These Dreams of You

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The singer has brought with him back from L.A. a new-world madness to mix with the old-world’s. “Don’t tell me I’m not insane,” he says to her the next blue morning, not unlike the one when she knew she was pregnant; she finds him standing in a window muttering.

“Right,” she says.

“I know about insanity, don’t I,” he says matter-of-factly, “I have a brother who’s insane, it runs in the family. My good fortune was I found a method for my madness,” and he looks at her and says, “I’m going to be the first rock star assassinated.”

“Brilliant,” she sputters, “we’re grabbing headlines again, are we?”

“It’s not a romantic notion,” he insists.

“Look here,” she says, “I won’t try to tell you about insanity if you don’t try to tell me about assassinations. And just how disappointed will you be, mate,” she adds scornfully, “if it doesn’t happen?” But she feels the chill, and when she leaves forty-eight hours later, the only thing she takes that doesn’t belong to her is the paperback with the portrait of her that he drew, some mysterious moment when she wasn’t looking.

She means to have her daughter in London but gets as far as Paris and a flat in Montparnasse. A New Jersey punk poetess’ record plays through the window of another apartment across the courtyard. No sooner has Molly slipped into welcoming hands than the midwife holds her up astonished at the hum from her little body; already the baby transmits on Molly frequency. For six months she has her mother’s gray eyes, before they turn brown.

If no one can be sure where the frequency comes from, it makes sense anyway for Jasmine to try and return Molly to its source. Fifteen months after her daughter’s birth, the little girl already walking adeptly, the mother spots a familiar redheaded rock star coming out of a hotel on the rue des Beaux Arts off St. Germain-des-Prés, and she pivots, sliding around the corner of rue Bonaparte just as he turns to do a double-take. Some mysterious music from some unknown place has gotten his attention. The next day from the window she spots him in the street below as though searching, and she lets loose the curtain from her fingers just as he looks up; she hurls a blanket over the child to smother her broadcast. The next morning the girl finds outside her door a small box.