The Rules of Dreaming (4 page)

On this particular occasion she had choreographed a kind of ballet that required an audience of patients and staff to sit on the terrace while she cavorted around on the lawn behind the Institute.  I had spent the afternoon attending to some personal business, and when I returned I caught a glimpse of Olympia through one of the upstairs windows.  She drifted through the evening mist in a blue ballet dress, waving her willowy arms gracefully, sometimes violently, as she acted out some ghostly drama.  As dancing it probably left something to be desired, but in terms of raw passion and beauty I had never experienced anything like it.  And when at the climactic moment she raised her eyes to meet mine, and held them there for a long moment, I wanted to rush outside and embrace this beautiful phantom before she disappeared into the night.  But then she did a strange thing:  the music stopped and she whirled onto the terrace toward Hunter and Antonia, who sat between Mrs. Paterson and Nicole, and she bent over to kiss each of the twins on the forehead.  And then without looking at anyone else she put her hands together and slowly slipped back into the shadows like a feather floating away on the wind.

Olympia’s room, as it happened, was in the residential wing just around the corner from mine.  Most of the residential wing had been blocked off for years; my room and Olympia’s were the only ones still in use.  That night, after I made sure all the patients were safely in bed, I waited in the dimly-lighted hall to see if I could catch a glimpse of Olympia.  When she appeared I pretended to be fumbling with my keys, but on her way past me she smiled archly, as if she took it as a token of the power she exercised over men, women, children, animals—indeed all living things and probably more than a few inanimate objects—that they would forever be fascinated with her and her movements.

“Good night,” she murmured as she unlocked her door.

“Good night,” I said.  “I enjoyed your performance.”

She stared back at me uncomprehendingly.  “It wasn’t intended to be enjoyed, exactly.  It’s a type of therapy.”

“Oh, I know that,” I stammered.  “And quite honestly I’m fascinated by its therapeutic possibilities.  For the patients it’s therapy, but for those of us on the other side—therapists rather than patients, I mean—it can be very beautiful.”

“Is there really an ‘other side’?” she asked.  “Isn’t
therapy really just another way of learning to experience the world?”

And with another enigmatic smile she slipped into her room.  I spent a restless night dreaming about Olympia and her almond eyes.  I imagined myself falling in love with her—basking in her smile, entranced by her words, thrilling to her gentle laughter as she strolled beside me or danced with me on a moonlight cruise.  We sipped wine in sidewalk cafes and coffee in bohemian bistros; we splashed in the Caribbean and cycled through the South of France.  Hesitant, even tongue-tied at first, we gradually opened our hearts to each other, confiding all our hopes and dreams.  I bought her a bouquet of long-stemmed roses, comforted her when she was sick, paced the floor despairingly when she stayed away.  It was a montage of every hackneyed image of the intoxicating whirl of love that Hollywood ever put on the big screen, and when I woke up I was sure that it was all true, every frame and flicker of it. 

That was an illusion, of course, which quickly wore off as I rolled out of bed and staggered into the shower.  I don’t know if I ever really fell in love with Olympia, and I doubt if she ever loved me, but I’ll never forget that dream and the sensation it left me with.  I should have recognized it for what it was—a token of my deteriorating mental health—but some illusions are too precious to do without, even when you know they are illusions.  The sensation, even the false sensation, of being in love with Olympia was an experience I did not want to forget.

T
he next morning I made the mistake of asking Gottlieb what he knew about Olympia. “Oh, what a wacko!” he laughed.  “Just like her father.  Did you see her cavorting around on the lawn last night?  The patients must be wondering what they’re doing in here if she’s allowed on the streets.”

“I don’t know.  I thought her dance was very beautiful.”

“Has she told you about her past life regressions?  She will, if you give her a chance.  She used to be a temple prostitute in the court of Cleopatra.”  He laughed uproariously. 

“She seems nice enough to me.”

“She is very nice.  Her basic problem is that she grew up surrounded by crazy people, with her father and Miles Palmer vying for her affections.  For those two everything has to be a competition, if not a fight to the death, and they spoiled her rotten.”

