“The only place I’m going now, Dennis, is inside my home. I don’t feel well.”
“You don’t look as good as you do sometimes. You got a headache? Darla used to have the cruelest headaches. I’d soak cloths in cool vinegar and put them on her head.”
She probably had tumors the size of goose eggs in that head, Francine thought. Any operation was bound to be futile.
“OK, you go on inside,” Dennis said. “Close the blinds. Put on this music I’m going to give you. Put this in your tape player. Take whatever’s in there and throw it away. You’ll never care for it again.” He unbuttoned the pocket of his denim shirt and removed a plastic Baggie containing a tape. “It’s Darla playing the piano. It was in the lodge at the dude ranch right where Galore is, as I’ve told you. We didn’t have a piano in St. Louis. This is pure Darla. She was so talented! When you hear this you’ll recognize everything for the first time.”
“Music can’t do that.”
“It can’t?” He pressed the tape into her hand. “Since when?”
There was still no coffee. She wasn’t going to waste her time looking for coffee when there wasn’t any. A moth was floating in the sheltie’s water bowl. This was one of those recurrent things. She went into the bedroom and lay on the unmade bed. She wanted to sleep. She could no longer fall asleep! Insomnia, of course, was far worse than just being awake. She thought longingly of those two stages — the hypnagogic and the hypnapompic, although she could never declare with confidence which was which once she’d been informed of their existence — on either side of sleep, the going into and the coming out when the conscious and the subconscious were shifting dominance, when for an instant the minds were in perfect balance, neither holding dominion. But she couldn’t sleep, she lacked her escorts, the hypnapompic and the hypnagogic — who had of late been acting more like unfriendly guards.
The sun was slipping into the afternoon, exposing the dirtiness of the windows, which she never cleaned in the hope of dissuading doves from crashing into the glass. The doves flew undissuaded. The many blurred impressions of their dove bodies depressed her but she was convinced that sparkling windows would be even more inviting to them as they attempted to thread their way among the houses in their evening plunge from the foothills to the valley below.
She had removed the tape from the dusty little bag and played it. It was a formal exercise — familiar, pleasant, ordinary playing. It didn’t cast a spell or create a mood. It was not the kind of music that tore hungrily at her. It did not appeal to her at all. Much of the tape was empty of all but hum and hiss. The playing had simply stopped and had not resumed again. There was no applause, no exclamations of approval, no sense of an audience being present, least of all an impressionable child. Darla had certainly taken that kid for a ride. Had she confounded everyone she met in her brief life or only him? Probably him alone. She didn’t think Dennis even knew this Darla very well, not really. He had a collection of queer memories — a girl leaping in place to what avail — of no more value than bits of broken glass. He had nothing. Darla inhabited his world more than he did, for she infused it, doing what the dead would like to do but in most cases couldn’t, which in Francine’s opinion was a very good thing. As far as she was concerned, though, Darla, her quenched double, was a disappointment.
She played the tape again and it sounded even less interesting than before and briefer as well. She didn’t know what was missing, it had just become, was becoming, more compressed. She began to play it once more, then thought better of it. She ejected it from the machine and put it back in the Baggie. Locating a pencil, she tore an envelope in half — another unpaid bill! — and wrote:
Dear Dennis. We appreciate the work
you’ve done. Good luck in raising
security cactus! Good-bye and all best.
Her sentiments were not at all sincere but such were the means by which one expressed participation in the world.
Dennis was scrubbing the swimming pool tiles with a pumice stone.
“Here’s your tape back,” Francine said.
“It’s something, isn’t it,” Dennis said.
“I found it a little repetitive.”
“Yes, yes, those final chords can never be forgotten quickly enough.” He seemed pleased.
“Dennis, I’m curious about a number of things.”
“Darla was curious.”
“You are from St. Louis and Darla is buried there?”
He nodded. “My family once owned half of St. Louis but they don’t anymore.”
“It seems a lot to be responsible for,” she agreed. “But my point is, with you treasuring the memory of Darla so, I would think you would find her more present back there.”
Dennis opened his mouth in a wide grimace. “Sorry,” he said. “Darla always told me I eat too fast. Sometimes I can’t catch my breath. I just had lunch.”
“You could visit her grave and such,” Francine went on relentlessly.
“That would be unhealthy, wouldn’t it?” Dennis said. “Besides, Darla never liked St. Louis. She didn’t care for vernacular landscapes. You couldn’t see the stars in St. Louis. Darla liked a pretty night. No one liked a pretty night more than that girl did.”
“She sounds like an exceptional young woman,” Francine said dryly.
“She was beautiful and smart and kind and generous.”
“I don’t see her, Dennis. I can’t picture her at all.”
“And when she looked at you, she did it with her whole heart. You existed when she looked at you. You were …” He appeared to be short of breath again.
“I’m not a particularly nice person, Dennis. I’ve had to admit that to myself, and I’ll admit it to you as well. I might have been nice once but I get by the best I can now. I don’t even know how you’d look at someone, anything, with your whole heart. Why, you’d wear yourself out. You’d become nothing but a cinder. Life would become intolerable in no time. Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn’t. It’s what I always think when I see cows grazing in the fields or standing in those pleasant little streams that wind through the fields or finding shade beneath the occasional tree, that they have a very nice life until they don’t. An extreme analogy, perhaps — well, yes, forget that analogy, but you have to move on, Dennis. Your life’s not assimilating your days and that’s not good, Dennis.”
“What?” Dennis said.
“Now I want you to read the note I’ve given you. And I really must find Freddie. He and the sheltie have been gone for an unusually long while.”
Francine walked briskly through the patio to the garage. The door was open and Freddie’s large dour Mercedes was gone, leaving only “her” car, an unreliable convertible she professed to adore. She would go to the dog park. She stepped into the convertible, turned on the ignition and studied the gauges. It was very low on fuel.
At the gas station, the attendant inside said, “What would you do if this wasn’t a real hundred-dollar bill?”
“What would I do?”
“Yeah!” The girl had unnaturally black hair and a broad unwinning smile.
“Of course it’s real. Do you think I’m trying to pass off a counterfeit?”
“Nah,” the girl said, “I’m not going to take it. I’m using my discretion.”
“It’s a perfectly good bill,” Francine said. “Don’t you have a pen or a light or something that you pass over these things?”
“You have to give me something smaller. I’m using my discretion.”