18

I dreamt I was a paper doll. I was one in a row of paper doll cutouts sitting on a swing set. We wore triangular lime-green dresses and had shoulder-length flip hair, like from the sixties.

At lunchtime I tried to draw the dream, but couldn’t. Beyond the doll bodies, there had lain a sleepy hint of magic, something astral and sublime that continued to insinuate itself upon me, like an ocular echo. After school I rummaged through my mother’s bossa nova records. There were ones by João Gilberto, Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim. I finally settled on Getz/Gilberto because it had Astrud Gilberto singing “Corcovado.”

I stripped to my long johns, leaving my clothes in a pile near the hearth, and I listened to the song, closing my eyes to reconstitute the dream’s elusive vitality, its lightness and lift. The song was delicate and de-emphasized, melodious and modern, serene and insurgent, similar to the feel of my dream. It was feminine, but also civic and political. The women on the swings had been separate and connected—it would not have been possible to extract one without collapsing the whole. It was the way women used to be in the 1960s, or maybe just the way I imagined them to be. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t draw the dream but try to cut it, so I got a stack of paper from the basement and some sewing scissors from Kate’s room, then returned to the fireplace.

By the time I heard the rain, it was after six o’clock. Frozen drops were making a spreading sound on the roof, like nickels on a tent. I once proposed a study of the water cycle for a science fair. I wanted to draw attention to the beauty of the rain. Everyone always just complains about it.

Nick Kraft, the earth science teacher, said, “No way. Do not try to make rain.” He recommended a tidal wave or a volcano. “Tragedy is more fun,” Nick told me. “You buy some glue and plastic doodads at the five-and-ten, and create a theater of disaster.”

I wasn’t surprised by his response. In high school, the study of the earth is pretty much the study of maps and catastrophe, as though the only possible points of interest are border wars and devastation. It’s similar in other subjects—history is the history of battle, language is the study of English, and science is an excuse to play with acid and cut frogs. If you’re waiting for some creative digression into the rhetoric of math or the zoology of conquest, you will be waiting a long time.

I spread my legs as wide as possible and folded another sheet of paper in rectangular strips. I’d been having trouble with the hairstyles. They weren’t flipping properly. In my dream the hair had been weightless, curling up and in, with party kinks. I often dreamt of long hair now that my own hair was so short, though never before of happy, bouncing hair.

Suddenly the room darkened freakishly; the sky turned to ash. Wind discharged against the picture window in erratic gusts, and there was an itinerant commotion—sounds of people running through rain, of voices caught in pockets. The front door blew open with a slam, and Kate came through, her body huddled against the water. Her acting partner Tim Storey followed, urging her in, going, “C’mon, c’mon.” Tim stomped his feet and shook his head like a two-legged dog. It was funny to think of him that way, as though he were standing upright with difficulty, as though he would have been better served on all fours. He removed his shoes and crossed directly to the fire and stepped over me. I drew my papers into the pocket of my legs.

The door did not close. It was braced by a hand—Rourke’s. In one giant stride, he moved from the porch to the plank floor. When he passed through the door frame, he had to lower his head. His eyes found mine easily, as if he had expected me to be exactly where I was.

“Hey,” he said, and I replied, “Hey.”

He dried his feet and smiled shyly. I saw the edge of his perfect teeth and the dimple on the right side of his face, which was a furrow like a pen puncture. I returned to my work, though I continued to regard him from beneath the hood of my head. He unzipped his jacket, and there he was, in my tiny house. It was like having a constellation down from the sky.

“It was raining too hard for me to walk,” Kate explained. “Now it’s raining too hard for them to drive. You can just put your coat there,” she told Rourke, referring to the couch back, as she turned on the desk lamp. The incandescence blanched the firelight; I flinched. “Sorry,” she said, smiling tightly, rolling her eyes, adding, “Evie hates lights.”

Rourke scrutinized my mother’s bookshelves, the exhausted textbooks and frayed novels, the thumbtacked newspaper clippings and the loose nudes on cocktail napkins. How small the house seemed with him in it, how steeped with color and congested with effects. It was like a feast or a carnival; the ceiling seemed to swag. His eyes lingered on a white wooden sailboat I’d built in my dad’s shop when I was five, and he lifted it—feeling the canvas triangle crisp with paint, running one finger across the name painted on the block bottom. Eveline. It was nice that he looked for me there; no one had ever looked for me there.

Kate invited them into the kitchen. Tim hopped right off the hearth, but Rourke remained, continuing to scan the shelves in silence. When she called him once again, he moved to join them, first turning off the desk lamp that Kate had put on. His hand lingering on the switch, his back to me.

