By the time he’d finished his broiled squid and calamari salad and Pope his chicken lemoni Bass realized something that didn’t make him happy at all. He kind of liked the guy. What a pain in the ass. And he guessed that Pope could see it on his face because he laughed.
“Disappointed? That I’m not some prick you could just keep on hating?”
“I never….”
“Come on. If you didn’t hate me you were sure working on it. Look, I’m a writer. I’m good at body language. There was a definite poker up your ass when you walked in. You only just relieved yourself of it a while ago.”
He thought of the dream, Gerard’s sad nod to him that was almost a bow. He was pretty good at body language himself. But he only now realized what the nod was telling him. Not resignation to the knife, which was what he’d thought it to be the following morning. Recognition. Recognition of the Other.
In his mind he spoke the dream words do you love your wife? but what came out of him was “You love her, don’t you.”
“Of course I do. She’s pretty damn easy to love. Which you of all people ought to know. She was trying to do you a favor, Bass.”
“Oh yeah? How so?” He hoped it didn’t come out as bitter as it sounded.
“Telling you she’d thrown out the photos, for one thing. Telling you to do the same. But cutting you off. That was the main thing.”
Cutting you off. He thought of his dream and suddenly it clarified and almost startled him. He realized that in the subtle inversions dreams will make it hadn’t been Gerard sitting tied to the chair at all. It was Bass. Unable to move or defend himself, unable to speak or argue his position. Waiting, nodding sadly in recognition of Gerard. And finally cut off at the very moment of awakening.
“She knew it wouldn’t work. She was trying to do you a kindness by not letting it go any further. And herself a kindness too. Me, too, of course.”
Bass thought about it. Finally he nodded.
“I had a dream about you,” he said. “I lit a cigarette. You took it from me and threw it away.”
“Pushy little bastard, huh?”
“No. It was for my own damn good.”
They split the bill.
“You asked me if I loved my wife,” Gerard said — though he hadn’t, exactly. “If you love her you’ll do the same as she tried to do for you. Metaphorically at least, throw those damn pictures away. Tear them into little pieces. Maybe someday when we’re old and grey, you can take a new one.”
“Or maybe not.”
“Or maybe not. Nice meeting you, Bass. This never happened but I’m sort of glad it did, if you know what I mean.”
Bass ordered another beer and sipped it slowly, thinking things through.
A little while later he switched to scotch.
Midway through the second one he stepped outside for a smoke and watched the street life. Nannies and brisk young mothers with double-wide strollers. Truckers delivering paper goods and dairy. A woman across the street jogging in place at a stoplight and shouting furiously into a cellphone. A guy in a mohawk, moccasins and fur earmuffs, stripped to the waist, all buff and tanned. What’s with that? he wondered. Tonto Nuevo? Earmuffs in August? It seemed there were people out here way more strange and obsessive than he was.
He went back inside and finished his scotch and had another. He sipped this one for a long time. The bartender made no effort to engage him in conversation. Sometimes they just knew.
He paid for the beer and scotches and headed home
Home was as he knew it would be. Empty. Empty of Laura, mostly.
He poured himself a final scotch he certainly didn’t need and sat back heavily on the couch and sipped it and he supposed he must have dozed for a little while because the next thing he knew his face was wet with tears, he was crying in his sleep now for chrissake, that was different and he thought of the dream and what the dream maybe wanted him to do so he went to the kitchen and opened the drawer and took out the knife.
He looked at the long heavy blade. It needed honing but he guessed it would do the trick. He looked at his fingers spread out on the counter. A symbol, he thought. That was what dreams were all about, weren’t they? Symbols for what still needing doing in your life? He lit a cigarette and thought about it some more. Nah, he thought. That’s more loco than the earmuffs. Not even the tip of a pinkie. You didn’t want to take this dream terminology too damn literally.
Besides, something else had occurred to him. In his dream, the end of his affair with Annabel was loss, pure and simple. Symbolized by a few missing fingers. He thought it was more complex than that.
You lost something, sure. But when you did you added something too.
Scar tissue.
He could live with that.
He put down the knife and stripped off his shirt, pulled deeply on his cigarette and then pressed it slowly to the flesh directly over where he imagined his heart to be. He wanted the burn to last. Here’s to you, Annabel, he thought. He smelled his chest hair burning and another sweeter smell beneath it and felt something like a hornet’s sting, sharp and abrupt and then fading to a bright throb as the ember gutted out.
He tossed the butt into the ashtray and headed for the bacitracin.
Roughly seven years later preparatory to Annabel and Gerard’s tenth anniversary party he stepped out of a steaming shower and admired the pale white circle that stood out plainly against his glowing flesh.
Laura was already waiting, dressed and ready to go.
She always was a bit ahead of him.