← Selected Shorts
Selected Shorts
Roz Chast: While You Were Dreaming
01:01:09
Host Meg Wolitzer presents three works from an ev…
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- [00:08]
A
Forget Freud. New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast is the best interpreter of dreams, hands down. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and on this selected shorts, Chaste reads from her new book, I Must Be Dreaming.
- [00:20]
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So I had this dream about Danny DeVito. I dreamed that I was married to him. In my dream, he lay with his head in my lap, gazing up at me with adoration. And I thought, I'm not in. But it's nice to be adored, so maybe this will work out.
- [00:36]
A
Stay with us for fiction about sleep and dreams with hilarious tales from Chaste's own vault of neuroses. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. As long as people have been telling stories, dreams have been a narrative tool to communicate meaning. Dreams appear in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian and Greek stories. They motivate characters in early novels like the Tale of Genji and Don Quixote. And for some reason, just about everyone has had that dream in which they find themselves on stage in a play, but they don't remember their lines. Not to mention the dream where they're on the street where they grew up dressed as the Easter Bunny, going door to door asking for pocket change. Or is that just me? Dreams are irresistible to writers, with good reason. Dreams might lend a little foreshadowing to unfolding events, serve as a kind of supernatural exposition, or provide some cathartic insight to characters who are really going through something. Because dreams are ultimately kind of mysterious, there are a lot of ways to use them. If a writer is skilled enough, they can even make their own dreams entertaining. Seriously, set aside all the time some friend or partner or friend's partner droned on about their uninteresting dream, we actually know someone who cracked the code. It's New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. For decades, she has spun her anxious thoughts and careful observations into comedy gold, and she's shared them in books, including what I Hate From A to Z and Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? And as her new book, I Must Be Dreaming, proves, Ra's Chast can make her own dreams not just relatable, but compelling. Being dreams, of course, they are a little weird, but they're also hilarious. Chaste's book is charming, and she is, too. I've known her for quite some time, and her sensibility is just as wonderful in person as it is on the page. So we invited her to host a night of stories about dreams and hear excerpts from her book, too. This selected shorts is the product of that live show with different ways to look at dreams. Writers often use them as clever literary devices, while Chaste delivers them as a wild personal journey with laugh lines. Chaste is a convivial New York original who helps ease your neuroses by exposing her own. Here she is introducing the evening on stage at Symphony Space.
- [03:18]
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Ever since I was a kid, I was interested not only in the content of my dreams, but the fact that one dreamed it all. Why didn't I switch off when I fell asleep? And what was this mishmash of stuff that projected itself inside my head like my own weird theater that showed nonsensical movies on a nightly basis. And some years ago I was working on a book that was going nowhere and I really sort of hated working on it and I procrastinated anytime I could. And what I got involved with was drawing up my dreams and, and I enjoyed it so much, kind of taking the dream and cartoonifying it. As I say in this book, there are like the filets of the dreams. And this was the first one that I drew up. Bissell and the Glove. My mother and her friend, a man named Bissell, I don't know this person, had come into possession of O.J. simpson's famous glove. This Bissell guy telephoned her to tell her of this great business idea. We can rent it out for parties. As a matter of fact, I'm wearing it right now. And my mother had a different opinion. That glove belongs in a safety deposit box.
- [04:33]
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That was Roz Chast sharing how her book of illustrated dreams, I Must Be Dreaming, came to be. Now let's get to the stories. Our first piece is by Ed Park. He's a longtime writer and editor who whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Harper's and the New Yorker. His titles include the novel Same Bed, Different Dreams, which was named one of the top 10 books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly. This piece, a kind of late night fever dream tweaked by pharmaceuticals, is called the Wife on Ambien. Reading it is John Fugelsang, an actor, comic and the host of Tell me everything on SiriusXM. He unsurprisingly finds his way into the story's comic elements. And now Ed Park's the Wife on Ambien, read by John Fugelsang.
- [05:28]
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Good evening.
- [05:30]
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The Wife on Ambien. The Wife on Ambien knows the score. I mean this literally. Rangers 43 in the overtime, Devils fall to the Flames 3 to 1. Knicks lose again at home in the morning. I open the paper and none of this checks out. The wife on Ambien calls me Bob, calls me mom, calls me Mr. Blue Pants. The wife on Ambien makes false starts. In one week she has sketched a music hall. She is not an architect, designed a drone. She is not an engineer. Written two scenes of a play called Haunted Masquerade. Her MFA Is in sculpture. The handwriting is a bear, but I piece together a plot. Society lady leads double life in the London of Jack the Ripper. In the morning. The wife on Ambien denies authorship, though at lunch I hear the first line of the soliloquy leave her lips. The wife on Ambien cooks eggs. I take pains to hide the ingredients and the hardware. Still she conjures omelets from a secret stash of eggs with a pan I somehow miss. She singes her robe. I gain five pounds in a month. The wife on Ambien gets fresh. She moves on top of me like it's spin class. That was nice, I say afterwards. Really nice. It reminds me of our wedding night. Paris. My God, we were so young. Do you remember how the stars? I say, then stop, because she's already snoring. The wife on Ambien tries to order Ambien on Amazon. The wife on Ambien makes up the names of golfers. The wife on Ambien keeps me guessing. You don't want to know what I did in Tucson, she says, patting me on the head like a child. I'd better not say what went down in West Hartford. Tell me, I say. She looks around for some eggs. The wife on Ambien recites The poetry of T.S. eliot, sings the music of Jesus, and Mary Chain, calculates how much we have to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambien also tells me it doesn't matter that the sun will swallow the Earth exactly 8 billion years or or 13 weeks or 24 hours from now. The wife on Ambien orders Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It's 4am Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, arrange marriages among their offspring. The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies.
