Last night I dreamt PD Walker hosted a murder mystery at his house in DC. He showed us hidden nooks for inappropriate dalliances; he served only chicken salad with sticks of celery. I suspect the salad was a holdover from that film with Meryl Streep, the one where she’s bald and cannot sing but persists in wearing curlicue wigs and caterwauling opera off-key in NYC. I also suspect the expectation of dalliances stemmed from that nonchalant kiss on the mouth PD gave me when I was last in DC—or from my recent dry spell—because I’m just not PD’s type. Because he’s gay. Otherwise, I think we’d get along swimmingly.
That said, the mystery ensued in PD James-fashion: a bad, bad man shot in the chest; his dismembered body drug to the tub for an acid bath. They left a blood trail on the white rug, but some maid came by and scrubbed it away. Still, the wetness left a streak of pristine clarity—as damning as the blood itself had ever been. I witnessed it all, then thought about the dusty attic.
Next I knew, I was in an open car with Gatsby. We raced the train, stopped to see Myrtle, but she refused to get into the car with us. Myrtle had black hair and black eyes and arm bruises. She sat sullenly on an oil drum in the garage. Maybe PD actually played Gatsby, suddenly grown a mustache and an oversized nose with a notch in it. I watched his profile for that high-class tilt, that smirk I’d come to recognize in his posts on social media. (PD meticulously curated his photos online—I never saw him behaving unkindly—but his captions conveyed a certain snark.) In the car, Gatsby sat in the middle of the front with a woman on either side. I sat to his right; somehow, he drove from the center of the seat with both arms occupied. His knees, maybe?
Dream logic is the best logic, because back at the house, PD thought he should kiss me in the white living room in full view of the rest of his guests, both dead and alive. I suppose more had died by then—or pretended to die, though I don’t know how to pretend dismemberment, and I never saw the bad, bad man again—but I was alive and PD was alive and Gatsby was gone.
When PD kissed me, his lips seared my surprised mouth. When I tried to kiss him back, he suddenly grew too tall, and my lips only touched warm air. PD held me close enough to breathe on me, but just too far away to be reached, unless he wanted to be reached.
I think of that dream now, and I see how my passion was misplaced, like FFJ in NYC. Don’t be singing when you can’t. Don’t be kissing when you can’t.
