PETER GORDON

Dream Space

Just after her fortieth birthday my wife sold a poem to a prestigious literary magazine. She had been published before but I could tell this time was different. They paid her four hundred dollars and she let the check lay around in plain sight for a few days, as if to tell me, See, I told you it wasn’t just a hobby. The way she saw it the acceptance vaulted her from base camp to somewhere halfway up the mountain, from someone who wrote poetry to being a poet. It was positively metamorphic, I heard her say to a friend. It changed everything.

When the issue with her poem came out, she was invited to join other contributors at a launch party at the journal’s city offices. She was planning to go alone but that afternoon she was hit by one of her vertigo episodes – they happened a few times a year, usually lasting anywhere from two hours to a whole day, their origin always a mystery – and while there was no way she was going to miss the event there was also no way she could drive herself or navigate a crowded room without an arm to lean on.

“I can take you,” I said.

“You hate those things.”

“I hate the idea of those things. Maybe the reality won’t be so terrible.”

I sensed her nervousness on the drive in – how could I not? – but her fear that she would go unnoticed at the party was quickly dissipated when two women rushed up to greet her as soon as we walked in. “Joan, we swooned when we read your poem.“

“The honesty of it is almost unbearable,” the second woman said.

“Your wife is a very brave writer,” the first woman said to me.

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

The thing is, I didn’t know. I’d never really read her poetry; I’d never been much of a reader. She’d never gone out of her way to show me her work and I’d never gone looking for it except one time, in the blush of having written something that excited her, she handed me a poem and there must have been something in the way I reacted, or didn’t react, that made her snatch the paper away. She never showed me anything again.

“We’d like you to give a reading,” the first woman said.

“There are agents here,” the other woman said in a lowered voice.

“The thing is, I’m having a bout of vertigo,” my wife said.

“Oh I’m so sorry –”

“Of course, we understand, it was good of you to come at all,” the other woman said.

“I’ll do it,” my wife suddenly said.

“I need you to go up there with me,” she said to me once the effusively grateful women moved on.

“And do what?”

“Just be there. Just don’t let me fall.”

“Do you need me to turn the pages?” I asked. Somehow I had this image of her playing a long piano concerto and me turning the pages of sheet music, frantically trying to keep up.

“It’s only one page,” she said. “No turning required.”

The poem, as best as I could tell, was about two men, a young man the poet once loved who disappeared from her life, and an older one she didn’t love nearly enough who stuck around.

Those were the first few lines anyway; I was so focused on waiting for her body to wobble or her knees to buckle that her voice melted into background noise.

After the reading, as I led her across the room, a tall, completely bald man greeted her.

“I’m Arthur.”

“Yes, I know. I’m Joan.”

I found out later he was Arthur Berenson, a novelist, someone whose name came up every Nobel October. He briefly shut his eyes. “Joan. From the Hebrew. God is beneficent.”

She smiled in appreciation. Maybe she knew that; I know I didn’t know the origin of my wife’s name.

“I’ve known a few Joans in my time,” he said. “I almost married one. But she wasn’t a poet like you. If she had been we might still be together.”

He was diverted by a handler, someone who seemed to be guiding him around the room the way I was attending to Joan, but as he was being led away he looked back and asked my wife how she found the time and place to write. She told him she had a home office. “With a lock on the door I hope,” he called out. “Protect your dream space!”

I later found out this was a stock phrase of his and he’d even written an essay called Dream Space but at the time, in that moment, my wife thought he’d harvested that little pearl on the spot just for her.

A week later, when I was at work, she had a lock installed on the door to the spare bedroom, the room she used as an office.

“It’s symbolic,” she told me.

“Yes,” I said, “symbolic of a single cylinder deadbolt.”

“It’s my dream space.”

Starting the next day she was always in her office. The door was closed when I left for work and closed when I came home. Soon she was taking most of her meals in there and sometimes sleeping on the sofa-bed. The only sound I ever heard coming out of the room was the tap-tap-tapping of her old typewriter.

One night I knocked on the door.

“Joan?”

No answer.

“Can I come in?”

She kept typing.

I tried turning the handle.

“Open the door, Joan.”

The typing suddenly stopped.

“Will you please open the door?”

Silence.

“I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry for everything. Can we please talk? Joan?”

The next day I called a locksmith – a different one – who dismantled the lock and opened the door. But when I stepped inside the only thing there was a poem, written just for me.

Peter Gordon is a fiction writer living in Boston. His work has appeared in Litro, Amsterdam Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Grub Street Literary Magazine and other places.