- [08:25]
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Get a life.
- [08:25]
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You're a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed to her own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail. The wife on Ambien shouts, atlantis. Just that. Atlantis. The wife on Ambien drinks an entire quart of milk. She washes out the slim jug and stands it up in the recycling bin like a soldier. The the wife on Ambien forgets about our children, Danica, 11, and Morris, 5. We named them after a race car driver and a cat. It was her idea. She had it on Ambien. I get home from work after nine and see all the kids attacking each other with belts while she sleeps, all the cushions and pillows piled in the center of the room. Don't wreck our fort, Daddy, morris says. More like a tower, I say. Then don't wreck our tower, danica says. What about your homework? I ask my daughter. Homework's for losers, she says. Losers like you, morris says. Honey, I call, but the wife on Ambien is sawing logs. The wife on Ambien takes her vitamins, organizes the spice rack. She alphabetizes the shelves in the hallway and polishes my shoes. She wanders a while adjusting picture frames that are out of true everything looks cleaner in the morning, but other nights she's knocking tchotchkes off tables surrounding the wastebasket with coffee grounds in ritual fashion. The wife on Ambien. How can I describe her? The way she tilts her head reminds me of pictures of her grandmother as a youth. The way she does a Bronx cheer reminds me of my first boss who was in the Merchant Marine. The wife on Ambien scrolls through her phone, swipes with her eyes shut. I can't wrench it from her iron grip. In the morning she asks, did you change the time zone to Dubai? I sense a light. It's 3:15am and the wife on Ambien is playing online poker. Around the virtual table are Joker, Seventeen, Ace in Hole, and Mr. Blue Pants. I would force her to stop, but she's winning by a lot. Someone has to bring home the bacon while my startup starts up. That's how I figure it. I'm seeking funding for a virtual reality venture that will let you live in the home you grew up in. The wife on Ambien can list the presidents in order. The wife in real life can't. The wife on Ambien tries her hand at painting. The tubes are open. The brushes stand in a coffee can of gray water. There's a becoming beige smudge on her brow, but where are the canvases? Wither the tableau Many years later, when we move out of the city, I find her art under a box of books in a basement storage locker. These are all pictures of toast, I say. The wife on Ambien solves Danica's Rubik's Cube. The wife on Ambien insists she doesn't snore. One night I set up my phone to record her balancing it on an eyeglasses case between our pillows, wondering if that's legal. In the morning, the device tells a different tale. It's just me calling out her name, my voice thinning to a whine like a dog that strayed too far from its master. A voice that would keep the best of us up at night. Thank you.
- [12:21]
A
That was Ed Park's story the Wife on Ambien, performed by John Fugelsang. You know, I tried to write a story like that once, something autobiographical, but the Wife on Alka Seltzer plus just felt a little less dramatic somehow. And in truth, I too am someone who requires help falling asleep at night. But instead of going the pharmaceutical route, I've been going the sleep story route. There are a lot of podcasts out there that promise a slightly boring but never too boring listening experience. You may learn a little something about shearing wool or about the history of the Canadian Mounted Police, but not enough that you will get so excited you need to get out of bed and sign up for that sheep shearing course at the Y. Or shake your spouse awake to tell him or her you've decided to switch careers, not to mention nationalities. So if you're like me, go find one of these podcasts. They really work. But just to make it clear, we at Selected Shorts do not consider our show to be sleep inducing. Feel free to operate heavy machinery while listening. Our stories, we hope, will keep you awake and enthralled all the way until the end. Now let's hear from New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, our inspiration for this show.
- [13:39]
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I don't know about you guys. I have a lot of repeating dreams, and these are some of them alone at a party. I have a terrible disease. New York City has an unusual neighborhood, a beach in Midtown. Well, I'll be Once again, I have lost my purse. The subway is different today. This is the X train and it is in the Alps and pregnant and old. And this is not a happy dream.
- [14:08]
A
That was Roz Chast performing an excerpt from her cartoon memoir, I Must Be Dreaming. Next, something from British writer Tessa Hadley. She is the prolific author of titles including Free Love and After the Funeral. This story about how dreams might push us into real world action is the title story from her collection Bad Dreams and Other Stories. It is read by Rita Wolf, an actor who has appeared in off Broadway shows including the Michaels and An Ordinary Muslim and A Delicate Balance. And now here's BAD DREAMS by Tessa Hadley Performed by Rita Wolf.
