Sputterpub's Blog

Lately I’m restless in bed. I don’t toss or turn but also I don’t sleep.

My father once told me it doesn’t matter whether we actually lose consciousness. It’s only important that we rest our bodies and our minds. He counseled me to lie quietly in my bed, to relax. I knew even at eleven when he first told me this that it wasn’t the truth. I sensed then that he was tricking me into some form of sleep-promoting meditation. But it worked.

My father is Japanese and a Buddhist. That advice is typical of him. He has also taught me independence of spirit, control where I’m capable, patience with my mother. Mom is Jewish/Italian; we like to say she leads “a rich emotional life.” Watching my parents has always been more entertaining than TV.

Lately I’m restless because I have so much on my mind. The characters on the Commission. The catastrophe in the elevator. Small wonder I’m not sleeping.

“My name is Isabella Aaroner Muramoto. My face is pretty and my spirit is persistent.” That’s what I wrote on my eighth grade statement when I ran for student body secretary. It made little sense but I won the election. I was a good listener, and they let me take the notes for my class. That’s one of the reasons I remember youth so well; I wrote it down. I understand kids because I recollect. I think I’ll be a good parent. I hope so. Oh God I-beneath-the-level-of novice so humbly invoke the necessary skills…

I continued to be pretty. Persistent. Organized. Determined. Humble. Polite. Hopeful. I was lucky in the love of my parents. I was seen as a good representative. I was successful in elections. High school class president. College yearbook editor. Now the Commission. Next year, maybe City Council.

If the Commission met more often, each occasion wouldn’t be so momentous. But the schedule is monthly. I think that’s why I make such a big deal about it. Always preparing for a week ahead of time, envisioning the other commissioners to get a feel for how they’ll move the meeting. Reviewing the agenda, imagining. And now: afterwards… debriefing myself this way. Replaying the motions and emotions. Understanding.

I pan around in memory…my camera obscura… this dark box…a talking head. Easily I remember a meeting that ended only two hours ago. I’m positioned at one corner of a “U” of rectangular tables: Chairwoman Isabella. To my right are deaf Debra, Lisa, and Weird Walter: to my left the two Carols, blind Barbara, and the ever-formal Commissioner William Jones. Debra and Lisa and Walter, brownhaired and well-proportioned…Carol and Barbara and Carol, lighthaired and grotesque…Commissioner William Jones, tall, black, deep-voiced and proud, with a Caucasian-colored prosthetic right foot. The sight of that Crayola-flesh-toned device, peeking like a lip of Silly Putty between the Commissioner’s pantleg and his New Balance shoe, makes me feel sad in a slow way.

Commissioner William Jones always identifies himself before he speaks to the group. He thanks us for the time when he’s done. I can’t say I really like the man, but he’s a character. The Commission wouldn’t be the same without him.

But maybe the Commission can do without Barbara and the Carols. Tonight I could have done without them.

Jill read a memorable magazine article years ago, about a strange little father-daughter family. The father was mentally retarded or developmentally disabled or otherwise just marginally capable of caring for himself. He’d somehow managed to marry a functional woman, and she had run away sometime after the birth of their daughter. At the time the article was written the little girl was about ten years old. The reporter commented on how miraculous the situation was, with the bright little girl loving and caring for the father. But the reporter also quoted some experts as saying that, while a situation like this little girl’s might be expected to promote autism or at least dysfunction in the child, sometimes (rarely but observably) the child rises to the occasion, and acts like a responsible adult.

Jill knows that. And she’d be the first to declare that the child doesn’t just act like a responsible adult. The child becomes a responsible adult. Short but analytical. Inexperienced but determined. Absorptive and retentive and adventurous. Some of them even take notes.

(Jill crossed over to adulthood herself at five and a half. That’s the primary reason she gets this. She also knows that she views life at least two ways – from the perspective of five and a half as well as from now – but she’s starting to suspect that happens to each of us. Whatever age we look from when we mature, we retain as we proceed.)

