Picturing Will by Ann Beattie Page B

of the dream was still there: a tourist in a pink pants suit, taking a picture of a flat yellow-and-blue fish that floated by. Then there was the carnage: the deer on the road, again; the Halloween revelers squatting and standing in the glow of the headlights. The bright eye of the deer. A body too large to have been supported by such delicate legs.
    He kicked his feet backwards, out of the covers.
    In the next part of Mel’s dream the small dog who lived downstairs was sniffing the corpse in the road.
    Mel opened his lips, exhaling to blow the scene away, but the deer stayed still. The October cold made him shiver. His lips closed.
    The small dog sniffed and sniffed, and then it became apparent that there was a second dog, identical with the first, and that they were not partygoers on Halloween night but damned souls in Hell.
    He had some consciousness of his mouth. Was he drooling on the pillow? But then there was confusion: It was the dog who was drooling—the dog in the dream—and that dog was Cerberus, who was guarding the gates to Hell.
    The small dog had an owner, but Mel could not imagine who among the costumed partygoers that could be. It was not Richard Nixon, because Richard Nixon’s dog was named Checkers. It must be Will’s dog, then. He and Will must have persuaded Jody to get a dog.
    Mel turned onto his side.
    Just before the dream ended, dogs were floating past the window of the submarine. In the little corner of his mind that fought to become conscious, Mel knew that if there were a cartoon caption—if Gary Larson were in charge—everything that was dreadful could be amusing. But the unconscious mind won out, so he knew that if he laughed it could be a death sentence: It would attract the rabid dog, and once bitten—once his leg had sprung a leak—it would be impossible for the submarine to rise again. Even the woman in the pants suit was alarmed. She had been photographing fish, and then drowned dogs began to drift by. Then Will was in the dream, looking at him as if he had known all along how grotesque this would become.
    Mel drew his feet inside the covers and moved his knees up, toward his chest. His eyes darted left and right, behind closed eyelids. Like little fish, Jody thought. She was propped up on one elbow, looking at Mel. The aspirin she had taken was slowly dulling the thud in her head that was the result of too many drinks too late at night. Now Mel’s REMs had subsided, though she still looked sleepily at him in the gradually brightening bedroom. A line from “The Waste Land” came to her: Those are pearls that were his eyes . She had read Keats and Auden to Will, but did not think “The Waste Land” would hold his attention, even though a few of the lines had end rhyme. What was the line before that line? The world could indeed be a perilous place, she thought as she was falling asleep, if you could not remember those things that came first. She remembered that someone had drowned but not the line itself.

EIGHT
    L ord Haveabud raised his glass—topheavy, so that it was easier to curve his fingers under the bowl and forget about the stem—and swooshed the blue margarita through the air like a courtesan about to make an elaborate curtsy. The toast was all eye contact and no words. The deal had been decided on (though Jody, who kept forgetting his last name, didn’t know it was a deal), the deed as good as done (though Haveabud wanted to see the entire shoot, not just the enlargements Mel had shown him at Palio), and now all that remained was for Haveabud to buy a tie—lately, he didn’t like what Alexander Julian was up to—to wear to the opening. Photographic galleries, like Witkin, were showing paintings, so why shouldn’t he show photographs? Haveabud believed that new ties brought him luck. Also, whenever he flew, he carried with him in some pocket a small geode he had bought in a previous life, when he and his second wife visited a gift shop near the Grand Canyon. Being