Harvey’s Dream
By Stephen King
Janet turns from the sink and, boom, all at once her
husband of nearly thirty years is sitting at the kitchen table in a white
T-shirt and a pair of Big Dog boxers, watching her.
More and more often she has found this weekday commodore
of Wall Street in just this place and dressed in just this fashion come
Saturday morning: slumped at the shoulder and blank in the eye, a white scruff
showing on his cheeks, man-tits sagging out the front of his T, hair standing
up in back like Alfalfa of the Little Rascals grown old and stupid. Janet and
her friend Hannah have frightened each other lately (like little girls telling
ghost stories during a sleepover) by swapping Alzheimer’s tales: who can no
longer recognize his wife, who can no longer remember the names of her
children.
But she doesn’t really believe these silent
Saturday-morning appearances have anything to do with early-onset Alzheimer’s;
on any given weekday morning Harvey Stevens is ready and raring to go by
six-forty-five, a man of sixty who looks fifty (well, fifty-four) in either of
his best suits, and who can still cut a trade, buy on margin, or sell short
with the best of them.
No, she thinks, this is merely practicing to be old, and
she hates it. She’s afraid that when he retires it will be this way every
morning, at least until she gives him a glass of orange juice and asks him
(with an increasing impatience she won’t be able to help) if he wants cereal or
just toast. She’s afraid she’ll turn from whatever she’s doing and see him
sitting there in a bar of far too brilliant morning sun, Harvey in the morning,
Harvey in his T-shirt and his boxer shorts, legs spread apart so she can view
the meagre bulge of his basket (should she care to) and see the yellow calluses
on his great toes, which always make her think of Wallace Stevens having on
about the Emperor of Ice Cream. Sitting there silent and dopily contemplative
instead of ready and raring, psyching himself up for the day. God, she hopes
she’s wrong. It makes life seem so thin, so stupid somehow. She can’t help
wondering if this is what they fought through for, raised and married off their
three girls for, got past his inevitable middle-aged affair for, worked for and
sometimes (let’s face it) grabbed for. If this is where you come out of the
deep dark woods, Janet thinks, this . . . this parking lot . . . then why does
anyone do it?
But the answer is easy. Because you didn’t know. You
discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life
mattered. You kept a scrapbook devoted to the girls, and in it they were still
young and still interesting in their possibilities: Trisha, the eldest, wearing
a top hat and waving a tinfoil wand over Tim, the cocker spaniel; Jenna, frozen
in mid-jump halfway through the lawn sprinkler, her taste for dope, credit
cards, and older men still far over the horizon; Stephanie, the youngest, at
the county spelling bee, where “cantaloupe” turned out to be her Waterloo.
Somewhere in most of these pictures (usually in the background) were Janet and
the man she had married, always smiling, as if it were against the law to do
anything else.
Then one day you made the mistake of looking over your
shoulder and discovered that the girls were grown and that the man you had
struggled to stay married to was sitting with his legs apart, his fish-white
legs, staring into a bar of sun, and by God maybe he looked fifty-four in
either of his best suits, but sitting there at the kitchen table like that he
looked seventy. Hell, seventy-five. He looked like what the goons on “The
Sopranos” called a mope.
She turns back to the sink and sneezes delicately, once,
twice, a third time.
“How are they this morning?” he asks, meaning her
sinuses, meaning her allergies. The answer is not very good, but, like a
surprising number of bad things, her summer allergies have their sunny side.
She no longer has to sleep with him and fight for her share of the covers in
the middle of the night; no longer has to listen to the occasional muffled fart
as Harvey soldiers ever deeper into sleep. Most nights during the summer she
gets six, even seven hours, and that’s more than enough. When fall comes and he
moves back in from the guest room, it will drop to four, and much of that will
be troubled.
One year, she knows, he won’t move back in. And although
she doesn’t tell him so—it would hurt his feelings, and she still doesn’t like
to hurt his feelings; this is what now passes for love between them, at least
going from her direction to his—she will be glad.
She sighs and reaches into the pot of water in the sink.
Gropes around in it. “Not so bad,” she says.
And then, just when she is thinking (and not for the
first time) about how this life holds no more surprises, no unplumbed marital
depths, he says in a strangely casual voice, “It’s a good thing you weren’t
sleeping with me last night, Jax. I had a bad dream. I actually screamed myself
awake.”
She’s startled. How long has it been since he called her
Jax instead of Janet or Jan? The last is a nickname she secretly hates. It
makes her think of that syrupy-sweet actress on “Lassie” when she was a kid,
the little boy (Timmy, his name was Timmy) always fell down a well or got
bitten by a snake or trapped under a rock, and what kind of parents put a kid’s
life in the hands of a fucking collie?
