Independence Day Read Free

idiotic answer. I felt I might possibly be asleep but tomorrow still have a hard time convincing myself this conversation hadn’t happened—which is also not that infrequent with me.
    “I had a dream tonight,” Sally said. “We were in your house in Haddam, and you kept neatening everything up. I was your wife somehow, but I felt terrible anxiety. There was blue water in our toilet bowl, and at some point you and I shook hands, standing on your front steps—just like you’d sold me your own house. And then I saw you shooting away out across the middle of a big cornfield with your arms stretched out like Christ or something, just like back in Illinois.” Where she’s from, the stolid, Christian corn belt. “It was peaceful in a way. But the whole effect was that everything was very, very busy and hectic and no one could get anything done right. And I felt this anxiety right in my dream. Then I woke up and I wanted to call you.”
    “I’m glad you did,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like anything that bad, though. You weren’t being chased by wild animals who looked like me, or getting pushed out of airplanes.”
    “No,” she said, and seemed to consider those fates. Far away in the night I could hear a train. “Except I felt so anxious. It was very vivid. I don’t usually have vivid dreams.”
    “I try to forget my dreams.”
    “I know. You’re very proud of it.”
    “No I’m not. But they don’t ever seem mysterious enough. I’d remember them if they seemed very interesting. Tonight I dreamed I was reading, and I was reading.”
    “You don’t seem too engaged. Maybe now isn’t a good time to talk seriously.” She sounded embarrassed, as if I was making fun of her, which I wasn’t.
    “I’m glad to hear your voice, though,” I said, thinking she was right. It was the middle of the night. Little good begins then.
    “I’m sorry I got you up.”
    “You didn’t get me up.” At this point, though, and unbeknownst to her, I turned out my light and lay breathing, listening to the train in the cool dark. “You just want something you’re not getting, is my guess. It’s not unusual.” In Sally’s case, it could be any one of a number of things.
    “Don’t you ever feel that way?”
    “No. I feel like I have a lot as it is. I have you.”
    “That’s very nice,” she said, not so warmly.
    “It is nice.”
    “I guess I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, won’t I?”
    “You bet. I’ll be there with bells on.”
    “Great,” she said. “Sleep tight. Don’t dream.”
    “I will. I won’t.” And I put the phone down.
    It would be untruthful to pretend that what Sally was wrestling with last night was some want or absence I didn’t feel myself. And perhaps I’m simply a poor bet for her or anybody, since I so like the tintinnabulation of early romance yet lack the urge to do more than ignore it when that sweet sonority threatens to develop into something else. A successful practice of my middle life, a time I think of as the Existence Period, has been to ignore much of what I don’t like or that seems worrisome and embroiling, and then usually see it go away. But I’m as aware of “things” as Sally is, and imagine this may be the first signal (or possibly it’s the thirty-seventh) that we might soon no longer “see” each other. And I feel regret, would like to find a way of reviving things. Only, as per my practice, I’m willing to let matters go as they go and see what happens. Perhaps they’ll even get better. It’s as possible as not.
    T he matter of greater magnitude and utmost importance, though, involves my son, Paul Bascombe, who is fifteen. Two and a half months ago, just after tax time and six weeks before his school year ended in Deep River, he was arrested for shoplifting three boxes of 4X condoms (“Magnums”) from a display-dispenser in the Finast down in Essex. His acts were surveilled by an “eye in the sky” camera hidden above the male hygiene products. And