All right, all right, you’re good, Paul says.
Lil reaches for an envelope, flashes that it’s addressed from Marolda Properties, and puts it in her purse. Now what, she says.
We wait.
How about we knock? She raises a tiny fist.
I wouldn’t.
Can we smoke?
No . . . but yes, he says. He reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a silver-on-bronze case, flicking it open and offering her a cigarette.
From crimped lips: no light?
He produces a lighter, flicks it open too. Matches the case. The cherry blooms, and the door unlocks.
Put those nasty things out, the Dreamer of the Day says. You’ll kill us all. The Dreamer’s not a striking man. He couldn’t get a job standing on the lip of a grave on a soundstage, to stare down at the lens of a video camera. A little pudgy, skin like defrosting chicken. His undershirt is yellowed, his eyes an unremarkable brown. Hair a bundt cake around the back of his head. Lil didn’t have lunch today. She couldn’t eat.
The apartment is all newspapers, at first. Then she sees other things—boxes stuffed with green-and-white-striped printouts, old black-screened TVs, dusty Easter baskets, a pile of shoes. The Dreamer leads them like there’s a choice—the kitchen is piles up to the Dreamer’s eyebrows except for the path carved out from force of habit, and the living room is newspapers and magazines avalanching from sagging couches, and the bedroom is just piles of old-man clothes. Hats and green suit jackets and shirtsleeves sticking out like quake victims who didn’t quite pull themselves from fissures. The man has to stand sideways and sidle after the Dreamer. The woman fits, but barely, her elbows tight.
Lil doesn’t smell a thing except old man: lavender and urine.
The bedroom—magazines she’s never seen before, filing cabinets on their sides across a twin bed, a rain of hanging plants. A patch of mattress ticking, bald and empty—the Dreamer takes a seat there. Paul finds a little bench, sweeps it free of old coffee cans and pipe cleaners, and sits. There’s room for her but she stands. The Dreamer reaches and there’s an audible click. A big cabinet-sized television set, framed in trash. Knobs. Black and white, but a nest of cables snaking up from it to a hole punched through the tin ceiling. Her former show is on. The Cove of Love.
Is this some kind of setup? Lil asks. Is this some kind of joke?
The Dreamer says, I like this show. You were good on it.
I don’t watch it anymore, she says.
Paul pats the bench. She sits.
Sotto voce, Paul says, We really should wait for a commercial.
On the screen there’s a man. Old, with silver hair. In business wear, but he means business too. Sleeves rolled up. Suspenders, thick and brown. A pile of dirt, a shovel. The sky behind him is swirls of paint, normally bursting with red and purple (the woman knows that matte painting well), but on the Dreamer’s television screen it’s a sea of gray. The man picks up the shovel and begins to dig. A voice, tinny and distant, begs him to stop. It’s her voice.
That’s a clip from three years ago, she says. Paul hisses at her. She nudges him with her elbow. The bench wobbles under them.
Yes, the Dreamer says. When Savannah was in that old bomb shelter where the gang had her cornered, and they decided to lock her in. I remember those words, that tone. Tell me something.
Yes?
Do you have a lot of the same outfit?
Excuse me?
When you’re doing something like that. Does wardrobe take back whatever you’re wearing every day and clean it, then dirty it up again so it’ll match, and you wear that suit every day? Or is there a rack full of identical pantsuits, with identical tears and identical smudges and burn marks, and you wear a new one every day? You were in that bomb shelter for three months, ten minutes a day.
They have a few outfits. We have girls who take digital pictures and they try to match the amount of dishevelment, Lil says. I think we had three of that outfit for that story arc.
That’s why I like The Cove of Love. I can tell that the director really cares about the show, the Dreamer of the Day says. The other soaps don’t even try anymore.
A commercial for vegetable oil. A world where people in a room can look out the windows, where women stare off into space and hold up bottles and confide in the universe that some things are tastier than others.
Why’d you bring her here, Ron? the Dreamer asks.
I want my husband—the words stick in her throat.
Ron.
Ron opens his mouth. She is tired of being married to her husband.
The Dreamer turns to look at her, to look at Ron too.
Aren’t you a women’s libber?
Lil laughs at that. Who even says women’s libber anymore?
You can get a divorce.
Maybe he doesn’t deserve a divorce. You want the gory details? Paul told me you’re a no-questions-asked kind of guy.
Ron, the Dreamer says.
She looks at the man next to her.
Here, he says, I’m Ron.
Savannah—
Call me Lil, she says.
Savannah, the Dreamer repeats, I am a no-questions-asked kind of guy. I can’t say I like women’s libbers very much. I don’t care why you want your husband dead, but women like you, Savannah, you want to talk about it.
I’m not a woman like Savannah, she says. That was a character I played on the show.
And the show starts again. There’s a hospital. A man turns on his heel and walks off frame. A close-up of a woman’s face. All redheads and blonds look alike. The Dreamer tells them the character’s name is Trista and that she has something horrible inside her. Then two kids bouncing on a couch, too enthusiastic when the man who meant business walks in after burying Savannah alive. A restaurant scene is next, the rhubarbrhubarb of the crowd scene like the Dreamer’s labored breaths. Then a commercial for people who want to fill a bag with gold and mail it away.
The Dreamer says, Ron, go downstairs and get us some coffees. Ron gets up and squeezes past the rubbish into the next room.
Lil puts her hand in her hair, combing it with her fingers. I want my husband dead because he’s been cheating on me.
Bullshit. Pardon my French. I don’t get many female visitors. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you. I know I haven’t kept up my apartment. I’m embarrassed. Ron should have told me you were coming. That you were coming. We could have met in the diner.
I thought you never leave.
Maybe I’d make an exception, the Dreamer says. He looks at Lil. His dentures are heavy like two rows of tombstones.
He is cheating on me. This is his third or fourth little whore.
That’s not why you want him dead. If you wanted him dead, you would have put out a hit two or three whores ago.
I used to have a career, something to occupy my own days. Now I’m home all day, or at the gym. I can feel her sweat on the sheets of my own bed when I lay down at night. It’s humiliating.
Humiliating, the Dreamer echoes.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get another role. I’m forty-one years old. I never crossed over to movies, not even to prime time.
You’re not the bitch-goddess type, the Dreamer says. Not the part for you.
I want to know that there’s something more to the world than what I’ve already lived through.
The Dreamer extends a finger and turns off the television set. A single pixel burns in the middle of the screen.