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A. R. Taylorlonecamel@ca.rr.comWord count 3172

DESTROYER OF THE DREAM

(originally appeared in Rosebud)

Jack became famous the day his wife died. It happened like this. He was once

married for a little less than a year to this thin, intense artiste type named Alix. They got

married while they were both in college, and I could never figure out why he had done it.

He seemed like a real normal guy. Good-looking, a jock, a scientist, he and I were both

studying chemistry. Alix dressed like a dancer, always wearing black leotards and

sweaters draped around her shoulders. I don't know if she could actually dance, but she

sure thought she could write.

She wrote an incredible number of stories for one of those women's magazines,

the kind that specialize in busty women on the front, polls on your sex life, and recipes.

She showed us one once, when Jack and I were in the kitchen drinking beer. It was

called "The Desire of Thelma Dodd," about a woman with a metal claw for a hand who

cracked her husband over the skull. Real cheery stuff. Jack and I were bombed, so the

story was definitely a slow read. After a few pages, I looked over at Jack. It occurred to

me that there was something about the naked whiteness of the printed page that made her

words stick out a little too prominently. I looked up at the ceiling, then said, "Perhaps it

would work better in another medium." We couldn't stop laughing and made various

other literary remarks, none of them flattering. I think Alix heard us. Honestly, though,

I could see why the ladies' magazine kept sending her rejection notices. Between the

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linguine with clams and how to keep fleas off your pets, people do not want to read about

ladies with metal claws.

I never understood Jack's penchant for these literary types, so needy. They were

always wanting to have "talks," the kind of talks that leave men absolutely silent.

But what I'm trying to tell you is how Jack got famous. It was four years after he

and Alix got a divorce. He had gotten a job as a chemist at a large company in Southern

California - they specialized in refractory metals like hafnium, titanium, niobium, all

resistant to corrosive environments and high heat. I was working in the aerospace

industry and used to see him occasionally for a drink. One night he came lurching up

with a newspaper rolled under his arm.

"There she is - Alix, right on page one of the 'View' section." He handed me the

paper.

She looked exactly the same, dark leotard, droopy breasts, hair pulled back in a

pony tail. Anyway, it says she's written a book of poetry and now she's some big deal.

"I write poetry almost the way I breathe, intensely and constantly." She was quoted. I

glanced at Jack.

"Wow," I said.

"Yeah, wow," he muttered. "You know, when I was married to her, I thought she

was so untalented it was tragic." He grabbed the paper. "She says things like 'my

marriage involved the death of love,' and 'my husband was the destroyer of the dream.'

Destroyer of the dream, my ass."

"Forget it, Jack," I said. "Look, the press has just locked off on her for this week.

It will move on shortly. In the meantime, enjoy it."

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Most of his old friends thought it was funny. After all, being a poet in Southern

California means being not merely insignificant - more like nonexistent. A great many

people claim to be artists of some kind, but being a poet is rarely the claim they make. If

you're a poet you live in London or New Jersey, immersed in the seedy life of

contemplation and poverty. There is too much sun here for poetry.

Then one night I saw her on television. I had been flipping channels, looking for

a news story related to my job, when there she was, looking exactly the same as the first

time I met her. She was talking about love. "I don't know how to say it exactly, but love

infuses my world. Not the love between men and women, but the larger love, cosmic I

guess you'd say." The host was mesmerized. He looked as if he wanted to lick her leg.

She talked so convincingly, ethereally, that you just wanted her to go on and on, even

though what she said sounded foolish. She was the fairy princess of words.

That was the weird thing about her. She really did look like a poet, and you

associate certain positive personal traits with that - at least I do. But she was scary if you

actually knew her. One of her unusual talents - she could get people to do things for her.

After three or four dates she had Jack feeding her parrot when she went out of town. He

was not very good at this, because he hates birds. One day I dropped over to find him

running around her house chasing the ugly green thing, whatever its name was. It had

somehow gotten out of the cage, and he couldn't tempt it back in. "Get in here and help

me catch it!" he screamed when he saw me. We maneuvered it into the bathroom, where

it perched on the rod above the bath curtain.

"Now what?" I said. We stood there, helpless. Then we started lunging after it.

Finally, I couldn't help myself, "Why are we chasing this bird? Let's just leave it

here and when she comes home she can deal with it. It's her parrot." Jack looked at me

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in horror. Right then I had to wonder about a girl who was able to make two grown men

run around a small bathroom after an even smaller bird. "O.K. let's wrap it in this towel

and shove it back in the cage."

"Brilliant," Jack said with the rapture of the saved. Except we must have stunned

it with the towel, because it sure looked dead once we tried to set it on its bird jungle

gym. It just flopped onto the bottom of the cage. "It's unconscious," I said and went into

the kitchen for a glass of cold water. "Let's throw a little water on it, to revive it," I

offered. We started flicking tiny droplets at the two upraised feet. Of course, at some

point it occurred to me that we were both trying to kill it. Then she walked in the door.