- [14:58]
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BAD DREAMS A child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface, which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open. At first the darkness was implacable, but as she stared into the darkness, familiar forms began to loom through it, the pale outline of a window printed by the street lamp against the curtains, the horizontals on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys. The child knew these details by heart, though she couldn't see them in the dark. She was where she always was when she woke up, in her own bedroom in the top bunk, her younger brother asleep in the lower one. She struggled to sit up out of the tightly wound nest of sheets and blankets. She was asthmatic and feared not being able to catch her breath. Something had happened, she was sure, while she was asleep. She didn't know what it was at first, but the strong dread it had left behind didn't subside with the confusion of waking. Then she remembered that this thing had happened inside her sleep. In her dream she had dreamt something horrible and so plausible that it was vividly present as soon as she remembered it. She had dreamt that she was reading her favorite book, the one she read over and over, and actually had been reading earlier that night until her mother came to turn off the light. In the dream she had been turning its pages as usual when, beyond the story's familiar last words, she discovered an extra section that she had never seen before, a short paragraph set on a page by itself, headed Epilogue. She was an advanced reader for nine and knew about prologues and epilogues, though it didn't occur to her then that she was the author of her own dreams and must have invented this epilogue herself. It seemed so completely a found thing, alien and unanticipated, coming from outside herself and against her will. In the real book, she loved swallows and Amazons. Six children spent their summers in perfect freedom, sailing dinghies on a lake, absorbed in adventures and rivalries that were half invented games and half truth, pushing across the threshold of safety into a thrilling unknown. All the details in the book had the solidity of life, though it wasn't her own life. She didn't have servants or boats or a lake or an absent father in the navy. She had read all the other books in the series, too, and she acted out their stories with her friends at school, although they lived in a city and none of them had ever been sailing. The world of swallows and Amazons existed in a dimension parallel to her own, touching it only in their games. Now the child seemed to see the impersonal print of the dream epilogue written on the darkness in front of her eyes. John and Roger both went on to it began in a businesslike voice. Of course, the words weren't actually in front of her eyes, and parts of what was written were elusive when she sought them. Certain sentences, though, were scored into her awareness as sharply as if she'd heard them read aloud. Roger drowned at sea in his 20s. John suffered with a bad heart. The Blackett sisters, long illnesses. Titi killed in an unfortunate accident. The litany of deaths tore jaggedly into the tissue that the book had woven, making everything lopsided and hideous. The epilogue's gloating, bland language, complacently regretful, seemed to relish catching her out in her dismay. Oh, didn't you know? Susan lived to a ripe old age. Susan was the dullest of the swallows, tame and sensible, in charge of cooking and housekeeping. Still, the idea of her ripe old age was full of horror. Wasn't she just a girl with everything ahead of her? The child knew that the epilogue existed only in her dream, but she couldn't dispel the taint of it clinging to her thoughts. When she was younger, she had called to her mother if she woke in the night, but something stopped her from calling out now. She didn't want to tell anyone about the dream. She was afraid, anyway, that her mother wouldn't understand the awfulness of the dream. If she tried to explain it, she might laugh or think it was silly. For the first time, the child felt as if she were alone in her own home. Not wanting to lie down in the place where she'd had the dream, she swung over the side rail of the bed and reached with her bare feet for the steps of the ladder. The lower bunk was a cave so dark that she couldn't make out the shape of her sleeping brother. Quietly she opened her bedroom door. The doors to the kitchen and the lounge, which were at the back of the flat, stood open onto the windowless hallway. A thin blue light falling through them lay in rectangles on the hall carpet. She had read about moonlight but had never taken in its reality before. It made the lampshade of Spanish wrought iron, which had always hung from a chain in the hallway, seem suddenly as barbaric as a cage or a portcullis in a castle. Everything was tidy in the kitchen. The dishcloth had been wrung out and hung on the edge of the plastic washing up bowl. Something on a plate was wrapped in grease proof paper. The sewing machine was put away under its cover. At one end of the table the pieces of Liberty Lawn print which her mother was cutting out for one of her ladies were folded carefully in their paper bag to keep them clean. Liberty Lawn, her mother named it reverently, like an incantation, though the daily business of her sewing wasn't reverent but briskly pragmatic, cutting and pinning and snipping at seams with pinking shears, running the machine with her head bent close to the work in bursts of concentration, one hand always raised to the wheel to slow it or breaking threads quickly in the little clip behind the needle. The chatter of the sewing machine racing and easing and halting and starting up again was like a busy engine driving their days. In the lounge the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. She touched the pages heaped on her father's writing desk, his meaning densely tangled in his black italic. Writing seemed more accessible through her fingertips in the dark than it ever was in daylight when its difficulty thwarted her. He was studying for his degree in the evenings after teaching at school. All day she and her brother played quietly so as not to disturb him. Their mother had impressed upon them the importance of his work. He was writing about a book, Leviathan. His ink bottle had left imprints on the desk's leather inlay, and he stored his notes on a shelf in cardboard folders carefully labeled, the pile of folders growing ever higher. The child was struck by the melancholy of this accumulation. Sometimes she felt a pang of fear for her father, as if he were exposed and vulnerable, and yet when he wasn't working, he charmed her with his jokes, pretending to be poisoned when he tasted the cakes she had made, teasing her school friends until they blushed. She never feared in the same way for her mother. Her mother was capable. She was the whole world. In their absence, her parents were more distinctly present to her than usual, as individuals with their own un, unfathomable adult preoccupations. She was aware of their lives running backward from this moment into a past she could never enter. This moment too, the one fitted around her now as inevitably and closely as a skin would one day become the past. Its details then would seem remarkable and poignant, and she would never be able to return inside them. The chairs in the lounge, formidable in the dimness, seemed drawn up as if for a spectacle, waiting more attentively than if they were filled with people. The angular recliner built of black tubular steel with lozenges of polished wood for arms, the cone shaped wicker basket in its round wrought iron frame, the black painted wooden armchair with orange cushions, and the low divan covered in striped olive green cotton. The reality of the things in the room seemed more substantial to the child than she was herself, and she wanted, in a sudden passion to break something, to disrupt this world of her home, sealed in its mysterious stillness where her bare feet made no sound on the lino or the carpets. On impulse, using all her strength, she pushed at the recliner from behind, tipping it over slowly until it was upside down with its top resting on the carpet and its legs in the air. The rubber ferrules on its feet, unexpectedly silly in the moonlight, like prim tiny shoes. Then she tipped over the painted chair so that its cushions flopped out. She pulled the wicker cone out of its frame and turned the frame over, flipped up the goatskin rug. She managed to make very little noise, just a few soft bumps and thuds. When she had finished, though, the room looked as if a hurricane had blown through it, throwing the chairs about. She was shocked by what she'd affected, but gratified too. The after sensation of strenuous work tingled in her legs and arms, and she was breathing fast. Her whole body rejoiced in the chaos. Perhaps it would be funny when her parents saw it in the morning. At any rate, nothing, nothing would ever make her tell them that she'd done it. They would never know, and that was funny too. A private hilarity bubbled up in her, though she wouldn't give way to it. She didn't want to make a sound. At that very moment, as she surveyed her crazy handiwork, the moon sank below the top of the wall outside and the room darkened, all its solidity withdrawn. The child's mother woke up early in the dawn, had her little boy called out to her. He sometimes woke in the night and had strange fits of crying, during which he didn't recognize her, and screamed in her arms for his mummy. She listened but heard nothing. Yet she was as fully promptly awake as if there had been some summons or a bell had rung. Carefully she sat up, not wanting to wake her sleeping husband, who was lying on his side with his knees drawn up and his back to her. The bristle of his crew cut the only part of him visible above the blankets. The room was just as she had left it when she went to sleep, except that his clothes were thrown on top of hers on the chair. He had stayed up late working on his essay. She remembered dimly that when he got into bed she had turned over, snuggling up to him, and that in her dream she had seemed to fit against the shape of him as sweetly as a nut into its shell, losing herself inside him. But now he was lost somewhere. She couldn't follow him. Sometimes in the mornings, especially if they hadn't made love the night before, she would wake to find herself beside this stranger, buried away from her miles deep, frowning in his sleep. His immobility then seemed a kind of comment or a punishment directed at her. The grey light in the room was diffuse and hesitant. Even on sunny days. These rooms at the front of the flat weren't bright. She had been happy in this flat at first, in the new freedom of her married life, but now she resented the neighbors always brooding overhead and was impatient to move to a place they could have all to themselves. But that would have to wait until he finished his degree. She eased out from under the warmth of the blankets in the hall. She listened at the door of the children's room, which stood ajar. Nothing. The lavatory was chilly. Its tiny high window made it feel like a prison cell, but a blackbird sang liquidly outside in the yard. On the way back to bed, she looked into the kitchen, where everything was as she'd left it. He hadn't even made his cocoa or eaten the sandwich she'd put out for him before he came to bed. His refraining made her tense her jaw, as if he had repudiated her and preferred his work. She should have been a painter, she thought in a flash of anger, not a housewife and a dressmaker. Still, her orderly kitchen reassured her, the scene of her daily activity poised and quiescent now, awaiting the morning when she'd pick it up again with renewed energy. Perhaps he'd like bacon for his breakfast. She had saved up her housekeeping to buy him some. His mother had cooked bacon for him every morning. When she glanced into the lounge, her shock at the sight of the chairs thrown about was as extreme as a hand in clapped over her mouth from behind. The violence was worse because it was frozen in silence, had lain in wait, gloating while she suspected nothing, someone had broken in. She was too afraid in the first moments to call out to her husband. She waited in the doorway, holding her breath for the movement that would give the intruder away. It was awful to think that a few minutes ago she had gone unprotected all the way down the lonely passageway to the lavatory. Then, as her panic subsided, she took in the odd specificity of the chaos. Only the chairs were