She turns to him again, forgetting the pot with the last
egg still in it, the water now long enough off the boil to be lukewarm. He had
a bad dream? Harvey? She tries to remember when Harvey has mentioned having had
any kind of dream and has no luck. All that comes is a vague memory of their
courtship days, Harvey saying something like “I dream of you,” she herself
young enough to think it sweet instead of lame.
“You what?”
“Screamed myself awake,” he says. “Did you not hear me?”
“No.” Still looking at him. Wondering if he’s kidding
her. If it’s some kind of bizarre morning joke. But Harvey is not a joking man.
His idea of humor is telling anecdotes at dinner about his Army days. She has
heard all of them at least a hundred times.
“I was screaming words, but I wasn’t really able to say
them. It was like . . . I don’t know . . . I couldn’t close my mouth around
them. I sounded like I’d had a stroke. And my voice was lower. Not like my own
voice at all.” He pauses. “I heard myself, and made myself stop. But I was
shaking all over, and I had to turn on the light for a little while. I tried to
pee, and I couldn’t. These days it seems like I can always pee—a little,
anyway—but not this morning at two-forty-seven.” He pauses, sitting there in
his bar of sun. She can see dust motes dancing in it. They seem to give him a
halo.
“What was your dream?” she asks, and here is an odd
thing: for the first time in maybe five years, since they stayed up until
midnight discussing whether to hold the Motorola stock or sell it (they wound
up selling), she’s interested in something he has to say.
“I don’t know if I want to tell you,” he says, sounding
uncharacteristically shy. He turns, picks up the pepper mill, and begins to
toss it from hand to hand.
“They say if you tell your dreams they won’t come true,”
she says to him, and here is Odd Thing No. 2: all at once Harvey looks there,
in a way he hasn’t looked to her in years. Even his shadow on the wall above
the toaster oven looks somehow more there. She thinks, He looks as though he
matters, and why should that be? Why, when I was just thinking that life is
thin, should it seem thick? This is a summer morning in late June. We are in
Connecticut. When June comes we are always in Connecticut. Soon one of us will
get the newspaper, which will be divided into three parts, like Gaul.
“Do they say so?” He considers the idea, eyebrows raised
(she needs to pluck them again, they are getting that wild look, and he never
knows), tossing the pepper mill from hand to hand. She would like to tell him
to stop doing that, it’s making her nervous (like the exclamatory blackness of
his shadow on the wall, like her very beating heart, which has suddenly begun
to accelerate its rhythm for no reason at all), but she doesn’t want to
distract him from whatever is going on in his Saturday-morning head. And then
he puts the pepper mill down anyway, which should be all right but somehow
isn’t, because it has its own shadow—it runs out long on the table like the
shadow of an oversized chess piece, even the toast crumbs lying there have
shadows, and she has no idea why that should frighten her but it does. She
thinks of the Cheshire Cat telling Alice, “We’re all mad here,” and suddenly
she doesn’t want to hear Harvey’s stupid dream, the one from which he awakened
himself screaming and sounding like a man who has had a stroke. Suddenly she
doesn’t want life to be anything but thin. Thin is O.K., thin is good, just
look at the actresses in the movies if you doubt it.
Nothing must announce itself, she thinks feverishly. Yes,
feverishly; it’s as if she’s having a hot flash, although she could have sworn
all that nonsense ended two or three years ago. Nothing must announce itself,
it’s Saturday morning and nothing must announce itself.
She opens her mouth to tell him she got it backward, what
they really say is that if you tell your dreams they will come true, but it’s
too late, he’s already talking, and it occurs to her that this is her
punishment for dismissing life as thin. Life is actually like a Jethro Tull
song, thick as a brick, how could she have ever thought otherwise?
“I dreamed it was morning and I came down to the
kitchen,” he says. “Saturday morning, just like this, only you weren’t up yet.”
“I’m always up before you on Saturday morning,” she says.
“I know, but this was a dream,” he says patiently, and
she can see the white hairs on the insides of his thighs, where the muscles are
wasted and starved. Once he played tennis, but those days are done. She thinks,
with a viciousness that is entirely unlike her, You will have a heart attack,
white man, that’s what will finish you, and maybe they’ll discuss giving you an
obit in the Times, but if a B-movie actress from the fifties died that day, or
a semi-famous ballerina from the forties, you won’t even get that.
“But it was like this,” he says. “I mean, the sun was
shining in.” He raises a hand and stirs the dust motes into lively life around
his head and she wants to scream at him not to do that, not to disturb the
universe like that.
“I could see my shadow on the floor and it never looked
so bright or so thick.” He pauses, then smiles, and she sees how cracked his
lips are. “ ‘Bright’ ’s a funny word to use for a shadow, isn’t it? ‘Thick,’
too.”
