4

Stella sat up in bed and talked to him as if he had said something reasonable. "Wasn't John's party over a year ago, Ricky? I don't see what that has to do with last night's snow."

He rubbed his eyes and his dry cheekbones; he smoothed down his mustache. "It was a year ago last night." Then he heard what he had been saying. "No, of course not. There's no connection, I mean."

"Come back to bed and tell me what's wrong, baby."

"Oh, I'm okay," he said, but returned to the bed. When he was lifting the blankets to get back in, Stella said, "You're not okay, baby. You must have had a terrible dream. Do you want to tell me about it?"

"It doesn't make much sense."

"Tell me anyhow." She began to caress his back and shoulders, and he twisted to look down at her head on the dark blue pillow. As Sears had said, Stella was a beauty: she had been a beauty when he met her, and apparently she would be a beauty when she died. It was not a plump chocolate-box prettiness, but a matter of strong cheekbones, straight facial planes and definite black eyebrows. Stella's hair had gone an uncompromising gray when she was in her early thirties, and she had refused to dye it, seeing long before anyone else what a sexual asset an abundant head of gray hair would be when combined with a youthful face: now she still had the abundant gray hair, and her face was not much less youthful. It would be more truthful to say that her face had never been precisely youthful, nor would it ever truly be old: in fact with every year, up nearly to fifty, she had come more completely into her beauty, and then had pitched camp there. She was ten years younger than Ricky, but on good days she still looked only a blink over forty.

"Tell me, Ricky," she said. "What the hell is going on?"

So he began to tell her his dream, and he saw concern, horror, love and fear cross her elegant face. She continued to rub his back, and then moved her hand to his chest. "Baby," she said when he was through, "do you really have dreams like that every night?"

"No," he said, looking at her face and seeing beneath the superficial emotions of the moment the self-absorption and amusement which were always present in Stella and which were always joined, "that was the worst one." Then, smiling a little because he saw where she was going with all this rubbing, he said, "That was the champ."

"You've been very tense lately." She lifted his hand and touched it to her lips.

"I know."

"Do all of you have these bad dreams?"

"All who?"

"The Chowder Society." She placed his hand on her cheek.

"I think so."

"Well," she said, and sat up and, crossing her arms elbows-out before her, began to work her nightdress over her head, "don't you old fools think you ought to do something about it?" The nightdress went off, and she tossed her head to flip her hair back into place. Their two children had left her breasts sagging and her nipples large and brown, but Stella's body had aged only a little more than her face.

"We don't know what to do," he confessed.

"Well, I know what to do," she said and went back down on the bed and opened her arms. If Ricky had ever wished that he had remained a bachelor like Sears, he did not wish it this morning.

"You old sexpot," Stella said when they were done, "you would have given this up a long time ago if it hadn't been for me. What a loss that would have been. If it weren't for me you'd be too dignified to ever take your clothes off."

"That's not true."

"Oh? What would you do, then? Chase after little girls like Lewis Benedikt?"

"Lewis doesn't chase after little girls."

"Girls in their twenties, then."

"No. I wouldn't."

"There. I'm right. You wouldn't have any sex life at all, like your precious partner Sears." She folded back the sheets and blankets on her side of the bed, and got out. "I'll shower first," she said. Stella demanded a long time by herself in the bathroom every morning. She put on her long white-gray robe and looked as if she were about to tell someone to sack Troy. "But I'll tell you what you should do. You should call Sears right now and tell him about that awful dream. You won't get anywhere if you won't at least talk about it. If I know you and Sears, you two can go for weeks at a time without saying anything personal to each other. That's dreadful. What in the world do you talk about, anyhow?"

"Talk about?" Ricky asked, a little taken aback. "We talk about law."

"Oh, law," Stella said, and marched off toward the bathroom.

When she returned nearly thirty minutes later he was sitting up in bed looking confused. The pouches beneath his eyes were larger than usual. "The paper isn't here yet," he said. "I went downstairs and looked."

"Of course it isn't here," Stella said, dropping a towel and a box of tissues on the bed, and turned away again to go into the dressing room. "What time do you think it is?"

"What time? Why, what time is it? My watch is on the table."

"It's just past seven."

"Seven?" They normally did not get up until eight, and Ricky usually dawdled around the house until nine-thirty before leaving for the office on Wheat Row. Though neither he nor Sears admitted it, there was no longer much work for them; old clients dropped in from time to time, there were a few complicated lawsuits which looked to drag on through the next decade, there was always a will or two or a tax problem to clarify, but they could have stayed home two days of every week without anybody noticing. Alone in his part of the office suite, Ricky lately had been rereading Donald Wanderley's second book, trying unsuccessfully to persuade himself that he wanted its author in Milburn. "What are we doing up?"

"You woke us up with your screaming, if I have to remind you," Stella called from the dressing room. "You were having problems with a monster that was trying to eat you, remember?"

"Um," Ricky said. "I thought it looked dark outside."

"Don't be evasive," Stella called, and in another minute or two was back beside the bed, fully dressed. "When you start to scream in your sleep, it's time to start taking whatever is happening to you seriously. I know you won't go to a doctor-"

"I won't go to a head doctor, anyhow," Ricky said. "My mind is in good working order."

"So I said. But since you won't consider that, you should at least talk to Sears about it. I don't like to see you eating yourself up." With that, she left for the downstairs.

Ricky lay back, considering. It had been, as he said to Stella, the worst of the nightmares. Simply thinking about it now was unsettling-simply having Stella go down the stairs was, at some level, unsettling. The dream had been extraordinarily vivid, with the detail and texture of wakefulness. He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life. That had been horrid: it had been somehow immoral, and the shock to his morality even more than the horror had made him open his mouth and scream. Maybe Stella was right. Without knowing how he would bring up the subject with Sears, he nevertheless picked up the receiver of the bedside phone. After Sears's phone had rung once, Ricky realized that he was acting very much out of character and that he didn't have the faintest idea why Stella thought Sears James would have anything worthwhile to say. But by then it was too late, and Sears had picked up the phone and said hello.

"It's Ricky, Sears."

Evidently it was the morning for demonstrating inconsistency of character; nothing less like Sears than his response could be imagined. "Ricky, thank God," he said. "You must have ESP. I was just going to call you. Can you come by and pick me up in five minutes?"

"Give me fifteen minutes," Ricky said. "What happened?" And then, thinking of his dream, "Did anybody die?"

"Why do you ask that?" Sears said in a different, sharper voice.

"No reason. I'll tell you later. I take it we're not going to Wheat Row."

"No. I just had a call from our Vergil. He wants us out there-he wants to sue everybody in sight. Step on it, will you?"

"Elmer wants us both at his farm? What happened?"

Sears was impatient. "Something earthshaking, apparently. Pull the plug out, Ricky."