A Dream Inside of a Dream by Barbara Bottner

Stark beams of light escape from under our blackout shade, waking me. The clock says 8:15. I hear movement and spot my husband, Dan’s computerized packing list resting neatly on his hunter green suitcase, which is open and perfectly organized. It’s a miracle what a man can do when a woman is utterly unconscious. I drag myself to the bathroom, wondering if I have had enough sleep.

“Can I get you something?” says Dan softly. He wants me to accompany him on his job search in Laredo, Texas. That little bit of noticing shifts me, and he sees this.

“You should come with me!” He cheers up at the prospect. “You can meet Dr. Gomez and his wife. You’ll be treated like a queen down there.”

“When did you book this trip? Doesn’t matter; I’m not going to live in Texas,” I say.

“Please,” he says in his lovely, liquid, sonorous voice, the voice I married him for. “C’mon! We can talk about how impossible I can be sometimes. Anything you want. You’ll see Laredo for yourself. Maybe you’ll like it, honey. It’s a walk across the bridge over the Rio Grande, and then you’re in Mexico. You love Mexican art!”

“I should uproot my career for Folk Art?”

“They pay doctors triple what we make in L.A.” He’s got all the moves down; he leans over me so I can smell his aftershave. Then he nips my ear flirtatiously before he pulls out my suitcase. “Underwear, shoes, makeup,” he tosses things into a pile. “You want your linen jacket?” He manages to add a flowered dress, sandals, a hat, even my script. I’m a Hollywood writer, obsessed with trying to make a living. “What did I miss?” He gives me the killer smile, says some stuff about being a bad boy and how he can’t stand it when I’m mad at him.

He plays me like a cello, but I try to resist. “I’m not coming with you, Dan,” I say, yet hear the shaky ambivalence in my voice.

“I do want to stop with the racehorses,” he says. “A part of me does, but something is holding me back.”

“Perhaps the part of you that’s a gambler?”

“Let’s talk about it on the flight down there?”

“Nice try.”

“All of this is a dream,” says Dan. “A dream inside of a dream.”

He releases the shade. It brightens the brilliant paint I recently picked for the room; in the afternoon the walls make you feel as if you’re inside a fresh cup of cappuccino.

“At home, I admit it: I’m distracted,” says Dan. “Away, I’ll talk to you. And I’ll be able to listen better, I know it.”

‘Listen’ is one of the key words you learn when you study relationships, like I have, compulsively, exhaustively, since I married Dan fifteen years ago. I’m always wishing he could see me full on without all his diversionary tactics: it makes me feel unreal. I watch my arms throw my personal pharmacy in with my clothes.

“You’re coming!?”

“I guess for a year we could live in two places,” I say.

I mean to say we could use a time-out. His eyes hit the floor. It’s forlorn Dan, part of his repertoire. “Don’t talk that way.”

Dan continues to act solicitous all the way to the airport, through check-in at LAX. As the plane takes off, he even folds up the sports section instead of studying it as if it’s the lost Sea Scrolls. Then at 39,000 feet, he drops a bomb. “Oh! By the way, I bought a racehorse before we left. She’s going to make us a fortune. Then I can quit working.”

“You must be kidding.” I almost drop my peanuts.

“Laredo is great horse country.”

“Retire by owning a racehorse? You’re nuts!”

But I’m nuts too. I’m the one on the plane with him who ignored his hints, which all come rushing back to me now. I fume silently until touchdown. We’re to be met by Annie, the headhunter who works for Dr. Gomez. I figure I’ll dial it down, calmed to meet a charming young southern woman driving a luxury car, offering us a Spanish-tiled hotel, chocolates on our pillows. But no. We wait in the lounge for almost an hour. This is the emptiest airport I’ve ever been to, and it’s aggressively hot, too. After a multitude of phone calls and no response from Annie, we rent an azure Ford compact without power steering. It is six PM.