So it’s memory but also journals that tell the story. When Anita introduced Jill to Kevin and his friends, back in 1978, the guys were all in their mid-thirties, all married and unfaithful to varying degrees, all surprised devoted fathers. They were lawyers or business people, they wore suits, and they all liked cocktails after work, in bars where the single young women went after their office jobs, alone or in sauntering groups, to sip at vodka or wine until the frustrating edges of their day melted and they became receptive, maybe, to the men’s looks.

At the time, these men seemed harmless and friendly. Now perspective shows that they – far more than any high school boys – were exactly the sexual predators they said they feared when they contemplated their own daughters. Kevin and Bruce and those suited old boys were systematically hunting for what they called “talent” and then comparing war tales, simultaneously eliminating the possibility of intimacy with their own wives while they also betrayed the already low confidence of their single girlfriends. For they talked. They talked out of school like crazy. Kevin betrayed Jill once by announcing to the others that he was going where he knew he had a “sure thing,” and then heading unmistakably for a meeting with her. And she felt a little flattered but mostly exposed when he told his friends he came once just by eating her.

Eddie was the worst. He is an Irish Catholic alcoholic depressive, self-medicated back then with cocaine and gossip. He could be completely charming in his manic phase, and he made up some fantastic stories. He would have had his way with Jill except the night he tried he was far too soused to perform. He did end up with Anita for awhile, and that’s where the problem began. Eddie circulated a nasty fiction about her, with repercussions.

Anita began her tour of that group by having an affair with Kevin. He was accomplished at sniffing out needy females, and he zeroed in on her shortly after she started working and not long after she broke up with her college boyfriend. Flush with the thrills of work and legal drinking, she’d had a number of quick liaisons before settling into some habits with Kevin. He visited her once or twice a week for nearly a year before they both moved on, he to the new secretary in his friend Bruce’s office, and she to Kevin’s friends Pete and Tim and Eddie, and then to Bruce.

She actually feel in love with Bruce. She loves him even now. But he was married of course, and he was more conservative than Kevin. One evening Eddie told the guys that Anita had to have surgery to repair her rectum after he had been too forceful in bed. There was no truth to it, but Bruce stopped calling her. Kevin hadn’t been their deal breaker but it didn’t help when he joked that Allen was the only guy in their group whom Anita had rejected.

Bruce is nice but he’s conventional. It’s easy for Jill to imagine Eddie made enough of a joke of Anita that Bruce decided to discontinue the most important affair of her life. That’s how Jill interprets what happened, based on occasional conversations with Kevin. But Jill couldn’t talk about Kevin to Anita, and Anita wouldn’t talk to Jill about sex. There was no way Jill could tell her about it.

Jill’s going to have to break up with Kevin soon. Except soon can whip by so fast at their age … she could temporarily do nothing and then find months have passed. It’s not like there’s anything so wrong. Mostly it’s that she can see the writing on the wall: they’re old now, and already he’s needing more care and coaxing than she’s likely to want to provide. They’re looking for different things.

And she has to face it: she’s embarrassed by him. This surprises her. She’s spent so much energy not being embarrassed by her weird friends, learning to overcome the humiliation of her mother’s loud opinions, she never thought she’d be embarrassed by conventionality. The fact is, he’s just too suburban, too pot-bellied, too jowly, too white for Jill. She doesn’t like what she senses is assumed about her, when she appears in public as his mate.

Jill hopes to keep him as a friend. She always hopes that. She’s known Kevin so long and they’ve had a lot of practice at it; it may work. Then again, she’s puzzled lately about what friendship is, and her conversation with Kevin, about Anita, hasn’t helped.

If nothing else, Jill wants to see what happens next, to Kevin and his buddies. Because now they are on the cusp of retirement, and suddenly they’re wondering what’s next. For forty years they’ve been married to women who bore them, and mostly they’ve said they stayed married so they’ll have someone to grow old with. Now here they are, about to do that old-growing, and they don’t want to enter this phase with the person they thought all along would be their partner for it.

What will they do?

Kevin has already left his wife and once he accepts the idea that Jill won’t marry him, he’ll look elsewhere. Bruce is probably wobbling in his bad marriage. At least that’s what Kevin figures, but Bruce isn’t talking to him (as usual) and Anita isn’t talking to Jill (as tragic). The only act Kevin and she have ever taken as a couple was the lunch they organized that reunited Anita and Bruce. Kevin had watched their early affair fold in the face of the mean gossip and he felt some responsibility. He told Jill he wanted to make it up to them. She went along with the idea. Three months ago they arranged the reunion lunch.

