'What a dump,' she crowed, and meant it for a compliment.
'All that I have is yours.'
'That bed isn't even big enough for club sandwich sex.'
'One partner always has to stay on the floor.'
'Jesus, what year is that typewritou're using?'
'1935 Underwood Standard, old but great.'
'Just like me, huh, kid? You going to invite the ancient celebrity in and unscrew her earrings?'
'You've got to go back and look in Fannie's icebox, remember? Besides, if you slept over tonight, spoons.'
'Plenty of cutlery, but no fork?'
'No fork, Constance.'
'The memory of your mended underwear is devastating.'
'I'm no boy David.'
'Hell, you're not even Ralph. Goodnight, kid. It's me for Fannie's icebox.
Thanks!'
She gave me a kiss that burst my eardrums and drove away.
Reeling with it, I somehow made it to bed.w Which I shouldn't have done.
Because then I had the Dream.
Every night the small rainfall came outside my door, stayed a moment, whispered, and went away. I was afraid to go look. Afraid I might find Crumley standing there, drenched, with fiery eyes. Or Shapeshade, flickering and moving in jerks, like an old film, seaweed hung from his eyebrows and nose.
Every night I waited, the rain stopped, I slept.
And then came the Dream.
I was a writer in a small, green town in northern Illinois, and seated in a barber chair like Cal's chair in his empty shop. Then someone rushed in with a telegram that announced I had just made a movie sale for one hundred thousand dollars!
In the chair, yelling with happiness, waving the telegram, I saw the faces of all the men and boys, and the barber, turn to glaciers, turn to permafrost, and when they did pretend at smiles of congratulation their teeth were icicles.
Suddenly I was the outsider. The wind from their mouths blew cold on me. I had changed forever. I could not be forgiven.
The barber finished my haircut much too quickly, as if I were untouchable, and I went home with my telegram gripped in my sweating hands.
Late that night, from the edge of the woods not far from my house, in that small town, I heard a monster crying beyond the forest.
I sat up in bed, with crystals of cold frost skinning my body. The monster roared, coming nearer. I opened my eyes to hear better. I gaped my mouth to relax my ears. The monster shrieked closer, half through the forest now, thrashing and plunging, crushing the wildflowers, frightening rabbits and clouds of birds that rose screaming to the stars.
I could not move or scream myself. I felt the blood drain from my face. I saw the celebratory telegram on the bureau nearby. The monster shouted a terrible cry of death and plunged again, as if chopping trees along the way with its horrible scimitar teeth.
I leaped from bed, seized the telegram, ran to the front door, threw it wide.
The monster was almost out of the forest. It brayed, it shrieked, it knocked the night winds with threats.
I tore the telegram into a dozen pieces and threw them out over the lawn and shouted after them.
'The answer is no! Keep your money! Keep your fame! I'm staying here! I won't go! No,' and again, 'No!' and a final, despairing, 'No!'
The last cry died in the monster dinosaur's throat. There was a dreadful moment of silence.
The moon slid behind a cloud.
I waited, with the sweat freezing over my face.
The monster sucked in a breath, exhaled, then turned and lumbered away, back through the forest, fading, at last gone, into oblivion. The pieces of wtelegram blew like moth wings on the lawn. I shut and locked the screen and went, mourning with relief, to bed. Just before dawn, I slept.
Now, in bed in Venice, waked from that dream, I went to my front door and looked out at the canals. What could I shout to the dark water, to the fog, to the ocean on the shore? Who would hear, what monster might recognize my mea culpa or my great refusal or my protest of innocence or my argument for my goodness and a genius as yet unspent?
Go away! could I cry? I am guilty of nothing. I must not die. And, let the others alone, for God's sake. Could I say or shout that?
I opened my mouth to try. But my mouth was caked with dust that had somehow gathered in the dark.
I could only put one hand out in a gesture, a begging, an empty pantomime.
Please, I thought.
'Please,' I whispered. Then shut the door.
At which point, the telephone across the street in my special phone booth rang.
I won't answer, I thought. It's him. The Ice Man.
The phone rang.
It's Peg.
The phone rang.
It's him.
'Shut up!' I shrieked.
The phone stopped.
My weight collapsed me into bed.
Crumley stood in his door blinking. 'For God's sake, you know what time it is?'
We stood there watching each other, like boxers who have knocked each other silly and don't know where to lie down.
I couldn't think of what to say so I said, 'I am most dreadfully attended.'
'That's the password. Shakespeare. Come.'
He led me through the house to where coffee, a lot of it in a big pot, was cooking on the stove.
'I been working late on my masterpiece.' Crumley nodded toward his bedroom typewriter. A long yellow page, like the tongue of the Muse, was hanging out of it. 'I use legal paper, get more on it. I suppose I figure if I come to the end of a regular-sized page I won't go on. Jesus, you look lousy. Bad dreams?'
'The worst.' I told him about the barber shop, the hundred-thousand-dollar movie sale, the monster in the night, my shouts, and the great beast moaning away gone and me alive, forever.
'Jesus.' Crumley poured two big cups of something so thick it was bubbling lava. 'You even dream better than I do!'
'What's the dream mean? We can never win, ever? If I stay poor and don't ever publish a book, I lose. But if I sell and publish and have money in the bank, do I lose, too? Do people hate you? Will friends forgive you? You're older, Crumley, tell me. Why does the beast in the dream come to kill me?
Why do I have to give back the money? What's it all about?'
'Hell,' snorted Crumley. 'I'm no psychiatrist.'
'Would A. L. Shrank know?'
'With finger-painting and stool-smearing? Naw. You going to write that dream? You always advise
