Without speaking, Katya looked down and very delicately plucked one of the creatures off her breast. Then she spread her legs a little wider, so that Jerry had an even more intimate view of her private parts. He was no connoisseur, but even he could see that there was a certain prettiness to the configuration of her labia; she had the pussy of a young girl. Putting her hands down between her legs she spread her lips and delicately applied the snail she’d taken from her breast the flesh there.
Jerry watched with a kind of appalled fascination as it responded to its new perch, expanding its horns and investigating her.
Katya sighed. Her eyes fluttered closed. Then, suddenly, they opened again. When they did they were fixed on him, with startling fierceness.
“There you are, Jerry,” she said, her voice full of the music he remembered from his childhood: the kind of bitter-sweet music by which he had judged the voice of every woman he’d met since.
Later he’d learned that silent movie stars had been notorious for having voices that precluded them from careers in the sound cinema: but Katya had been one of the exceptions to that rule. She had the slightest foreign inflection (nothing recognizable; just enough to add a certain poignancy to her sentences); otherwise she spoke with a beguiling elegance.
“I need help,” she said to him. “Jerry, will you come to the house? Please. I am alone here. Utterly alone.”
“What happened to Todd?” he said to her.
“He walked out on me.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Well it’s true. He did. Are you going to choose between him and me?”
“No, of course not.”
“He was just another empty shell, Jerry. There was no substance to him. And now I’m alone, and it’s worse than death.”
His dream-self was about to get clever and ask her how she could possibly know what death felt like, but then he thought better of asking her. Perhaps she did indeed know. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility. He’d never understood exactly how her life had worked, up there in the house in the Canyon, but he suspected there were terrible secrets in that place.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked her.
“Come back up to the Canyon,” she said.
That was the end of the dream, at least as he remembered it when he woke. The image of her body covered with snails disgusted him, of course; especially its sexual details. Had she conjured that, in dispatching this dream, or had he dug it out of the recesses of his own subconscious? Whichever it was, it had done its duty: making certain he understood the pitiful state she was in.
All through the following day, as he went about his chores-down to the market, back from the market, cooking himself chicken, eating the chicken, washing the plate from which he’d eaten the chicken, talking with Luis, who lived below, about how the apartments all needed painting, and who was going to talk to the manager because it had to be done soon; and so on, and so forth — through all of this he kept thinking about the dream, and whether it was really trying to tell him something or not. Out of the blue, he said to Luis: “Do you believe in dreams?”
Luis, who was a plump, amicable man who’d been in Christopher Street the night of the Stonewall riots, in full drag, or so he claimed. “Like how?” he said. “Give me an example.”
“Like: you have a dream and it seems like it’s telling you something.”
“Oh yeah. I’ve had those.”
“And were they?”
“Like I had a dream in which my mother told me to get out of this relationship I was in with a guy. I don’t know if you met him. Ronnie?”
“I remember Ronnie.”
“Well he was a sonofabitch. He used to beat me up, he’d get drunk on tequila and beat me up.”
“What’s this got to do with the dream?”
“I told you: my mother said throw him out. In the dream. She said throw him out or he’ll kill you.”
“What did you do?”