How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet Page A

yourself. They have kids up on the stage that have bravely survived. But then they go deaf or retarded. Water on the brain. It’s always this overcooked salmon. Two hundred a plate. I don’t know where he is! He could be anywhere! What should I say? What if I tell everyone and then he decides to come back and it turns out I never had to tell them at all?”
    “Is that what you’re worried about? Is that your main worry?” “It’s time for my car’s thirty-thousand-mile service, I got a notice from the dealership. He always takes it in. The lights give me migraines. The fluorescents. What if it just breaks down on me and I have to walk miles in the dark to a payphone to call triple-A and I get raped on the way? That would
    be his fault then!”
    “No one’s being ravished, OK? Here. Do me a favor. Can you just slow down a minute? Sit back and relax. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Would you do that?”
    “Don’t talk to me like I’m crazy! I am your mother , T.!” “Of course you are. And I’m your son and I’m worried
    about you.”
    She looked at him blinking, and he thought she was considering his words until he noticed she was not looking at him but over his shoulder.
    “And what is that ?”
    He turned and followed her gaze. It was a pencil sketch by a famous expressionist. He had bought it at a Sotheby’s auction.
    “It’s art, Mother.” “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    But she seemed mollified, and began to pack her personal items back into her purse.
    “Let me take you to my place, OK? I’ll make you dinner.” “I’m not hungry.”
    “Then maybe just a cup of tea.”
    “I’m not an invalid, you know. I’m just a woman whose husband walked out the door. For all I know he’s doing it with his secretary.”
    “He took early retirement. He doesn’t have a secretary.” “You know what I mean. Some random floozy.”
    “Let’s just go, OK? Let’s talk about this when you’re rested.”
    “And I don’t need to stay with you. I made my own arrangements. I have a room in a four-star hotel.”
    “Well, I need you to stay. Come on. Come home with me.”

    Weeks later she was still in his guest bedroom. He did not always mind and was even glad, at times, that she was there, but in terms of progress her presence threatened to reduce him. She was a liability.
    He liked to present himself as solitary and free, an argument for potential; he moved and spoke with the official neutrality of a man sprung fully formed from the background of commerce. But now suddenly he carried personal freight, which threatened to hold him back. He cringed at the thought of business associates encountering his mother, whether by design or accident. He did not want his investors, for instance, to think of him beholden to a mother, childlike. And she was bad for his image, far too frail and specific to reflect the broadness of his interests and his command of prospects.
    The most austere among his investors, in fact, the ones who had wide ocean views out their office windows, gave the impression of never having been born at all. They would die, admittedly, that much was tacitly conceded; but this was understood to be almost a polite gesture on their part, part of a genteel tradition whereby the old bowed out into the wings to make room for the young.
    So they would die, when their race was run, but they had never been born: they had not been children. They had not ever been anything but what they were now. And he would not make the concession either.
    Still his mother was pathetic, hurt and lonely. He could not bring himself to hurt her further.
    When he was at the office she walked the dog three times a day; arriving home he found his laundry washed and folded, shirts hung in the closet by color, mail carefully sorted. She busied herself with the housework usually done by the cleaning woman, and when for the first time since his mother’s arrival the cleaning woman arrived and let herself in she found a screaming