Gottlieb was taking a little too much glee in bursting my bubble.  When I started to walk away he called after me.  “Hoffmann,” he said, lowering his voice.  “You wouldn’t want to make the mistake of getting involved with that girl.  I considered that when I first met her too.”  He shook his head.  “Bad idea.”

I smiled and nodded as if I appreciated his advice, but kept walking.  Getting into a conversation with Gottlieb was always a mistake, especially on the subject of women.  He was balding, bug-eyed and overweight, and he had a wife and two kids. Yet for some reason he seemed to think of himself as God’s gift to women.  Everybody knew he was sleeping with Julietta, the voluptuous receptionist who didn’t need a past life regression to look like a prostitute.  I tried to picture the two of them together, and it made me feel a little sick.  Julietta flirted with me sometimes as I passed her desk, stopping me to ask some pointless question as she tilted forward in her low-cut dress.  If I kept going she’d call my name in her low, sensuous voice;  if I turned around she’d slide her tongue over her lips in a pantomime of desperate love.  One day Gottlieb walked into the reception area just as I began to respond: she giggled, and he warned me off with a proprietorial smirk.  Then I remembered what he’d said about Olympia—how he’d considered getting “involved” with her when he first arrived at the Institute.  That must have been seven or eight years ago, when she was still a teenager.  I felt like going back and telling Gottlieb that Olympia would never have considered going out with a creature like him, even for a minute, even when she was seventeen years old, and that if I ever even heard of  him putting one of his smelly hands on a young girl I would....

But I had to stop fantasizing and start my afternoon rounds with the patients.  In those days I still didn’t understand how things fit together at the Institute.  That afternoon Hunter Morgan would sit down to play the piano for the first time.  Only much later would I begin to grasp the connection between that strange performance and Olympia’s of the night before.

*   *   *

Nicole had mixed feelings about
going home after two weeks at the Institute.  She occupied a dingy garret in a dark rambling house that had been converted to apartments, overseen by a nosy landlady named Mrs. Gruber who owned several cats but never seemed to feed them.  Nicole’s entrance was through a side door that led up a musty staircase to her apartment.  The familiar clutter was there, just as she’d left it, even the dirty dishes in the sink.  There was comfort in that, she told herself.  Getting back to normal, all the little routines of life—that would put her mind in the right groove.  Washing the dishes, taking out the trash—what a smell!—cleaning the toilet, vacuuming the rug.  All that would distract her from the bigger issues.  And there were even more urgent concerns: she was famished and everything in the refrigerator was sprouting black spots and patches of hair.  Anything in the cupboards?  Half a box of stale cookies, a can of chicken noodle soup.  Barely enough to take her through what promised to be a long night.  Maybe this wasn’t such a bright idea, renting an apartment so far out of the city.  After the breakup with Richard, she’d thought the rural setting would help settle her mind, help her focus on her work.  And what did she end up with, besides commuting on the bus two or three days a week?   A smelly apartment, a nosy landlady, and two weeks in the loony bin.  In fact the apartment was beyond smelly; it was frighteningly isolated—at the top of a dark winding staircase used only by feral cats—and positively gothic in its gloom, with shadows so deep she had never actually looked into some of the corners.  The kind of place where a woman could be murdered in her bed and none of the neighbors would notice or care.

One bright spot: the computer was still on, waiting faithfully for her return.   The screen was blank but all she had to do was touch the space bar and a magic technicolor world rose up before her.  Out of habit she opened her “Things To Do” folder.  Most of it was out of date now—unminded reminders, dead deadlines, pointless appointments.  With one sweep of the mouse she consigned the entire contents of the folder to the trash bin.  It was a grand feeling, having nothing to do, but it was short lived.  Now the computer stared at her with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.  Tentatively she started typing:

Bread, milk, eggs, corn flakes.

Pick up dry cleaning.

Find a thesis topic.

Keep from going crazy.

This won’t do, she thought. How am I going to keep from going crazy if I have to think of a thesis topic?   Let’s put that one on top and keep it there.  Thing To Do Numero Uno:  Keep from going crazy.  Easier said than done—especially when you might already be crazy.  No, Dr. Hoffmann said you’re definitely not there yet.  No reason to think you ever will be.  So there’s still hope, even if you do have to think of a thesis topic that will satisfy the Dead White Males who run the Critical Studies department.

