The Dream King

Gregor Robinson

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781554886333
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

With exceptional power, Robinson exposes both the gravity and levity of relationships — formed in duty, in fear, in need — and the subtle ways we attempt to escape their persistent pull. At turns humourous, chilling and tender, Robinson's fiction displays a versatility in tone and subject that mirrors the stories of our lives, real or imagined, domestic or exotic. His writing elevates the "What If?" to new imaginary heights.

GAPS

In the eyes of his parents, Dearborn lived in a foreign country and it made him feel like an alien. How on earth would he tell them about Helen? He thought of himself as dutiful—he phoned his mother every Sunday and there were even occasional letters—but there was always reproach. Why had he left his home town? Dearborn said that this was life in the Twentieth Century. People left towns and homes in the country and moved to cities. People were in motion, not only in Ontario (he had only moved one hundred seventy miles, after all; they ought to put the matter in perspective) but across the globe. There was greed, fear, hatred, starvation; immense economic and demographic forces were at work. Dearborn knew these things. He earned a living doing market research, was an expert in his field.

That was another thing. “What is it you do, dear?” his mother would say. “People ask—your Aunt Adelle, friends— and I’m never able to explain. Not advertising, I know that. But something. What, exactly? What do you do?”

His father had been a bank manager, as had his father before him.

They were arriving that afternoon, staying three or four days. Dearborn had the details before him—his mother’s clear handwriting on blue letterhead with a line drawing of the house where both he and his father had been raised. His grandmother had moved next door; his mother visited her every day until she died. His parents’ lives made Dearborn feel insubstantial, like the cotton that drifted from the branches of the big trees that grew at the end of lawn.

They were coming to visit the children, his mother wrote. They thought it would be a help. They didn’t know that “the difficulty”, as his mother always called it, was long over, had all been settled, really, the first year of the marriage.

And his father would visit doctors. He was being watched. For diabetes. For the arthritis that interfered with his walks. He also drank too much. “Eight ounces a day, I said to the doctor!” he’d told Dearborn the last time he was in the city, his eyes bright. His heart. And the thing they avoided—his spells.

“Stupid!” Roxanne shouted. Dearborn looked up from his mother’s letter, working the gap in his teeth with his tongue. “Careless girl!” Roxanne shouted. It was an expression of Anne’s. Dearborn used to admonish her, “Don’t speak to the children like that. They’ll pick it up.”

“Girls,” he yelled “stop yelling.”

“The reason they’re always yelling,” Anne would tell him, “is because you’re always yelling. You should listen to yourself sometime.”

“We’re not fighting,” Roxanne yelled back from the living room. She was the older one, almost six. Jasmine was three and a half, and in her current phase preferred to be called Snow White. Jasmine and Roxanne.

“What kind of a name is Jasmine?” Dearborn’s mother had asked. “Are there Arabs in our family somewhere? Am I missing something?”

Roxanne and Jasmine. Anne’s choices. Dearborn would have named them Mary and Susan. One of the many decisions over which he had not exercised his veto.

The latest thing was that Anne wanted one of the girls. She didn’t see how splitting them up made any difference, since they were adopted anyway. He said it was creepy, and it was crazy. They were supposed to be a family.

“But we aren’t a family any more,” said Anne. “You and that teenager.”

“She’s not a teenager,” he’d told her. “And you started it.” Almost true, Dearborn reflected. We order events according to our own mythologies.

Roxanne, walking around now with one of the fat lamps in her arms: “It’s alright, Sarah,” she said to the lamp. “I’m here. Daddy’s here.”

“What are you playing?” Dearborn asked.

“Big sister. This is the baby. Her name’s Sarah.”

“I told you, don’t play with the lamps. Use a doll, the cat, something. You drop this lamp, you’ll cut yourself.”

“Is it made of china?”

“It’s made of china. You know that,” said Dearborn.

“It’s precious, right?”

“Precious. Very precious, but not as precious as you.” It was a discussion they’d had before. “Plus you could electrocute yourself pulling the plug.”