overturned at the center of the room. Nothing else had been touched, nothing pulled off the shelves and thrown on the floor, nothing smashed. The lounge windows were tightly closed, just as the back door had surely been closed in the kitchen. Nothing had been taken, had it? The wireless was intact on its shelf. Rousing out of her stupor, she crossed to the desk and opened the drawer where her husband kept his band earnings. The money was safe. Three pound ten in notes and some loose change, along with his pipe and pipe cleaners and dirty tobacco pouch, the smell of which stayed on her fingers when she closed the drawer. Instead of waking her husband, she tried the window catchers, then went around checking the other rooms of the flat. The kitchen door and the front door were both securely bolted, and no one could have climbed in through the tiny window in the lavatory. Soundless on her bare feet, she entered the children's bedroom and stood listening to their breathing. Her little boy stirred in his sleep but didn't cry. Her daughter was spread eagled awkwardly amid the menagerie of her stuffed toys and dolls. Their window, too, was fastened shut. There was no intruder in the flat and only one explanation for the crazy scene in the front room. Her imagination danced with affront and dismay. Chilled, she returned to stand staring in the lounge. Her husband was moody, and she'd always known that he had anger buried in him, but he'd never done anything like this before, nothing so naked and outrageous. She supposed he must have got frustrated with his studies before he came to bed. Or was the disorder a derisory message, meant for her because he despised her homemaking, her domestication of the free life he'd once had? Perhaps the mess was even supposed to be some kind of brutal joke. She couldn't imagine how she had slept through the outburst this time. For once she was clearly in the right, wasn't she? He had been childish, giving way to his frustration, as if she didn't feel fed up sometimes, and he criticized her for her bad temper. He had such high standards for everyone else. From now on she would hold on to this new insight into him, no matter how reasonable he seemed to her. Disdain hurt her like a bruise to the chest. She was more used to admiring him, but it was also exhilarating. She seemed to see the future with great clarity, looking forward through a long tunnel of antagonism in which her husband was her enemy. This awful truth appeared to be something she'd always known, though in the past it had been clouded in uncertainty. And now she saw it starkly. Calmly and quietly, she picked up each chair, put back the cushions which had tumbled onto the carpet, straightened the goatskin rug. The room looked as serene as if nothing had ever happened in it. The joke of its serenity erupted inside her like bubbles of soundless laughter. Nothing, nothing, nothing would ever make her acknowledge what he'd done or the message he'd left for her, although when he saw the room restored to its rightful order, he would know that, she knew. She would wait for him to be the first to acknowledge in words the passage of this silent violence between them. In the bedroom she lay down beside her husband with her back turned. Her awareness of her situation seemed pure and brilliant, and she expected to lie awake, burning at his nearness. There was less than an hour to wait before she had to get up again. She got back into bed only because her feet were cold and it was too early to switch on the electric fire in the kitchen, but almost at once she dropped into a deep sleep, particularly blissful, as if she were falling down through syrupy darkness, her limbs unbound and bathing in warmth. When she woke again, this time her little boy really was calling out to her. She remembered immediately what had happened in the night, but she also felt refreshed and blessed. A young wife Fried bacon for her husband. The smell of it filled the flat. Her son was eating cereal at the table. Her husband was preoccupied packing exercise books into his worn briefcase, opening the drawer in his desk where he kept his pipe and tobacco, dropping these into the pocket of his tweed jacket. But he came at some point to stand behind his wife at the stove and put his arms around her, nuzzling her neck, kissing her behind her ear, and she leaned back into his kiss as she always did, tilting her head to give herself to him. When the bacon was ready, she served it up on a plate with with fried bread and a tomato and poured his tea, then went to find out why their daughter was dawdling in the bedroom. The girl was sitting on the edge of her brother's bunk, trying to pull on her knee length socks with one hand while she held a book open in front of her eyes with the other. Her thin, freckled face was nothing like her mother's. One white sock was twisted around her leg with its dirty heels sticking out at the front, and the book was surely the same one she'd already read several times. The child was insistent, though, that she needed to start reading it all over again from the beginning. Her mother took the book away and chibied her along.
- [35:43]
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That was Rita Wolfe. Living Through Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley. When we return, Love, Insomnia and a little more Raz. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You're listening to selected Shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Dreams. That's what we're exploring in this week's shorts. Not only do a lot of short stories use dreams as a plot point, but but the stories themselves can kind of feel like dreams, with their own logic, their own weird twists. Next, a piece from writer Tom Barbash. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, and his books include the Dakota Winters and the Last Good Chance. We're going to hear the title story from his collection, Stay Up With Me. While dreams aren't the bulk of the narrative here, they make up a very crucial element just under the surface. Performing it is Jason Ralph. He's an actor who made his name on stage and has since appeared in series including the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and starred in the Magicians. Here's Jason Ralph in his selected shorts debut reading Tom Barbash's Stay Up With Me.
