Girl of My Dreams (37 page)

When Nils described this scene I was confused, uncertain what the point was.

“Mossy proceeded,” Nils said, “to dive in from the shallow end and swim languorously up and down his pool, not exhibiting himself particularly, just naked. A frog stroke, a surface dive, a slither past me where I treaded water not knowing what to do. I couldn't look at him, I couldn't look anywhere else. We'd each been trying to upstage the other, Mossy with his silence, I with my speedy swimming. But he trumped me when he took off his bathing suit. Flashing by me, slicing through the water like a barracuda. His torso a compact missile, limbs like knives.”

“So Mossy's a secret fruit cup?” Tutor Beedleman offered.

“Hardly,” Nils said. “Mossy just naturally wants to own the other guy. He takes all the space. I know this as a magician. Doing a magic act means you take the stage and hold it, like a commanding actor. On my sets, as a director, I'm in charge. I know how to do this. But Mossy, everywhere he goes is his own set. He wants to invade you until you say I give, I cave, what do you want me to do? He won't stop until he has you.”

“That's not one man raping another?” I asked.

“Yeah, fucking his mind,” Nils said. “Mossy doesn't bother with your body. He skips right over that and leaps into your mind.”

18

Re-entry to the Kingdom

Sunlight glinted off the fronds of the palm trees and the hood ornaments of the other cars, especially the expensive ones. Relieved to be safe at home, I'd awakened very early on Sumac Lane and even with my bandaged leg did a kind of hopping run down to the ocean to make sure it was there. I was still so anchored to what had happened—and almost happened—in San Francisco it was a happy surprise to see the Pacific rolling, boiling, slapping away at the sand. Southern California was the Kingdom of Heaven.

Driving to the studio, I felt I'd been in a fierce wind that left me wrong in the head. What was Mike Quin doing on that sidewalk? Was that Widdelstaedt himself driving the car next to mine? It wouldn't have shocked me if the stevedore had jumped out at a stop sign and broken my windshield. Yet I was free of all that now; the owners and longshoremen could fight until the redemptive sun turned to ice. I drove along Sunset, uncrowded at that early hour, cranky little cars putt-putting along, beeping cheerily at each other occasionally, gardeners hosing the bougainvillea and chrysanthemums, sprinkling the lawns because it would likely be a scorcher.

Passing the pink stucco Beverly Hills Hotel and turning down through the
allée
of palms on Canon Drive, I fancied myself in Jerusalem. Ideas churned on how to do what the studio wanted and also convince them to do what I wanted. I was taking the long way to work to assure myself of the glories of this Eden. This presumed Eden, as Yeatsman never failed to remind me.

Reaching Olympic Boulevard, I remembered I had an appointment with Dr. Pogorzelski and doubled back a few blocks. Trapped in the alley the day before, I'd assumed Widdelstaedt's carving knife would cause Pogo's couch to lie bare this morning. When he summoned me from the waiting room, I settled in by saying how glad I was to see him though I wasn't really seeing him but staring at the Florida-shaped crack in his ceiling. I spilled it all out. As the huge longshoreman pursued me, I told Pogo I felt I was looking straight into the next world. I gave a blow-by-blow of Widdelstaedt chasing, slashing at me until I finally leaped out of his grasp onto the fire escape. Dr. Pogo was silent, waiting for me to continue. Finally, I said, “That's it, that's the whole thing.”

“Umm,” he said. “What do you think it means?”

“What do I think what means?”

“What do you think your fantasy means?”

This is what always puzzled me about psychoanalysis: tension between reality and the imagination. Perhaps it is the same tension that exists in writing. How much are we mining, how much are we making up? Dr. Pogorzelski was certainly a good and compassionate doctor. Though he'd gone from Cracow to study with the master in Vienna, he never pulled apostolic succession on me nor, I gathered, on his less fortunate colleagues. Unslavish about psychoanalytic dogma, he was secularly open to whatever varying interpretations or theories I would bring him. Early on, in the first or second session, he had said our analysis (and he did say “our,” impressing me with the collaborative nature of my treatment) would consist eclectically of present concerns, memories of the distant past, dreams, fantasies, word associations, and the relationship between the two of us. Our twin goals would be to try to untie inhibitors preventing full expression of what I wanted to be and do and say and write, and to retrace the beginnings of neurotic behavior so that it need no longer be repeated.

