The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (3 page)

Nora came out of the bathroom and got back into bed with him.

“All right,” she said. “Now you can tell me what it was all about.”

“What was all about?”

“That dream.”

“It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”

“I don’t expect it to. But tell me anyway.”

Reluctantly he told her. She thought about it for a while. Then:

“That Indian stuff in the dream. The fact that you teach the subject.

Probably some kind of simple association.”

“It could be a little more than that.”

“Yes?”

“I happen to be one-sixteenth Indian.”

She stared at him. “Come on. You’re putting me on.”

“No, seriously. My great-great-great-grandfather, or whatever the sequence, was a Seneca. The Senecas are part of the Iroquois nation. The story goes that he was a chief, took this white woman a captive—my great-great-etcetera-grandmother—and made her his squaw. It’s part of our family history, and I’m not quite sure I believe it. It could be a lot of romantic crap.”

“You never told me.”

“You never asked me.” He grinned. “I hope you’re not prejudiced.”

“Me? Are you out of your mind?” She laughed. “How many other girls get a chance to sleep with an authentic early American like you? Part Indian, the rest old Wasp. It’s in to be ethnic these days.” Then her smile vanished. “One thing I can’t get over is that
voice
I heard coming out of you.”

“Mr. Hyde.”

“Yes. You know what I kept thinking of?”

“What?”

“The ‘little man.’ Sir James Frazer wrote about it in
The Golden Bough
. It’s a classic study of myth. I wrote a paper on it in my senior year. Frazer said primitive man believed that an animal lives and moves only because there’s another animal living inside of him. Same with a man. A man lives and moves only because there is a ‘little man’ inside of him. Today we’d call it the soul. If the ‘little man’ is present, there is life. If he is absent, there is death. Sleep is the time the ‘little man’ is temporarily absent. In dreams, the ‘little man’ leaves the body and wanders around—visiting the places, seeing the persons, and performing the acts of which the dreamer dreams. In this case, your ‘little man’ had a date. With some lady named Marcia. A very murderous little date.”

“Very interesting,” he said.

“I knew you’d be fascinated.” Then, abruptly: “Time to get dressed.

Who showers first?”

“You,” he said.

He lay there, thinking of Nora Haines.

She’s a good kid—bright, lovely to look at. Great in bed, good to talk to. Apparently we like each other. The proof is here—between these no-wrinkle sheets.

Question:
Premature, of course. But still. Could this last? Go the whole route?

Answer:
Who knows? It’s much too early to tell. But it could, it could. I’m a little tired of running around.

They had met a little over a month before. At the moment, she was a teaching assistant in a course on Introductory Sociology. She was a girl who knew what she wanted, she seemed to take to him right away, and she had no particular hangups when it came to sex. In fact, she took a healthy pleasure in it. A week after they’d met, they had gone to her small pad and she’d taken him to bed, and they had found they pleased each other very well. It was just as simple and as good as that. Three weeks later she had moved in with him. She came out of the bathroom glowing, one of his big Turkish towels wrapped around her, and began to get dressed.

“Nora,” he said, “What’s your hurry? Why get dressed now?”

“I’ve got things to do.”

“It’s still early.”

He threw off the bed sheet and lay on his back, naked, sprawling. She studied his reflection in the mirror, then turned for a better look.

“I thought you were tired.”

“Not
that
tired.”

She smiled. “So I see. You know, darling, that girl in your dream—Marcia—she was a bitch. Trying to smash that beautiful thing. It’s really a work of art. A monument. She just didn’t appreciate you.”

“True!” He grinned. “But do
you?
”

“Oh, I do, I do.”

“Enough to stay a little longer?”

“Sorry, but not today, Napoleon. I know it’s early, but I have a
class at nine, and I want to get to the office early and correct a few student papers and gradually put on my normally stern face, so that I can stand up before all those eager young faces looking properly professional and harried. I don’t want to look like some contented Cheshire cat who’s had a long night with some virile tom and has just lapped up a whole bowl of heavy cream besides. My students are very bright, very perceptive. They notice these things. Especially the girls. Now, for God’s sake, darling, get up so we can have breakfast. I’m starved.”

He rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom. He studied his face in the mirror. It looked haggard, as though he’d been up all night. Shadows under the eyes, the eyes themselves narrow slits.

Twenty-seven, and today I look forty
.

Right now, he thought, he could simply fall into the bathtub and go back to sleep. He would have all he could do to get his ass through the day. He thought of Sam Goodman now. Goodman was a friend of his, and a tennis partner, but he was more than that. He was the professor in the psychology department who ran the experimental Sleep Laboratory at UCLA. He had told Sam about these wild hallucinations he’d been having, and the obvious fact that his sleep patterns had been disturbed by them. Sam had shown immediate interest. He had suggested that Pete come over to the Sleep Lab and go through the routine.

Maybe they could come up with some answers. There wasn’t any room at the moment but at the first opening Sam would let him know.

He picked up his electric shaver and began to buzz it over his stubbled chin. Then he stepped into the shower. In a way, he regretted telling Nora about the Lake Dream. He had not told her, of course, that it happened over and over, in the same way. Neither had he told her about all the others. The ones he had listed in his black notebook, each with a special name. He ticked them off, one by one, in his mind.

The City Dream. The Tower Dream. The Tennis Dream. The Window Dream. The House Dream. The Cliff Dream. The War Dream. The Tree Dream. The Baby Dream. The Prison Dream. The Cotton Mather Dream
.

He stared into the mirror, and for an instant he saw a face that wasn’t his. X. Or was it?
My God
, he thought.
I must be going psycho
. He shivered.

His first appointment was at ten with a couple of graduate students. They wanted to discuss possible subjects for their dissertations. After that, lunch, then one class and one seminar. And, finally, a late appointment at the dentist. A normal, unexciting day.

The Summit Plaza was a high-rise apartment house of fourteen stories, the top two of which were penthouses. Its name was emblazoned in gilt on a great red awning over the imposing entrance. It had a switchboard staffed around the clock, and there was always a uniformed attendant waiting to park your car in one of the lower garage levels. Peter had a large one-bedroom on the fifth floor, and he drove a Mercedes 450 SL. All of which, of course, was impossible on the salary of an assistant professor and made him an oddity among his colleagues. But Peter was fortunate in that he didn’t have to teach to live.

He walked into the lobby. The girl at the switchboard, a pudgy, freckle-faced bleached blonde, smiled at him, When she was not taking calls and messages, she alternated between the soap operas on a portable television stand next to the switchboard and a book on astrology, Right now, Peter noted, it was astrology,

“Good morning, Dr. Proud.”

“Morning, Edna.”

They played their usual little game.

“What’s my horoscope for today, love?”

“Let’s see. You’re a Libra. Right?”

“Right.”

She knew his sign by heart, but she always asked anyway. She screwed up her face, concentrating.

“Let me think. This is December. The sun transits your solar fourth house. Uranus and Pluto continue their slow transit of your solar second house.” She opened the book, found the page. “ ‘Uranus, ruler of your solar house of true love, makes it possible to seek and find romantic episodes that transform your life into colorful and lively events.’ ” She looked up at him and smiled. “I’ll bet I know who.”

He grinned. “I’ll bet you do, too.”

She went back to her book. Then her face clouded as she studied the page.

“Oh-oh. There’s more.”

“Yes?”

“ ‘However,’ ” she read, “ ‘there may be trouble for you ahead today. Unexpected events. Disturbances. Your planetary influences advise against your usual daily activities. It is better to stay home today, rest quietly, read, sleep, meditate.’ ”

“Oh, fine,” he said.

She stared at him, concerned. “I really don’t think you ought to go out today.”

“Got to, Edna. I have appointments, classes, things like that.

“Can’t you cancel them?”

“No. No way.”

“Then be careful. Please. Watch out when you drive.”

“Thanks, Edna. I’ll do that. It’s sweet of you to warn me.” He took the elevator down to the garage.

Crazy. She really believes that stuff
.

His car was already on the ramp. He waved at the attendant and drove off.

Moving up Sunset, he tried to figure out what it all meant.