“Harvey—”
“I crossed to the window,” he says, “and I looked out,
and I saw there was a dent in the side of the Friedmans’ Volvo, and I
knew—somehow—that Frank had been out drinking and that the dent happened coming
home.”
She suddenly feels that she will faint. She saw the dent
in the side of Frank Friedman’s Volvo herself, when she went to the door to see
if the newspaper had come (it hadn’t), and she thought the same thing, that
Frank had been out at the Gourd and scraped something in the parking lot. How
does the other guy look? had been her exact thought.
The idea that Harvey has also seen this comes to her,
that he is goofing with her for some strange reason of his own. Certainly it’s
possible; the guest room where he sleeps on summer nights has an angle on the
street. Only Harvey isn’t that sort of man. “Goofing” is not Harvey Stevens’s
“thing.”
There is sweat on her cheeks and brow and neck, she can
feel it, and her heart is beating faster than ever. There really is a sense of
something looming, and why should this be happening now? Now, when the world is
quiet, when prospects are tranquil? If I asked for this, I’m sorry, she thinks
. . . or maybe she’s actually praying. Take it back, please take it back.
“I went to the refrigerator,” Harvey is saying, “and I
looked inside, and I saw a plate of devilled eggs with a piece of Saran wrap
over them. I was delighted—I wanted lunch at seven in the morning!”
He laughs. Janet—Jax that was—looks down into the pot
sitting in the sink. At the one hard-boiled egg left in it. The others have
been shelled and neatly sliced in two, the yolks scooped out. They are in a
bowl beside the drying rack. Beside the bowl is the jar of mayonnaise. She has
been planning to serve the devilled eggs for lunch, along with a green salad.
“I don’t want to hear the rest,” she says, but in a voice
so low she can barely hear it herself. Once she was in the Dramatics Club and
now she can’t even project across the kitchen. The muscles in her chest feel
all loose, the way Harvey’s legs would if he tried to play tennis.
“I thought I would have just one,” Harvey says, “and then
I thought, No, if I do that she’ll yell at me. And then the phone rang. I
dashed for it because I didn’t want it to wake you up, and here comes the scary
part. Do you want to hear the scary part?”
No, she thinks from her place by the sink. I don’t want
to hear the scary part. But at the same time she does want to hear the scary
part, everyone wants to hear the scary part, we’re all mad here, and her mother
really did say that if you told your dreams they wouldn’t come true, which
meant you were supposed to tell the nightmares and save the good ones for
yourself, hide them like a tooth under the pillow. They have three girls. One
of them lives just down the road, Jenna the gay divorcée, same name as one of
the Bush twins, and doesn’t Jenna hate that; these days she insists that people
call her Jen. Three girls, which meant a lot of teeth under a lot of pillows, a
lot of worries about strangers in cars offering rides and candy, which had
meant a lot of precautions, and oh how she hopes her mother was right, that
telling a bad dream is like putting a stake in a vampire’s heart.
“I picked up the phone,” Harvey says, “and it was
Trisha.” Trisha is their oldest daughter, who idolized Houdini and Blackstone
before discovering boys. “She only said one word at first, just ‘Dad,’ but I
knew it was Trisha. You know how you always know?”
Yes. She knows how you always know. How you always know
your own, from the very first word, at least until they grow up and become
someone else’s.
“I said, ‘Hi, Trish, why you calling so early, hon? Your
mom’s still in the sack.’ And at first there was no answer. I thought we’d been
cut off, and then I heard these whispering whimpering sounds. Not words but
half-words. Like she was trying to talk but hardly anything could come out
because she wasn’t able to muster any strength or get her breath. And that was
when I started being afraid.”
Well, then, he’s pretty slow, isn’t he? Because Janet—who
was Jax at Sarah Lawrence, Jax in the Dramatics Club, Jax the truly excellent
French-kisser, Jax who smoked Gitanes and affected enjoyment of tequila
shooters—Janet has been scared for quite some time now, was scared even before
Harvey mentioned the dent in the side of Frank Friedman’s Volvo. And thinking
of that makes her think of the phone conversation she had with her friend
Hannah not even a week ago, the one that eventually progressed to Alzheimer’s
ghost stories. Hannah in the city, Janet curled up on the window seat in the
living room and looking out at their one-acre share of Westport, at all the
beautiful growing things that make her sneeze and water at the eyes, and before
the conversation turned to Alzheimer’s they had discussed first Lucy Friedman
and then Frank, and which one of them had said it? Which one of them had said,
“If he doesn’t do something about his drinking and driving, he’s eventually
going to kill somebody”?
