Hall of Small Mammals (4 page)

She is on her fourth menthol when she hears a car in the driveway. A few minutes later, Tommy comes around the corner of the house, his face gaunt under the porch light. He looks out to
the dog pen and seems relieved not to see a mammoth there. If Shirley knows what's good for her, Mawmaw thinks, she won't come anywhere near the house tonight, not with Tommy here. She'll wait until he's gone again before coming home.

“I was knocking out front,” he says, his hand up to shield his eyes from the light. “Guess I should have called first.”

Mawmaw takes another drag of her menthol. In this light, he is only the outline of a man. “What's the matter?” he says, stepping toward her. “It's me.”

H
e's been living with her for not quite a year when Claire first mentions Alan Gass.

“I think I need to tell you about something,” she says. “About
someone
.”

Walker turns down the stereo above the fridge and readies himself for whatever comes next. They are in the kitchen—formerly her kitchen, now their kitchen. The butter crackles around the edges of the potatoes he is frying in a big cast-iron pan. He runs his hand through his dark hair, as if exhausted. If she confesses an affair, what will he do? First, switch off the burner. Second, grab his jacket and go without a word. The third step could involve fast walking, tears, and possibly a stop at the liquor store. Beyond that, it's hard to say.

Claire is on the other side of the kitchen island with her laptop open, an old black T-shirt sagging down her left shoulder, a turquoise bra strap exposed. Until now, she's been quietly at work. She no longer takes classes, but when she did, they had titles like
“Advanced Topics in Sub-Subatomic Forces.” Thanks to a graduate fellowship, she spends most days on the top floor of the physics building at the university, thinking about a theoretical particle called the daisy.

The daisy is a candidate for the smallest particle in the universe, but no one has devised a way to observe or prove the existence of one. Doing so would probably require re-creating the conditions of the Big Bang, which everyone seems to agree would be a bad idea. The wider academic community has not fully embraced Daisy Theory, as it's called. Claire's advisor came up with it, and, like him, Claire believes the mysterious particle is forever locked in a curious state of existence and nonexistence, sliding back and forth between the two. Daisy Theory has helped put Claire's physics department on the map.

“I haven't mentioned him until now because”—she scratches her chin with her chipped electric-blue fingernail—“I was embarrassed, I guess.”

“Just tell me,” he says, wanting this over with quickly.

“All right, here it is. Okay. I'm kind of married.”

“Kind of?” He doesn't understand. Typically, one is or isn't married. He races through the possibilities: she's separated from someone and failed to mention it until now; or rather, she met and married a mysterious man on the sly; or, not a man, but a woman, and what she wants to propose next is an open relationship. No, more likely this is a new and clever update on the same old fight they have about time and priorities. She's married to her
research
, and he just needs to get that through his head.

“No, what I mean to say is, sometimes at night, when I dream, I dream I have a husband.”

“A dream marriage,” he says. “Okay.” He kills the burner under the pan and scrapes the potatoes onto the plates where already the green beans have gone cold.

“Tell me what you're thinking. Does this bother you? You're not the man in the dream.”

“Just so I'm clear,” he says. “This isn't you telling me that you're cheating on me?”

“I'm not cheating on you. Not unless you count dreams as cheating. Do you?”

Walker wonders if this is an elaborate test; if, maybe, he muttered some other woman's name in his sleep the previous night. Although he sometimes dreams about sex, in the morning the details of his encounters are usually hazy and impressionistic, with floating parts that don't connect to a specific face. He doesn't mention this now. A dream marriage, if that's really what this is about, should probably not bother him. He tells her so.

“So it doesn't concern you that I'm in love with someone else in my dreams?” she asks.

“You didn't mention love.”

“Well, I married him, didn't I?”

“Do I know the guy? Have I met him? Please don't tell me it's your advisor.”

Whenever she talks about needing more time for her research, Walker knows, that includes more time alone with her advisor. She reaches across the island for Walker's hand, a gesture that makes him suspect he's about to get more bad news.

“It's not my advisor,” she says. “My husband's name is Alan Gass.”