We drive to the center of town if you’re generous enough to call a few run-down mom-and-pop stores ‘town.’ Then we’re soon speeding through it to the burbs, where there are new and spacious homes which vary from Tudor to Spanish to Colonial, all superbly landscaped. We continue south, through a blue-collar neighborhood with sad, unkempt homes, some with four-axel vehicles dumped in the front yard. Neglected Saguaro cacti making their way with barely any water. Unfinished paint jobs. Then there’s a commercial street: Steve’s Gun Store, Easy Pawn, Gus’s Clock Shop, and the Rio Grande Hardware Emporium. There’s not a single high-end grocery that might sell sun-dried tomatoes or gluten-free bread.

I know. I sound like a California meme.

Finally, we get to the Holiday Inn, turn in to unload our suitcases. Dan assures me he’ll get a call soon, and when we meet for dinner at Gomez’s country club, we’ll be treated like royalty because they need docs down here. Meanwhile, the hotel has not a single Mexican tile. It has only a shoddy elevator and dirty carpets. Our room is for smokers and overlooks the parking lot. I run the bath. The water is brown. I take care of relocating us while Dan continues to call the phantom headhunter. It is 7 PM. We’re striking out.

It was a few months ago when Dan’s hospital closed its doors for good, and we were left in financial distress. I’m a freelancer, so my income is unpredictable, to say the least, and worry bursts out of me again. “I can’t believe you bought a racehorse, Dan, when you’re out of a job!”

“That’s why we came down here! Anyway, she’s a breeder’s wet dream. An investment! I have no emotional attachment whatsoever. It’s like buying a bond.”

“Then buy a bond!”

“Bonds can fall.”

I hear him kick his shoes off. “Fall. But not trip and break bones or get infections.” I’d forced him to sell the previous trotter we once briefly owned.

Dan’s lost interest. Now he has the remote and is flipping through the Spanish-speaking TV channels. I admire how everyone has magnificent cheekbones, dramatic make-up, amazing amounts of black hair. Plus, they’re all rather hysterical. I relate to the operatic pitch; it’s how I roll. I shuffle into the bathroom. The tap has mercifully clear water. I wash my face.

“Look,” he yells in. “We can’t fight in front of Gomez. Promise me. I need the offer!”

“You want the offer, or you want the job?” I emerge, patting my face with a towel that could be made of sand.

“Having a firm offer here helps me get a job in L.A.”

Which doesn’t answer the question. Then slam, dunk, he’s got the network news on. I grab the mute. “I thought you had the offer; that’s why you wanted the Texas license!”

“That license took me four months to get; you have to have a job in order to qualify, so I don’t have an actual signed contract.”

“You never closed the deal?”

He squirms to regain control of the remote. I kick it under the dresser.

“I have the paperwork with me,” he squeals.

“Four-month delay! Didn’t that turn Gomez off?”

“He brought us down here, didn’t he?”

“The airline tickets were purchased two months ago!”

“Dammit, he didn’t tell me not to come, Sharon!”

Dan’s now up and hunting for the damn remote. He’s decided to move the dresser. A man after his dream cannot be stopped.

“Why doesn’t Gomez call you then?”

“Why are you so worried? You refuse to move here anyway!” The remote is gone. “C’mon, gorgeous. Let’s go find that prick Gomez at the hospital!”

We get into his rent-mobile and speed back through the poor part of town, past more boarded-up houses, the occasional burst of cheery annuals trying to spruce up the front of old fences, until the Ford lurches into the hospital parking lot. Dan screeches to a “Doctor’s Only” spot, sprints to the front, and unlike his usual kicked-back self, practically pole vaults past the receptionist, right up to Anesthesiology. I’m behind him. This is new stuff—Dan on the attack. But half an hour later, Gomez hasn’t appeared. We’re patrolling the hospital hallways, and we’re hungry, too.

“Where is he?” Dan shouts at a tech. “I’m Doctor Dan Stivers….”

