These Dreams of You (7 page)

T
he flight for London departs at seven the next evening. Leaving for the airport that afternoon, Zan and Viv gaze around at the house before locking the door behind them.

As they wait at their gate for the flight, Zan watches a news cable channel on the television. Parker listens to the fluorescent-green music player around his neck and Sheba climbs over all the furniture in the terminal.

W
atching her, Viv says to Zan, “In London you'll need to find a salon for her. Some place where they can do her hair.”

“All right,” Zan says absently, watching the news.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes. Sheba's hair.” Ever since the girl came to live with them, Viv has been confounded by Sheba's hair. Once in a shopping mall, a black woman approached Viv and pointed out that the hair was different and couldn't be neglected and demanded constant attention.

“You never should have started calling her Sheba,” says Viv.

A
fter this has sunk in a moment, Zan turns his attention from the television. “What?”
“You shouldn't have called her Sheba. It sounds like a B-movie,” she protests. “
Queen of the Jungle
.”

Zan says, “That's Sheena.” Coming almost two years after the fact, this is an unforeseen point of contention. “What should we call her?”

“Not so loud.” Viv glances the girl's way. “Her real name, maybe?”

“Do we know that ‘Zema' is her real name?”

“Well, we know it's no less real than Sheba,” says Viv.

“We have no idea what it means. ‘Zema.' It sounds like a power drink.”

“It means ‘hymn'.”

“That's
kind of
what it means.”

“It's close enough.”

“People have been as vague about her name as they have about everything else,” including, he wants to point out but doesn't, her mother. “It means different things depending on how the stars are aligned that day, or the given meteorology. A fog happens to roll in, and for all we know suddenly it means ‘Death to the Great Satan' or something.”

“Sheba sounds silly.”

“Won't it seriously mess with her sense of self if now we go back to calling her something else?”

“Her sense of self is going to be O.K.,” Viv answers firmly.

“Yeah, if we don't start calling her Death to the Great Satan.”

Z
an would like to note that Viv has been calling the girl Sheba too but decides it's best to accept the full brunt of the accusation. “It's a cool name,” he says. “She can be a rocker with that name.”

“Or a stripper,” Viv retorts. For a while they don't say anything. Zan gets up and crosses the lobby to the television. On the cable news, a black man argues against the new president's foreign policy; he looks unhappy, sour, and Zan isn't sure he would have recognized him—certainly given the political viewpoint he now expresses—if he weren't identified at the bottom of the screen where it reads RONALD J. FLOWERS and, beneath that, “Los Angeles Director, Civic Organizers Network.” Zan listens for a while and returns to his seat next to Viv. “Ever tell you my Ronnie Jack Flowers story?” he says.

“Yes. It's why you don't write novels anymore—I've heard it.” She says, “Sorry. That came out crabbier than I intended.”

After a moment Zan says, “You can't hold yourself responsible for everything.” He means to offer it as, in part, a rapprochement.

“That story's about you,” she answers, “not me.”

T
he mother, father, son and daughter checker coach, only two of the assigned seats together, which means that Zan and Viv take turns with Sheba while Parker has his own seat across the aisle. On Zan's shift, scruples waver and soon he has the four-year-old swilling Benadryl; as the plane flies into darkness, Sheba sleeps on her father's lap with Parker slumped two rows ahead.

Viv says to Zan, “While you're in London, you need to have the Talk with Parker.” Trying not to look as glum about it as he feels, Zan nods. “He's twelve,” Viv insists, and Zan says, “All right,” realizing it sounds snappish. “I know he's twelve.”

“He's going to start wondering,” says Viv.

“He's beyond wondering. He's already figured stuff out.”

“He doesn't know anything.”

“He knows all of it.”

“Did you? At twelve?”

“I don't remember how much I knew or exactly what, but I had gotten the gist of it.”

“The
gist
?”

“Yes, the gist.”

“Shhh,” she says, looking at everyone around them sleeping.

H
e repeats emphatically, “The gist.”
“Did you have the Talk with your father?” says Viv.
“My father was appalled by the whole subject. He gave me a book that I barely looked at. Everything I know about sex I learned from James Bond movies.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, that explains a few things.” After a while she falls asleep and Zan turns on his laptop and reads the news on the airplane WiFi that he had to pay for. Soon a woman in the seat next to him strikes up a conversation that Zan immediately realizes is intended to be political.

Z
an never has picked a political argument with a stranger before. Actually he doesn't pick political arguments with anyone; he's so averse to confrontation that when people talk politics, he's as likely to sink into even greater silences. It's hard to tell what age the woman is. She could be an older-looking thirty-eight or a younger-looking fifty-one. She looks older than Viv, who looks ten years younger than she is.

The woman is wearing a new ring that she's shown off to the flight attendants. Zan decides she's just gotten engaged—maybe, to put it cruelly, in the nick of time. He isn't sure what leads the woman to draw conclusions about Zan's political views, which are less predictable than the woman assumes; maybe it's something she's seen Zan reading on his laptop. Later he'll wonder—though this might be unfair—if she saw Zan with his black daughter. In any case she immediately means to straighten him out on some things. After some back and forth that Zan wants no part of, she blurts, “The big difference between us is that I believe in personal responsibility and you don't.”

He says in disbelief, “I don't?” He looks back to his wife's seat to see if she's catching any of this, but Viv sleeps. Zan doesn't understand Viv's sleeping habits, how the slightest thing at home keeps her awake but she can sleep upright on a plane in a seat smaller than a coffin. “No,” the woman says emphatically, and Zan, visions of foreclosure in his head, wonders if she's right. But she doesn't know me, he thinks, doesn't know my life; in fact—and there it is right on the edge of his brain—if she's just getting engaged then in all likelihood she doesn't have kids, and he hears himself snarling at her, “Do you even have kids? and if you don't, then you have no clue what responsibility is.” Finally having gotten some guy to give her a ring, her chance of having children now, at either thirty-eight or fifty-one, is as far from her as the ground below them is now; and she looks stricken, her sense of power suddenly shattered, and bursts into tears . . .

Except she doesn't, “because,” Zan later relates to Viv, “I didn't say that. It was there on the edge of my brain and there it stayed, because as much as I would have liked to let her have it, with her I'm-all-about-personal-responsibility-and-you-aren't, as much as she asked for it, as much as she deserved it—”

“—you couldn't bring yourself to,” says Viv.

He knows it's the way a woman can be most profoundly hurt, “and maybe that's my fucking problem,” he mutters, more to himself, maybe it's the problem with all of
us
(whoever we are) when it comes to dealing with
them
(whoever . . . ), a softness, no killer instinct, mush for fortitude. “She didn't have any problem telling me I have no sense of responsibility.”

“I know,” Viv says, and takes his hand.

T
he flight is half an hour late into London, eating into Viv's connection time that's precious to begin with. In the midst of the mindboggling bazaar of Heathrow's duty-free shops, Viv has only the time to say, “I'll email,” then, “I'll call,” then she and Zan seem to realize they've no idea when they'll next see each other and have spent most of what time there was bickering.

Viv grabs the kids goodbye then kisses Zan, and “O.K.” is all he can say. Shaking off the Benadryl stupor, Sheba begins to wail and Viv is slightly stricken. “It will be O.K.,” Zan says to Viv as he scoops up Sheba, nodding in a way that means, Go. Both will remember how quickly all this happened.

I
n her usual manner, Sheba begins making her presence known to London as soon as she, Zan and Parker are in the car that's been arranged to take them from the airport. “I WANT MAMA!” she screams, and the driver jumps in his seat, eyes filling the rearview mirror. “How long is Viv going to be gone?” asks Parker.

