That's kind of grim.
The story isn't anywhere near so grim.
It has a dream in it, too.
But it's a prosaic dream, of course, and not a poetic one.
The title is "Desserts."
"I wake from a dream of eclairs.
The details are hazy, but the tone is that of a spy thriller.
Someone has sent me a dozen eclairs, each of which
contains part of a secret message
that I must put together.
I lock myself in a room with high windows,
snap the string and open the pink box of eclairs
and begin to break them in two.
Out of each oozes a rope of custard smelling strongly
of vanilla, nothing but custard.
Though I am lying on my stomach and can't see the clock,
I realize immediately that it is late.
Without Dennis's alarm clock, I have forgotten to wake up.
White sunlight has crept almost to the edge of the bed.
The cat comes in, picks his way across the patch
of sunlight blinking, goes into the bathroom.
I can hear him drinking out of the toilet.
Rolling over, I see that it is past 10 o'clock.
In the kitchen I make a cup of coffee.
I carry it back with me to the bathroom
and sip it while I wait for the tub to fill.
I haven't as much time for my bath
as I'd like since Robert said he'd be here by 11:30.
Robert is my lover, has been my lover for several months
now since the Harrison's New Year's Eve party,
in fact, when Dennis was in Guatemala
and Laurie had gone to San Diego to stay with my sister.
Paper hats, and noisemakers, and champagne
weren't doing anything for either of us,
so we left early and spent the next two days in bed.
Robert's an architect, a good one I guess.
Though I don't know anything about architecture.
At any rate, he's very busy.
But he's built me into his schedule on Tuesdays
when he always comes over for a couple of hours around lunch.
The rest of the time it's catch as catch can.
I lower myself into the bath water, which is warm,
and slippery, and smells of white ginger.
I wash myself carefully, examining my body
as I wash for signs of aging, droop of breast,
fold of flesh around abdomen, wrinkle at knee.
They are probably no worse than they were last Tuesday.
Actually, I don't have a bad body for a woman of 40.
Robert will be 36 next week.
He has a beautiful body--
fine-boned, dark-skinned, hairy.
Actually, Robert is getting a bit of a paunch,
but he still has a beautiful body.
I get out of the tub and let myself drip dry
as I make the bed and take my coffee cup back to the kitchen.
Then I powder myself with the Chanel Robert bought me.
I start putting on makeup.
Just as I'm lining my left eye, the telephone rings,
and I draw a broad stroke out to my left temple.
I start swearing.
I have an astonishingly foul mouth when I'm alone.
The cat who has settled his striped bulk on my pillow
leaps away as I grab at the phone on the table beside him.
Hello?
Western Union.
I have a telegram for Mrs.--
Mrs.-- she mangles my name.
OK, yeah, that's me.
Madeleine and I reunited.
Stop.
En route to Hawaii to celebrate and work out details.
Stop.
Now you will be glad for us.
Stop.
Love, Robert.
[LAUGHTER]
The operator puts the same flat emphasis on every word, even
the stops, so that I get confused and have
to ask her to repeat the message while I scribble it down
on the yellow pad.
I wish telegrams were delivered in sealed envelopes
by little boys in uniforms, like they are in the movies.
Later, the sealed envelope will arrive in the mail,
among a batch of bills and political flyers, I know.
But then it will be too late.
This flat, disembodied voice has already
participated in my telegram.
In the end of my affair, I hang up.
I have been expecting something like this.
But this, I haven't been expecting at all.
I rather thought Robert would invite me out
for lunch or a drink.
We seldom go out together.
This city is still too much like a small town,
and we are too likely to run into one of Dennis's friends
or Dennis himself.
Lunch, I have thought, maybe at the Samaniego House, asparagus,
crab, and a glass of white wine.
Robert is married to Madeleine.
They have been separated for over a year.
But lately, she has crept more and more into his conversation.
He is passionately attached to his children
who live with their mother.
Amy is 12, and Jeremy is nine.
And he spends every weekend with them.
Lunch in some place so public that my breeding wouldn't
possibly allow me to break down and make any sort of scene,
but not a telegram.
When Robert and I became lovers, I
held on to a little sliver of dislike for him.
He was pretentious in his knowledge of wines.
He told mother-in-law jokes.
He drove a silver LTD.
When he took off his glasses, he squinted and looked
a little vacant like an infant.
I kept the sliver home so that if ever I needed to,
I could slice him neatly out of my life.
But gradually, I forgot about it.
Now it seems to be gone.
I do not bother to unmake the bed,
but I lie down on top of the spread and fall asleep.
I wake up with cat fur in my nose.
The cat has returned to my pillow
and is sleeping in a tight ball against my cheek.
