See, I’ve Been Having This Dream

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Well, yeah, that’s Daphne du Maurier’s line.

But for years I’ve had this recurring dream of a house, my Manderley. I have lived there, walked through it over and over. It’s large and rambling, disintegrating in places—an entire wing we don’t use, unless Perry’s family (now mine) is visiting and we need bedrooms for the girls. Normally it’s lonely, that wing: cold and silent. I rewatched Antonioni’s visual masterpiece L’avventura and at once recognized the hotel corridor along which Monica Vitti runs as having the same feel, the same emotional resonance as it, the wing in my house.

We keep the door to this wing shut. The rooms are off a long hallway, the walls chalky and damp. Each room has its own bath in a corner: showers with janky heads, shower door frames of oxidized aluminum with cloudy pebbled glass etched by scale. In one dream three of my nieces had spread out in one of the rooms, hair wet from the shower, suitcases open, heaps of jumbled clothes. They seemed not to notice the extreme dolorousness. Downstairs, at the bottom of a staircase I hadn’t noticed before, the rest of the family was a jumble of bodies and conversations, food in various stages of preparation: a family reunion just getting started.

It took me a long time to find a home of my own. I lived in a decrepit flat for 10 years after I moved to San Francisco. It had been a rooming house once, evidence of hasp latches on the rooms; a shower created from a dark wedge of space under some stairs. The previous tenants, a throuple who called themselves The Family, left taped to the high kitchen walls watercolors they’d painted on newsprint. When we took them down to a frantic exodus of cockroaches who’d made polycules of their own behind them. I furnished it with the least worn sofa at Thrift Town, a busy floral in autumn colors that distracted from the stains.

When Perry and I moved in together. We rented from a gay schoolteacher, top floor of a house near UC San Francisco, up against a hill where eucalyptus trees never stopped twisting in the wind blowing through from the ocean.

We filled it with art and objects, mostly Perry’s, (old cameras, a Keith Haring barking dog print, an old coin bank of oxidized metal) alongside my pots, pans, and cookbooks. The joy of roughing out a space with bits and pieces. We made a nighttime run in our old VW Squareback to steal wooden pallets off the loading dock of a paint store out on Polk and formed a wonky deck in our little backyard at the foot of the eucalyptus. Perry, bracing for shocks, felt his way with the already questionable electrical wiring to rig track lighting for the teensy kitchen. Our space was dazzling, and so was our life.

Of course both places, the scarred and emotionally blank flat and the little object-filled apartment under the sighing trees, are the mise en scene of my recurring dream. If dreams can be “about” anything, mine—these—move through fulfillment and possibility. The rooms that go unused, unacknowledged for so long, take a kind of dread-inducing form. It’s like all the people I’ve loved who have died—they did so before I knew all there was to know about them. The world was a place I could only imagine them in, a place I was left with, alone, after they vanished.

The burden of keeping that world in my imagination alone is enormous. The walls go soft and chalky, the plumbing deteriorates, the air is turgid with the damp. Yet the house of my present love is one I move through every day. It fills with sisters and brothers—Perry’s siblings, mine by marriage, related to me by the collective will to form kin. They must all be fed, a responsibility I take on in these dreams, though it leaves me anxious as hell—the vegetables pile up on the counter, the meats on the grill need turning—I must navigate a way to dinner, to make sure everyone under our roof finds satisfaction. The girls sift through their clothes in bedrooms that have not noticed are sad, or crumbling, they’ll soon be coming down the stairs I forgot were there.

We have lost innumerable things, Perry and I, in almost 35 years together. Things scattered, sold, or lost—I have forgotten about many of them, I care less and less about those that remain. They decorate my dreams, though, the objects lost, not as recognizable props but as guides to feeling. I grew up never really believing I could have a home, and for the first ten years of my life after coming out I existed in my hollow flat with the Thrift Town sofa that was the closest thing to domestic solace I knew—that, and my Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington Song Book, my Smiths records, Elizabeth David paperbacks, and pirated video copy of All About Eve. It took me ten years after coming out to fall in love. That is a residence I occupy still, though my Manderley of the dead is never further than REM sleep, when the abandoned wing opens again and all I do not have, everything I cannot hold or become, haunts the joy of having; of feeling. #