Free Another You by Ann Beattie Page B

best .
    Until we meet, Fondly ,
M .

5

    IN A DISTURBING DREAM , the beagle that had run into the road when Cheryl Lanier had been in his car took flight just as he was about to hit it, his attempts to brake in time futile, the car like a heat-seeking missile targeting its object. Marshall was asleep and aware that he was dreaming, but someone or some situation had forced him to be asleep, so it was with the mixed emotions of a person unwittingly drugged, or perhaps hypnotized, somehow kept in a dreamlike state against his will—well: he couldn’t articulate it, but if he’d been forced to describe the way he felt, he could have said only that he felt slightly anesthetized and that while he knew the out-of-control car might cause serious harm, there was a simultaneous awareness that he could relax, because he was only a dreamer in a dream. Then his perspective shifted, and what he saw was a car in the snow, a car that might drive forever, a snowstorm that would continually fall, and beside him in the car was Cheryl. He had thought, within the dream: I’m dreaming , but then he had felt her hand in his and been sure that he was in real time, that whatever was happening was real. Somehow he and Cheryl had gotten out of the car, and they stood on an embankment, ankle-deep in snow, looking down on a miniature car running on its own, as if they were watching a slotcar someone else held the switch for. He felt momentarily pleased, in the dream, like a child taken to look inside a department store window at Christmas, seeing a train whizzing around a track, mounds of cotton sprinkled with glitter approximating fallen snow, small lights warming the interiors of each small cottage. Everyonewas old-fashioned: the women in their wide-brimmed hats and floating scarves, hands plunged into furry muffs; the men in fedoras, holding aloft tiny children who were replicas of themselves. Everyone was waiting—as those at the store window waited—for Santa’s sleigh. He was clasping Cheryl’s hand in childish excitement as the teetering sleigh on its nearly invisible wires began its transit across the night sky, the sound of bells heralding its passage, Santa’s face seen in profile, until the sleigh with its shaky runners disappeared in a denouement of tinkling bells, while down below the automated figures, whose movements had not been well synchronized to correspond to the arrival of Santa’s sleigh, looked up just after he disappeared, their hats falling backward, the children held aloft to gaze upward at absolutely nothing.
    None of which Marshall remembered until, standing with his bare feet on the cold bathroom tiles, he glanced out at the snowy morning, looking through the window to where one long icicle seemed to divide the glass in two. He crossed the floor to rub his pajama sleeve on the smudge of frost inside the window, peering up to see where the icicle originated, peering down to guess the depth of snow. He saw a dog sniffing near a bush. Seeing his car in the drive transformed to an R. Crumb mound, he remembered that not long ago he had been out in the snow, standing on a hill with Cheryl. No, he hadn’t; he had dreamed they stood together in the snow, but actually, the time they had been together, they had been inside his car, or in the tavern. They had not stood in the cold night air and observed any winter wonderland, any department store’s miniature animation of village life on a wintry night. He had heard about her roommate’s problems, she had flirted with him—to give her credit, what she had done was certainly a rather forthright, innovative version of flirting—and driving home he had thought again about the necessity of getting adequate counselling for Livan, about the surprising stupidity of so-called counsellors who should not have been able to keep their jobs if they could only question the victim about how abusive sex might affect her future. For a while he had successfully displaced his hostility