The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘Yes! And President Obama is going to tab me as the new Poet Laureate!’ Don Allman exclaimed. Then he pointed at something on Wesley’s cluttered desk. The Kindle was currently sitting on American Dreams, the textbook Wesley used in his Intro to American Lit class. ‘How’s that little bastard working out for you?’

‘Fine,’ Wesley said.

‘Will it ever replace the book?’

‘Never,’ Wesley said. But he had begun to wonder.

‘I thought they only came in white,’ Don Allman said.

Wesley looked at Don as haughtily as he himself had been looked at in the department meeting where his Kindle had made its public debut. ‘Nothing only comes in white,’ he said. ‘This is America.’

Don Allman considered this, then said: ‘I heard you and Ellen broke up.’

Wesley sighed.

Ellen had been his other friend, and one with benefits, until four weeks ago. She wasn’t in the English Department, of course, but the thought of going to bed with anyone in the English Department, even Suzanne Montanaro, who was vaguely presentable, made him shudder. Ellen was five-two (eyes of blue!), slim, with a mop of short, curly black hair that made her look distinctly elfin. She had a dynamite figure and kissed like a dervish. (Wesley had never kissed a dervish, but could imagine.) Nor did her energy flag when they were in bed.

Once, winded, he lay back and said, ‘I’ll never equal you as a lover.’

‘If you keep lowballing yourself like that, you won’t be my lover for long. You’re okay, Wes.’

But he guessed he wasn’t. He guessed he was just sort of … mediocre.

It wasn’t his less-than-athletic sexual ability that ended their relationship, however. It wasn’t the fact that Ellen was a vegan who ate Tofurky for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t the fact that she would sometimes lie in bed after lovemaking, talking about pick-and-rolls, give-and-gos, and the inability of Shawna Deeson to learn something Ellen called ‘the old garden gate.’

In fact, these monologues sometimes put Wesley into his deepest, sweetest, and most refreshing sleeps. He thought it was the calmness of her voice, so different from the often profane shrieks of encouragement she let out while they were making love. Her love-shrieks were eerily similar to the ones she uttered during games, running up and down the sidelines like a hare, exhorting her girls to ‘Pass the ball!’ and ‘Drive the paint!’ Wesley had even heard one of her sideline screams, ‘Go for the hole,’ in the bedroom from time to time.

They were well matched, at least in the short term; she was fiery iron, straight from the forge, and he – in his apartment filled with books – was the water in which she cooled herself.

The books were the problem. That, and the fact that he had freaked out and called her an illiterate bitch. He had never called a woman such a thing in his life before, but she had surprised an anger out of him that he had never suspected. He might be a mediocre instructor, as Don Allman had suggested, and the novel he had in him might remain in him (like a wisdom tooth that never comes up, at least avoiding the possibility of rot, infection, and an expensive – not to mention painful – dental process), but he loved books. Books were his Achilles heel.

She had come in fuming, which was normal, but also fundamentally upset – a state he failed to recognize because he had never seen her in it before. Also, he was rereading James Dickey’s Deliverance, reveling again in how well Dickey had harnessed his poetic sensibility, at least that once, to narrative, and he had just gotten to the closing passages, where the unfortunate canoeists are trying to cover up both what they have done and what has been done to them. He had no idea that Ellen had just been forced to boot Shawna Deeson off the team, or that the two of them had had a screaming fight in the gym in front of the whole team – plus the boys’ basketball team, which was waiting their turn to practice their mediocre moves – or that Shawna Deeson had then gone outside and heaved a large rock at the windshield of Ellen’s Volvo, an act for which she would surely be suspended. He had no idea that Ellen was now blaming herself, and bitterly, because ‘she was supposed to be the adult.’

He heard that part – ‘I’m supposed to be the adult’ – and said Uh-huh for the fifth or sixth time, which was one time too many for Ellen Silverman. She plucked Deliverance from Wesley’s hands, threw it across the room, and said the words that would haunt him for the next lonely month:

‘Why can’t you just read off the computer, like the rest of us?’

‘She really said that?’ Don Allman asked, a remark that woke Wesley from a trancelike state. He realized he had just told the whole story to his officemate. He hadn’t meant to, but he had. There was no going back now.

‘She did. And I said, “That was a first edition I got from my father, you illiterate bitch.”’

Don Allman was speechless. He could only stare.

‘She walked out,’ Wesley said miserably. ‘I haven’t seen or spoken to her since.’