Alan Gass only exists in her dream, she explains. He is an
ophthalmologist, a tall man with bright blue eyes and a lightly bearded face. His favorite meal in the world is barbecue biscuits. He is allergic to shellfish. Years ago he played college football, but he's put on a little weight since those days. On Saturdays he plays golf, but professes to hate what he calls clubhouse culture. He just likes the wind in his hair, the taste of a cold beer on the back nine. Claire has been married to him for almost a decade.

“Wow,” Walker says. “You have incredibly detailed dreams.”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you. They're super-realistic. Sometimes I dream that we're just eating dinner together, kind of like this. We tell each other about our day. Or we don't talk at all. We've known each other so long, silence is okay at this point, you know?”

Walker takes a bite of the potatoes. Claire hasn't shut her laptop.

“You writing Alan an email over there?” he asks, and expects a full assault of noncommutative geometry, U-waves, big gravity. But when she turns the screen, he discovers that she's looking at a website with pictures of celebrities eating messy sandwiches and picking out shampoo at the drugstore.

“So is Alan Gass better-looking than me?”

“Silly duck,” she says, a recurring joke about his outturned feet. She shuts the laptop and comes around the island. “Silly duck with big sexy glasses.” She plucks the glasses from his face. “Silly duck with snazzy shoes.” She taps his black shoes with her socked feet. “Silly duck with perfect duck lips.” She kisses him.

He stands and wraps his arms around her waist. A former high school volleyball star, Claire is a few inches taller than Walker, and even more so right now with her blond hair up in a
high, messy bun. He doesn't mind her height, but whenever they ride an escalator together, he claims the higher step to see what it's like.

Admittedly, her dream is a strange one—so visceral, so coherent, so consistent—but he can see no reason why Alan Gass should come between them. After imagining a real affair, he feels somewhat relieved. It isn't as though she is actually married and actually in love with an actual ophthalmologist. What counts is that the real Claire—the waking Claire, the part of her that matters—wants Walker and only Walker, and that is the case, is it not? She says that it is most definitely the case. She kisses him, tugs his hand to her cheek. She is relieved, she says, that he finally knows her secret, a secret she's never told anyone, not even her parents. What a weight off her shoulders. Anything he wants to ask, he can ask. She will hide nothing from him.

•   •   •

Over the next few weeks, new details emerge. Claire's dreams began when she was in high school. Walker can't help wondering about the subtle differences between himself and Alan. Alan grew up Baptist in a small town and doesn't drink. Walker grew up Episcopalian and drinks a glass of wine every night. Alan regularly wears suits. Walker prefers tight dark jeans and designer T-shirts. Alan volunteers at a free medical clinic. Walker can't remember the last time he volunteered for anything.

But Walker tries not to dwell on Alan Gass.

Walker is the artistic director at a theater downtown. He met Claire there when she volunteered to help at the box office one semester. He was in that particular production. It was a German
play about a ghost that wreaks havoc on a town by possessing prominent citizens and causing them to behave strangely. The town believes the ghost is that of a young woman who recently drowned herself because of a broken heart. The townspeople set out to find her body, thinking that will satisfy her, but it does not. The ghost responds by taking over the body of the town mayor and hurling the man off a tall building. To try and appease the ghost, the townspeople gang up on the man responsible for the woman's broken heart. They tie weights around his ankles and drop him in the ocean. But that doesn't solve the problem. This man also returns as a ghost looking for revenge. It was a gruesome play. Walker played the second ghost, the heartbreaker. Despite the white gunky makeup, Claire told him he was handsome.

Alan Gass is a ghost, and Walker knows you cannot fight ghosts. They are insidious. You can't punch a ghost or write it a drunken email. You can only pretend the ghost is not there, hope it loses interest, evaporates, moves on, does whatever it is that ghosts do when they disappear completely.

•   •   •

They are sitting in the back row of a half-packed lecture hall on campus. Thanks to Claire's advisor, their university is home to a conference dedicated entirely to the daisy. He is on the stage, pacing before a giant screen of exploding charts and graphics, a headset microphone curled around his ear, a scientific evangelist with brown curls and a bright, boyish face. Daisy Theory is under attack, he warns, from all sides.

Planets, hearts, even the parts of our brains responsible for
dreams—everything in the universe is made of daisy particles. The daisies come together to form larger particles by interlocking in a chain formation. No one is entirely sure what holds the chains together, but Claire's advisor imagines them like the daisy garlands that children wear as crowns.

In theory a daisy chain could pop in and out of existence, just like the individual daisy. In theory your entire body—since every atom in it is nothing but a complex collection of daisies—could also pop in and out of existence.

“Isn't that amazing?” he asks the crowd.

On the top of the conference program, Walker draws two flowers and gives them arms and legs and hands to hold. The figures are like cave paintings. Me, man. You, woman. This, love.

He writes,
Want to be in my chain gang?
and slides the program across his knee to Claire. She smiles and grabs the pen. She doodles a penis on one figure and breasts on the other. They have to avoid eye contact or else they'll lose it.

After the lecture, a handful of people gather in a small white room with mahogany tables, where they quietly sip red wine in groups of two and three. Claire's advisor meanders over with a barely suppressed grin on his face.

“And?”

“Brilliant,” Claire says.

Within only a few seconds, the two of them are lost in daisy revelry and Walker can only nod and smile. “We're stretching math to the breaking point,” her advisor says, turning to Walker. “It's almost unmath. One and one aren't two, but onetyone.” Her advisor has his hand on Claire's elbow, cupping it, as if propping
it up. If he lets it go, her elbow might go crashing to the floor like a satellite from space. But when he walks away again, at last, Walker is pleased that her elbow stays put at her side.

“He's got a thing for you,” Walker says.

“This again?”

“Not that I can blame him.”

“Even if he did,” she says, “it's not like I've got one for him.”

On the way home, because of construction on the bridge, they have to take a detour through another neighborhood. Claire knows these streets better than him but, against her advisement, he takes a left turn. The road dead-ends in front of an old farmhouse, its giant gray shutters flapping in the wind like moth wings. It is early summer, perfectly warm, and they have the car windows rolled down. To turn around he backs their Jeep into the driveway, the brakes squealing. Another car has turned onto the street behind them. They pass it on their way back to the main road, a pearly gray Lexus. The driver's face is obscured by lights across the glass, but Walker can see that he has a military haircut, the gray lines sharp around his ears, the seat belt tight against a white oxford shirt. But his features are blurred. He could be anyone. Even Alan.

Walker waits until they are back on the main street before asking what he wants to ask. Has she ever wondered if Alan is really out there somewhere? That's he not just a dream? What if he's real and dreams he's married to a woman named Claire?

“Very funny,” she says. “I don't think so.”

“You should ask him. What do you normally talk about?”

“The usual stuff. Books, movies. What to fix for dinner.”

“So in the dream, you're definitely still you?”

“Who else would I be?”

“Anyone. A prairie wife, a criminal, whatever. One time I dreamed I was the king of Europe.”

“There is no king of Europe.”

“Right, but the point is, some people dream about being someone else. And apparently you don't. You're you, and Alan is Alan.”

She shrugs. They've reached the house. He parks the car along the curb, lined with tall shapely pear trees, their wilted white blossoms pressed flat into the sidewalk that leads to the front door. Claire inherited the house from her great-aunt. Her parents were both engineering professors at the university. She went away for college but came back for graduate school. Inside, Walker leans over Claire's blue bicycle and flips the light switch on the wall.

“Okay, I have to ask something else,” he says, dropping his satchel on the hardwood floor. “Do you have sex with Alan in your dreams?”

She is ahead of him, halfway up the stairs.

“He's my husband,” she says.

Walker knows that Claire has been with other men. He thinks about this fact as little as possible, though he knows that before him there was another student in her department, and before that a Swedish guy named Jens who actually proposed, and before them a couple of college mistakes and a backseat high school fling. She never mentioned Alan in the list.

“How often?”

“Do you really want to do this?”

“Just tell me once, and then we won't have to talk about it again.”

She's pasting their toothbrushes.

“If you must know, probably a few times a week. But it doesn't often happen in the dream itself. It's kind of offstage action, you know? For instance, the other night, we were on our way to a friend's house for dinner, and the car ride took up the entire dream. But I knew what I'd done over the course of that day. I'd run some errands, picked up the dry cleaning. Baked strawberry brownies for dinner. The dessert was on my lap in the car.”