These Dreams of You (16 page)

B
ut Viv doesn't know Sheba is missing, and now the choice doesn't seem so easy. Zan can't ignore what's plainly a message from his wife, and—reminding himself that he still has Sheba's passport and no one can take her from the country—never in the previous twenty-four hours has he believed the girl to be in danger.

Of course this leads to the next thought which finally it's time to express if only to himself. With the sound in Zan's ears of the lost Sheba constantly calling Molly's name in the Hamp­ton maze, and with the scene playing out in his mind's eye of Sheba turning to Molly in the maze and racing into the woman's arms, finally it's time to say the crazy thing that's been in his head since the moment Molly appeared at that door–Zan looks at the door now–and stepped inside.

In no way does it make sense, and in every way does it feel true; and who's to say no to it? And if it is true, then who's to say Molly shouldn't have her? Who's to say that at this moment Sheba isn't reunited with the very person in search of whom Viv has vanished in the first place? Zan thinks, When there's no other obvious option, sometimes you can only follow the signs. They can ignore Viv's posting and continue waiting for her while they try to search London, and a month from now be exactly where they are at this moment with not a thing different. Sometimes life calls for a catalytic instant.

F
ather and son spend the next day packing. Zan moves by rote; he can barely think at all. He arranges with the front desk to leave their bags behind; he has no idea how to explain that he can't settle the bill. Ruling out the clandestine escape in the night, nonetheless he can't stand the prospect of humiliating himself before his son.

The woman at the desk says, “Yes, Mr. Nordhoc, it's taken care of.”

“What?” says Zan.

She looks at the computer. “Mr. Brown has taken care of it,” and Zan is too relieved to feel bruised. Well, you're all right then, James, he thinks to himself; maybe this is the first sign of straits at their most dire, when pride dies.

T
heir last night in London, Zan and Parker return to the pub that used to be the Ad Lib, where everything began with Molly, in one last hope Sheba will be there. Stepping inside, Zan closes his eyes thinking he'll hear the girl and woman in front of him; but in the dark of his eyelids he knows the pub's music isn't theirs.

They take the table by the window through which Sheba saw Molly the first time. On the tabletop Zan counts his money before he orders a sandwich for his son: “You haven't,” he struggles to ask the bartender, “seen a woman and small girl, have you? Today or yesterday, or the day before.”

“Well, that could be anyone, couldn't it?” says the bartender. Examining the shaken man in front of him, he says, “Are you all right?”

“They're black.” Now it seems like a magic word.

“How's that?”

“The little girl,” Zan mutters.

“Still doesn't narrow it down much,” the bartender answers.

In a hoarse whisper the father says, “Can I leave a number with you?” He writes it on a cocktail napkin. “It's very important. In case they show up?”

The graying bartender looks at it. “I'll be straight with you, mate,” he says, “forty-three years I've gotten a lot of napkins with a lot of numbers, and never wound up calling any of them.” Back at the table, pressed against the glass of the window and peering out one last time, Zan whispers, Sheba, forgive me. I didn't even get your hair done like I was supposed to. I've failed you completely; and once again he has to pivot sharply so the boy won't see him break down. “Tell them we'll be coming back,” he chokes to the bartender over his shoulder, who doesn't hear, or maybe Zan never really gets out the words.

F
orty-three years ago, at this same table where Parker eats his sandwich, another Yank passing through town on his way to somewhere else, who feels every minute as old as Zan even as he's almost twenty years younger, gazes at the front page of a newspaper that someone has handed him in the street.

The newspaper is an unseemly mess of text and image, as anarchic as the sensibility it means to convey. The black ink comes off on his fingers, with streaks of headline-red, and the Yank frowns at its front page, which has the picture of a nun who appears to be at some sort of social occasion. She's surrounded by people who have the look if not of familiarity, of celebrities, young men and girls with hair longer than his, and caught by the camera from the back, she reveals a bare bottom.

H
e glares at the tall ale he's barely sipped. Lately he's heard that everything in London is spiked with a new and dangerous intoxicant. He brushes a brown lock of hair off his forehead.