So far so good. But I was never too sure how Pogo—or other members of his profession—dealt with reality. In-your-face occurrences. Here I'd just told him of a narrow escape from death in my encounter with the distressingly real would-be killer Widdelstaedt, and his response was to ask me what the fantasy meant.

I swiveled on the couch and looked at him where he sat, his knees possibly eighteen inches from my head. I was like a small gun going off. “Are you n … ? Doctor, every word I've just told you is exactly what happened to me in San Francisco!
Exactly!
Please! Not a shred of it was my imagination!” I swiveled back into my usual supine position, jerking my head and folding my arms over my chest as if to say, Take that.

“Oh, of course, sorry,” Dr. Pogo said. “I hear so much of people's violent dreams and fantasies I'm afraid I lost myself. It's a staggering experience. Are you all right?”

“I'm all right. The guy cut my leg. Other than that, okay.”

“Did this terrible incident remind you of anything?”

“It reminded me I want to stay on this planet for a while. It reminded me I'm glad I'm not a stevedore. It reminded me how oppressed workers are by owners. It reminded me of what scapegoat means. That guy would kill someone who's not even close to being his true enemy. It reminded me of what your profession means by displacement!”

I was still hot. But then, taking my own cue, I remembered two real dreams I'd had the night before. (Real? But then what was San Francisco? Provisional? Dreamlike but not as real as a dream?) In the first, I met a doctor in the street, much older than Pogo. I knew he was a doctor because he carried a black bag. He asked what I wanted. I was unable to answer. I only looked at his gray hair and clean-shaven face, which was kindly but also judgmental. I noticed his blue tie hung down from an old-fashioned curved collar. The dream ended.

“What do you think of that?” Pogo asked.

“I guess it meant I was on my way to see you, a doctor who tries to help though I can't always say what I want to. I wanted to get to you after San Francisco.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “And the tie?”

“Sometimes you wear an all-blue tie, don't you?”

“Actually, I don't, but that doesn't matter. Any other thought?”

“I think the dream means that I've been rescued from this awful thing that almost happened to me, and I'm glad to be safe again.”

“Mmm-hmm. I don't think so.”

“You don't? What then?”

“It's not that you're not relieved to be rescued, or to be home, or seeing me again. Incidentally, you were not rescued. You rescued yourself, you absolutely saved yourself, and no one is responsible for your being alive and on this couch except you yourself.”

“What do you think, then, about the dream?”

“The man in the old-fashioned collar is not me but the doctor from long ago, the doctor of your mother. Not perhaps her actual doctor but the composite of the doctors who treated your mother in her illness. You want him to cure her, to change the past, and you don't dare say so because she has sacrificed herself for you, and if you undid that you might have to die instead of her. Not a real sacrifice, one created in your unconscious.”

“It's that depressing?” I couldn't imagine a sacrifice that guilt-producing.

“I don't know that's depressing,” Pogo said. “Perhaps it's bringing forward a part of you that doesn't accept what happened to her but senses, irrationally, that it could have happened on your own behalf. This can create similarly irrational guilt, which we can deal with, but can also help you bring all of yourself into the present, helping you understand her illness and death, that she cannot be cured or returned to you. Acceptance is not necessarily depressing. Perhaps it is only”—and he paused—“growth.”

“You mean I've delayed my grief all this time?”

“Not entirely. Surely you were sad when she died. Also you couldn't write in your diary, remember? You were mute, as in the dream. But then you got up and went on. Except not all of you went on. Part of you stayed behind, in denial. What is the blue tie?”

I chuckled. “Well, Doctor, if I can paraphrase Freud on his beloved cigars, sometimes a blue tie is just a blue tie.”

“And sometimes blue means sad. The doctor cannot cure your mother.”

