got in—terrifying stuff, nightmare shapes rising out of rock, absolutely terrific. The Amsterdam News promised me they’ll send down a reviewer.
Unfortunately, we’re also debuting one other artist—at Vic’s request. You’re well rid of that dentist, sugar. Marty has as much artistic sensibility as a government-employed horsefly, but Vic’s got it in him to be “generous.” Foreshortened doodles of horse’s heads with teeth like a toothpaste model’s! I know Vic made the Pelican, but sometimes I swear he did it by accident.
Well, I don’t mean to bore you with all this gossip while you can’t even come down here to see it! You scared the devil out of me, Phyllis. Get better soon and get out of that damned hospital. I owe you a good reading. I’ve been trying, but the numbers are funny and I think it would be better if I had you with me when I laid out the cards. All I get are spades, Pea, spades and hearts and every once in a while, as if he’s been watching over my shoulder, that damned devil joker.
xoxo
Tammy
P.S. Clyde sends his love!
This made me laugh and roll my eyes and mutter crossly to myself and feel better by the end.
She was wrong, in any case—Victor had known exactly what he was doing when he made the Pelican: integrated, high-minded, perfumed with reefer and the right kind of danger, the kind that kept the cops as disinclined to arrest you for indecency as for selling liquor without a license.
