My Dream Man
He was not like the other men. He offered to tie the complex and numerous straps of my top, and I was receptive, lifting my hair with my one hand while he stood behind me and worked. I felt his posture slump horizontally, like a sigh. What’s wrong? He did not respond immediately. He pulled one string across the other and looped it underneath, pressing the strings with the tip of his index finger before tying them into a bow. I felt unexpectedly affectionate. My skin burned where his fingers brushed against me, imperceptible, impossible to understand, as if scalded by a transparent cloud of steam. He finally replied, It will be impossible to sleep without you tonight. I did not turn around. I looked at my bed. Two of the pillows lay beside each other. One was slightly angled, the corner pressed against the other pillow.
I was silent even though I wanted to respond. To express a similar sentiment. But I recently noticed other people enjoyed interrupting or overtaking me in conversation and I realized I was content to remain quiet, preferring to resume the dialogue in my journal or my dreams where language was not confined to the linear chronology of sentences. We could get back into bed. We could be playful and warm and nonverbal. I pulled at the edge of the sheet and watched the fabric slide toward me. I touched his hand.
In the morning I wrote this dream in my journal. The same journal whose pages I handed him in small batches as he attempted to start a fire. I gave them reluctantly at first, as if relinquishing them meant my inner world might grow smaller, and then eagerly. Less space to write might do me good. He thanked me, crumpled the pages in his fist, and stuffed them underneath the logs. He dropped a dozen used matches into the fireplace. Everyone was tired by the time the wood finally caught fire. They went to bed. He lingered for a few minutes but left with a wave. I slept. I woke up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. I was barefoot. The wooden floor was cold as I walked softly across the living room. The embers were still pink and orange in the fireplace.
The page had a single paragraph dedicated to a recurring scenario that I noticed in my dreams: I was somewhere in the woods, hiking, and I warned whoever I was with that the plants at the edge of the trail were poison ivy. The leaves were easy to identify; Three tear-shaped leaves with notched edges, usually green, although sometimes red, like painted lips. I pointed them out to Z when we attempted to fuck in the woods. We scrambled to dress ourselves when we heard a couple approaching on the trail. Later that night we fucked in his bed. Afterward I remembered that our pants were potentially coated in oil from the leaves and hurried to transfer them to his washing machine, carefully holding both by the waist to avoid touching the hems. Z watched me incredulously and suggested that I was exaggerating the severity of my allergy.
Your hometown is responsible, I teased. I was a teenager visiting another Rust Belt city while on a mission trip. One afternoon, when everyone else was inside organizing mildewy storage closets and painting hallways, I walked into the woods behind the church and overturned random logs, looking for salamanders. The rash appeared the next day on my right leg. I could not resist the urge to itch it until I broke the skin. Pus leaked from the wound and hardened into amber droplets like tree sap that I peeled off. My knee swelled several times its normal size. I contracted cellulitis and had to take steroids and antibiotics to combat the infection. The steroids tasted ashy and prevented me from sleeping. I laid on the couch and pretended to read. How enjoyable, I thought, to feign attentiveness, channeling the urge to scratch myself into the task of observation even if I could only comprehend words as visual marks without meaning. The doctor warned me that each time I contracted poison ivy I would become more vulnerable. I could die, I warned. Z was unmoved. It was impossible to determine if I misremembered this diagnosis. Or if I fabricated this warning to instill fear and prevent myself from being careless.
I dreamed more vividly than ever after doubling my progesterone. Z appeared most often. But other men appeared too. Friends’ boyfriends. Acquaintances. B-list celebrities. Twitter personalities. Perhaps because my increased libido spilled over into my unconscious, which seemed to possess my entire ability to fictionalize. This week I sat in front of the classroom and explained to the students that I felt capable of writing fiction (I don’t) because I love lying (I do). As I slept I could unthinkingly exchange one person for another, and I discovered that I could do the same thing while awake, if I concentrated hard enough and arranged my words in a pleasing order. Yet some fundamental truth remained.
In the morning I woke up with my head resting on the chest of the man I love. We made coffee and listened to Lana Del Rey. The glass flower I made was on the coffee table beside the empty pack of American Spirits. I looked at my calendar and tried to pick a date for a “Debt-Free Party” to celebrate paying off my credit card even though I told my friends I paid it six months prior, eager, I think, to seem self possessed; I couldn’t bring myself to return that leather minidress. Such a celebration would be odd, I imagined, when my student debt remained. But a debt never feels like a debt if you don't intend to pay it.
Z finished cooking two hard boiled eggs and frozen sausages and portioned them into Tupperware. I watched while Z stretched on his yoga mat and wanted to say, We’re living it, the good life, I mean, borrowing a phrase from Bonjour Tristesse that I continued to think about. I wanted to climb back into his bed. To fall back into our dream.
Image: Duncan Grant, Untitled Drawing, c.1946-1959.