“He’s in with someone,” the tech says evasively.

Techs don’t usually cut off doctors, and certainly not in the South where politeness is a fine art. So, I believe there is some kind of lunacy going on. At the same moment, I spot a guy spying behind an office door, then ducking back inside.

“Would that be Dr. Gomez?” I try sounding casual.

“That’s him!” says Dan. He’s leaping towards the office, moving faster than I’ve ever seen. The doc, a short, wiry man with a fiercely dark mustache and deeply set eyes, bolts out of the office. Dan is on his heels. Together, they whiz past me, down the long hallway. Gomez can run. He must have had practice. Running from other doctors, or women perhaps, or law enforcement; who knows? I jog behind, sandals flapping.

“Talk to me!” Dan howls. I know how he feels since it’s one of my own top ten sentences.

“I sent you a letter, Stivers!” the fleeing MD shouts.

“I’m right here, you bastard!”

Gomez is a mesomorph, an embarrassed one. He slips through a door and shuts it fast and hard. Dan pushes against it. The smell…oh God, it’s the men’s room! And Gomez must have his entire body weight against the bathroom door to keep Dan out because it’s not giving.

“Son of a bitch!” yells Dan.

“So, it really sucks when someone lies to you.” I take the opportunity to shout my own truth.

“Shush, Sharon!”

What was I thinking, not to check on the plans myself? If I’d only taken a moment to search Dan’s desk, I would have found the contracts unsigned. But I’m busy writing scripts. I need to be an earner.

“Go away!” Gomez’s grunt is muffled.

“You hired me as your partner, you prick!” Dan throws his body at the door while people begin to gather, fascinated by two doctors fighting.

“Well,” I say, “it’s clear we’re not moving to Laredo! Great news!”

Quite a crowd has been magnetized to the scene now. Three techs, another man who must be a doctor, two nurses, an electrician, several patients, and me.

Dan bangs on the wall, shouts: “I’ll sue your ass, Gomez.”

The anger looks good on him. He’s a young Marlon Brando, invigorated as hell, color in his face. And now, finally, he’s managed to crack open the odiferous men’s room door, barge inside, and almost pin Gomez to the wall, which I can see, hovering closer yet.

Gomez screams: “Puta!”

“Gay in dred, you chaim yankel!” I scream in my grandmother’s Yiddish

“Talk English!” Dan yells at both of us.

“Chaim Yankel means schmuck!” I explain to everyone, as if they care.

Meanwhile, my phone rings. It’s Stan, my agent, calling from New York.

“Hi…not a good time,” I manage.

“I think I have an offer for you,” he says.

“I’ll take it!” I huff and hang up. What did I just do?

“I waited for months,” shouts Gomez, his small black eyes locking Dan’s.

“You didn’t have your license yet, Stivers. You said ‘soon.’ Weeks, you told me, then a month. Then three months. Soon wasn’t soon, Dr. Stivers, even by Mexican time. I needed help, and I hired a guy ages ago! My secretary made a mistake with the airline tickets. But when I realized you were coming. I thought maybe I should meet you in the future, but then my wife made other plans. You should go home.”

“Immediately! So I can call my lawyer,” Dan screams, about to punch the head of the department.

I think about how attractive my husband is when he’s not vague, lost, or distracted. Meanwhile, Gomez’ loyal tech appears and throws his arms around Dan and begins to drag him away, but Dan throws the guy off him with an elbow to his groin.

I’m thinking if he lived this intensely all the time, he might not need horses. I watch how this man who disappears into his phone and his horses can still burn with desire—whether for a stupid job, a stupid horse, or me. I’m encouraged. Then, I remember those fierce women from Spanish soap operas and think they’d fit perfectly into this scene.

I grab my husband and curse Gomez in even better Yiddish: “Gay kohken affen yam. Ich hawb dir in bawd!”

“Shut up!” Gomez screams at me.