She heated the can of soup and dipped the stale cookies in it one at a time.  Not bad.  When she finished that she boiled some water for a cup of tea, which she would have to drink black since the milk in the fridge was sour.  Now what?  There was the mail—when she came in she’d tripped over a pile of mail that had been stuffed under the door.  Bills she couldn’t pay and catalogs full of clothes she couldn’t afford.  Too depressing to think about.  She sipped her tea and wondered what to do next.

Thing To Do Numero Uno: Keep from going crazy.  But how?  Much as she liked Dr. Hoffmann, she wanted to accomplish that particular Thing To Do in her own way, without any help from the pharmaceutical industry.  She reached in her purse and found the pills he’d given her, and without thinking very much about it she ran into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. 

Now, she thought, I’m on my own
.

Chapter
4

Miss Francine Whipple could hardly contain her excitement when she spoke with Dubin in the library
that afternoon.  It had been four days since his surveillance of the Palmer Institute, and his account of what he’d seen stirred her imagination as nothing in the True Crime section had ever done.  She was brimming with theories, speculations and even a few facts about the Morgan twins and the Institute.  And Dubin—with Susan Morgan’s $5,000 check in his pocket—found a new interest in what she had to say.  “I need to find out all I can about Maria Morgan’s death,” he told her.

“Writing one of your articles?”

“Thinking about one.”

“Well, you can come in and talk to me about it whenever you want.”  She glanced around furtively and lowered her voice.  “I just hope I’m not a suspect.”

“A suspect?”

“I knew
Maria Morgan better than most people.  Doesn’t that make me a suspect?”

Dubin shrugged gallantly.  “If you insist.”

“Did I tell you she was rehearsing
The Tales of Hoffmann
at the time she died?  Under the direction of Casimir Ostrovsky at the Met.  She used to come in here and tell me about the production, knowing how much I love opera, especially that one.  They were changing the plot around, if you can believe that.”  She started digging through the pile of papers on her desk.  “I might have some more clippings somewhere.  Or be able to find them for you.”

“For me or your other borrower?”  Dubin smiled.   “I’m a little jealous.”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

“Is it the police?”

“No, it’s not the police.  Do you think I’d consider them a borrower?”

“They might still be interested.”

“Not since Frank Lynch retired.”

Frank Lynch.  Dubin remembered that name.  He was the cop quoted in the newspaper articles.  “He said there was no doubt it was suicide.”

“Yes,” she agreed.  “That’s what he said in the newspaper.  But privately he had his doubts, I can tell you that.”

“Where is he now?”

“Retired a couple of years ago.  He lives somewhere down at the Jersey shore, I think.”

The door flew open and
a slight young woman with reddish blond hair fluttered inside.  There was something almost angelic about the way she beamed at Miss Whipple with her emerald eyes.  “Hello,” she said to the librarian.

“Hello, Nicole.  How are you?”

The young woman seemed a little embarrassed as she hurried past the desk.   “I’m just fine, thank you,” she said with a slight lilting accent.  “Where’s the music section?”

“All the way in back.” 

Miss Whipple waited until the young woman was out of sight, then leaned closer to Dubin and whispered:  “Just got out.”

“Just got out of what?”

“The Institute.  She checked herself in a couple of weeks ago.  This is the first I’ve seen her since.”

Dubin gestured quizzically, not wanting to be overheard.

“Very sweet girl but she seems to live in her own world.”

“I see.”

“She’s a graduate student,”  Miss Whipple nodded, as if that explained all.

The young woman stepped back with a music CD called
Piano Music of Robert Schumann
, which she checked out at the desk.  Then she smiled at Miss Whipple in her ethereal way and flitted out of the library.

Dubin followed her with narrowing eyes.  “If she was in the Institute, she might know something about the Morgan twins.  Where does she live?”

“Right here in the village.  Commutes in to the university three days a week.”

He headed for the door.  “I’ll see you in a day or two.”

“You’re wasting your time following her,” the librarian called after him.  “She doesn’t know anything about it.”

