In Between the Sheets
That night Stephen Cooke had a wet dream, the first in many years. Afterwards he lay awake on his back, hands behind his head, while its last images receded in the darkness and his cum, strangely located across the small of his back, turned cold. He lay still till the light was bluish gray, and then he took a bath. He lay there a long time too, staring sleepily at his bright body underwater.
That preceding day he had kept an appointment with his wife in a fluorescent café with red formica tabletops. It was five o’clock when he arrived and almost dark. As he expected he was there before her. The waitress was an Italian girl, nine or ten years old perhaps, her eyes heavy and dull with adult cares. Laboriously she wrote out the word “coffee” twice on her notepad, tore the page in half and carefully laid one piece on his table, face downwards. Then she shuffled away to operate the vast and gleaming Gaggia machine. He was the cafe’s only customer.
His wife was observing him from the pavement outside. She disliked cheap cafés and she would make sure he was there before she came in. He noticed her as he turned in his seat to take his coffee from the child. She stood behind the shoulder of his own reflected image, like a ghost, half-hidden in a doorway across the street. No doubt she believed he could not see out of a bright café into the darkness. To reassure her he moved his chair to give her a more complete view of his face. He stirred his coffee and watched the waitress who leaned against the counter in a trance, and who now drew a long silver thread from her nose. The thread snapped and settled on the end of her forefinger, a colorless pearl. She glared at it briefly and spread it across her thighs, so finely that it disappeared.
When his wife came in she did not look at him at first. She went straight to the counter and ordered a coffee from the girl and carried it to the table herself.
“I wish,” she hissed as she unwrapped her sugar, “you wouldn’t pick places like this.” He smiled indulgently and downed his coffee in one swallow. She finished hers in careful, pouting sips. Then she took a small mirror and some tissues from her bag. She blotted her red lips and swabbed from an incisor a red stain. She crumpled the tissue into her saucer and snapped her bag shut. Stephen watched the tissue absorb the coffee slop and turn gray. He said, “Have you got another one of those I can have?” She gave him two.
“You’re not going to cry are you?” At one such meeting he had cried.
He smiled. “I want to blow my nose.”
The Italian girl sat down at a table near theirs and spread out several sheets of paper. She glanced across at them, and then leaned forwards till her nose was inches from the table. She began to fill in columns of numbers. Stephen murmured, “She’s doing the accounts.”
His wife whispered, “It shouldn’t be allowed, a child of that age.” Finding themselves in rare agreement, they looked away from each other’s faces.
“How’s Miranda?” Stephen said at last.
“She’s all right.”
“I’ll be over to see her this Sunday.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“And the other thing…” Stephen kept his eyes on the girl who dangled her legs now and daydreamed. Or perhaps she was listening.
“Yes?”
“The other thing is that when the holidays start I want Miranda to come and spend a few days with me.”
“She doesn’t want to.”
“I’d rather hear that from her.”
“She won’t tell you herself. You’ll make her feel guilty if you ask her.”
He banged the table hard with his open hand. “Listen!” He almost shouted. The child looked up and Stephen felt her reproach. “Listen,” he said quietly, “I’ll speak to her on Sunday and judge for myself.”
“She won’t come,” said his wife, and snapped shut her bag once more as if their daughter lay curled up inside. They both stood up. The girl stood up too and came over to take Stephen’s money, accepting a large tip without acknowledgment. Outside the café Stephen said, “Sunday then.” But his wife was already walking away and did not hear.
That night he had the wet dream. The dream itself concerned the café, the girl and the coffee machine. It ended in sudden and intense pleasure, but for the moment the details were beyond recall. He got out of the bath hot and dizzy, on the edge, he thought, of an hallucination. Balanced on the side of the bath, he waited for it to wear off, a certain warping of the space between objects. He dressed and went outside, into the small garden of dying trees he shared with other residents in the square. It was seven o’clock. Already Drake, self-appointed custodian of the garden, was down on his knees by one of the benches. Paint scraper in one hand, a bottle of colorless liquid in the other.
“Pigeon crap,” Drake barked at Stephen. “Pigeons crap and no one can sit down. No one.” Stephen stood behind the old man, his hands deep in his pockets, and watched him work at the gray-and-white stains. He felt comforted. Around the edge of the garden ran a narrow path worn to a trough by the daily traffic of dog walkers, writers with blocks and married couples in crisis.
Walking there now Stephen thought, as he often did, of Miranda his daughter. On Sunday she would be fourteen, today he should find her a present. Two months ago she had sent him a letter. “Dear Daddy, are you looking after yourself? Can I have twenty-five pounds please to buy a record-player? With all my love, Miranda.” He replied by return post and regretted it the instant the letter left his hands. “Dear Miranda, I am looking after myself, but not sufficiently to comply with… etc.” In effect it was his wife he had addressed. At the sorting office he had spoken to a sympathetic official who led him away by the elbow. You wish to retrieve a letter? This way please. They passed through a glass door and stepped out on to a small balcony. The kindly official indicated with a sweep of his hand the spectacular view, two acres of men, women, machinery and moving conveyor belts. Now where would you like us to start?
Returning to his point of departure for the third time he noticed that Drake was gone. The bench was spotless and smelling of spirit. He sat down. He had sent Miranda thirty pounds, three new ten-pound notes in a registered letter. He regretted that too. The extra five so clearly spelled out his guilt. He spent two days over a letter to her, fumbling, with reference to nothing in particular, maudlin. “Dear Miranda, I heard some pop music on the radio the other day and I couldn’t help wondering at the words which…” To such a letter he could conceive of no reply. But it came about ten days later. “Dear Daddy, Thanks for the money. I bought a Musivox Junior the same as my friend Charmian. With all my love, Miranda. P.S. It’s got two speakers.”
Back indoors he made coffee, took it into his study and fell into the mild trance which allowed him to work three and a half hours without a break. He reviewed a pamphlet on Victorian attitudes towards menstruation, he completed another three pages of a short story he was writing, he wrote a little in his random journal. He typed, “nocturnal emission like an old man’s last gasp” and crossed it out. From a drawer he took a thick ledger and entered in the credit column “Review… 1500 words. Short story… 1020 words. Journal… 60 words.” Taking a red biro from a box marked “pens” he ruled off the day, closed the book and returned it to its drawer. He replaced the dust cover on his typewriter, returned the telephone to its cradle, gathered up the coffee things onto a tray and carried them out, locking the study door behind him, thus terminating the morning’s rite, unchanged for twenty-three years.