- [37:33]
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Stay Up With Me. Henry is in the part of the dream where his father carries him piggyback through the shoulder high waves. His father's T shirt is soaked through, and the salt water is making the cut on Henry's elbow sting when a woman's voice calls out, henry. Henry. And before his eyes open, he knows who it is. He can tell by the smell of her shampoo that it's Alice. He'd been napping in the cafe around the corner from his apartment, the one open till midnight. He just left, alice says, sitting down at Henry's table, which is by the corner window. She does this fairly frequently. She finds Henry, now boy faced, 31, somewhere in the neighborhood when she wants his advice. Once, when she needed to choose between two job offers, she searched the grocery store, three coffee shops and two bars before discovering himself seated with his eyes closed on the couch at the laundromat. Henry has been escaping into dreams a lot lately, in movie theaters or on buses or subways, but mainly in cafes or coffee shops, where he spends the bulk of his afternoons and evenings reading or working on one of his scripts. He thanked me, she says with a pained smile. Services rendered, I guess. He stares at her blankly and then glances at his watch. I'm sorry to bug you, but I really need you, Henry. And she gives him the little girl pout, the one that often convinces him to give her rides or buy her dinner. All right, then, when did he come over? Just after nine. Henry does the math. It's 11 now. Well, that's sufficiency. It's not like that. He. He works in the emergency room and he has this ridiculous schedule. Anyway, I think I was insensitive to him. How so? His dog died this morning. I guess that's a pretty big deal. Yeah, I'd say so. I told him I was sorry. I was really sorry, many times over. I just. I don't know. I mean, how many times can you say, my God, that's awful, that's so sad. I mean, I had a pretty traumatic run in at work and I kept it to myself. Dogs are family members, henry says as he gazes down at his screenplay, which is about a spy mission in Tunzia during World War II, and he considers letting Alice read some of it, and then he remembers how badly that went last time. He said it had a heart attack. Since when did dogs start having heart attacks? I thought of a dog dressed up like one of those overworked executives eating too much bacon, cheese, and then like, keeling over. Henry looks at the other tables to see if anyone else is hearing this. I'm going back to work, he says. Not just yet, Henry. I've got a deadline. But you were sleeping. Napping. She bites her lower lip and sighs. You want to maybe go grab a drink? She says. He considers the offer. Henry is in the parched badlands of a dry spell, and the thought of a couple drinks with Alice followed by a trip to his apartment is like a sugar rush, apt to raise his spirits for an hour or so before dropping him into a prolonged crash. Maybe not. All right, she says. Can I just sit here with you and read it for a while? Remember when we used to do that? Do you have something to read? Nope. Henry hands her a book from his bag and then goes back to working on his screenplay. Alice begins reading the book and twirling a strand of her straight brown hair around a pencil, and after a while she tilts her head thoughtfully and she asks him, how's your dad, Henry? He's good. I think about him all the time, and Henry raises his eyebrows dubiously. Let's go visit him this weekend. Like we did that one time. Remember when we went to the movies afterward? Moulin Rouge? They had arrived 10 minutes late and they had to sit in the front row, and with all the jump cuts and the pulsating lights. Henry felt like he might go blind. I thought I would cheer you up. You thought it would cheer you up. You were the one who was being strange. Water under the bridge, he says, but Henry remembers it vividly. He was planning to ask Alice to move in with him that night after they made a lobby drop off of some books at his father's and his father insisted that they come up for a quick drink so he could finally meet Henry's girl, and his old fashioned use of the word touched Henry enough to consent. He had assured Henry that his apartment was in cocktail party shape and possibly in his eyes it was. He'd set out a full bar, dusty bottles of Tanqueray and Stolli and Maker's Mark, a few wedges of odd tasting cheese, some hard salami, what might have been pate, and he'd clearly vacuumed and he straightened the furniture. But along the most of cursory of investigations, Henry saw trouble. A moth eaten alligator sweater thrown over piles of paper in his office, mold green growing on the refrigerator shelves and in the corners of the bathroom. Until that night, it was possible for Henry to live in a state of suspended judgment about his father's circumstances. But now, through Alice's eyes, he saw every coffee stain in the carpet or stray clump of rice on the kitchen stove as proof of his father's alarming decline. His father had downed a martini or two before they arrived, giving him the jittery gin emboldened air of a nightclub MC trying to earn the love of an unresponsive audience. He told a few old stories, told them flawlessly, and then, like a man who takes the wrong road on the way home and finds himself on a street very much like his but which doesn't contain his house, lost his bearings. When he recovered, he warmed to Alice and he acted around her like a teenager with a crush, and she flirted back. It irritated Henry, but he knew that it was simply her way of making herself comfortable in a strange situation, and when Alice leaned down to retrieve a fallen ice cube, Henry caught his father admiring her ass. When his father retreated to the kitchen for a forgotten hors d', oeuvre, Henry apologized for the mess in the apartment. It's fine. He's been a perfect host, alice said without knowing how true that had once been. In the old life his parents parties were legend, posh caterers, pianists and torch song singers and guests in black tie, all before the business tanked and before his father fell asleep smoking a cigarette burning two rooms of their brownstone and before Henry's mother left, sending Henry plummeting into that blind alley of resentment where he both hated his father for making his mother leave and felt responsible for him and his fragile loneliness. At the door, Henry's father pressed Alice's hand in his and he told her, eyes moist, how much he loved his son and that Henry was all that he had left in the world. And then, perhaps losing his spot in time again he apologized to them both about the final, and he showed Alice the burn marks on his forearm and his shin. How often do you see him? Alice asked when they were outside