*   *   *

Olympia remained at the Institute for the rest of the week.  The day after her ballet on the lawn, I was preoccupied with Hunter’s first encounter with the piano and Nicole’s final therapy session.  On a couple of occasions I noticed Olympia gliding down a corridor and I felt a bashful thrill when she flashed her smile in my direction.  I remembered my dream, of course, and the precious illusion that I was in love with her.  By the light of day that idea seemed absurdly improbable—but so did Hunter’s piano playing, Gottlieb’s cynicism, Julietta’s lasciviousness, Antonia’s ethereal innocence, and so many other features of everyday life at the Institute.  As it turned out my own grip on reality was weakening.  Like my patients I had emotions that were secret even from myself, lurking in the shadows like demons in a medieval woodcut; it was only a matter of time before they would start to intrude on my life. 

At night on my way to bed I stole a glance at Olympia’s door and wondered whether she wa
s in her room.  Then on Wednesday evening she gave another performance therapy session, this time in the patient lounge.  The presentation was altogether different from the last one, and Olympia came across as less vivacious and self-assured, even somewhat bored and guarded, until the moment when Hunter suddenly sat down at the piano.  Once he started playing—it was the same piece he’d played on the two earlier occasions—her face lit up and she started spinning around the room as if she were in a trance. 

Then came the inevitable moment when Hunter stopped short in that jarring climactic passage and fled back to his room.  Olympia faltered, almost fell, then gestured to me—I had been watching in alarm from the back of th
e lounge.  “I’d better call it a night,” she said, forcing a smile.  “This was very good.  I’ll see you all again next time.”

It was clear that I had been chosen to escort her to her room.  I took her arm and we stepped slowly away from the lounge while the orderlies ushered the patients to their beds.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, catching her breath.  “Just a little surprised, that’s all.”

Looking back at that moment, I can see that it was a turning point, the first step in a misadventure I could not have foreseen and am embarrassed to relate.  I called it the madness of love, and madness it may have been.  But it was only a dream of love.

There was no one else in the residential wing, and when we reached her door she pulled me inside. As the door closed behind us I found myself folded in her willowy embrace.  Without saying a word, we stood for a long time kissing and caressing each other as our clothes gradually slipped to the floor.  It was a warm, still night and her skin felt soft and moist.  I kissed her face, her neck, her breasts, all the way down to her magnificent thighs, and then we tangoed naked across the room and fell on her bed.  A cool breeze wafted in through the half-open window as she stretched herself back and I rolled on top of her.  The curtains were open slightly but that didn’t matter—outside there was nothing but darkness and the mechanical chattering of insects.  We started gently, almost tentatively, as if we were trying something new, but then quickly our hearts began to pound and they continued to pound until we had both cried out in that closeness that has no equal in this world.  Yet through it all, mingled with my tenderness for Olympia, there was a sense of detachment and unreality that I will confess I often
feel in such moments.  Although I know this is happening to me, I am also aware of myself as being apart from it, watching as if in a dream.  And what I saw in the dim light frightened me—an Olympia entirely given up to the motions of love like a perfect machine whose movements are directed solely to the task it is designed to perform.  And there was such a wild energy inside her—an acceleration so intense that it seemed to propel her beyond her limits—that I was afraid she would break apart before we were done.

The first words out of her mouth astonished me.  “I want to introduce you to my father.”

We were lying on our backs gasping for breath as the sweat melted off our fevered bodies.  “Your father?” I cried.  “What made you think of that?”

She laughed and started kissing and caressing me again, and once again her feverish energy overpowered us both.  Before long our hearts and our bodies were pounding with a whirling beat that reminded me—in my detachment—of that demonic music Hunter had discovered in the piano.  But this time when we had finished I felt guilty and ashamed, as if I had crept into a patient’s bed, and all I could think about was Hunter Morgan and his piano music and the fact that
in two more days Dr. Palmer would return to the Institute.