Zan says, “A few days,” and turns his gaze outside in a way meant to preclude further explanation. It's been more than twenty-five years since Zan last was in London, and as has become true with so many things, it doesn't seem so long ago at all, and even as it doesn't seem so long ago, it seems another lifetime, before Sheba, before Parker, before Viv. At the time he just had finished what would become his first published novel and still was more than a year from selling it and nearly three years from publication. Turning in the backseat of the car and craning his neck to take in this and that, he realizes he's seeing less what he's looking at than whatever memory it marks in some mental almanac that's already begun to crumble.

T
he driver of the car clears his throat and ventures into something that Zan guesses he's been considering since Heathrow. “Well done, then,” he says, “you Yanks.”

“Sorry?” says Zan.

“Well done,” the driver nods in the rearview mirror, a tentative smile, “the new top man. You did it!”

Zan looks at Parker, and Parker looks back at his father and shrugs. It's a few seconds before Zan understands; everyone wants to talk politics these days. I should introduce this guy to the woman who harangued me on the plane, he thinks. See how “well done” she thinks it is. “Oh,” Zan says, “yeah, it's . . . kind of unbelievable, really.”

“Think he'll turn it all around, then?” says the driver.

“Everyone hopes so. Almost everyone, anyway.” Zan realizes that, seeing Sheba, the driver assumes he knows how Zan voted: Is this cause for indignation? An assumption made solely on the basis of Sheba's color? On the other hand, well, the assumption happens to be correct, if not the reasoning. “She was for the other guy,” Zan jokes to the rearview mirror, pointing at Sheba in his lap.

The driver laughs, maybe with some relief that he hasn't given offense. After a pause he says, “Funny place, the States. Given the bloke you had before, I mean.”

“Yeah,” says Zan, “funny place.”

P
olitics, such as it is, doesn't come up again until the car nears the hotel in Bloomsbury, where Zan and his children have been put up by the university. The driver has taken the long way to show off the city, turning south to come into London by way of Hammersmith, then cutting through St. John's Wood to Regent's Park where he slows and points to a distant, grand red-brick mansion with white columns. “Winfield House,” the driver says.

Zan says, “I don't think that's our hotel.”

The driver chortles. “Your ambassador lives there. Or used to,” he adds, suddenly a bit unsure.

“Really,” Zan says with all the enthusiasm that politeness can muster. He looks at his kids to get a more accurate reading of just how boring this is; Parker's expression confirms that it's somewhere around Def-Con Two. Sheba has fallen asleep again. The inventor of Benadryl, Zan thinks, should get the Nobel Peace Prize. “I heard your President Kennedy lived there, didn't he?” says the driver. “That's what someone told me.”

Zan realizes the driver might be correct. “I believe so. As a boy.”

The driver does a double-take. “He was ambassador as a boy?”

“No, of course not. He wasn't ambassador, his father was ambassador.”

The driver gazes at the red mansion. “They say the new man is like him, then?”

“Who?”

“President Kennedy?”

“Uh,” Zan shrugs, “maybe.” He says, “The campaign was more like his brother's.”

“Was he the one shot?” Parker says.

“Both of them were shot.”

“The heck?”

Z
an is shocked by the tactlessness of the conversation, but it's history that's been tactless. “The father was ambassador,” he says, looking at the house, “before World War II. One of his sons became president. He was shot. A few years later his brother ran for president and he was shot too. Some people think the new president's campaign was more like the brother's.”

“Would the brother have become president,” says Parker as the driver starts up the car, “if he hadn't been shot?”

“Hard to know. Some people think so.” Zan says, “I'm not so sure.”

The driver pulls out into traffic. “Funny place, the States.”

In the small Bloomsbury hotel, Zan and his children have a room on the third floor. The woman at the front desk says, “Are you Alexander Nordhoc, the author?” An international warrant must be out for my arrest, he thinks. WORLD'S MOST OBSCURE AUTHOR FLEES DEBT COLLECTORS reads the headline in his mind, INTERPOL ON THE HUNT. On their first day the father and children wander the neighborhood, submitting to fish and chips at a corner stand; twice Zan yanks Sheba from the path of oncoming taxis. “We're not in the canyon,” he admonishes the kids, “this is a big city, a real city. Not like L.A.”