ch 2

Sometimes I wake up from a dream, and I know that within a few minutes I will not be able to remember it anymore. In such situations, I like to tell myself the dream out loud, in as much detail as possible, in order to seal it in my memory. I’ve found that the trick is to begin speaking the dream as soon as I realize I may not remember it. If you miss that instant, it’s all over. I’ve lost dreams because of a trip to the bathroom, a drink of water, turning the radio on – things that only took a moment, but one moment too many.

One Wednesday, sometime shortly after acquiring the house, I woke up from such a dream. It took me a second to realize that I was no longer dreaming, that I was in the hotel suite and not my new (and newly-refurbished) house, that I was alone and not surrounded by blithe and attentive people, and that I was wearing pajamas and not a gown by Marc Jacobs.

I sat up, still inspired by the dream, and began to speak it out loud. A loud, almost abrasive, buzz from the telephone interrupted me. I started, reached for the phone instinctively. I was holding it to my ear when I realized I had lost the dream. It was gone. I remembered that there had been a myriad of people, and that I had been wearing the Marc Jacobs dress, but the rest of the details had faded. I remembered only that I had loved the dream, that I had wanted to hold on to it, that it had been full of beautiful and happy details.

Generally speaking, I am not that easily annoyed, but it is possible that I sounded a bit frosty when answering the phone. I am not one to let courtesy overtake my real emotions, and I made no attempt to conceal any irritation I might have expressed.

“Hello.”

“Hey!” I was greeted by a deep, vibrant voice, unconcerned by any hostility in my greeting. I recognized it as Devon’s instantly.

I paused, recovering from annoyance and navigating between confusion and flattery. “Hi,” I managed to squeak out.

“I woke you up!” he exclaimed, an apology weaving through his tone. “I’m so sorry!”

I made every attempt to come to my senses. However inconvenient I might find their phone calls, I was never one to throw devilishly handsome men aside. “No, no, you didn’t wake me up. I was already awake. How are you?”

“Good, good. I’m back in town. I just thought I’d see if you wanted to go down to the Sound – I was hoping to see your house, get the full tour, hear all your plans, you know!” His voice rose slightly, excited and impatient, and I found it as contagious as his imagination had been on the first day. It was full of energy and oddly authoritative – confident and coaxing at the same time.

“Oh! Yeah! I’d love to. I was going to head down there today anyway.”

“Awesome. I was thinking I’d grab coffee for us both and pick you up at your hotel in – let’s say an hour?”

“Sounds great.”

“Perfect. See you then!”

I was buttoning my sweater when I remembered that I had forgotten the dream. I sighed; my fierce annoyance had waned, but a wistful sting remained.

Devon arrived, looking like he belonged in a Nautica advertisement, and I hoped I was wearing matching socks. Coffee was distributed, and we headed off.

The radio was on a news radio station – there was a presidential campaign going on at the time, quite a close race for all practical purposes. I didn’t care very much about politics, but liked to appear as though I did, and so I listened with what I hoped was an intelligent expression on my face.

After a short while, though, I lost interest and began to try to remember my dream. My attempt at looking intelligent must have faded as well because Devon glanced over at me and turned the radio down.

“What’s going on in that head of yours, Boss.”

He had taken to calling me Boss that first Saturday, when I had dictated tasks to him and Caroline. It wasn’t my favorite nickname ever, but it beat several others I could recall having, and he always said it with such a lovely smile that I couldn’t make myself ask him to stop.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “I had this dream last night, and I’ve been trying to remember it all morning.”

“Oooh, nice!” He gave an encouraging nod. “What do you remember of it? Maybe I can help you piece it together.”

I told him about the house, the people, the colors, and the Marc Jacobs dress.”

“Marc by Marc Jacobs?” he teased.

“Nope, this was Marc Jacobs,” I said, utterly impressed that he knew the difference. We both laughed, and there was a painless pause, and I fell back into thinking. He turned the volume on the radio back up again. “The thing is,” I said a few moments later, oblivious to the radio, “I can’t remember what made this dream so great. Like I don’t know why I wanted to remember it. I can’t remember what the feeling was, or what it made me think of – nothing. But I remember that I really, really, really liked it.”

I leaned back in the seat, slightly startled to find I had been leaning so far forward all this time. I was still consumed with the thought, and we drove on in silence again.

“Can you remember any of the people in the dream? Any specific faces?” Devon asked. It was a good question, though he was starting to sound merely polite and uninterested. I considered, trying to picture the house, the dress, any detail I could.

“Oh!” I exclaimed involuntarily. Patrick. Patrick had been in the dream.

“You know the people?” still in that same civil tone.

I never understood why I did not tell him about Patrick then. At the time, I attributed it to his indifferent tone, not wanting to bore him further, and so forth, but I knew that was not a real reason. Whatever my various shortcomings may be, I am proud of the fact that I am the sort of person who knows when she is lying to herself. It would be, I suppose, more useful to be the kind of person who knows the truth and does not lie to herself, or even to have known why I lied to myself, but the real reason eludes me to this day.

“No,” I shrugged. “I guess not.”

But Patrick had been in the dream, and though I couldn’t remember any other details about it, not what he was wearing or doing or saying, I remembered his presence with perfect clarity.

Patrick and I grew up together in the same town and same social circle from birth. I am fourteen days younger than him, eight inches shorter, forty (or so) pounds lighter, and six IQ points higher. He was my best friend though all of school, my boyfriend in high school, my best friend again in college, and my boyfriend again thereafter. He is my fiancé now, although he hasn’t actually proposed and I haven’t actually accepted – it is the beauty of small towns and small social circles: someone decided we were getting married and neither of us could be bothered to discredit the rumor. He offered to buy me a ring if I wanted it, to make it official, but I said I didn’t care. So, much to the chagrin of Both Families, my fingers were bare.

“Well, might as well let it go, then,” Devon shrugged. “Dreams are funny like that – it’s like if you don’t remember them right away you never can.”

I raised an eyebrow, but “yeah, I’ve noticed that, too,” was all I said.

He turned a disarming smile my way and asked if I was hungry; we were approaching a string of cafes and restaurants before we left the city for a while. Bagels sounded good to us both, so we grabbed those and continued on.

The rest of the drive was inconsequential – we talked about things of little or no importance for a while, and at his request I told him a little about myself. We talked about Texas and the east, about The Family and my great-aunt, and about growing up the way I did. He was a master conversationalist, I thought, as he drew story after story out from me. I told him about the church picnic when I was twelve, about fishing with my father and learning to waltz with my grandfather. I told him about never meeting my great-aunt because she had been all but disowned when she was younger, and how, as I went through her house, I wished I had known her. Taxidermy kittens and all. I told him about how much I hated my hair as a child and how much I loved the horses on the ranch. About Piper McKinley and Anthony Childress in fourth grade. About learning to read when I was three, and reading everything by P. G. Wodehouse and Louisa May Alcott before I was thirteen but nothing of J.D. Salinger until I was nearly twenty-five. About trips to Dallas, Houston, London, Tokyo, Paris and Berlin, but never Los Angeles and never New York.

When we pulled up to my house, it occurred to me that I had told Devon almost everything about my life (inasmuch as we can ever “tell” our life), and he had told me nothing. He was a master at superficial answers, I realized with no small degree of envy. The stories he told were elegant and humorous, but contained no real details, no real insight, no real anything about him. A more cynical mind might have suspected that his stories were cleverly designed so that he need say very little about himself. They always ended in such a way so as to prompt me to answer with a story of my own and to allow him to recede back into an attentive silence. It was a thing of genius to me, and I would have liked to learn how to do it, but by the time I realized what was going on, we had pulled into the back driveway of my house.

“This is it,” I said, stretching my arms out as we approached the back door, forgetting that he had seen it before, that he had been there with me when I made the offer.

“Have you made any plans yet? Know what you’re going to do with it?” he asked, tracing his finger along the crumbling walls.

I started to tell him my dreams for the front room as we walked through it, but he interrupted me absently.

“Isn’t there an amazing veranda out front?” he asked.

“Well, it’s more on the side,” I corrected, “but yeah, it’s absolutely breathtaking when you consider what it could look like.”

We walked in that direction; he seemed uninterested in the house itself, glancing around dutifully but with none of the passion I had expected. “You’ll need new crown molding,” he offered as we exited the front foyer.

Even in its dilapidated state, the veranda was impressive. It clearly needed work, there was no contesting that, but it stood with such posture and elegance that we were both momentarily silenced.

“You should rebuild this first!” The idea burst out from Devon. “Fix up the veranda and throw a house-warming party!”

“I’d love to,” I agreed, my own excitement growing. “I want to fix it all – I just don’t know exactly where to start. I can sand the woodwork down, but that’s about it.” I laughed. I had told him about the summer of the banisters.

“Will you let me help you with this?” He turned to face me directly, and I realized he didn’t often do that – look at me directly, full-on, and hold the gaze. His voice was confident, knowing my answer, and yet still slightly pleading.

I was faintly reminded of a scene on the playground when I was a child: Ashley Delaney had sidled up to me one day, leaning in conspiratorially as though we were best friends, and whispered, “I know a secret.” I still remember her enormous blue eyes, mischievous and delighted and arrogant. I had wanted to ask her what it was, to be a part of anything that Ashley Delaney was a part of. As I went to open my mouth to inquire, a tiny flicker of a thought struck me: that all of Ashley Delaney’s power right then was dependent on my caring about the secret. That, if I did not rise to the bait, I could somehow win. But I wanted to know the secret (desperately, if truth be told), and I was only eight; so I asked, and Ashley said she couldn’t tell me and flitted away.

“Of course you can! If you want,” I told Devon, banishing the memory of Ashley’s triumphant giggle.

“I’d love to! I know some guys – they could do this kind of work in no time at all, I bet. I need to get some specifics for them, but I think they could do it. If we can get some landscapers out here, too – it’ll be awesome – the inside will take longer, but the house will be one of the prettiest facades here! And then we can pack the lawn with people, throw a fantastic party, and end the summer with a bang.”

“Let’s do it!” I cried. It did not occur to me then that no one I knew would be at the party; my friends and family were in Texas, thousands of miles away, and most of them had not even heard that I had bought a house.

After Ashley Delaney’s little taunt with the secret, I had gone back into the classroom, where her crowd of girls all stared at me and laughed as I walked by. It occurred to me later how little there was to actually be humiliated by, but at the time I felt it acutely. “I know a secret too, and I bet my secret is better,” I said haughtily. “You’re so dumb,” Piper McKinley accused. “You don’t even have a secret,” and they all rolled their eyes at me. “Yeah, she does. I told it to her,” Patrick said, appearing out of nowhere. No one knew what to say to that, and the teacher had walked back into the room, , so the competition died. Ashley Delaney eyed me all afternoon, trying to decide if Patrick and I were lying or not.

Devon decided to take some measurements so that he could give the workers an idea of the task, and we went back down to the car to get a tape measure in his trunk. He talked the whole way, a barrage of glamorous ideas and glittering prospects. Lights here? There? Marble here, mirrors there, a small statue, tables and chairs and a swing – his ideas went on and on. I soaked it all in, trying to remember it all, repeating it to myself under my breath so that I would not forget.

“When do you want to move in by?” Devon asked, as we measured various points around the veranda.

I looked up, startled. It hadn’t occurred to me, I realized, to live in this house. I suppose I knew that I might have to move in for a bit while I was working on the place, or having work done, rather, but to live there as a resident… I glanced around again, surveying things. When I turned back to face Devon, he looked faintly amused.

“You didn’t buy it as an investment, did you?” he asked.

“No, of course not!” I decried the idea emphatically. “I totally want to live here. It’s the most perfect house in the world. I’m just not sure how soon I’d be able to – I mean I have to get electricity, heat, water, and all that hooked up still.” I tried not to sound defensive, but I’m not sure how successful I was.

“Well, it shouldn’t be too hard – I would think you could get the basic amenities pretty easily; the other houses around here are mostly inhabited, so the city should be able to work into your place without too much hassle.”

“Yeah, and I don’t need access to the whole house,” I reasoned. “I can just live in a room or two on the first floor while I’m fixing things. It’ll take a while, but I knew I’d need to be here to oversee it all.”

“Yeah,” he nodded with mock deference, “and to do all the sanding.”

“Hey!” I grinned. “I’ll have you know that I actually am quite a master sander. And shellacker.”

“Well, then, the job’s half done,” he asserted gravely. We laughed, and he finished noting the measurements he had taken.

“You have a great view of the Sound,” he said a few moments later, facing out.

“Yeah, it’s quality,” I agreed. “And you can see the other peninsula across the way.”

“All the old money,” he mused.

“Is that what that is?”

“Yeah, didn’t you know? The other peninsula is full of homes from the last couple hundred years. Built before the turn of the twentieth century. This peninsula was where all the new money came, an attempt to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’ so to speak.”

“A funny little counterfeit.”

“I think it was seen like that, yeah,” Devon glanced at me. “But that’s all old news now. Times changed after the wars – it looks like everything changed.” He gestured to the other houses around mine. “They all look like they’ve kept things in good repair. And you’re going to bring this house back to life.” He nodded encouragingly, and I was appreciative for the effort. But I was suddenly sad for this house, for whoever had owned it – sad that their new money had run out and that they had been reduced to having to listen to the taunting laughter from lawn parties across the Sound.

continue to chapter 3
return to chapter 1

(c) 2008. anothernicole.