You don't dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it every minute you are asleep, as though were having a long dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep, sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.
That was the way it was for a while after I didn't have any job. It wasn't new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had even given a name to it–The Great Sleep. The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph. D. in American History. It was almost finished, and they said it was O. K. The sheets of typed-on paper were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes f cards were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there, the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paperweight. And I'd see them there when I came in after supper to go to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door and didn't come back and left them there. And the other time the Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out the apartment and Lois started to get the divorce.
But this time there wasn't any American History and there wasn't any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.
When I did get up I just piddled around. I went to movies and hung around speak-easies and went swimming or went out to the country club and lay on the grass and watched a couple of hot bastards swing rackets at a little white ball that flashed in the sun. Or perhaps one of the players would be a girl and the short white skirt would swirl and whip about her brown thighs, and flash in the sun, too.
A few times I went to see Adam Stanton at his apartment, the fellow I had grown up with at Burden's Landing. He was a hot-shot surgeon now, with more folks screaming for him to cut on them than he had time to cut on, and a professor at the University Medical School, and busy grinding out the papers he published in the scientific journals or took off to read at meetings in New York and Baltimore and London. He wasn't married. He didn't have time, he said. He didn't have time for anything. But he'd take a little time to let me sit in a shabby overstuffed chair in his shabby apartment, where papers were stacked around and the colored girl had streaked the dust on the furniture. I used to wonder why he lived the way he did when he must have been having quite a handsome take, but I finally got it through my head that he didn't ask anything from a lot of the folks he cut on. He had the name of a softy in the trade. And after he got money, people took him for it if they had a story that would halfway wash. The only thing in his apartment that was worth a plugged nickel was the piano, and it was the best money could buy.
Most of the time when I was at Adam's apartment he would be at the piano. I have heard it said that he was pretty good, but I wouldn't know. But I didn't mind listening, not if the chair was good and comfortable. Adam must have heard me say one time or another that music didn't mean much to me, but I suppose that he'd forgotten it or couldn't believe that it was true for anybody. Anyway, he would turn his head at me and say, "This–now listen to this–my God, this now is sure a–" But his voice would trail off and the words which were going to tell what the thing sure and eternally was in its blessed truth would not ever get said. He would just leave the sentence hanging and twisting slowly in the air like a piece of frayed rope, and would look at me out of his clear, deep-set, ice-water-blue, abstract eyes–the kind of eyes and the kind of look your conscience has about three o'clock in the morning–and then, unlike your conscience, he would begin to smile, not much, just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, "Hell, I can't help it if I look at you that way, buddy, it's just the way I look at things." Then the smile would be gone, and he would turn his face to the piano and set his hands to the keys.
Sooner or later he would get enough of the music and would drop into one of the other shabby chairs. Or he might remember to get me a drink, or might even take one himself, paler than winter sunlight and about as strong. We'd sit there, not taking, sipping slow, his eyes burning cold and blue in his head, bluer because of the swarthiness of the skin, which was drawn back taut over the bones of the face. It was like when we used to go fishing, when we were kids, back at Burden's Landing. We used to sit in the boat, under the hot sun, hour after hour, and never a word. Or lie on the beach. Or go camping together and after supper lie by a little smudge fire for the mosquitoes, and never say a word.
Perhaps Adam didn't mind taking a little time out for me because I made him think back to Burden's Landing and the other days. Not that he talked about it. But once he did. He was sitting in the chair, looking down at the eyewash in the glass which his long, hard-looking, nervous fingers were slowly revolving. The he looked up at me, and said, "We used to have a pretty good time, didn't we? When we were kids."
"Yeah," I said.
"You and me and Anne," he said.
"Yeah," I said, and thought of Anne. Then I said, "Don't you have a good time now?"
He seemed to take the question under advisement for a half minute, as though I had asked him a real question, which maybe it was. Then he said, "Well, I don't suppose I ever thought about it." Then, "No, I don't suppose I ever thought about it."
"Don't you have a good time?" I asked. "And you a big-shot. Don't you have a good time being a big-shot?" I didn't let go. I knew it was a question you haven't got any right to ask anybody, not with the tone of voice I heard coming out of my mouth, but I couldn't let go. You grow up with somebody, and he is a success, a big-shot, and you're a failure, but he treats you just the way he always did and hasn't changed a bit. But that is what drives you to it, no matter what names you call yourself while you try to stick the knife in. There is a kind of snobbery of failure. It's a club, it's the old school, it's Skull and Bones, and there is no nasty supercilious twist to a mouth like the twist the drunk gets when he hangs over the bar beside the old pal who has turned out to be a big-shot and who hasn't changed a bit, or when the old pal takes him home to dinner and introduces him to the pretty little clear-eye woman and the healthy kids. There wasn't any pretty little woman in Adam's shabby apartment, but he was a big-shot, and I let him have it.
But it didn't register on him. He simply turned on me the candid, blue gaze, slightly shaded by thought now, and said, "It just isn't something I ever thought about." Then the smile did the trick to the mouth which under ordinary circumstances looked like a nice, clean, decisive surgical wound, well healed and no pucker.
So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was, and pulled out the soft-and sweet stop, and said, "Yeah, we did have a good time when we were kids, you and Anne and me."
Yes, Adam Stanton, Anne Stanton, and Jack Burden, back in Burden's Landing, had a good time when they were children by the sea. A squall might, and did, pile in off the Gulf, and the sky blacked out with the rain and the palm trees heaved in distraction and then leaned steady with the vanes gleaming like wet tin in the last turgid, bilious, tattered light, but it didn't chill us or kill us in the kingdom by the sea, for we were safe inside a white house, their house or my house, and stood by the window to watch the surf pile up beyond the sea wall like whipped cream. And back in the room behind us would be Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden, or both, for they were friends, or Judge Irwin, for he was a friend, too, and there wasn't a wind that would ever have the nerve to bother Governor Stanton or Mr. Ellis Burden or Judge Irwin.