on the street. Once a month maybe. The truth was closer to once a week. I really like him, she said, and then added, he's different from what I expected. How so? Henry asked. But he knew Henry had gone to Blue Blazer private schools and his father lived in a nice Upper east side block, and she'd been imagining luxury or at least the semblance of order. He looked like him, you know. Henry peered at his reflection in a shop window. He looked more like his mother, he thought. She said a few more nice things about his father, about a sense of humor and the first edition books she'd found on his shelves. But Henry wasn't listening. I think we should move in together, he said. She ran her finger down his sideburn as though he were an injured pet. There's an idea, she said. Alice heads up to the counter now and orders a glass of wine and an espresso for Henry so that he'll stay awake with her. It is in this cafe that the two of them first met. It was after they both attended a screening at NYU where Henry once taught a class for four former teacher who had pneumonia. Alice and a friend were talking about films in general and Henry offered them a few well honed observations about Otto Preminger and John Cassavetes. Alice had long legs, ringlets of brown hair and alabaster skin, with six small earrings circling one ear and a little too much mascara around her large brown eyes, and she seemed interested in Henry's opinions and countered with a few provoking ones of her own. She was slightly younger than him, 25 or so, and she'd seen most of the movies that Henry cherished and read many of his favorite books, and before long they were spending entire weekends at Alice's place, staying up until 4 watching underground films that Henry brought home from his part time job at the film archive, or just messing around and waking at noon, and some nights they hit a party thrown by one of Alice's friends, but they rarely stayed long and sometimes after a cocktail or dinner they'd sneak off to a back bedroom or bathroom or stairwell and they learned how to keep their voices down and their eyes open and were caught only once by someone who was too high to care. One night as they entered a restaurant for a late night supper, Alice in a satin T shirt and a narrow black skirt, hair pulled back and a spiky bun, Henry lazily self assured in the tan suede shirt Alice picked out for him, Alice's hand in his rear jeans pocket. He paused to imagine what they must look like and they're just fucked. Bliss, like the kind of people you would die to be. Henry's thoughts are floating in that time as he leaves the coffee shop with Alice and heads with her towards the blue lit bar where they used to get tipsy together and make out. Henry hates the moment in which he wants her all over again because it feels like a regression, and so he treats her with a forged indifference which he hopes will realign the balance of desire between them. They have far too much history to ever make this work, he thinks, but in certain moments, moments like this one or on the occasional nights that Alice decides to sleep over, he wonders. They are fluent in each other's faults and wounds and hypocrisies and so sleeping together has this feel of sleeping with a failed part of themselves, like pornography with familiar dialogue. He could teach a course on their maneuverings, he thinks, and yet he'd always get it half wrong. There's no one I'm closer to in the whole world than you, Henry. I feel the same, he says briefly before realizing it might be true. He wants to tell her his theory, that that night at his father's had pushed them off course. Alice had witnessed Henry's future, or so he imagined, and so to alter that trajectory she began needling him about finding a full time job or selling one of the dozen screenplays he'd finished, and she took heed of his subpar housekeeping and his smoking, which Henry said he'd stop but he never did and he rebelled by smoking more and allowing the plates to to pile up and the question of them living together was never brought up again. She asked him at a Burger King one night about his family when he was a kid, a softball toss so he could give her something positive to hook into, and he refused to describe aloud any of the happy scenes that he'd been playing over in his mind in order to get to sleep. The surf and turf barbecues, the Florida vacations, the weekend parties at the Cape Rides in his father's white Mustang convertible, his mother reading him Watership down when he was he was 8, and to his thrill, changing one of the rabbits names to Henry. They felt too much like the right answer to an admissions interview. Like everyone else's, he said. And then a more unsettling memory came to him of when he'd actually last spoken to his mother. She'd called from Albuquerque, New Mexico, from the house where she was raising two other children with a different husband, to tell Henry that she loved him and always would. It was late Thanksgiving night and her voice felt so close he was certain she was just on the block. Henry? She said, as though it hadn't been five years, as though they had just been speaking. Are you awake? Alice waited for him to say something, anything, but he only glared at her and he lit another cigarette, staring at the match like he wanted to set the place on fire. They're drinking whiskeys now, seated across from each other in a booth. Alice smiles fondly. It's so easy, isn't it? She says. In some ways. Remember the things we did in that bathroom? That wasn't me, henry says. Funny. Well, he kind of looked like you. I was pretty hammered, she says. To be truthful, Alice was never as drunk as she pretended to be. She was always in control and always looking, watching, grating. Henry. Or so he believed. Remember when we sat on the opposite sides of the bar and pretended that we didn't know each other? That I remember. I kept sending you drinks and then you made me pay you back. I guess I did. Henry sifts his drink and he watches how the ice cubes catch the light from the bar. I was such an asshole to you, Henry. Oh, I don't know. Who can tell about these things? This is our place and I shouldn't have come here with someone else. It takes him a moment to realize what she's talking about. He'd managed to put from his mind the afternoon that she'd brought the ass face to Music Executive here and Henry had seen them through the side window by then. It didn't matter, Henry says, but it had made him crazy seeing them flirting and ear nibbling like a scene from Early Alice and Henry and he got wasted at a dive bar down the block, and then he shattered the window of a black Saab 93, the model of car that he'd seen the Dayton Alice riding in the weekend before. He used a rusted metal folding chair someone had left on the Street.
