mayonnaise. She said no, briskly but cheerfully, to a glass of the white wine and the slice of pizza—she had, she explained, eaten in the traffic jam. She had ordered in. So Fat Charlie sat in the kitchen, and poured himself the final glass of white wine, and picked the cheese and the pepperoni from the top of the cold pizza while Rosie went off to run the bath and then started, suddenly and quite loudly, to scream.
Fat Charlie made it to the bathroom before the first scream had finished dying away, and while Rosie was filling her lungs for the second. He was convinced that he would find her dripping with blood. To his surprise and relief, she was not bleeding. She was wearing a blue bra and panties, and was pointing to the bath, in the center of which sat a large brown garden spider.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed. “It took me by surprise.”
“They can do that,” said Fat Charlie. “I’ll just wash it away.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Rosie, fiercely. “It’s a living thing. Take it outside.”
“Right,” said Fat Charlie.
“I’ll wait in the kitchen,” she said. “Tell me when it’s all over.”
When you have drunk an entire bottle of white wine, coaxing a rather skittish garden spider into a clear plastic tumbler using only an old birthday card becomes more of a challenge to hand-eye coordination than it is at other times; a challenge that is not helped by a partially unclothed fiancee on the edge of hysterics, who, despite her announcement that she would wait in the kitchen, is instead leaning over your shoulder and offering advice.
But soon enough, despite the help, he had the spider inside the tumbler, the mouth of which was firmly covered by a card from an old schoolfriend which told him that YOU ARE ONLY AS OLD AS YOU FEEL (and, on the inside humorously topped this with SO STOP FEELING YOURSELF YOU SEX MANIAC—HAPPY BIRTHDAY).
He took the spider downstairs and out of the front door, into the tiny front garden, which consisted of a hedge, for people to throw up in, and several large flagstones with grass growing up between them. He held the tumbler up. In the yellow sodium light, the spider was black. He imagined it was staring at him.
“Sorry about that,” he said to the spider, and, white wine slooshing comfortably around inside him, he said it aloud.
He put the card and the tumbler down on a cracked flagstone, and he lifted the tumbler, and waited for the spider to scuttle away. Instead, it simply sat, unmoving, on the face of the cheerful cartoon teddy bear on the birthday card. The man and the spider regarded each other.
Something that Mrs. Higgler said came to him then, and the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Perhaps it was the devil in him. Probably it was the alcohol.
“If you see my brother,” said Fat Charlie to the spider, “tell him he ought to come by and say hello.”
The spider remained where it was, and raised one leg, almost as if it were thinking it over, then it scuttled across the flagstone toward the hedge, and was gone.
Rosie had her bath, and she gave Fat Charlie a lingering peck on the cheek, and she went home.
Fat Charlie turned on the TV, but he found himself nodding so he turned it off, and went to bed, where he dreamed a dream of such vividness and peculiarity that it would remain with him for the rest of his life.
One way that you know something is a dream is that you are somewhere you have never been in real life. Fat Charlie had never been to California. He had never been to Beverly Hills. He had seen it enough, though, in movies and on television to feel a comfortable thrill of recognition. A party was going on.
The lights of Los Angeles glimmered and twinkled beneath them.
The people at the party seemed to divide neatly into the ones with the silver plates, covered with perfect canapes, and the ones who picked things off the silver plates, or who declined to. The ones who were being fed moved around the huge house gossiping, smiling, talking, each as certain of his or her relative importance in the world of Hollywood as were the courtiers in the court of ancient Japan—and, just as in the ancient Japanese court, each of them was certain that, just one rung up the ladder, they would be safe. There were actors who wished to be stars, stars who wanted to be independent producers, independent producers who craved the safety of a studio job, directors who wanted to be stars, studio bosses who wanted to be the bosses of other, less precarious studios, studio lawyers who wanted to be liked for themselves or, failing that, just wanted to be liked.
In Fat Charlie’s dream, he could see himself from inside and outside at the same time, and he was not himself. In Fat Charlie’s usual dreams he was probably just sitting down for an exam on double-entry bookkeeping that he had forgotten to study for in circumstances which made it a certainty that when he finally stood up he would discover that he had somehow neglected to put anything on below the waist when he got dressed that morning. In his dreams, Fat Charlie was himself, only clumsier.
Not in this dream.
In this dream, Fat Charlie was cool, and beyond cool. He was slick, he was fly, he was smart, he was the only person at the party without a silver tray who had not received an invitation. And (this was something that was a source of astonishment to the sleeping Fat Charlie, who could think of nothing more embarrassing than being anywhere without an invitation) he was having a marvelous time.
He told each person who asked him a different story about who he was and why he was there. After half an hour, most of the people at the party were convinced that he was the representative of a foreign investment house, seeking to buy outright one of the studios, and after another half an hour it was common knowledge at the party that he would be putting in a bid for Paramount.
His laugh was raucous and infectious, and he seemed to be having a better time than any of the other people at the party, that was for certain. He instructed the barman in the preparation of a cocktail he called a “Double Entendre” which, while it seemed to begin with a base of champagne, he explained was actually scientifically nonalcoholic. It contained a splash of this and a splash of that until it went a vivid purple color, and he handed them out to the partygoers, pressing them upon them with joy and enthusiasm until even the people who had been sipping fizzy water warily, as if it might go off, were knocking back the purple drinks with pleasure.
And then, with the logic of dreams, he was leading them all down to the pool, and was proposing to teach them the trick of Walking on the Water. It was all a matter of confidence, he told them, of attitude, of attack, of knowing how to do it. And it seemed to the people at the party that Walking on the Water would be a very fine trick to master, something they had always known how to do, deep down in their souls, but they had forgotten, and that this man would remind them of the technique of it.
Take off your shoes, he said to them, so they took off their shoes, Sergio Rossis and Christian Louboutins and Rene Caovillas lined up side by side with Nikes and Doc Martens and anonymous black leather agent-shoes, and he led them, in a sort of a conga line, around the side of the swimming pool and then out onto its surface. The water was cool to the touch, and it quivered, like thick jelly, under their feet; some women, and several men, tittered at this, and a couple of the younger agents began jumping up and down on the surface of the pool, like children at a bouncy castle. Far below them the lights of Los Angeles shone through the smog, like distant galaxies.
Soon every inch of the pool was taken up with partygoers—standing, dancing, shaking or bouncing up and down on the water. The press of the crowd was so strong that the fly guy, the Charlie-in-his-dream, stepped back onto the concrete poolside to take a falafel-sashimi ball from a silver plate.
A spider dropped from a jasmine plant onto the fly guy’s shoulder. It scuttled down his arm and onto the palm of his hand, where he greeted it with a delighted
There was a silence, as if he was listening to something the spider was saying, something only he could hear; then he said,
He placed the spider down, carefully, on a jasmine leaf.
And at that selfsame moment, each of the people standing barefoot on the surface of the swimming pool remembered that water was a liquid, and not a solid, and that there was a reason why people did not commonly walk, let alone dance or even bounce, on water, viz., its impossibility.
They were the movers and the shakers of the dream machine, those people, and suddenly they were flailing, fully dressed, in from four to twelve feet of water, wet and scrabbling and terrified.
Casually, the fly guy walked across the pool, treading on the heads of people, and on the hands of other people, and never once losing his balance. Then, when he reached the far end of the pool, where everything dropped into a steep hill, he took one huge jump and dove into the lights of Los Angeles at night, which shimmered and swallowed him like an ocean.