What can I say? She came over and looked into the cage.

Jack said, "I think it's going to be all right."

"I sure hope so," I added without a trace of sincerity.

Alix looked at us both, then looked down at the bird. "He senses your hostility."

Trust me on this. That bird couldn't sense diddly. I got out of the house before I started

laughing, but just barely. How on earth could Jack put up with this babe?

A couple of months later, right before they were married, they invited me over to

dinner. Various other intellectual types were there, a black economist, very boring, from

Brazil, the other a composer. I frankly thought Jack was losing out to the musical guy, a

reedy Britisher aching to charm an artiste like Alix right out of her turtleneck. We drank

vats of terrible red wine, while Alix and her friends discussed things - the decline of the

rain forest, whether the Russians were sincere, if two people could have an orgasm at

exactly the same moment. Alix was particularly adamant on this last one - they could,

and should. She sounded like the traffic cop of sex. What a group! Obsessed with

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themselves and every miserable little thought they had ever had. But Jack was

fascinated, obviously.

Her house bothered me too, especially the plaques. She had plaques everywhere,

celebrating her eighth grade graduation, her merit badges from Camp Wahonka - Best

Camper, First Fishing Award, and then her cum laude certificate from college. I've won

some awards, hell, everybody has. But why is all this stuff on the wall? Dentists I can

understand, lawyers, maybe, but a writer?

About three months after they were married, Jack and I had dinner, and he told

me this story. One evening, having just washed the dishes, Alix asked him to go for a

walk. She said they had to have a "talk." This time it was about the groceries. It seems

that she would buy things at the store and then find certain items mysteriously missing

when she got home. Specifically Jet-Dry and toilet paper. Had he stolen them from the

grocery bag? When Jack told me the story, he was actually laughing about it. The

concept "steal" was a problem, since he paid for everything. Also, he wasn't sure what

Jet-Dry was.

I wasn't surprised when I heard they got a divorce, only amazed that Jack could

tolerate any time at all with her.

So Alix's picture on the back pages of the newspaper, now as some sort of poet,

came as a shock, but it was something you could basically ignore. Whatever meager

fame she had achieved just seemed odd. An aberration that would recede as rapidly as it

had thrust itself forward. Then something terrible happened. Alix killed herself by

sticking her head in a gas oven.

Suddenly her picture was everywhere. What had been sort of a here-today-gone-

tomorrow thing became sheer, unadulterated hero worship. Conferences, call-in radio

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shows, articles in that awful ladies' magazine - the very one that wouldn't publish her

stories! She was an absolute goddamned legend. All of this happened so fast every

waitress in town knew the Jack/Alix story and felt free to gossip about it. I was in a

drugstore where I heard two old ladies talking loudly about that poor poet and her

horrible husband. And that's how Jack became famous. 

I tried to tell him it would pass, but it just kept growing. Jack got phone calls

every day from women wanting to talk to him. They asked him to be on t.v. now. It was

all pretty grotesque. The weirdest thing about it was that Jack hadn't seen Alix for over

four years. He did not know what she'd been doing or really anything about her. But he

became some sort of necrophilic hero. All kinds of women wanted to go out with him. I

guess he appeared in the poems in a way that made him sexy - that's all I could figure.

The guys at his company put a sign above his office door: DESTROYER OF THE

DREAM! HERE, with an arrow pointing down.

One night about a month after Alix died, Jack and I went to a trendy restaurant on

Ocean Avenue, the kind where the menu weighs more than the food on your plate. We

started in with margaritas and then moved on to straight tequila. We were talking about

Alix, naturally. Reminiscing. Jack said he was amazed she had lived as long as she did.

When he left her, she wept and had threatened suicide, this after telling him he

represented "everything in Western civilization she despised."

I told him I thought she was one of those people who just seem "doomed." As

soon as I said this, we both started laughing and couldn't stop. I was sitting under a

plastic palm tree, watching someone eat thirty-five dollar meat loaf. In this setting

"doomed" had a larger meaning neither one of us wanted to understand.

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While we were laughing I suddenly remembered my last, and worst encounter

with the dreadful Alix. How could I have forgotten it? She once tried to seduce me. I

had come over to see Jack, he wasn't in, and she suggested drinks. What I haven't

mentioned is that Alix could really pack in the booze. Her particular favorite was Jack

Daniel's, straight up, which she would drink all evening without ever appearing drunk.

She claimed it was her Southern, whiskey-sipping heritage. You see, the family lost the

plantation, Walkley Grove, about a hundred years ago, and when Alix got really tanked

up she would relive the whole treacherous affair. Also her brother was in jail for murder.

Seems he had threatened a neighbor with a gun, then shot him in the foot by accident -

all of which led to a very heavy felony charge. Meanwhile her mother had died while

going over a jump on a horse; her father, a former commercial pilot, was now just an old

boozer walking on his swimming pool when it got frozen, and her sister was a lesbian

named Daryl.