I looked for new music. I’d lost interest in bossa nova. The woman Rourke awakened in me was not gifted with delicacy or political cause; she came in an atomic rush, possessing nothing more than instinct and courage. I chose Al Green’s “Here I Am (Come and Take Me).” The song played the way I felt—knowing, but new, secretive, but open.

I can’t believe that it’s real, the way that you make me feel
A burning deep down inside, a love that I cannot hide

Rourke’s jacket was across the room. I resisted as long as I could, and then I crawled to the couch. My hand felt the leather. In the kitchen they chatted capably, as though they’d been brought together by choice rather than chance.

“Actually,” Rourke was saying, “I took a costume design course in college.”

“You’re kidding!” Kate giggled.

Tim said, “Why not, Kate? It was probably an easy A.”

“Not quite. I almost failed.”

“Oh, shit,” Tim groaned. “There goes the GPA.”

“I asked the teacher if there was anything I could do to bring up the grade. She said, ‘As a matter of fact, Mr. Rourke, there is. I’ll give you the weekend to make a wedding dress.’”

There was an explosion of laughter. “No!” Tim said. “The bitch.”

“What did you do?” Kate asked.

“I made a wedding dress.”

“And did your grade go up?”

“I got an A,” Rourke said, “and several marriage proposals.”

They laughed again and then moved into a discussion of politics and sports and classic cars. Rourke talked about the upcoming election and President Carter and the Soviet Union and Afghanistan and the boycott of the winter Olympics. Coming from his voice, with its rich cadence, worldly things did not seem petrifying. It intrigued me, the way he excelled socially, the way he spoke that language but also mine. If I was sorry not to know more about current events, I was consoled by the fact that I could mold a finch from clay and recount in detail the aroma of a half-dead oak leaf. But possibly that all counted for nothing.

One by one, I burned my cutout attempts. The dolls made a contorted lattice on the logs, leaping eerily to puppet-like existence, contracting to pitiful cinders. It was like a breath—like breathing life into, like sucking it out again. There was a place in the middle where they looked best. It was the place of my dream.

A single sheet of paper remained. I folded it, then cut without penciling, my body reaching for each new inch, going by sense of feeling, and as I went, I kept thinking, It’s not the chime of the bell, it’s the echo of the chime.

To make the inner openings around the bodies and swings, I used an X-Acto knife, unfocusing my eyes, steering through resistant folds. Just as I made the final incision, and the curious remains dropped to the floor, the glow of the firelight darkened.

“What are you making?” he asked. Rourke spoke with care, as though aware in advance of the difficulties he might face. He wanted me to know he regretted using words on me so soon after using words on them and that the words reserved for me were different words. His caution was not inappropriate: somehow I felt I’d been lied to.

He squatted, his knees coming to the height of my shoulders. He allowed me to examine him, letting my eyes go slowly over. In his willingness to be searched and to be seen, in his conscious quietude I perceived his resolve. I had the feeling of being a cat to catch. Once Powell taught me how to catch cats. We were at the tracks, crouching to lure a stray kitten. “Build trust,” he instructed, hardly moving his lips. “Gesture slowly.”

Rourke’s forearms ventured off his legs. They reached into my vicinity then paused. When I did not pull back, they came farther. He took the paper from me, and I let him.

“I had a dream,” I said, speaking because he willed me to. “I was a cutout. On a swing.”

From each end of the chain, he grasped a doll’s hand, a fist really—there were no fingers—and, gently, he pulled. The hair was perfect. He smiled. “Which one are you?”

I stared widely. “Which side is the front?”

“This side,” he said. The side facing him.

I pointed to the third from the right. “This is me.”

Dishes clattered in the kitchen. I startled, but he did not move, except to reassign his weight to the opposite leg. He seemed disinclined to give my dolls back. Maybe he was going to take them away, like he took the chapel. But instead, he released them reluctantly into my reluctantly receiving hands. There was a single second during which we each held one end of the dolls, and, in that second, I felt a riveting and arduous bliss.

“No more hail,” he said, looking out the window. Then he stood. Though I was sitting, I felt I might topple without him there. My hand grabbed the floor.

“See you soon,” he pledged confidentially as his arms entered the sleeves of his jacket.

“Yes,” I said, pledging too. “Soon.”

“What were you two talking about?” Kate asked as we watched Rourke’s car pull out onto the street. The headlights scanned her face through the window, and implications of raindrops slithered across her cheeks, skulking left to right like legions of obedient insects. I thought of an old detective movie, The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon. Kate and I had come to inhabit a menacing realm of extremes—shadows and light, desire and aversion, faith and betrayal, wins and losses; in that realm, we were liars, each of us.

“Nothing,” I said. “The rain.”

Kate hoped I was friendly, at least.

I told her I thought that I was.

She fell back onto the couch. “I can’t believe he was actually here.”

“Neither can I,” I said, agreeing. It felt good to agree with Kate. It had been a long time.