When I stir, he rouses and starts to purr.
I push him out of the way so I can see the clock.
It's after 3, and Dennis, who has been consulting
on the Apache reservation since yesterday morning,
is supposed to be home for dinner.
Dennis is my husband.
He's a hydrologist.
I know a little more about hydrology
than I do about architecture since I've
been married to Dennis for 20 years, but still not very much.
I need to buy bread for dinner.
I pull on a pair of shorts and a jersey.
In the bathroom, I wipe away the worst
of the smudges in my makeup.
My car keys have fallen down behind the table
in the front hall.
Crawling after them, I find the leather button
that has been missing from Dennis's corduroy blazer
since March.
He will be pleased.
Outside, I am hit with the full force of the desert in June.
The air is hot and so dry that my skin seems to be curling.
The mountains to my left look flat and grayish in the glare.
As I pull out of the driveway, the air conditioner
gives a kind of wheeze and starts blowing hot air.
I don't know anything about air conditioners
except that they have something to do with freon,
which is a deadly gas.
And I don't have time to drive to the BMW place
to consult with Harry, so I turn off the air conditioner
and roll down the windows.
By the time I get to the bakery, water
is dripping between my breasts and behind my knees.
The bakery is called La Boulangerie.
It doesn't look like a French bakery to me.
It is in a new Spanish-style shopping
center designed by Robert.
[LAUGHTER]
Inside, it has pale vinyl floors, white plaster walls,
glass and chrome cases piled with bread and sweets.
I think of La Patisserie in Harvard Square, which
looked like a French bakery to me, dark, tucked down
under the brick sidewalk.
I think of a baguette spread with sweet butter
and thin, hard, salty salami and thin slices of white cheese.
I think of lying on the grass in the sun
by the river chewing the tough crusty bread.
Actually, I don't know what a French bakery looks like.
I've never been to France, and I'm not likely to go.
While I'm waiting for my bread to be wrapped,
I look into the display cases.
There are eclairs on the top shelf by the cash register.
I do not much care for eclairs, but something my mother
said when I was little makes me feel that I ought to.
When the girl hands me my bread, I ask her for two eclairs,
and she puts them into a pink box
and ties it shut with twine.
At home, I put the bread on the counter and the eclairs
in the refrigerator, then I go to take a shower.
On Tuesdays, I always bathe in the morning and shower
in the afternoon because Robert likes Chanel and Dennis can't
stand it.
Dennis prefers [?? Ecoussant ??].
I like them both.
When I have showered and redone my face,
I put on the white sundress I was going to wear this morning.
I go into the kitchen and wrap myself
in a big apron with a picture of Auguste Escoffier
on the front, which Laurie gave me for Christmas.
I like being in my kitchen, which is large, and white,
and functional.
I like the whir of the Cuisinart grating cheese,
the fleshy give of a tomato under the edge of a knife,
the pungency of garlic crushed into butter.
I'm a good cook.
In fact, by training, I'm a chef.
And when we lived in the East, I used
to cater dinners quite a lot.
But here, there's not much demand for catered dinners.
And for buffets and cocktail parties,
they mostly want Mexican food.
I don't like Mexican food.
I don't like to cook it.
Dennis comes home in time for a drink before dinner.
And while I am fixing the salad, he tells me about his trip.
He's done quite a bit of work with the Apaches
and knows some of them pretty well,
but they still fascinate him.
I set two places at the table and wish
suddenly that I hadn't sent Laurie to Europe
for the summer with Dennis's parents.
It was going to be more convenient, of course,
not having her hanging around the house all day
when Robert wanted to come over.
But now Robert is gone, and Laurie is gone.
And two places at the table don't look like enough.
I'm too old to risk having another child.
And anyway, Dennis has had a vasectomy.
When we have eaten our dinner, I bring on coffee and the eclairs
on dessert plates.
They're beautiful plates, German with fruit hand-painted
on them, each one different.
Dennis loves desserts, but Laurie and I don't, and I never
make them.
So he has long since learned to make do with cheese and fruit.
"Eclairs!", he exclaims.
He looks really pleased.
What's the occasion?
Oh, nothing.
I have speared my fork through the icing and the pastry,
and a clod of custard oozes off around the tines.
I wonder about the secret message in my dream.
I was just in La Boulangerie for the bread, you know.
And I saw these, and they sort of looked good.
Actually, I can't remember noticing what they looked like.
But dreams seem remote and a little silly
as we sit here waiting for the sun to go down,
the air to cool off enough so that we can carry
our coffee out to the patio.
No occasion, I repeat.
Nothing really."
[APPLAUSE]