Dearborn took the lamp and put it back on the table. He handed her one of the dolls from the armchair. But she’d already picked up the bookends, budgies in white marble. “It’s alright, Sarah, don’t cry,” she said to one of the bookends. “Do you want to go to sleep? It’s alright, you go to sleep. I’ll be right here in the next room. I’ll wear my big shoes, so you’ll be able to hear me walking.”

There was a note from the senior kindergarten teacher attached to the refrigerator door with a Pizza Hut magnet: Please make a special effort to come on Monday. We would like to talk about Roxanne.

Roxanne came into the kitchen. “Daddy, are you going to marry Helen?”

Dearborn shrugged, his mouth full of muffin.

“Moon and June and kissing,” said Roxanne. “Yuck.”

She turned and left, back to the living room, where Jasmine was playing with the cassette machine.

“Daddy, show us your monster laugh.” Jasmine had sneaked up behind him through the dining room door.

During an argument on their first anniversary, Anne had reached across the glass table (they had crammed her patio furniture onto the tiny balcony of their 21st floor apartment) and slapped Dearborn so hard she loosened an old tooth. Now he had a crown, cloned on some fragment of the actual tooth. It kept falling out. He couldn’t afford to go to the dentist every time, so he endured the gap, did the monster laugh. On special occasions—nights out, meetings with clients—he shoved the tooth in with some chewing gum. It was usually good for two, perhaps three hours.

Roxanne came in with a tangerine. She wanted Dearborn to do Marlon Brando from The Godfather, another of his specialities.

“Not today, girls. The monster has a headache.”

“You and Helen had too much wine, right Daddy?”

Dearborn led them into the living room and put The Three Stooges on the video.

“How could you have bought that for them?” Anne had asked. “You think its funny, hitting people over the head, sticking things up nostrils? You want them to grow up like that?”

Dearborn did think it was funny. And he hadn’t grown up like that. What about your mother? he thought. She thinks farts are funny. Dearborn was at the stage where he was still framing responses, composing ripostes to old jabs.

Upstairs, Helen was sitting on the floor in the corner of the bedroom, playing with the cat. She was just out of the bathroom. She was wearing bikini underpants, no top.

“I love you,” Dearborn told her. He bent down and kissed her left nipple. She smelled of his shower soap. “But you have to move your things out of the house.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “You’re forty-four, right? Maybe it’s time to tell them. Your parents. You know, like, you have a penis? You like girls?”

“You’re only twenty-four. My mother is seventy-two.”

“Great. Now we know everybody’s age.”

“They haven’t taken it in that Anne is out of the picture. They think we might get back together.”

“Doesn’t matter to me. Really. I just think you should level with them. I don’t believe in shame.”

“It’s not a question of shame,” said Dearborn. “I just don’t want them to know I’m involved so soon after my wife has left. And with a woman twenty years younger.”

“Like it might give them the wrong idea? I think they’re old enough, you know?”

“How about your mother?” Dearborn asked. “What does she think about us?”

“She likes you. She does. After Anne first left, she wanted to ask you over for dinner. She wanted to go out with you herself. I think so. I really do. Get you in the sack.”

“What about the age difference?”

“She’s only two years older than you.”

It wasn’t just his imagination: he and Helen always seemed to be talking about people’s ages. “I meant the difference between you and me,” he said.

Helen’s mother was on her own; her husband had just come out. “We used to wonder, like, why he never came home?” Helen had told Dearborn and Anne when she’d first found out. “Those walks in the park?”

“Another homo,” Anne had said, glaring at Dearborn. She was at the stage where she still blamed everything on man, the species. She was always in the process of escaping a world of vile men.

Dearborn took Helen by the hand and pulled her up, towards the bed.

“I’ve got class today,” Helen said.

She taught classes at a gym, Saturday mornings. Dearborn told her he would give her a lift. Anne had left him the car. He’d won that argument—he needed the car for his work. In the end, when Anne moved out, Dearborn had quit his job and gone freelance. He now hated being out of the house, hated being away from the children. He stayed at home with the kids and his modem, Helen and teenagers from the neighbourhood helping out with the sitting. But he still had the car.

Before she got out, Helen said, “Warren called again.”