“If I were a safecracker, tumblers would be falling into place. “Born Blue” is Palmyra Millevoix's song. Yes. I had another dream too. More falling. I dreamed I fell out of bed actually. I startled myself. Possibly I even woke up, I don't recall, to reassure myself I was still in bed and hadn't really fallen. And then I fell right back to sleep. Still falling, heh heh. But this is just the classic dream of being born, isn't it? I'm reborn after my terrifying brush with death in San Francisco.”

“And?”

“Isn't it enough to be reborn?”

“I don't think so.”

That was Pogo's usual way of letting me know he thought there was more to whatever I'd said or interpreted. “What then?”

“This is my own fantasy,” he said. “Use it if you wish. Do you remember your dream of Ulysses? Odysseus?”

Months earlier I'd told him of a dream about Odysseus in which I imagined the hero of the
Odyssey
outwitting a group of players on a football field, running around them toward the goal line, then diving for a touchdown. At the time I'd gone no further than to interpret the dream as my hope of eventually outsmarting the old-timers at the studio and becoming a Jubilee champion writer. Pogo had supported that.

But now, he said, “I think your falling is like your diving, diving means going down, going under. In the earlier dream a touch
down
. You descend in the dream to the underworld, like Odysseus, like the descent to Nighttown in Joyce's
Ulysses
. Odysseus speaks to his mother. You are going to the underworld to retrieve your mother. You are also re-enacting her death even while you, as yourself, join her in the underworld. But you cannot bring her back, and you don't really want to be in the underworld—yet—so you awaken yourself for reassurance. San Francisco shook some apples out of the tree, yes?”

“Ah, so I'm doomed,” I said, “to walk the earth forever, like a Greek unhero, or perhaps like Oedipus himself, looking for the woman who is my mother.”

“But unlike Oedipus, you'll never be able to marry your mother.”

I laughed. “We'll see about that.”

Pogo said, with just a trace of triumph, “An element of a movie plot's what-if is in the dream. What if you hadn't saved yourself in San Francisco, what if you had indeed dropped, fallen, off the fire escape into the not-so-tender mercies of the stevedore Widdelstaedt. What if he became your executioner and sent you to the underworld?”

“Oh.” I was a little dazed. I'd never catch up with this guy.

“Till next time, then.”

“No goddammit.” I was still angry at Pogo's initial failure to see my San Francisco experience as reality. I wanted my parting shot. “Of course,” I said, “if I'd been an Army veteran telling wartime battle experience you'd have had an institutional framework—ah, a soldier at war, he may have shell shock, a terrible revisiting of comrades being bayoneted in the trenches of France. But here's a simple peacetime occurrence where I almost lose my life and your first instinct is to call it fantasy.”

“Your point,” Dr. Pogorzelski said, “is well taken.”

As I entered the studio, the early sun disappeared in mist, leaving a silken sky. The action at Jubilee was not just on the sound stages. Mossy had flown to New York to mend fences. Goddard Minghoff was in charge and ordered a speed-up of all work, including scripts, to let any New York spies on the lot know the boss's absence wasn't hindering production. Having had my confidence shaken by my close call in San Francisco, I consulted Yeatsman on how to write my earthquake treatment. While I was telling him I also had to write something about the strike, he interrupted to tell me Pammy was moping. Minghoff was threatening her with suspension. She was on the lot but hadn't shown up on the set where she was shooting; since she was fond of me I should go cheer her, get her quickly over to her set. My skin, like the peel of a grape about to burst, felt tight, not ample for this labor. I thought, never send a boy to do a man's … but I stopped myself from that kind of thinking.

Pammy answered the door to her bungalow in her robe. To my amazement she kissed me on both cheeks. A strand of her hair, wispy, brushed my chin as she drew back, and I thought I might run a fever. I held my breath, thrilled. I'd never noticed her eyelids, but as she turned aside, blinking, her eyelids, translucent, had the character of thoughtful concern and … alabaster. Having escaped death so recently, I could have died at that moment to preserve the perfection of my bliss. She said she wanted to let me in on a secret no one knew. “I need,” she said, “a confidant. I believe I can trust you.” At this I was, if possible, even more thrilled. I was suddenly an intimate. Speaking or singing, Pammy had a voice like Champagne. Could I take her in my arms? Don't be ridiculous.