*   *   *

Nicole knew she was drinking too much coffee when she couldn’t concentrate long enough to worry about whether she was drinking too much coffee.  In the morning she’d bring home a 20-ounce Colombian from the little convenience store around the corner.  That was breakfast.  Lunch was another 20-ouncer—absolutely necessary if she was going to make any progress on finding a thesis topic.  By four o’clock, still no progress in that department but a deepening sense of restlessness and frenzy.  The apartment was like an inferno and every once in a while she thought she could hear someone creeping up and down the stairs.  Probably—hopefully—one of the landlady’s cats.  She skittered to the window and peered down through the cypress trees that surrounded the house.  Nothing unusual there, just a black BMW parked in the shade across the street and a man in sunglasses who turned away when she looked out.  She yanked on her running shoes and fled outside—by the time she hit the sidewalk the BMW and its driver were gone—and endured three miles of sweat before it was time for another stop at the coffee shop. Standing in line behind her—where had she seen that guy before?   No matter: 20 more ounces of coffee, please.  You can always reheat it in the microwave.

By eight o’clock when she took the first bite of her frozen pizza she was wired as tight as a mandolin.  Tapping her foot.  Drumming her fingers on the table.  Racing her eyes distractedly around the gloomy apartment.  Her home, she realized, looked like the set for a 1950s horror movie: peeling wallpaper, cobwebs in the corners, stalactites dripping from the rotten plaster ceiling—everything but Vincent Price and the organ music.  Instead of organ music, she had the bone-grating sound of animals (she hoped they weren’t rats) scurrying around behind the walls.  Suddenly she remembered Thing To Do Numero Uno:  Keep from going crazy.  Not so easy when you’re living in a tomb and you have an appointment with your advisor on Monday.  And you still don’t have a thesis topic.  Go with what you know best, he’d told her:  Modern languages.  French and German literature.  Semiotics, whatever that was (at what point in her graduate career were they going to tell her what semiotics actually was?), close reading of texts—“You took a first at Oxford, didn’t you?”  And here she sat on the bed in her cluttered apartment, having wasted a fine afternoon watching soap operas, ready to plunge into an evening of idiotic sitcoms.  Better
make sure the door is bolted.

Somewhere in the middle of a beer commercial, the days and nights of exhaustion finally caught up with her and she slipped into a violent sleep.  It lasted a little over an hour but the dreams that gripped her seemed to span
decades, hurling her back and forth between one end of her life and the other.  It was all there: her childhood in the west of Ireland, boarding school in Sligo, the years at Oxford and Munich and now in America, packing her bags and walking out on Richard as he sat sobbing in his underwear on their only comfortable chair, and in the middle of it all her dead brother at the bottom of the cliff looking straight up at her with his swollen mouth and his two black eyes, bruised and broken, hungry water swirling beneath him.  She woke up gasping and flailing her arms as if she were being shoved into an alien world, holding her eyes closed as she struggled to pull the dream’s final images into waking consciousness:  It wasn’t her brother at all or her mother or father but Dr. Ned Hoffmann, pursuing her through a shadowy mountain landscape—and cursing her, when she leapt over a cliff to escape him, with the unmistakable howl of madness.

The howl was what woke her up.  It was really the neighbors’ beagle mimicking a fire siren that wailed in the distance.  The animals in the walls were scrambling madly in every direction, as if they too were trying to escape.  Nicole looked at the clock—it was midnight—and killed the TV with her remote control.  Then she turned off the lights and tried to go back to sleep.  In the darkness the room still throbbed with the echo of her dreams.  The image of Dr. Hoffmann howling after her through the shadows—could that be from drinking too much coffee?  Be careful.  You could lie here all night and go crazy.  Better check the lock on the door.  A cat (she assumed it was a cat) scurried away and down the stairs.

She remembered the CD she’d found at the library:
Piano Music of Robert Schumann
, performed by Alicia de Larrocha.   Maybe that would help her sleep.  She stuck the CD in her portable disk player, pulled on the headphones and lay back on her pillow.  The music was Romantic, as she remembered from her school days, but it sounded strange to her ears: one minute chromatic and expressive, the next minute jagged and jittery, relentless, breathless, like a puppet in perpetual motion.  Easy to see why poor Schumann went mad.  Then suddenly there it was—the piece Hunter Morgan had played by heart without ever having touched a piano before.  At least she thought that’s what she was hearing.  She stopped the CD and rummaged through her purse for the cassette she had recorded of Hunter’s playing.  When she found it she plugged it into her Walkman and sat up on the bed with the disk player wired to one ear and the Walkman to the other. Yes, the music was the same.  What was it?  According to the liner notes it was a piece called Kreisleriana: