These Dreams of You

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Has he forgotten that on the opening blank page of the paperback he’s drawn a picture of her, one day as he sat in the recording studio gazing out the window at a couple by the Wall? He was a painter once, back before the music, before he concluded there was no future in painting. Or does he remember perfectly well and, very calculatedly, finds this an off-handed way of showing her? Whichever: Later when she opens the book she can see that the sketch on the inside is unmistakably her, in all her shades of brown but for the misplaced gray of her eyes.

She doesn’t remember him drawing her, doesn’t remember being in the recording studio when he did it. Was it absent-minded on his part, his eyes happening to fall on her as his thoughts drifted; or if she wasn’t in his presence, was it therefore more conscious? If she wasn’t within sight, then she would have to have been on his mind. She has no particular interest in him that way and hasn’t been aware that he has any in her; she has no interest in any of them — him or Jim or the Professor — and still hasn’t on the night that it happens, she and the three of them. But she doesn’t give the book back and in a few months when she leaves on the run she’ll take it, with the sketch of her on the front page and carrying inside her belly the daughter named, by coincidence perhaps, since she never really reads the book, after the woman who voices the century’s greatest yes.