Her ex-boyfriend. Warren Blue (he had invented his own name) played bass in a bar band. Otherwise, he did nothing. Dearborn would sometimes notice him loitering on the sidewalk in front of the house. Warren’s career allowed plenty of time for watching and besetting. It was hard for Dearborn to understand how Helen had ever become involved with such a person. She said it had started when she was in her freshman year, when she hadn’t had the confidence to say no. Warren Blue was six foot three. No doubt he was tireless in bed, thought Dearborn.

“Won’t take no for an answer,” he said.

“Won’t take an answer, period,” said Helen. “Bass players are strange.”

Dearborn took this as some kind of message, a vague threat. “I’ll tell my parents about us soon,” he said. “Perhaps, before they go home.”

“See you tonight.”

“Where are we going?” Dearborn’s father asked. He gazed around the hall. He had just left the TV room. He wore an old tweed jacket with saggy pockets. His glasses were crooked.

“Maple Leaf Gardens,” said Dearborn.

“Don’t see why,” said his father. “Don’t see why we have to go out.”

“Jack, try to fit in,” said Dearborn’s mother. She held his coat over her arm, waiting.

“You used to like hockey,” Dearborn said.

“He still likes hockey,” said his mother. “He watches on television all the time.”

“Matlock was just starting,” said his father, vaguely affronted. He shuffled along to the bathroom. From the hallway, Dearborn and his mother heard the click of the lock. They heard him urinate. They heard a gurgling sound. Dearborn’s father kept a bottle in his shaving kit.

“One good thing,” said Dearborn’s mother. “He’s drinking less. He forgets where he puts it. He forgets that he likes it.”

His father opened the bathroom door. He positively beamed. “Hockey!” he said. “They’ve finally started to win.”

Downstairs, Helen was waiting. She was dressed in faded jeans and a black ribbed turtle neck. Her hair was glossy. She was babysitting the children.

“I’m glad to meet you at last. I’ve heard so much about you,” Helen said when Dearborn introduced her to his parents.

“You have?” said his mother, glancing at Dearborn. She had eyes like a hawk.

After the game, Dearborn took them out for a coffee. The restaurant was brightly lit with huge orange globes, illuminating the brown and orange decor. The place was crowded and the manager sat them at a big table with a father and two young boys. The boys looked remarkably like their father, Dearborn noticed. As he aged, he took note of family resemblance more and more. He was becoming something of an expert on nature versus nurture, the various theories. What effect would divorce have on his children, he wondered?

The two boys had souvenir programmes from the game spread on the table.

“Good game,” said Dearborn’s father, smiling at them.

The boys nodded.

“I used to play for the Leafs,” said Dearborn’s father.

Was this true, Dearborn wondered? His father had played for McGill, before the war, and Dearborn remembered something about him having been asked to try out for the pros. But nothing more, surely.

“Yeah?” said the older boy. He would have been about nine. “Wicked,” said the younger, about six.

“Yup,” said Dearborn’s father. “Played with Eddie Shore and Turk Broda. Teeter Kennedy.”

The boys’ father looked at Dearborn’s father in studied silence. The boys were silent too. Perhaps the way Dearborn and his mother were watching, waiting to see what would happen next, gave them a signal.

“Johnny Bower. Gordie Howe. All the greats,” said Dearborn’s father.

“Johnny Bower?” said the older boy, puzzled.

“Really,” said the father. He definitely knew now that the chronology was impossible. He was young, maybe twenty-eight. Dearborn noticed that he had the same kind of intonation, used the same expressions as Helen.

“When did Gordie Howe play for the Leafs?” the older boy asked his father. “Gordie Howe never played for the Leafs.”

“Eat your cake,” the father answered.

“Is that guy weird, or what?” asked the six year old, half whispering.

Dearborn’s father looked down at his coffee. He took off his glasses; his eyes were red-rimmed. Dearborn thought his father might weep, and he reached out and put his hand on his arm.

“I think I’ll go downstairs and have a pee,” said his father, with immense dignity. Dearborn and his mother watched him shamble towards the kitchen. He looked ...