Anita and Bruce fell right back into sex and love. Anita was ecstatic. Jill thought she was secure. A few weeks after that lunch Anita asked Jill when/why, her face gleaming across a restaurant table with the heat of fresh infatuation, and maybe Jill should have sensed it was no time for heavy truth. Maybe she should have found a way to giggle and coo. But Jill was relieved to finally be able to talk; she told Anita about those long ago libels.

She didn’t expect Anita’s response. “You just can’t stand me being happy, can you?” was the accusation. “You never have taken responsibility for what you did,” Anita blazed. They stayed at that table of pain for at least an hour, alternating between attempts at reconciliation and spears of long-suppressed resentment. In Jill’s opinion, Anita was forgetting how malicious the now-reformed gossiper, fast Eddie, had been. Anita had rewritten the history so that Eddie was always honorable and Anita had never been promiscuous. As far as Anita was concerned, Jill had a warped perspective about sex, always had, and still couldn’t be trusted near the subject.

Anita is incorrect. Jill’s sexuality is no more warped than the next person’s. And it’s waning as she ages. It’s not that she’s uninterested. She hopes she isn’t finished. But the perspective is different.

She saw Kevin last night, and she thinks it may have been for the last time. What pleasure his company provides is getting overrun by his banality. Jill feels tired when she thinks of him. Weary when she contemplates the situation with Anita. Ready for some hibernation time.

She can feel herself retreating, but she understands it’s a temporary condition. She’s pretty sure she’ll come out of it, and then she’ll be ready to re-up with Anita. There’s too much love there to forsake.

It doesn’t hurt that Jill’s more confident now. She looks good. Better than Kevin does. Better than she did. She comes from a family that appears to look older when young and younger when old. She’s finally growing into her features and her personality. Kevin, on the other hand, was a normal cute guy when she met him and he was thirty-five. He dressed in a suit for work and jeans for home, he drove a yellow roadster, and he moved his body well. Now he’s got a paunch. His knees are shot so he walks with a rolling stiffness. The candy-apple red Corvette is embarrassing in any neighborhood. He has spent so many years in the suburbs that he doesn’t even notice how poorly his perennial weekend shorts fit. He must have forgotten that it’s just wrong to wear socks with sandals.

And Jill weighs less. She’s always been a shape-changer, and her last project removed 20% of the body she’d been carrying around. Couple that with the effects of increased regular activity, and she’s wearing a smaller size than she ever wore (or even imagined). It used to be she always watched what she ate, and Kevin could be careless. The situation is now so reversed he actually urges food on her.

But also she feels weightless, without the elephant. As natural as it has always felt to spend time with him, as easy as the laughs have sometimes been, as hearty the affection, they’ve had the shadow of Anita with them. Jill has usually decided not to let Anita know if Jill had any plans to see him, because Anita wanted it that way. She asked for silence, so Jill hasn’t told her about whatever was said. As often as Anita and Jill spoke, it was odd – avoiding a subject like that. And it was awkward for Jill, watching Anita avoid too. Because the fact is, Anita was never open with Jill about sex, after 1978. They’d try to talk about Kevin, to settle the subject, and Anita would quickly maintain that Jill had no right, ever, to an ex of hers. Jill would remind her that she had given Jill permission – had in fact pushed the flirtation – and Anita simply denied that. “You just should have stopped,” she’d say. And “I’m not going to discuss it any more.” And so the elephant grew between them, and grew until it recently became their whole world.

Except the elephant no longer visits when Jill is with Kevin. She is old with him but she feels lovely and carefree.

She isn’t surprised that Kevin is boring. Even in the beginning, when he regaled her with stories about his philandering exploits and partying triumphs, she remembers marveling most at the idea that he’d already told these exact same stories a hundred times, to a hundred lovers, in a hundred dusks. It was always dusk because he was always married and they weren’t, and he didn’t travel. So all of his trysts were from when he could leave work to when he had to be home. Except with Jill. She was his only married lover. They had to make it work at lunch. He’d pick her up in that Porsche and they’d buzz over to her friend Karen’s apartment, where somehow they’d manage to do it twice, and shower too, and talk like maniacs, and still get back to work by mid-afternoon, ready with excuses like addicts (“just let me get away with it this one more time”). He had a steel-trap memory and no hesitancy to reminisce, and Jill remembers thinking that he must find it tiresome, hearing himself narrate the same old tales.

Maybe not. Maybe Jill is just projecting. She hates boredom more than just about anything – even when she bores herself. But now she’s spending time with Kevin again, and what’s more familiar to her than the sex is the impatient boredom she can feel swelling in her, when he lengthens a recollection, even one about them, or drags out some banal question, like “Gee: what do you think we should say when our kids ask us if we used drugs?”

So they’re having sweet free times, but he’s boring. They’re finally both single and they can associate openly. Anita has hung Jill for the horse so Jill might as well ride it. They can meet with easy minds and spend time together without having to call someone and tell a lie. They smile honestly when they see each other and they like to be together. But then Kevin gets intense and starts nagging Jill with “Isn’t this great? Aren’t we having a good time?” Or he retells a story she’s heard too often. And Jill finds herself checking her watch and calculating how soon she can be back at her place, alone.

But she is doing that with Anita, too. She loves her, she loves seeing her, her heart warms at the sight of Anita’s face. And after an hour of conversation she realizes she’s bored; she’s distracted by thoughts about how to get free.

Part of Jill’s boredom may be anger. These are friends who opted for the paths of least resistance, while she was early thwarted and rewarded and so stubborn about blazing trails. Jill remembers noting mistakes her parents made, and knowing that she could have stayed angry with them for a long time, but opting instead to forgive them; they meant well. Anita went a different way: she stayed angry and hid herself. Jill kept blaring who she was at her intimidated parents and while they don’t know all about her, they know much more than they could have. Anita always advocated playing a part. Act the good daughter but then do what you want. And so in his way did Kevin. Ever the apprentice: that’s what he was taught.

Now Anita has friends and relatives and a social life but she also has nervous ailments and profound insecurity. She feels that if she really shows herself, her loved ones will leave her. Or Kevin – he acts the gregarious sport but alone is angry and agoraphobic. His biggest complaint now is about the lack of intimacy and spiritualism in his life. He reads Joseph Campbell and craves a sum-more-powerful-than-its-parts relationship. More than anything else, that goal establishes his incompatibility with Jill.

Because she doesn’t want that relationship. And she doesn’t want to act like whom she isn’t. That makes as much sense to her as cheating at solitaire, or wearing falsies around a guy she hopes to bed. She started blaring her separate identity when she was a child, and she’s still blaring it. See me. Hear me. Touch me. Feel me. This above all: know me.

“So what the fuck is friendship?” Jill asked Kevin after she told him about Anita. In the old days the narration would have been between but now it was after. Now his chest hair is white and her belly skin sags. Now there are no cigarettes and the bed is her own. But they have the oldies FM radio station on, so the music is the same. Their vision is dimming at the same pace that the wrinkles appear. And they don’t have to look over their shoulders for spouses or best friends.

Jill ran into Kevin four months ago. They’ve worked in proximate financial districts for the nearly thirty years since they met, and that’s never happened before. They encountered and appointed and reminisced, and then they did it some more. And Jill might say it was the best sex ever if she were careless about recording her history. But she’s always aimed to remember her life, and she and Kevin are old now; there’s no way it could be the best any more. When Jill hears newly enamored peers proclaim they’re experiencing best ever, she knows that they’re forgetting their old vigor. The girls are mistaking their middle-aged languor for some new orgiastic capability, and the boys, so guarded and orchestrated now about their infrequent ejaculations, are spending more time on the girls.

It wasn’t the best ever, but it was the easiest.

She exited her building on Pine Street at three on a gorgeous Thursday. She looked upwards after reading seventy-four degrees on the Bank of the Orient sign, and the sky was so blue it almost hurt her eyes. The air felt smooth on her forearms and the shadows were crisp as stencils on the ground. She had the bank deposit in her back pocket and the office keys in her front. She was unencumbered and enjoying it. And suddenly, there was Kevin.

He wore khaki slacks and a blue sport coat. His belly pushed his jacket open. His pockets were distorted by personal electronic devices. His grey hair was too short but it still covered his head. He held two inches of a cigar in his left hand. Old Kevin.

“Hey hey!” he exhorted when he saw her. He stopped walking and pulled his upper body back. Kevin had jowls even as a young man – hanging neck and dangling balls Jill would never forget – and his rear-back folded his wattles into fourths.

“Hey hey” he said again, and she came smiling into his strong hug. Then he looked at Jill, at the cigar, again at Jill, and he tossed the stub in the street. “Well hey … you look great.”

They met in 1978. They were introduced by Jill’s friend Anita, they fell for each other immediately, and the next day Anita tried to cancel what had begun so well. Anita had a history of sorts with Kevin, and she said Jill couldn’t have him. Jill resisted that cancellation, which produced an episodic but enduring problem between Anita and her, acutely during the initial affair and chronically since then, just about every time the subject arose, permitting the exchange of active respect and love but prohibiting the transfer of trust, like some one-way valve. The sore old subject was their elephant.

“It’s good to see you too. I can’t believe this … just running into you.”

There’s really nothing special about Kevin. At least nothing for which he can take credit. Never was. That may be his attraction for Jill. He’s an average white guy, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, an inch over six feet, tending to fat now that he doesn’t do sports any more. He was a good team player, an outgoing guy, a decent student who always lacked motivation.

Kevin’s a good old guy, successful with women but popular with other sporting men. He’s always had a model for whatever role he cared to play, so he’s an habitual acolyte too. He’s exactly the type of man Jill never has, which is almost surely why she has wanted him.

Jill was always a nerd magnet. The good friend to all eggheads and the secret infatuation for many of them. A specialist with the distractible, the stutterers, the odd. She was often the friend and sometimes the mentor of the quarterback and the cheerleader, but she never got to be a player. So she’s a sucker for a guy like Kevin. Now and then a jock has found her exotic, and she has fallen hard for that attraction. It didn’t matter that it bored her to be with him; the anticipation of the date, or the embarrassing memory of his physical confidence at the end of it, invariably animated her interest for more.

Kevin was bright enough, for a jock. Less smart than Jill thought at first, but intelligent enough to spend hours with. He always had an amazing memory. Almost as good as hers. In the same way that Jill has been misled sometimes to think someone stupid because he can’t remember things, she tends to mistake good memory for good brain. Kevin was never as bright as his memory made him seem.

But Jill knew all that four months ago. She knew it twenty-eight years ago, when first she fucked him. The truth is, he looked at her with sincere desire and a wide smile, and she fell for it again. He acted powerful and determined and even though Jill knows about his eczema and chronic reflux she felt myself condense and tuck in under his arm.

They had a drink that first day, and then a late lunch the next week, which ended in her bed. The sex was good enough, but it was not what it had been when they were young. Kevin remembers how exciting he found it then, the way she held his head to take her pleasure. As widely experienced as he was, Jill was the only woman who ever did that to him.

She doesn’t hold his head any longer. Either she know it’s going to be productive, or they just wriggle out of that now. But he holds hers. She knows he’s really just trying to get himself going, but it’s arousing anyway, to have his hands firmly about her ears, pulling her face to his mouth as he wrestles her beneath him.

Adam almost made the move back to Manhattan, but money was tight and the only way he could support Sharon and Ellen was if he lived in the same house with them. He didn’t exactly get back together with Sharon but it wasn’t an armed camp either. He took over the small study and made it as metropolitan as he could, but the compositions he produced in it and in other cruise cabins never took him further than other cruise cabins.

Sarah kept writing. She composed about three sonnets a week for nearly a decade, and then developed a broader range, expanding into essays and stories. She learned that work produces inspiration, instead of the other way around, and she worked.

She also saw her gynecologist. She was relieved to hear she had no infection or disease. She was dismayed to be told she had insufficient natural lubrication. She’d had a hysterectomy at 35, but she remained married and sexually active till almost 40. Things had changed for her, down there, in the ensuing almost two years of celibacy, and she just hadn’t noticed. She kind of wished she could explain to Adam, but she never had the opportunity.

It’s been nearly 20 years and they haven’t seen one another again. Adam looks for Sarah on the Internet more often than he ever thought he would, and he finds a sonnet now and then with a name close enough to hers that he thinks she’s writing.

Sarah googled Adam once, and gathered from the results that he was still alive, still working cruises, and publishing some complaints about the cruise entertainment industry.

She hasn’t had her dream again. As she would say, “big surprise.” The month she began regular writing she understood the metaphor. She probably said “no duh” to herself when she realized that the forgotten room in her dream stood in for the part of her mind she was finally using.

But she always felt a little bad about the sobbing. She regretted scaring Adam that way. She wished she could have been cooler. She wondered if she’d ever have the capacity to be involved and stay cool.

It wasn’t till last week, when she told the Adam story to a new friend, that Sarah started to view the emotions of that morning differently. “Oh my,” she thought then.

She sees now that part of her sobbing was sudden grief about how much she’d miss Adam. And part of it was fear that whatever miracle had begun, in terms of confidence and about writing, might stop with the removal of the magic feather. She knew those already. What she just realized was that the sobbing wasn’t only about grief and fear. It was also the cathartic release that accompanies big achievements. Her sobs signified a colossal unclogging.

Sarah received a prophecy when she was 21. At an end-of-college party she had her Tarot read by the woman who’d taught her comparative literature course four years earlier. Mrs. Hamilton told her she’d be 40 before she got the writing started. Sarah was beyond dismayed to hear that. She would have disregarded the forecast except that Mrs. Hamilton had been a force amazing when they met before.

She was Miss Litov then. Like all freshmen, Sarah was required to take a basic reading course: English, Comp Lit, Drama or Speech Arts. English was full so she enrolled in Comp Lit. Litov was her professor.

They were assigned to write criticism, but Sarah didn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead she kept a journal. She crafted poetry and prose in the style of the selected writers or in conversation with them, and she turned in her journal at the end of the quarter.

Miss Litov had scheduled a 15-minute “oral” with each student. As soon as she got Sarah alone she faced her and asked “Why do you write like a man?”

Sarah sputtered. She answered about whom she admired: Yeats, Service, Swift, Donne. Litov then gave Sarah some wisdom. She described the effect of love on art. She argued that men have to choose between love and production, but that a woman can use her emotions for material. A woman artist, she said, can ride her hormones. She urged Sarah to keep working, and to let her femaleness flow through everything.

Sarah lost Litov after that. And when she started hearing about the mentor of a friend’s friend – a professor named Mrs. Hamilton who had a possibly Svengali-like effect on an acquaintance named Ruth – she had no suspicion that Mrs. Hamilton was Miss Litov. It wasn’t till Sarah was seated at Ruth’s close-the-apartment party, plate of spaghetti on her lap and glass of Chianti between her feet, informed at least three times that Mrs. Hamilton was due to make an appearance, it wasn’t till the door opened to admit Ruth’s teacher that Litov-Hamilton’s eyes met Sarah’s, and recognition occurred.

That was the night Mrs. Hamilton shuffled the Tarot cards and announced that Sarah would be 40 before she called herself a writer.

Sarah got busy soon after, marrying and working a financial district job that became a career, birthing babies, divorcing, marrying, divorcing, raising those kids and a sick dog and a small nonprofit. She didn’t notice till recently that she started writing regularly when she was 41, that the habit originated in a dark windowless room in the quiet center of movement, and that the genesis was a deluge and an exodus as well.

She didn’t see Adam till the end of lunch. Her parents had opted for the buffet instead of the sit-down dining room, which suited salad-loving Sarah, and she was excusing herself from their table when she saw Adam at the beverage dispenser. She felt daring; she walked up to him and murmured something about an afternoon nap. He glanced at her with a look that cycled from surprise to glee. “Of course,” he nodded.