- [52:31]
E
Street.
- [52:33]
C
Utterly senseless since the car that Alice's guy owned was blue. Alice leans toward Henry now and runs her hand from his temple across the back of his head. Her index finger brushes a lock of hair behind his ear, and he feels very sleepy, and she pulls his face to her and kisses his cheek. Let's go back to your place, she says. On their walk to Henry's apartment, he thinks again of his father and how rather than dismissing Alice's concern about his father, it might be better to tell her the chronology events since that awkward visit, how Henry had put him in a managed care facility and how his father had become paranoid and frightened, but how for five full hours on his 65th birthday, his father had been himself, himself at 40, and how he and Henry laughed and reminisced together like lost best friends. Alice and Henry hold hands up the stairs as they enter Henry's clean apartment, and it crosses his mind that maybe they could try things again, because it was easy in a way, and they sit in his bed and kiss and then slip beneath the white down quilt. Alice asks him, you don't think he's a lost cause, do you? I haven't given up on him, he says, and from her confused silence he realizes that she isn't asking about his father. It stumps him for a moment and then he remembers. Oh, right. He says he'll come back. It's a weird place to bring it up, I know, but I kind of like him and I didn't want to be rude to him. And then neither of them says anything for a while, and she places her arm across his chest. You're so good for me, Henry, she says. You really are. He feels very tired and then very cynical, like someone who buys a car and then learns the engine is dead. He turns onto his pillow and he lets his eyes closed, and after a while he hears her softly whispering his name. Henry. Henry.
- [54:46]
E
What?
- [54:48]
C
She moves his hand between her legs. Do you want to? Let's go to sleep, he says, and turns away from her. I want to, she says, booning him. No one gets me like you do. He thinks of booting her out, but he has neither the energy nor the inclination. The heat kicks on again with a clank and a hiss. He will move from New York, he thinks. There's nothing to keep him here other than his father, and he can come back to visit and monitor his care by phone from a distance. But he will not stagnate here another year. His father will be happy for him. He thinks of places he can go Boston or Los Angeles, where he has contacts and and the sort of man he would like to be when he gets there. It's all for the best, he says to Alice and tries to explain why, but in his sleepiness he loses the strand and he nods off mid sentence and then he drifts back into the dream. The sand dune and the smell of seaweed, his tanned and healthy father carrying a bucket of mussels that his mother would use for labullabies. The cousins are over, and in the back of the house Henry has built a fort at a milk crates. Henry, the voice says again. Henry. But he won't come back for her this time. She keeps speaking, or maybe she's only speaking in his dream, but he likes that he can leave her like this, that he can find a place away from her. I'm sorry, the voice says now it isn't Alice anymore. Say it again, he says. I'm so sorry, sweet Henry. Of course you are.
- [56:58]
A
That was Jason Ralph reading Stay Up With Me by Tom Barbash. You almost forget about the dream in that story, don't you? Barbash engages us with Henry's history and the couple's challenges before looping back around to remind us about the place from which Henry's difficulties stem. I had the pleasure of working with Tom Barbash in a class I taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop many years ago, and it's been gratifying to follow his emotionally resonant work since then. If you follow a writer over time, you can see the way they play with different themes and threads, refining and deepening their work along the way. Now let's hear more from Roz Chast, describing her dreams often featured in New Yorker cartoons. Maybe you can relate.
- [57:45]
B
Everybody has these dreams. There's in fact a website which is I think it's called toothdreams.com tooth issues and back in high school and there's some sort of crisis. Usually for me it's I have my schedule or I don't have my schedule, I don't know where I'm supposed to be, and then I have to find the office and I don't know where the office is. And I have had this dream so many times that in the dream I think, wait a minute, I am like the age that I am. I've graduated from high school. This is not a problem. And you would think having this epiphany in the dream, I would never have this dream again. But you would be wrong. And this dream was. It was in the New Yorker, not that long ago. A lot of my dreams are they're pretty mundane, but sometimes they're just funny. So last night I dreamed about shopping for bed slippers. I tried on some big fluffy ones, but I didn't like them. Then I tried on a pair of cute green slippers which I realized could double as penny loafers, but I would have to put insoles in them because they had no arch support and the store did not carry arch support insoles. But I bought them anyway. My credit card was a square rather than a rectangle and had a picture of a wheat field on it. The lady wasn't sure that the machine would take it, but it did. And when the machine took the card, it made a happy little chime ding. The end.
- [59:14]
A
That was Roz Chast performing an excerpt from her book of illustrated dreams, I Must Be Dreaming. It may be true that in our own daily lives we are the only ones interested in our own weird dreams. But dreams can also be raw material for a creative person with a keen mind. A dream can become a harbinger of things to come, a cathartic release or a uniquely odd love story with a certain limoncello loving comic actor. In short, anything but a snooze fest. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimpkin, Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles, are recorded by Phil Richards. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Deardorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public feedback funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.
- [60:54]
E
Sa.