Michael: A Dream (Embellished)
I slept heavily and I dreamed, and it was a long, involved, epic dream, and it seemed so real — or at least like a really good story that should be written down for posterity.
My boss, Sam, told me I should marry his cousin Michael. Sam was a short, stocky — well, fat — very Jewish-looking man with a black beard, and the hair that was left was still black too, though he was almost fifty. If you put him in a white shirt and a black suit, you’d swear he was a Hasid, but he wasn’t, he was a Buddhist. His parents had been Holocaust survivors and he’d been born in a refugee camp in Sweden. He always told people he was Swedish, and he loved that moment of discomfort they suffered as they tried to figure out whether he was kidding.
Was he kidding now? He seemed so dead serious, so authoritative, that I knew I would have to marry Michael. That I wanted to marry Michael.
Michael was tall, lean, and prematurely white-haired. He had a slightly worn-out look, like someone who’d been through the ringer, but it was over now, he’d learned to live with it and was at peace. There was an innocence about him too, no complicated emotions. He was smart, all right, but his was an old workhorse intellect that didn’t move too fast, and I liked that. We sat next to each other on the couch and talked, both looking straight ahead, not at each other. I told him about myself.
“Sometimes I’m really quiet, I don’t even know what to say. Other times people can’t get me to shut up.”
“Yeah, I’m like that too,” Michael said.
I knew that’s not what he really meant; he meant, “I understand you.”
God, I’d always wanted to marry someone named Michael. Or maybe it was “Joseph,” I forget now.
So it was all set. There was only one problem.
Michael was really a cat. He was a white tomcat named Michael. I had to shlep him home in one of those cat carriers with the prisonlike grille in the front.
The cat peered out of the grille impassively, hunkered down for the disturbing interruption of his comfort that he tolerated because there was no other choice . . . so far. He wasn’t sleepy now, wasn’t hungry, he was just hunched there watching and waiting, relaxed but ready for his chance to break for freedom.
We got home, Michael’s home, that is. It was time to meet all the other relatives, rooms full of them. Michael was tall and handsome, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, talking in a relaxed way with Uncle Jerry. Eighty-eight years old and not a care in the world. It was sweet the way Michael was playfully teasing him, saying things like, “I always thought you looked like T.S. Eliot,” and Jerry said, “T.S.? Tough Shit.” His bitchy wife, Betsy, stood there scowling, but Michael ignored her. Jerry, however, patted her affectionately on her behind, what was left of it.
I was on the other side of the room, meeting Michael’s nephew Gary. He was a short, wiry young guy in his twenties with a darting intelligence and a keen humor, ready to laugh but not finding anything really hilarious. Dark hair, MIT type, Jewish-looking. Funny how in this family the men were all short, dark, and earthily Jewish; only Michael was tall, fair, and genteel. Except when he was a cat; then he was small and fluffy.
Gary and I hit it off right away, both silently recognizing our inner connection as we gazed into each other’s eyes. I knew I could confide in this boy.
“Gary, I’ve got to tell you something.”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t a question.
“I need a guru.”
“A guru. Yeah.” He had no idea what I was talking about but was stalling for time.
I could have had him wriggling like a fish on a line, but I felt sorry for him, so I quickly clarified:
“A computer guru.”
He tittered with relief. “Oh, yeah.” Pause. “How much can you pay?”
Disappointment began seeping in around the edges of my mind, and I closed my eyes, pushing it away. No, this wasn’t happening. He would help me, help me whenever I needed it, help me for forever, help me for free, give me what I wanted, whenever I wanted it. I could call him at any hour of the day or night and pour out my broken, bleeding heart. I thought of all the times I had not known what to do but had not had the patience to stop and figure it out or look it up, and how I’d plowed on ahead, just to do something, but that wouldn’t work and I’d try something else, and I’d keep going, getting lost in a labyrinth of mistakes and problems that I’d never escape from. I’d be frantic, even forgetting what the original task was, when suddenly the computer would start chaotically sending out e-mail messages at random, without my control over what it was saying in my name. I’d have a split second to decide whether to end the task, but before I could figure out whether “Cancel” or “OK” was the right answer, with a popping sound the screen would go blank, and I’d be left staring helplessly at a sickening green-gray void. Next I would strike the wrong key and the computer would blow up in my face.
Gary would understand, Gary would help.
He was looking at me politely. For the first time I realized there was another young guy sitting to my left. His smooth young face was reassuring, and I relaxed. Awkwardly he tried to make conversation. “Have you ever been on a ship, even once? Tell me about one time you’ve ever been on a ship.”
Oh, I could tell a tale. I could tell him about the three-day journey between Pyraeus and Haifa on a ship swarming with horny Greeks, all wanting me. That would impress him. He’d think I was a well-traveled, interesting older woman. She’d had a wild youth but now wore a smart-looking suit and a broad-brimmed hat. Her lipstick was perfect, and someone said she looked like Audrey Hepburn.
But that was a total lie, and he might catch me out at it, with trick questions requiring a knowledge of nautical terms. I would change the subject, tell him of other adventures, offer amusing anecdotes to dazzle and distract him.
There was the time I went to Indonesia and bargained with a street urchin for a pair of shrunken, dried elephant trunks. The kid wanted 88 dollars. When my weak, ugly face betrayed that I would, indeed, purchase them at that price, he set to work at once sawing the trunks off the elephants and drying them lickety-split in a tiered electric food dehydrator. Imagine how I felt after I got home and saw the same thing at Walmart’s, packaged in cellophane, for only 55 cents.
Or what about the time in India when I hopped into a tonga and the horse trotted off at a brisk clip before I could negotiate the fare, and we started going up, up, up a steep hill, and just as we were straining toward the top he said it would be twelve bucks.
“Wha-a-at?!!!”
I hopped out of the tonga and refused to go on. “As you wish, madam.” Clop clop clop, he was gone, leaving me in the middle of a teeming village market where every store was a chikki store. “Chikki Palace.” “Chikki Heaven.” “Chikki Wonderland.” “Chikki Galore.” “Quick Chikki.” “Chikki to Go.” “Chikki ‘n’ Bikki.” But what was chikki?
I got up abruptly. This was starting to feel like a dream and I was panicking. Oh yeah, it was a dream. I had to get out of it.
I knew you could wake up in a dream. But could you go to sleep?
Suddenly I was at Michael’s side, sensing without seeing the white hair at the top of his tallness. I was still staring straight ahead, as if at a single minuscule black point in a circular field of pure white. I struggled to fasten my gaze on the tiny black point, resisting the urge to look at anything else. Peripherally I saw the white circle starting to turn yellowish, the yellow of old peeling enamel wall paint. The time was the early 1950s, the linoleum was black and white, and I felt nauseous.
“‘Nauseated,’” corrected Mother. “‘Nauseous’ means ‘nauseating.’”
This was the moment for Sam to reenter briskly with that authoritative air. He was saying, “You will marry Michael,” but he didn’t actually speak the words out loud. I knew there was no way out.
Would Michael be a cat purring endlessly in my lap, kneading my thighs with his sharp paws, then suddenly jumping down and slinking away with cool indifference?
Michael and I walked slowly up the hill as the sky grew gray and dim around the intensely bright orange ball that was the setting sun. Shyly our hands found each other. For the first time I craned my neck to look up at his face. How I loved him.
It was only a dream, but damn, it seemed so real.