Why was he getting these weird hallucinations? Who was X? Was somebody trying to tell him something? Up to this point there had been nothing particularly eventful in his life. Oh, he had had the usual childhood and adolescent problems, but they were the normal kind. He had never thought of himself as a neurotic, and
people told him he was mature for his age. Put it all together, he reflected, and the life and times of Peter Proud had been fairly cut and dried. No big waves. No particular crisis.

He’d been born in Los Angeles and had lived there all his life. His parents had named him Peter, and he was sensitive about the name. Peter Proud. It sounded like something out of Mother Goose, and people were always making little jokes about it. His friends called him Pete. He was a descendant of an old California family. His father, John R. Proud, had made a fortune in real estate, buying choice land, when it was low, on Wilshire and in Orange County and the Valley. Nobody had dreamed California would have the tremendous migration after the war, and John Proud had sold high. He was now more or less retired and lived with Peter’s mother in a house in Palm Springs, complete with sauna and swimming pool and facing a golf course.

For some reason he, Pete Proud, had always been passionately interested in Indians and Indian history. Not because of his remote heritage in this regard. It was something more than that, something deeper. He felt some kind of definite identification with them, some kind of real kinship. As a boy he had read every book that concerned Indians he could get his hands on. He went to the movies and saw every film that was made about them. At ten he could name most of the principal tribes in the nation.

As an undergraduate at Berkeley, he had taken courses in the history and anthropology of the North American Indian; he had spent two years as a teaching assistant and had got his doctorate after a brilliant dissertation on the Plateau tribes. It had attracted considerable attention, and he became somewhat of a name in his field.

Finally he received an offer to teach at UCLA, and he accepted, passing up the opportunity to work in his father’s real estate business. He had two brothers who were already engaged in running the Proud Corporation, and he simply had no interest in the building and selling of condominiums or shopping centers. His father
was disappointed, but generous, and settled a healthy income on him. And so he was able to live comfortably and still teach.

He was now twenty-seven and had never been married. He was reasonably good-looking and attractive to women. There had been a couple of affairs of some duration, and he had lived with a psychology major at Berkeley for a while. He had liked many of the women he’d known, and had thought he loved a few, but never enough for a permanent relationship.

He had developed a taste for classical music; he liked an occasional game of chess and bridge; and in golf his handicap was five. He had played football at Berkeley, but tennis was really his game.

Actually, he thought, it was all pretty damned dull. And, when you come right down to it, rather empty. Without any particular purpose or future. Everyone was going to the same place anyway.

Solomon Grundy, he thought. How did it go? Solomon Grundy. Born on Monday. Christened on Tuesday. Married on Wednesday. Took ill on Thursday. Worse on Friday. Died on Saturday. Buried on Sunday. And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

And the end of us all. Amen.

Today, he thought, I am not only a dreamer. I am, God help us all, a philosopher, too.

He continued to drive west on Sunset. He entered the campus by turning left on Hilgard. Then he drove to Parking Structure Number Three.

A striped barrier blocked the entry. It could be raised electronically by reaching out of the car window and inserting a sensitized card into the slot. He reached into his inside pocket for his yellow car card, But it wasn’t there. He swore softly as he remembered that he had left it in another jacket. A hell of a way to start the day) he thought. It always meant a certain amount of inconvenience) time lost. The parking situation on campus was impossible. The first thing you always made sure to remember was that damned card.

Well, no help for it. He backed out and drove around until he
found one of the open parking lots. There was a windowed kiosk there, with a guard in attendance. The guard gave him a token. Then he returned to Parking Structure Three, waited for five minutes until a line of other cars went through, dropped his token into the slot, and passed under the gate.

Even in his irritation, he couldn’t help smiling wryly.
Score One for Edna
.

He parked the Mercedes on the second level. It looked somewhat conspicuous among the Volkswagens and Datsuns and Toyotas and Pintos. Most of the faculty drove small cars. A couple of professors, getting out of their cars, stared at his vehicle and then at him. They seemed to resent both it and him. Ordinarily he might have been a little embarrassed. Today, in his present mood, he didn’t give a damn.