“You deserve this hellhole,” I holler. “And furthermore,” I scream without restraint or dignity, “you have no dignity!”

We blast through the halls of the hospital, security on our tails. This puts us in an exuberant state, teenagers on the lam, avoiding the law. Maybe this is why we came down here; to get out of our routine, to be bandits. To stop living life as if it were only mundane, predictable. We’re panting with fury, which seems to alchemize into hot, red excitement. At the car, Dan pulls me close. “You were sexy! We’re going to have us a hell of an evening!”

“I need a drink, and who knows what else? Maybe a fucking sombrero.”

I don’t mention that I might have an actual writing job; I save it for when I need it for ammunition. We’re heading to a famous restaurant in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, but near the border, we glide to a standstill. Then, instantly, decisively, the traffic lets up, and we cross the bridge over the Rio Grande. The road becomes bumpy and narrow, flanked on each side with little family-owned stores, wretchedly unappealing. A few blocks deeper into the city, pottery shops, clothing, jewelry arcades pop up on both sides of the ancient tourist streets. I like that we’re no longer in America. On foot, Dan pulls me through the narrow stone sidewalks. I peek inside half-open doorways, tiny storefronts where old men lean forward towards ancient black-and-white televisions. The rooms are closet-sized with one or two pieces of furniture and a bed. Dan steers me inside Casablanca, an upscale restaurant, Nuevo Laredo’s best, and orders a Margarita. Mexican tile, lavender and mint walls with splashes of fuchsia, cerulean, then the undulating pure cherry wood bar, enormous butterflies painted on the trendy tin ceiling.

“She’ll have a Dos Equis,” says Dan, sloshed and happy with chips and salsa and rescue on the way in the form of food.

“And a divorce on the rocks.”

The waitress is puzzled in two languages.

“She has a sick need to be funny,” says Dan. “She writes comedy when she can get work. If she can get work.”

I give him a little kick under the table.

“C’mon, Sharon! We’re on the same team. My crash equals your high. We’re like a mini stock market.”

So, we drink. He kisses my hand. Out come his college stories, a stream of intoxicated and sad dates with haughty, rejecting sophomore coeds. Dan is loquacious; he tells jokes and talks about how he wanted to be a jazz saxophonist but was redirected to medicine by his psychiatrist father. After a while, the alcohol, the music, the sleek, exotic waitress, the flavorful chili rellenos work their ways with us. We are pecking each other affectionately until Antonio, the astonishingly handsome manager, sits down with us and regales us with local stories and serves us Drambuie on the house. We all toast each other as if we’re wartime buddies, reunited for an evening. By the time we leave, Dan and I remember who we used to be, and why we’re together.

At a tiny boutique, he buys me silver studs and a silk embroidered shawl. We hug in the street; his tongue is in my throat. At the dismal hotel, we make desperate, clumsy love as if we’re teenagers again. I love the majesty of him and his hungry sexuality and the way he can love and overtake me, that is, when he remembers to have sex. As he drifts off, I’m amazed that we can adore and detest each other all in the same day. It also amazes me that under certain circumstances, Dan can become a big, delicious lake to swim in again.

***

In the morning, we drive to San Antonio. The entire time my husband swears that he will sue Gomez for fraud. I don’t insist he sell this new horse, not yet.

“I’m such an idiot,” he says.

I let that gorgeous and true sentence hang there for his consideration. It’s hard to be pissed at a man when he’s so furious with himself.

Outside, there is nothing but dry, cracked land studded with dingy, low brush and a mean sun. We speed north listening to country radio. I’m cuddled in my new silk shawl, thinking that a foreign land can force you to become so unglued and lost that you feel you must search for connection. You grab the hand of the person next to you. If he is your husband, you can forgive his flaws. He’s familiar. His frank eyes and big heart seem franker and bigger.

This visit to the armpit of America has, perhaps, saved your fragile marriage.