"What do you hear from your folks? It's hard to believe they spent four full years in Germany. It went by like that."
"They're both fine," she said. "They want me to come over in the spring and if I can manage it I'd love to go. All those mosques."
"Turkey is a blending of several cultures, I understand."
"So mother says. Incidentally, I dreamed about you last night, David."
"Did you? Did you really?"
"We were sitting in the living room of the house in London where I stayed with my cousin Edwina that time."
"What were we talking about? Do you remember what I said?"
"I don't think we were talking about anything."
"I take it we were fully dressed. Or you would have mentioned something."
"Yes."
"What were we wearing?" I said.
"I don't remember."
"And we were sitting, not standing or walking around."
"I'm sure we were sitting. I was near the window. I was looking out on Lennox Gardens. And you were on the other side of the room."
"What was I doing?"
"You were just sitting there," she said.
"We must have been doing something. We must have said something to each other."
"I don't remember, David."
"Try to remember. It's important."
"Why?"
"Because there might be some kind of clue there. I mean it's not as though I strayed into a labyrinth. It's all part of some design. You put me in your dream and it's important for me to know what mission I was assigned. It's a kind of reprieve to enter someone else's sleep. The dream can tell you that you're not guilty after all. It's like a second chance. There's some kind of valuable clue in there someplace. Now try to remember what we did besides just sit there. Try to remember what we said to each other. It's important."
"I've told you all there is. If there's anything more I'm afraid I've lost it."
"I guess I'm making too much of it," I said. "Okay, let's hear about Puerto Rico and all the fascinating men you met down there."
She put the glass to her lips, looking at me over its rim. Then she decided to tell me.
"There was one. There on business. Extremely nice. You'd like him, David. Dry sense of humor. Very athletic. A photographer. There on assignment for Venture. He was born in Germany, which gave us something to talk about right away, my parents having been there and all. He lives in a converted farmhouse near Darien. Very married. Three sons. You'd just know that someone like Kurt would have all boys. That's the type he is. Athletic. Outdoorsy. Tweed and leather. But very married. We enjoyed each other's company. That was all. Nothing can possibly come of it."
This police-blotter description, meant to conceal the way she felt about him, had precisely the opposite effect; so precisely, in fact, that I wondered whether she had planned it that way. The stratagems of marriage sometimes seem refreshingly artless next to those of ex-marriage. She poured two more drinks and we talked further about Kurt. Meredith liked to confide in me. After some early hedging for form's sake, she would tell me about each of her romances with what seemed to be complete honesty. I enjoyed these discussions. They seemed to generate a real warmth between us, a fine, old and mellow heat, brandy by a fireside. I gave her genuine sympathy and some good advice and when my turn came, as it always did, to stand by that cheery fire and lift that grand old snifter and sing of my own true loves, I told nothing but lies. It was very entertaining. Soon I began to understand the attraction of pathological lying. To construct one's own reality, then bend it to an implausible extreme, was an adventure even more thrilling than the linguistic free falls of the network. I think I went at it fairly well for a novice. I learned that in an atmosphere of seclusion, intimacy, motel-confessional, no lie is too gaudy, no cliche too familiar, no side-trip of the imagination too dramatically scenic. Beyond sheer entertainment value there were exactly ten reasons for lying to her. (1) The manic quality of these stories provided a nice balance to Merry's conventional episodes of the heart and lower glands. (2) The night was swarming with serious young people telling their troubles to each other and I preferred to stand aside from all this empathy and slush. (3) The telling of needless lies to a loved one, or former loved one, stimulates in the liar a complex feeling of regret, guilt, superiority, pity, tenderness and power-a compound I would take downstairs with me and analyze like a vial of splendid chemicals. (4) The fabulist in me, lurking just below the water-line, welcomed the challenge of topping each new lie and looked forward to some distant nexus of perfection, the super-union of all lies into one radiant and transcendental fiction. (5) Related to (4). Man's amoebic inching thrust toward godlike creativity. (6) Being beyond gravity, weightless, in a dream assembled by one's own hands. (7) The sexual excitement aroused in both of us. (8) Boredom. (9) I put something of myself into some of those stories and hoped, in vain as it turned out, to arrive at a definition, one disguised of course by the surrounding absurdity-a definition of myself without the usual anguish such readings entail. (10) There was really nothing to tell her in the way of troubles, romantic or otherwise. The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person. This would have been hard to explain.
"The dream, David. I just thought of something. Maybe the clue is that we were just sitting there."
"The way we're sitting here."
"Maybe that's it. Maybe I was repressing something."
"Maybe that's it," I said.
Then, right on cue, she went to the window like Olivia de Havilland, so gracefully ill.
"It's still snowing," she said.
Communication between us was extremely precise. For a moment I thought of all the old Burtian and Kirkesque characteristics, the clenched emphatic fist, majestic teeth, angry hand brushing the hair, the surprise of a colossal smile, a smile as rich and full as a field of sun-cut Kansas wheat, and then a touch of passionate sadness, low flame in the eyes. Kirk as Van Gogh. Burt as the Birdman of Alcatraz. It was a comfortable feeling to be back in the simpleminded past. I noticed two new prints on the wall. I couldn't identify the artists but their subject was the same, expressionistic Germany, thick black plague and guilt, and I felt almost sure she had become interested in German painting because of her photographer friend, the man's man of the great outdoors. I moved toward her and the moment my hand touched her hip, loose and soft and lazy inside the housedress, I thought of the girl I had said goodnight to only several hours before, and of the circle she would resume with her sisters or brotherly lovers, the circle I had been afraid to enter. Meredith nude by the window was a known quantity. I took off my shirt.
Minutes later we were in bed and there was the feeling of a strange conspiracy. There was gratitude between us then, communication, mutual willingness to honor our conspiracy. And at the end, the fevers of our breaths mingling, what I knew more than anything was the feeling of coming back to an old and affectionate house. It was the twenty-first time we had made love in the five years since our divorce.
I carried in the portable TV and we watched a movie for half an hour or so. It was one of those old English films in which people are always promising to meet at Victoria Station the moment the war is over. She fell alseep then, on her belly, one leg draped over my thigh, her all-American ass classic and twinkling, campus-worthy as ever. My head went to one side and I was just beginning to go to black, in network parlance, when I heard footsteps in the hall below and the sound of crinkling paper. I knew that the journalist who shared the second floor with me was sneaking across the hall to put one of his garbage bags outside my door. Whenever he had just one bag for the janitor's morning pickup he left it by his own door; more than one bag, I got the surplus. I imagined his thin dry figure, in Punch-and-Judy pajamas and brown peeling slippers, hunching its way along the wall, teeth clamped tight and face all knuckled up. There are things nobody understands. In the last analysis it is the unseen janitor who maintains power over us all.