This gives you something of the flavor of the thing. What with the guns, the

booze, and the plantations, we were definitely in the land of the romance novel. In fact,

if I hadn't heard the story so many times, I would have thought it was one of those

terrible creations Alix tapped into her laptop computer. On this particular evening, I was

supposed to be attracted, I guess. Unfortunately whatever sexual signals were being sent

out I missed entirely, that is, until she started drinking directly out of the bottle.

Alix tipped the Jack Daniel's up towards her lips, took a swig and then threw open

her legs. "I am as honey to the bee. Let him taste the nectar."

Now I've been accused of being a little slow on the uptake when it comes to

women, but believe me, I got the picture. How to turn her down, and in what way?

That's where my mind was stuck when Jack walked in the door. Alix acted as if nothing

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had happened, and I hit the road. An evening like that, you got to check in your pants

and make sure everything's still intact.

I never told Jack about the incident. He knew she was awful anyway, so what

was the point? But I did get more of a sense of Jack's current problem when some

woman approached our table. "Aren't you Jack Huston?" she asked. Jack nodded. Then

she actually sat down! "Could I talk to you, for just a minute?" Jack nodded again. "I

just wanted to tell you how much your wife's work meant to me. I mean, it changed my

life, especially the poem 'Cut Flowers.'" Then she turned towards me. "Have you read

it?" she asked.

"No, no, I'm sorry to say I haven't."

"Well, you should."

I slurped another oyster into my mouth. "I will," I said, with a great deal of

conviction. After what seemed like forever, she went away.

Jack and I looked at each other. "See, see what I'm up against."

"It's pretty strange, I'll admit that. I wonder, if she'd lived, would it be any

different? Would anyone read that stuff, if she was just alive, failing politely?"

"You know, I read all the poems, and I can't make much out of them. I mean, not

that I'm a connoisseur or anything," Jack said, looking down into his glass. We got

tremendously drunk that night, blind, stinking drunk. We started reciting poetry, if you

can call it that. "I think that I shall never see, a thing as lovely as a tree," "big walls do

not good neighbors make," "my love is like a red, red rose." We got mixed up a few

times with song lyrics, jingles on television and all kinds of stuff. I remember trying to

claim that "goodness, gracious, great balls of fire" represented the art at its pinnacle.

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Jack got pretty maudlin and started moaning about how awful Alix was and she

was dead, thank god, and how funny she must have looked while her rear end was

sticking out of the oven as she madly turned the dials. "Why won't she leave me alone?"

he kept whining. "It took me a year to get divorced from her, and that was four years

ago. She won't go away. She's like a tick on my neck. I can't just rip it off because little

tentacles will still be stuck in there, ready to spring back into life. She's a vampire!" He

was really yelling now. I had to grab him and push him back into his chair.

"She was a witch, face it Jack. She was a witch. But she's gone, forever. She has

let go. Now you can."

It was inevitable. I had to go out and buy the infamous book of poems. The

cover sported a dramatic art deco motif and Alix's picture on the back. She was smiling

diabolically. Maybe she really was a witch. I kept putting off reading the thing, though I

had the eerie feeling that they - she and the book - were watching me.

Of an evening I don't usually read poetry, but I was trying to sandwich it in

between the basketball scores and the daily double at Santa Anita. I uncorked a bottle of

cognac and pulled up a chair on my balcony. I live at the Marina, on the main channel,

and you can often hear the sound of bells, from the boats tied up in their slips. I thought

this plus the cognac might get me in a poetic mood.

There was a man in the poems, but nobody I could recognize as Jack. The man

was depicted as an eagle, a bat, a squirrel - it didn't take Edna St. Vincent Millay to

figure out he was not high on her list of great people. All of my worst fears about Alix

and her possessions turned out to be true. For her the parrot was an icon of her very life -

it did care about what she was doing. The knife in the kitchen, the pot of stew, the

orchids in her study, they were all alive with malevolent life. "Cut Flowers," the one the

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restaurant lady liked, was full of bizarre reflections on stems and leaves, how green they

were, how little strings dangled when they got cut. It seemed she identified strongly with

stalks of every description. I've got to admit it was dramatic. She and her world seemed

to be joined where the pulse beats. It was her flesh and blood burned onto the page.

Even I could feel that.

I looked over across the channel. It was quiet, so quiet the silence seemed to rise

off the water like a mist. I read a few more lines of poetry, and then, unaccountably, felt

myself sinking into a restful, almost blank state of contemplation. Suddenly, I heard the

swishing sounds of a hull through water. A sailboat was gliding past me - a forty-eight

footer. It tacked around a small red and white buoy, then headed past the breakwater

toward the open ocean. The skipper was very accomplished; that's a lot of boat for one

person. I thought of Alix, journeying all alone, across the ice cold edge of time.