The Madwoman Upstairs (38 page)

To my surprise, when I looked up, Orville wasn’t making eye contact. He was massaging his palms, over and over again. It seemed as though an unexpected emotion had come into his repertoire and he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He stood up and moved to the freezer. When he returned, it was with a bag full of frozen lemon bars. He set the plate on the table, and waited.

I said, “Those look terrible.”

“I’ll get you a fork.”

“Americans eat with their hands.”

Orville sat back down across from me. I didn’t eat. I wondered if every dessert he had ever eaten had to come from a freezer.

He said, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“What did you mean to do?”

“I meant to be honest. I don’t think many people are honest with you.”

“I don’t think many people are honest with anyone. That’s why people have friends.”

I could feel that Orville was staring at me but I refused to return his gaze. I was already retreating to a very dull, colorless place, one that did not accept visitors.

“Tell me what is upsetting you,” he said.

“You, mostly. I am not ‘
desperately alone
.’ ” My words sounded pouty and childlike, even to me. “And I don’t think you’re allowed to blame me for attaching significance to imaginary things. Not when you teach literature.”

“You have something under your eye,” he said.

“Leave it. I like it there.”

“Hold still.”

“Stop.”

But he leaned over the table anyway, his massive right arm extended like a tree trunk. In a different world, I might have thought he was leaning in to kiss me. But instead, he rubbed one thumb right underneath my eye, slowly. It was wet from the tear and a half I had managed to squeeze out, and I wondered if this was what he meant by “something under your eye.” His skin was smooth and warm and my face felt small in his hands. I thought I might collapse right into him.

The moment didn’t last long. In a flash he had returned his arm to his side of the table, then exited the room. I had the feeling that I had received the first apology he had ever given.

That night, I dream of going to the parsonage again.

The road is wet and the melting snow has left a muddy path. I am walking quickly because it is cold. The house looks quiet and cozy tonight. Circular puffs of smoke erupt from the chimney, as if a large man is lying on his back somewhere inside, smoking a cigar. There is a number of grotesque carvings lavished over the front entryway, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins.

Inside the front door, I see a long, clean corridor. It is warm and smells of lavender. I walk down the hall. To the left is a fine living room, whose palatial fireplace defies the skinny proportions of the house’s exterior. It is a dimly lit chamber, filled with the echoes of recent laughter. The chairs are pulled away from the table, and one has tipped over. I spy fresh parchment, two quill pens, and a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie. The inhabitants must have fled, quite suddenly, without saying a word.

I look around, confused. Have my relatives abandoned me on the eve of my arrival? I know it’s rude to break and enter, but then again, this is my dream, and doesn’t that mean that I’m the narrator? I settle into the happy squalor of the room. It’s large and pleasantly untidy. A vague smell of extinguished candle pervades the air. There is a cold draft piping through the chimney.

I take a seat by the fireplace and interlace my fingers, in the way of contemplative assistant professors. Rarely have I felt quite so at home. The last piece seems to have fallen into place, in a puzzle I didn’t know I was a part of. I can’t shake the feeling that my father has sat in this exact seat, doing the same thing.

I wait for something interesting to occur, but all I can hear is the clock ticking. If this is my dream, shouldn’t fantastic things be happening? Gunfights, romances, premonitions? And should I feel this . . . awake? Maybe this is what a dream is supposed to be, and all of this time I’ve been doing it wrong.

Just then, I hear a rattling at the window. It sounds like a branch, rapping on the sill. Suddenly, a row of knuckles comes flying through the glass, and an arm comes right after it—I see the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand. A most melancholy voice sobs, “Let me in—let me in!”

I stand up straight, alert.

“I’ve come home,” says the voice outside. “I’ve lost myself on the moors!”

The cold white fingers and cold white arm give way to a cold white body, which pulls itself through the window. It is a man, and he is wearing a bathrobe and holding a martini. It is, I realize, my father.

“Dad?” I say.

“Hi, kiddo,” he says. “It’s colder than a witch’s ass out there.”

I say, “What are you doing here?”

“I told you you’d find me here someday.”

“Did I find you or did I conjure you?”

“Does it matter?”

I frown and take a step closer. Yes, it is most definitely my father. Those are his same weary, long-suffering eyes. I recognize his shock of black hair and his ski-slope forehead, and I congratulate my unconscious for creating such an exact image of him. He smells the same as he always has: warm, cozy, like an old, comfortable book.

“You’re not real,” I say. “I’m dreaming.”

“If it looks like a duck and tastes like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

This, I remember, is one of his old battle cries. An ache wells up inside of my chest, one that seems to defy the parameters of a dream. Time has failed me, I realize. The Dad-shaped hole in my life has not, in fact, become any smaller. It has just grown less and less visible. I feel the slow panic that accompanies the onset of grief.

I clear my throat. “I don’t totally respect you, you know.”

“Oh?”