He had to finish his laundry first. That should have shot the mood or at least provoked an agreement to meet a little later, but it was like they’d found one another by accident, latched on in an eddy, and neither was willing to let go. Each was amused, beguiled, aboard. They folded his stretched white briefs and his thin white undershirts together.

So began the strangest happiest affair either ever had. Passengers assumed they were an established couple. They often walked around the Promenade Deck together, and they were compatibly sociable. After each evening’s show they went to the bar above the bridge, where Adam sat at the piano and played whatever the drinking passengers requested. Sarah drank countless cups of ship’s coffee. She didn’t mind the time at all. That was unusual for her, but she felt easy. She enjoyed the music and waited for Adam to close the piano, shake down his unbuttoned white cuffs, say his goodnights and walk her out of there, hand confidently cupped under her elbow, to his cabin and good-humored affection.

Neither was bothered about the time spent with others – in fact they basked in the social approval, their eyes and smiles meeting across the conversation with whichever passengers accosted them – but they giggled like kids out of school when they got alone. And they agreed that the nights were too precious to waste in sleep, so they kept drinking coffee and talking. They traded nightmares.

Both of them had recurring dreams about architecture. These weren’t horrific, but they were disturbing enough to be described. Adam thought his was triggered by his recent move. After a lifetime in Manhattan he had tried to be a husband and father in a New Jersey suburb. He bought a car and even got somewhat comfortable driving it, before he acquired the divorce. And since then, wanting to be close to his daughter, he had remained in the suburban neighborhood. He hated the place. He was starting to consider a move back to the city. He was trying to justify an arrangement where he’d only be able to see Ellen on some weekend afternoons. His recurring dream had him lost in the floorplan of a ranch house in his despicable neighborhood, under extreme pressure to find his way out (and his jacket) in order to make it to an important gig. He interpreted it as combining geographical incompatibility with a dose of performance anxiety. He noticed that the closer he got to deciding to return to a small space in the big city, the more creative his brain became. He was finally composing again, late nights on this very trip, and he hoped that signified a return to some better version of his former self.

Sarah’s dream was more recurrent. She been having it as long as she could remember. Every time it played it seemed familiar and ancient.

It was set in a house. She could have drawn the floorplan, she’d been there so often. It was built on a slope and was taller at its back end than its front. The property was dotted with tall deciduous trees: birch or maybe aspen.

The dream always had her moving through the house for some natural reason. And it always ended with her discovery of the unused room. Off the kitchen – an interior space with no windows. Sarah’s progress through the house seemed to spiral inward like a nautilus shell, to the forgotten room. She always experienced a moment of recognition as she entered it (“Oh yeah, this place”), and then the anxiety started (“This time I won’t forget. How how how shall I use this room?”) as the dream ended.

That was serious talk for Adam and Sarah. Most of the time they were telling jokes or stories. And always they were touching.

Adam sold recordings of himself playing and of course he gave Sarah one the night before the cruise ended. He refused to sign it (“What would I write? best wishes?” he joked with a significant look). He insisted, to Sarah and her parents, that he would see them all soon.

It was odd how Sarah went from well-adjusted appreciative six-day lover to passionate wreck, but that’s what happened. She was okay when she said goodnight to Adam alone for the last time, at 4:30 that final morning. Instead of sleeping a few hours, she turned from that embrace and assumed a prone position diagonally on her narrow bed, where she began writing an erotic sonnet that she viewed as the lyrics to whatever melody Adam was then composing. Every night when he’d left her it was to work in his lined composition book, but only on that last one did she mimic him.

She was okay then, but at disembarkation time she surprised herself, startled her parents, and alarmed Adam. She broke down saying goodbye to him. Her face swelled, her eyes filled, her voice choked. The emotions were sudden and uncontrollable. She managed to board the bus and hunker up against a window. She continued quietly crying all the way from the dock to downtown Anchorage.

Her sobs upset him. He tried to put them out of his mind but her grief seemed too extreme to disregard. He called her once, from San Juan while working on a Puerto Rican run, but the connection was bad and half of their sentences were garbled. And although he had given her his P.O. box and invited whatever, the love poems she sent didn’t charm him.