Two Dreams Following the Death of a Girlfriend



5/9/08

When I walked out of my apartment building and across the two driveways that front it on West End Avenue I noticed a parked black car. I thought it was a limousine but when I passed the side of it two doors opened from the center like a carriage. Inside were four fashionably dressed women, long legged and heavily made up, so much so that I found it frightening. Their faces were white, pasty and blank except for eyes heavily lined in black. “We give women a ride”, one of the passengers said. She opened the square door wider inviting me to enter. Fearful I walked away quickly toward Broadway. I was aware the car was following me. I dialed my husband on my cell but each number punched in wrong, my fingers could not control the digits. On 65th St musicians carrying instrument cases were boarding a bus. I thought to fold into the orchestra’s line and ride away from the danger. The bus started down 9th Ave toward the Lincoln Tunnel and in the 50’s I requested to get off. I descended the steps of the bus in Hell’s Kitchen but suddenly it became a desolate stretch of green mowed fields and carefully sculpted shrubs. The black car, one door ajar, was waiting in the distance.





5/23/08

The architecture was such that there were no silences but arpeggios ascending and descending and long trills in a high register, neo Baroque style, much like Busoni.

The improvisation I heard in my head instantly transcribed to the page. It was as if it was never to be played but its form on paper would become something tangible, something woven, a covering, a shroud of protection. We were lying on the bed, giggling the way fifteen year old girlfriends do. The room was mine of the past. Windows opened to the seashore, lavender flowers papered the walls. But this shroud hung over us and although I could see myself lying there with Bonnie, I couldn’t hear what we were saying. I thought to move and let this covering follow over us so drew up my legs and started quickly toward the door. Turning back I saw Bonnie still lying there, motioning with her hand for me to go.

I was walking with my mother on 2nd Ave and 68th St. in Manhattan. My grandmother and a woman unknown to me walked ahead of us. It was a warm and sunny June day like the one I woke to this morning. My grandmother’s pace was slow and hesitant yet we kept the same distance between us, ten feet maybe, still close enough that we could hear her voice call to us, ‘I’m tired, I’m taking the crosstown bus.” I read my mother’s thoughts which were my own as well: We wanted to keep walking, looking in shops and end up at the street fair marked by barricades a few blocks beyond. Nana and her companion stepped onto the M66 bus, the doors shut quickly and I watched it zoom the long block to 3rd Ave. Immediately I panicked. I had missed my only chance to be with her whom I loved so much and had last seen alive in 1972. Why so absorbed in the city around me was I trailing her instead of being with her? Salt from my sudden tears were burning my cheeks, mascara dripped to my hands, the street was unbearably hot, the passing crowd an array of arms and shoulders; I leaned against the stone railing of a walk up. Stroking my hair my mother said, “You don’t really want to go”.