If he allowed himself to say so, he would admit it's an impressive bare bottom—and only when he spies the ends of blonde hair peeking out from under the rather chic habit does he fully realize this can't be a real nun. In another lifetime, as a devout Catholic he would have had to stifle a flash of anger; now it only embarrasses him. It isn't that he's no longer given to flashes of anger in his life. It's that over the past two and a half years the anger has become reserved for outrages greater than the irreverence of young people, when the anger isn't subsumed by grief.

Brushing the hair out of his face has become a nervous habit, almost a twitch.
it:
reads the newspaper across the front, above the altogether too comely nun, in the large red lower-case letters which he discovers inside the newspaper stand for “international times.” Sounds communist, he thinks, which also once would have provoked anger: subversion and heresy in one swoop—and he manages the smallest and most rueful of smiles. Though he knows little about the current music, he recognizes under the masthead the variation on Plato that serves as the newspaper's motto, and can't help feeling his admiration stirred:
When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.

I
t's been nearly an hour and a half since he slipped away from the house. I wonder if they're looking for me by now, he thinks. Perhaps I should go back.

The Yank lays the newspaper on the table. The music from the Ad Lib upstairs, which can be accessed only by a somewhat secretive elevator, is a muffled throb, and from behind the downstairs bar comes a pop tune on a radio or record player—
in dollhouse rooms with colored lights swinging . . .
—he can't tell. Sipping the tall ale in front of him, his first and last of the night, he finally notices the young English couple at the bar that have been watching him, and he's only surprised he got away this long without being recognized.

“Too old to be a musician,” says the young man standing at the bar. The Yank at the table is familiar, and the man at the bar, white and in his mid-twenties with long hair, and the younger black woman, her hair already in dreadlocks that aren't typical yet, are trying to place him. The woman teases, “But not that much older than you, is he?” and her companion exclaims, slightly outraged, “Are you serious? He's
much
older!” and the woman bursts into laughter.

H
e realizes, “You're having me on.” Maybe she knows he shaved four years off the bio he gave the record company. He calls to the bartender, “Jonesy!” with no reason to believe the bartender's name is Jonesy, then turns to the young woman. “So, this the night then, Jaz?”

She says, “Shut up.”

“A tumble would inspire me for tomorrow's session, yeah?”

“We both know,” Jasmine answers, “that
no
tumble will inspire you all the more, don't we?” Even by lead-singer standards, she thinks, Reg is lascivious; his songs are a nonstop orgy. The bartender brings another. “Dead night,” Reg says to him.

“Monday,” the bartender says, “theatres are closed.”

“Everyone's at the Indica or Marquee,” says Jasmine.

“Never heard of the Indica,” pouring the drink, “but then I'm new.”

“Me too,” says Reg. “In town, I mean.”

“Hear the Marquee lot used to come in straightaway after the shows.”

She says, “Too late for the Marquee.”

“Don't know why they stopped. Coming after the shows, I mean.”

“Soft Machine's on the bill, yeah?” says Reg. “Should be a bit of a crowd, then.”

“That's Sunday night,” says Jasmine.

“Never heard of the Indica,” the bartender says again.

“Next to the Scotch, over on Mason's Yard. It's not a club, it's a gallery. The Marquee moved.”

“Yeah?”

“From Oxford over to Wardour now.”

“Jonesy . . . ” says Reg.

“So if you're waiting for the lot from the Marquee,” says Jasmine, “you're going to wait awhile. Everyone heads for the Crom now, or the Ship a few doors down.”

“Jonesy.”

“But you got
us
, don't you?”

“Oh,” the bartender assures her, “I got more than you two—”

“But Jonesy,” Reg finally says emphatically enough to stop the other conversation, lowering his voice and leaning across the bar, “who
is
that?” and points at the Yank across the room.

W
hen they reach his table, the Yank speaks first. “Are you a Beatle?” he asks Reg so abruptly it can't help sounding accusatory.

The young man and woman laugh. “No,” says Jasmine, “he's Elvis Presley.”

Bewilderment flits across the Yank's face. He narrows his eyes, studying them on the other side of the ale he's barely drunk. “You're not Elvis Presley,” he decides; they laugh again. “I don't think he's in music, then,” Jasmine says to Reg, who worries, He's
much
older than I. She was just winding me up. For a moment the other man seated at the table is uncomfortable, slightly irritated before he forces himself to laugh as well. “You're not him,” he declares with more certainty.

“Not Elvis, anyway,” Reg says.