“You slept with a professor, you cheated on your wife, you drank yourself to death, and you abandoned me.”

Dad gives his drink a swirl. “Nobody’s perfect.”

His voice—God, his voice. He takes a seat and I sit next to him. He hands me the martini.

“Try some,” he says.

I refuse. Up close, Dad’s face is strangely perforated, like a slab of cheese, or a thin cut of meat.

“Where is the book?” I ask.

“What book?”

“The one you left me. You left me a diary, yes?”

“You mean this?”

He reaches behind him and pulls out a small leather volume—barely the size of his palm. I can just make out the faint words on the cover:
The Warnings of Experience.

I say: “Yes, I mean that.”

“You’ve had it all along.”

“That is clearly false.”

“Tap your shoes together and say there’s no place like home.”

“Can you please be sober?”

He frowns. I know that he is angry. He chucks the book at the wall. It makes a wide hole and I see it land in the snow outside, in the church graveyard. It descends into the earth, hollowing out a large, black crater. The book sinks into the pit and disappears from sight. I turn to Dad for an explanation, but his face has gone blurry.

I say, “Are you going now?”

“I don’t know—am I?”

“Please tell me what you’d like me to do. I’m too old to be doing this.”

“You won’t learn anything unless you discover it for yourself.”

“Our lessons are over.”

“If you think that, then I have failed you.”

“Please tell me what you wanted me to know.”

At this, he smiles, but only slightly. “ ‘I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.’ ”

“Don’t quote Anne Brontë. Not now.”

“ ‘But as the priceless treasure too frequently hides at the bottom of a well, it needs some courage to dive for it.’ ”

I blink. I glance at the graveyard. The patch of snow where the book landed has formed a very deep and very dark pit—a tunnel to the center of the Earth. It looks like an old pothole in an old street in Boston.

“Shit,” I conclude.

I stand up and stumble backward as I realize something of terrible importance. Suddenly, my father is gone; the house is gone; the world is gone. I am in a dark, cold place, goopy with black. Thunder shakes the house of James Timothy Orville III and I awake with a start.

“Orville.”

No response.

“Orville.”

“Hrmm.”

Smack.
“Orville.”

“What.”

“Wake up.”

“Amy?”

“Who’s Amy?”

The lights went on—well, one light went on. Orville had reached over and found the lamp beside the bed. He turned his eyes on me slowly. I was sitting on the edge of his bed, hovering over him, arms crossed. I wished that he had kept the lights off. He slept shirtless, and his white, white torso gleamed like the clean belly of a wet fish. Smooth and radioactively bright.

He blinked once, twice, three times. It had taken me four tries to find the right door, and now here I was, in Orville’s bedchamber. With the light on, I could make out the dim outline of tangled phone chargers on the shelf above his head.

“Samantha—what is it?” he wanted to know. His eyes were puffy with sleep, and there was a pillow mark slashed across his cheek. “Is Paris burning?”

I couldn’t seem to answer.

Orville sat up straighter. “You’re trembling—what’s wrong?”

“It’s cold in here.”

He paused. I secretly hoped he’d ask me to hop in, but he just said: “There’s a blanket in the dresser.”

I shook my head. “I just had a dream about my dad.”

Orville didn’t respond for a moment—then: “How was he?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” I said. “I want to talk about books.”

He gave a sideways glance at the clock on the wall. “Four in the morning,” he said. “It’s four in the morning.”

“You once asked me what reading meant to me. It was several months ago and we were at that pub. Do you remember? I have an answer for you now, if you’d like to hear it.”

He lay back down and put his forearm over his eyes. “Now?”

I poked him in the chest with my index finger. It worked—he reopened his eyes. His skin was warm, almost baked. It was a bad time to emote, apparently. He looked tired and useless.

I said, “Courage.”

“Pardon?”

“Reading teaches you courage. The author is trying to convince you something fake is real. It’s a ridiculous request, and it questions the sanity of the reader. The extent to which you believe the author depends on how willing you are to jump in headfirst.”

“Jump into what?”

“Can you please pay attention? Whatever the book has for you to jump on into.”

“You ended that thought with two prepositions.”

“Listen to me.”

“Do you think we might be able to have this conversation in the morning?”

“You once asked me why I appreciated no authors,” I said, ignoring him. “It’s because I simply cannot feel things as a normal person does. No—don’t look at me like that. It’s true. I have never been able to properly invest myself in a book because books are lies, and I do not like being lied to. Reading well requires bravery, and it’s something that I don’t have. This is why I am neither a good writer nor a good reader.”

Orville’s eyes narrowed. “Courage is not a possession. It is a state of mind.”

“Yes, one that requires a leap of faith. That’s what my dad used to tell me. I always thought he meant a figurative leap of faith. But I think he meant a real leap of faith.”

“I don’t follow.”

“As in, literal. Get it?” I made a leaping motion with two of my fingers, in case he needed the visual.

He squinted. “Are you planning on jumping off something?”