Next Life Might Be Kinder (5 page)

When I woke up from my nap, I went in and began to read Istvakson's questions, which Lily Svetgartot had left on the kitchen table: “1. According to someone who took the dance lessons with you and Elizabeth, your wife always wore . . .”

But I couldn't read any more. I crumpled up the piece of paper, stuffed it into the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink, and ground it to nothing. Then I telephoned Philip and Cynthia and begged off dinner: “I'm in a good place with this new novel and can't interrupt” (a lie), “and this so seldom happens” (the truth).

With Dr. Nissensen, December 5, 1972:

 

So far, I've discussed only one dream with Dr. Nissensen. “I had this dream,” I said, first thing, in today's session, “and I remember it in such detail it's like I'm still in it.”

Dr. Nissensen is sixty-one. I know this because I asked him his age. I also told him that I noticed, on the wall of his office, several photographs of himself, taken at least twenty years earlier, in which his thick, one might even say luxurious, hair was already completely white. “I got a virus at age thirty, and my hair turned white almost overnight,” he said. “Now that we've got my hair out of the way, how are things, Mr. Lattimore?”

Today he was dressed in dark green corduroy trousers, a gray tweed sports jacket, a pale yellow shirt, a black tie with a vertical lime-green stripe running top to bottom, black socks, and dark brown, comfortable-looking shoes. He was understated but subtly inventive in his choice of clothes. I admired this, maybe because I always felt disheveled, with limited taste and color sense in my own dress.

“Continue, please.”

“The guy who's eventually directing the movie.”

“Mr. Istvakson.”

“Istvakson has this assistant named Lily Svetgartot.”

“This is in the dream?”

“That's his assistant's real name—she shows up in the dream.”

“I see.”

“Last week she—real life now—knocked on my door and left me questions that Istvakson wants me to answer. Questions about me and Elizabeth. I was rude, but possibly not rude enough. I didn't completely deny access. Anyway, she left a page of questions. I mashed them up in the garbage disposal.”

“That's certainly a response to Mr. Istvakson's impudence. Carried out in the privacy of your home, but still a response.”

“Back to the dream. I'm in a diner at night, something like that famous Edward Hopper painting.”

“
Nighthawks.
I know it.”

“Ten years ago, I'd look at that painting—this is an aside. I'd look at it and think, The world's full of horrible loneliness. Now I look at it and feel envy toward that guy at the counter, the one sitting alone with his back to the viewer. You know, a little free time to just sit and have a coffee.”

“Was there a waitress? Who else was—”

“Istvakson is behind the counter. He's folding and unfolding cloth napkins like a crazy person. He can't get them right. Over and over. Folding. Unfolding. Lily Svetgartot is the waitress. I order a cup of coffee. Then the lights go out—not just go out, but blow out. The neon tubes shatter. It's nearly totally dark in there now. There's some light from the street. But I can still see the napkins, because they're translucent. I see them being folded and unfolded. Suddenly the assistant Lily Svetgartot pulls out a pistol and puts the barrel to the side of my head. ‘Did you answer the questions?' Istvakson says. I try to stay cool, calm, and collected and just sip the coffee, but then I say, ‘No, I didn't. I crammed them into the garbage disposal.' Then Lily Svetgartot shoots me in the head.”

“Just like you asked
me
to do, remember? In a previous session you said that if you ever said you'd found closure with Elizabeth, I was to shoot you in the head.”

He wrote something down.

“Those napkins suggest Istvakson's obsessive need to control—he's a film director, after all,” Nissensen said. “In your dream, when the lights blow apart, he's lost his temper. Normally as a director he'd control the lighting. He keeps folding and folding because he can't get it right without your answers. He can't square things. Or get the right angle. These are just initial responses. Let me give it more thought. It's a powerful dream, Sam. It must have been disturbing. Here, the assistant shoots you. But if you are dead, Istvakson cannot obtain the answers he so desperately needs. Your actual knowledge is what he needs. Your knowledge of Elizabeth. Your knowledge of your life with her. Nonetheless, the assistant shoots you.”

“Yep, he should've fired her on the spot.”

“Is that humor?”

“If you have to ask, probably it isn't. Anyway, now I'm on the cold floor of the diner. You know what I just remembered? Elizabeth used to say that there were two types of people in the world, people with complicated minds and people with complicating minds.”

“You're suggesting I just overcomplicated things, is that it? By the way, it's interesting, Sam, that you bring in Elizabeth as an authority on my own profession.”

“I miss Elizabeth sometimes to the point that all the oxygen in the world wouldn't be enough to let me breathe. I just stand there choking. If you write that down, I'll kill you.”

Dr. Nissensen set the notebook on the table next to his chair.

“Sam, do you ever feel—say, of late—that you're capable of doing another person bodily harm? That is, a person you can name. Such as Istvakson. A person you have some actual acquaintance with in your life.”

“Such as myself, you're saying. Doing bodily harm to myself, you're saying.”

“You say, ‘I'd like to kill so-and-so,' or ‘That person should be killed.' I'm concerned is all. It seems a reasonable avenue of inquiry.”

T
HE EVENING OF
Elizabeth's first intermediate lindy lesson, we ate a light dinner, omelets and bread; we each had a glass of wine, too. “You get all spruced up,” I said. “I'll clear the dishes and make coffee.” Elizabeth was usually casual about dressing and undressing in front of me, but this time she shut the bedroom door. I thought it was sweet, how she wanted to make a grand entrance. Which she did, wearing a black dress with a slit up the right thigh and a simple pearl necklace. As I looked at her slim body, her hair bobby-pinned up rather haphazardly, dark red lipstick that without fail drove me nicely crazy, she slipped on her shoes, balancing on one foot, then the other. “I think I'll skip coffee,” she said. “But I'll say yes to a second glass of wine.”

When I had poured the wine for her, I sat back at the table. She was looking quite pleased with herself. Then she slowly—and I mean half inch by half inch, in deliberate upward folding—lifted her dress to her waist so I could see the pair of panties she'd recently purchased, which were peach-colored with a pattern of tiny white seashells stitched along the hem. “For later, whether or not the lesson goes well,” she said, letting the dress drop to its full length again and spinning around once for a complete viewing.

“It'll go well,” I said. “Of course it will.”

“I'm only going a few floors down to the ballroom, right? But something just came into my head that my mother always said. If I was going for a walk, or to the soda shop, or to a high school dance, she'd say, ‘My thoughts and prayers go with you.' She wasn't really a religious person, either.”

“Do you want me to say that to you, Elizabeth? I will. I like it. Given that I agree with your mother, we need all the help we can get, even if it's just a walk around the block.”

“I know that's your philosophy of life, darling. But no need to agree with my mother.”

This made us both crack up laughing. She walked over and kissed me on the mouth. “Be back in a jiff,” she said. She touched up her lipstick and left the apartment. A moment later, the door opened and she appeared again. I looked up from the table. “Last chance,” she said in the open doorway. “Better to participate than imagine what's going on down in the ballroom, don't you think? Come take the lesson with me.”

“If I go with you, I won't be able to imagine it.”

“I'm not gonna beg,” she said. But she must have been a little pissed off, because she commented on my stodginess by placing the Do Not Disturb sign—at night, we continued to use this sign despite being considered long-term residents—on the inside knob of the door. Then she disappeared again.

In half an hour or so, however, I couldn't concentrate on reading
An Answer from Limbo,
by Brian Moore, my favorite writer, who spent summers near Port Medway. So I went to the ballroom, which was down a carpeted hallway off the lobby. The jukebox had obviously been retrofitted with music from the 1930s and 1940s: when you pushed, say, 5-E, a vinyl disc dropped and spun and a previous era came alive. I stood in the wide entranceway. There were about twenty people partnered up and dancing. I first noticed the bellman Jake Grune—Elizabeth and I had learned all the bellmen's names by now—who was dancing with Miriam Fitz, the daughter of the hotel's owner, Harold Fitz. Jake, dressed in his uniform, had spiffy shoes on. He was twenty-five and a touch overweight, but he moved well; I think he'd been practicing. Miriam was no older than sixteen and wore a white sweater, a navy-blue cheerleader-length skirt, black tennis shoes, and red socks—I saw all of this as they jitterbugged past me not five meters away. “Who's that singing?” I called out.

“The Boswell Sisters,” Miriam said.

There was a small bandstand on which stood the teacher, whose name, according to the flyer, was Arnie Moran. He seemed both instructor and impresario. He was a tall, thin fellow about age sixty, dressed in a white linen suit, white bucks, and socks with black lines forming yellow and white rectangles, a Mondrian effect. He had on a black shirt and white bow tie. His outfit made for a trim fit and seemed less like a costume than part of a wardrobe natural to his character. However, he did sport a penciled-in mustache, and maybe he had used an actor's makeup kit for that. His black hair was thin in front, and you could see comb tracks through the sheen along the sides, and his sideburns were long rectangles cut at the bottom in neat diagonals, art nouveau sideburns. He held a microphone that trailed its cord, and every so often he called out pointers, and once I saw him step up close to a couple and adjust them as they danced. A few times he turned his back on his students and performed the lindy steps like a man dancing with a ghost. What is more, a slide projector set on a wheeled cart was working on automatic, notching through documentary slides of people doing the lindy at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The slides were projected onto a screen behind the bandstand. Above the screen, brightly lit and in various neon hues, were the words
SCOTT FITZGERALD'S GOT NOTHING ON ME.
The knot of Arnie Moran's bow tie lit up and flickered every minute or so.

Then I saw Elizabeth at the far left corner of the room. She was dancing with a woman who appeared to be in her late thirties. I noticed, too, that there were half as many men as women on the dance floor. Of course, I didn't know if people had been assigned dance partners or chose them voluntarily, or if any of that mattered, really, except how it spiked one's erotic temperature, the result of watching people dance, especially if they were in the least graceful. Elizabeth's partner was about two inches taller than Elizabeth, which made her five foot eight or thereabouts, and wore black slacks and a maroon blouse, and the blouse had an outsize bow at the neckline. Also, she had a boatload of freckles. Another striking aspect was that her hair, a lighter shade of red than Elizabeth's, was fashioned into two shoulder-length braids. The braids flopped and flailed about, an anarchy of movement against the formal choreography that defined an established dance step, no matter how wild and faddish, which the lindy was.

Elizabeth saw me and waved—she looked so happy—and her partner scowled, as if Elizabeth had rudely broken their concentration; it was a slight scowl of betrayal, but they quickly regained the lindy rhythm, and to my untrained and impressionable eye, they seemed to have mastered it. Truth be told, it was not so much their duet of mutual regard, nor the intimate coordination of their bodies, which was not flawless, but their look of abandon that got deepest to me. Watching them (they sometimes closed their eyes), I imagined they were actually resident in the past, say the early 1930s, perhaps a decade before they would become war widows. At one point, Arnie Moran lost his composure, or fully realized his alter ego, and in a crooner's voice said loudly into the microphone, “Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! The lindy is a dance of love and romance, made to free the bohemian soul, my friends. Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” He spun on his heels, faced the projector screen, and said, “Gotta cut a rug!” In response to Arnie Moran's revelry, Elizabeth's face scrunched up in mild disgust. A few seconds later, though, her expression was full of pleasure again. That quickly, Arnie Moran was forgiven his—by Elizabeth's lights—cloying indulgence. Elizabeth and her partner both leaned back as far as they could while still holding hands—should either let go, the other would fly dangerously backward—free hands fluttering in the air, the lindy hop.

When the Boswell Sisters song ended, Arnie Moran all but shouted into the microphone, “Let your fancy feet get their money's worth!” Right away he punched the jukebox buttons and on came another fast tune, and this was when I saw Alfonse Padgett, who'd been dancing with a woman across the room, make a beeline for Elizabeth. Elizabeth's partner had gone to the ladies', and when she returned shot Padgett a nasty look, then stomped out of the ballroom, which of course left Padgett's recent dance partner the odd woman out. Arnie Moran didn't miss a trick. He saw the lopsided arithmetic of the situation and jumped chivalrously from the bandstand, bowed deeply in front of the abandoned woman, took her in his arms, and dipped her back with dexterity and flair. She was at once convinced.