“Not the Presley part either,” says Jasmine.

“Hey, you lot in management came up with
that
.”

“If you're not a Beatle, then you might as well not be anybody,” the Yank says, and it isn't clear to Jasmine if he realizes or cares how rude it sounds, though he does feel bound to add, “What I mean is, you might as well be a Beatle, for all that I know.”

H
e speaks in a whine. Over the gray noise from upstairs, the other two barely hear him. “Reg and Jasmine,” Reg tells him. He says the names like they go together but the woman decides to let it pass. There's a slight hesitation from the Yank: “Bob,” he says as though giving an alias, or as though he's got different names for different circumstances and has to decide which sort these are—circumstances, that is. He reaches out his hand. His handshake is almost womanly and Jasmine is put off by it.

It's a small hand like a child's that barely reaches all the way around Reg's. When he takes it back, Jasmine sees how it shakes. The Yank sees it too and tucks the hand under the other arm to hide it. Since it doesn't seem to occur to him to invite them to sit, Jasmine does it on her own and Reg follows. “So, Bob,” Reg says, “not into the music then, are we?”

“I, uh . . . ” the Yank begins and the other two have to strain to catch what he says, “like . . . the Broadway tunes . . . ” and smiles, “‘The Impossible Dream.' Do you know that one?”

“No,” Reg says, “who did it?”

“As he said,” Jasmine answers, “it's from a show. Broadway. Don Quixote, right?”

“Yes,” says Bob.

“Hey, it's a groovy song,” Jasmine allows, “good message.”

“I, uh, think you're being polite,” the Yank says.

H
e's out of place. In the dark of the club, Jasmine still can't place him; he looks like a fifty-year-old teenager but in fact has just turned forty, aging a decade in the last few years. With his rabbit's teeth and long brown hair already turning gray, all of his features are too big for his head. He's still growing into himself, still in the process of becoming who he'll be, and he has a perpetually distracted quality that seems interrupted only by concentrated doses of discomfort, self-amusement, a secret. He takes everything personally.

There's a calm about him but it's not the calm of sanguinity. It's the calm of something too damaged to be grace, let alone peace; Jasmine already has decided he's the most intense person she's ever met. She says, “What are you in London for, then?”

“Passing through,” Bob answers, voice dropping back to his nasal whisper, “here tonight, then leave tomorrow,” and adds, “I never sleep well so I . . . thought I would go out, not wake my wife . . . ”

“Get a bit of time for yourself,” observes Reg.

“Sometimes,” he says, “you're most alone when you're not.” Reg nods uncomprehendingly. “Where's home, then?” asks Jasmine, and the man smiles his little-kid smile. “New York,” he says, “sometimes. Boston. Washington . . . no,” he shakes his head, “not Washington.
Never
Washington.”

P
ushing away from the table, he gets up. “I, uh, should head back. They're looking for me by now.” He hesitates. “Want to walk?” No, Jasmine realizes, this isn't a man who fancies being alone; when he can, he bullies his way through his reserve, when he gets through at all. She says to Reg, “You have your session tomorrow,” and looks for a clock on the wall but there is none. “Or today, I mean.”

Reg answers, “Not till noon,” passing up the out she's given him, or too dim, she thinks, to realize she's given it. Bob gets up from the table and he's small like his hands; inside his clothes, his small frame sinks with exhaustion. “Don't fancy a taxi?” asks Jasmine.

“No.”

“Where you staying?” asks Reg.

“Over near the park,” says Bob, and both Brits laugh again. In the dark of the club the Yank flushes again, and again has to compel himself to smile at whatever he's said that they find so damned ridiculous. The three step outside the pub. In the late-night hours there's still scattered traffic and taxis gliding by. “We're in London,” says Jasmine, “more than a few parks. Not like New York where you might say ‘the park' and everybody assumes you mean the big one.” Bob nods. “Right,” she says, “so you know which park?”

“I can never remember the name,” says Bob.

Reg says, “Hotel?”

“I'm, uh, not at a hotel.”

“Residence,” says Jasmine.

“Yes.”

“Hyde Park,” she says.

“No.”

“Green Park, over near the palace.”

“No.”

“St. James.”

“No.”

“Regent's.”

“Yes.”

“You think it's Regent's?”

“It's Regent's,” the Yank says.