“And then Trish said what sounded like ‘lees’ or ‘least,’
but in the dream I knew she was . . . eliding? . . . is that the word? Eliding
the first syllable, and that what she was really saying was ‘police.’ I asked
her what about the police, what was she trying to say about the police, and I
sat down. Right there.” He points to the chair in what they call the telephone
nook. “There was some more silence, then a few more of those half-words, those
whispered half-words. She was making me so mad doing that, I thought, Drama
queen, same as it ever was, but then she said, ‘number,’ just as clear as a
bell. And I knew—the way I knew she was trying to say ‘police’—that she was
trying to tell me the police had called her because they didn’t have our
number.”
Janet nods numbly. They decided to unlist their number
two years ago because reporters kept calling Harvey about the Enron mess.
Usually at dinnertime. Not because he’d had anything to do with Enron per se
but because those big energy companies were sort of a specialty of his. He’d
even served on a Presidential commission a few years earlier, when Clinton had
been the big kahuna and the world had been (in her humble opinion, at least) a
slightly better, slightly safer place. And while there were a lot of things
about Harvey she no longer liked, one thing she knew perfectly well was that he
had more integrity in his little finger than all those Enron sleazebags put
together. She might sometimes be bored by integrity, but she knows what it is.
But don’t the police have a way of getting unlisted
numbers? Well, maybe not if they’re in a hurry to find something out or tell
somebody something. Plus, dreams don’t have to be logical, do they? Dreams are
poems from the subconscious.
And now, because she can no longer bear to stand still,
she goes to the kitchen door and looks out into the bright June day, looks out
at Sewing Lane, which is their little version of what she supposes is the
American dream. How quiet this morning lies, with a trillion drops of dew still
sparkling on the grass! And still her heart hammers in her chest and the sweat
rolls down her face and she wants to tell him he must stop, he must not tell
this dream, this terrible dream. She must remind him that Jenna lives right
down the road—Jen, that is, Jen who works at the Video Stop in the village and
spends all too many weekend nights drinking at the Gourd with the likes of
Frank Friedman, who is old enough to be her father. Which is undoubtedly part
of the attraction.
“All these whispered little half-words,” Harvey is
saying, “and she would not speak up. Then I heard ‘killed,’ and I knew that one
of the girls was dead. I just knew it. Not Trisha, because it was Trisha on the
phone, but either Jenna or Stephanie. And I was so scared. I actually sat there
wondering which one I wanted it to be, like Sophie’s fucking Choice. I started
to shout at her. ‘Tell me which one! Tell me which one! For God’s sake, Trish,
tell me which one!’ Only then the real world started to bleed through . . . always
assuming there is such a thing. . ..”
Harvey utters a little laugh, and in the bright morning
light Janet sees there is a red stain in the middle of the dent on the side of
Frank Friedman’s Volvo, and in the middle of the stain is a dark smutch that
might be dirt or even hair. She can see Frank pulling up crooked to the curb at
two in the morning, too drunk even to try the driveway, let alone the
garage—strait is the gate, and all that. She can see him stumbling to the house
with his head down, breathing hard through his nose. Viva ze bool.
“By then I knew I was in bed, but I could hear this low
voice that didn’t sound like mine at all, it sounded like some stranger’s
voice, and it couldn’t put corners on any of the words it was saying. ‘Ell-ee
itch-un, ell-ee itch-un,’ that’s what it sounded like. ‘Ell-ee itch-un, Ish!’ “
Tell me which one. Tell me which one, Trish.
Harvey falls silent, thinking. Considering. The dust
motes dance around his face. The sun makes his T-shirt almost too dazzling to
look at; it is a T-shirt from a laundry-detergent ad.
“I lay there waiting for you to run in and see what was
wrong,” he finally says. “I lay there all over goosebumps, and trembling,
telling myself it was just a dream, the way you do, of course, but also thinking
how real it was. How marvellous, in a horrible way.”
He stops again, thinking how to say what comes next,
unaware that his wife is no longer listening to him. Jax-that-was is now
employing all her mind, all her considerable powers of thought, to make herself
believe that what she is seeing is not blood but just the Volvo’s undercoating
where the paint has been scraped away. “Undercoating” is a word her
subconscious has been more than eager to cast up.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it, how deep imagination goes?” he
says finally. “A dream like that is how a poet—one of the really great
ones—must see his poem. Every detail so clear and so bright.”
He falls silent and the kitchen belongs to the sun and
the dancing motes; outside, the world is on hold. Janet looks at the Volvo
across the street; it seems to pulse in her eyes, thick as a brick. When the
phone rings, she would scream if she could draw breath, cover her ears if she
could lift her hands. She hears Harvey get up and cross to the nook as it rings
again, and then a third time.
It is a wrong number, she thinks. It has to be, because
if you tell your dreams they don’t come true.
Harvey says, “Hello?”
***************************
"Harvey's
Dream" is a short story written by Stephen King, originally published in
The New Yorker in June 2003 and later included in King's short story collection
Just After Sunset in 2008.
The story is very
popular among filmmakers. Here are several adaptations for your review and
comparison:
