Falling Awake

Sphinx pricked his ears.
    Isabel’s pulse kicked into high gear. “Oh, my gosh, he’s here already.”
    Hastily she yanked the remaining items—a log of goat cheese, two large bunches of fresh spinach and a package of frozen, uncooked puff pastry—out of the sack.
    Sphinx bestirred himself to get down from the chair and amble toward the front hall. Obviously he had already learned to recognize the sound of Ellis’s car.
    “I’m not trying to impress him with my cooking,” she assured the cat, pulling the bottle of hideously expensive California cabernet out of the sack. “A man on a mission isn’t going to pay much attention to food. This is just simple fare. I would have made a tomato-and-goat-cheese tart and fixed a lovely spinach salad tonight regardless of whether or not I was expecting a man for dinner.” She froze, assailed by a sudden wave of horrified doubt. “Oh, jeez, that’s not real macho food, is it? What was I thinking? I should have bought some salmon and grilled it withasparagus and maybe some sourdough bread. I should have done potatoes . Men like potatoes. Oh, jeez. I’m making a goat cheese tart. This is a disaster, Sphinx.”
    The knock on the front door interrupted her in mid–panic attack. Pull yourself together. You’re a professional. You have got to be cool, woman.
    She made herself walk to the front door and fling it open. Sphinx padded outside to greet Ellis, who was coming up the steps with a briefcase that looked as Italian and as expensive as the Maserati.
    He halted in front of her, politely quizzical. “Something wrong?”
    Wrong? What could be wrong? The man of her dreams was standing right in front of her and she was in a state of sheer, unadulterated anxiety because she was going to fix a tomato-and-goat-cheese tart with puff pastry, for Pete’s sake, instead of something manly like grilled salmon and potatoes.
    “No, of course not,” she said, pleased with the blithe, breezy way it came out. “Come on in. I’ll open the wine. We can talk about our plans while I fix dinner.”
    Maybe he would be so intent on his manhunt that he wouldn’t notice the puff pastry.
    e llis set the briefcase down beside the chair in the small living room and took a quick look around while Isabel made herself busy in the kitchen. He hadn’t had a chance to examine the place the night before and he was deeply curious.

    The furnishings looked as if they had come with the house. The sofa, chairs, coffee table and lamps were all nondescript and well worn, veterans of a lot of years of summer rentals.
    He was mildly surprised not to see more evidence of Isabel’s personal style and tastes in the room. He had figured her for the kind of woman who would put her stamp on her environment. Why the bland backdrop? Probably hadn’t had time to do any interior design.
    The collection of volumes in the plank-and-glass block bookcase proved to be the exception to the generic feel of the place.
    He glanced at a few of the titles and smiled. As he had expected, it was a mixed lot that ran the gamut from serious academic dream research to the bogus television psychic stuff. G. William Domhoff’s The Scientific Study of Dreams sat side by side with a collection of Jung’s essays on dreams and a popular book that purported to tell people how to interpret the symbols that appeared in their dreamscapes. Freud’s groundbreaking work on the psychological analysis of dreams was juxtaposed with Stephen LaBerge’s experimental reports on lucid dreaming. The legendary sleep studies conducted by Dement were wedged between copies of the elaborate Hall/Van de Castle dream coding system and a volume containing Patricia Garfield’s theories on the same subject.
    This was where Martin Belvedere had hoped to see his work shelved, he thought, right next to Freud, Jung, Domhoff, LaBerge and the others. He wondered if Isabel would someday make the old man’s dream of respect and recognition come true. One thingwas for sure. Belvedere had been right to entrust his papers to her. If anyone would take on the responsibility of getting him published posthumously, it was Isabel.
    “Wine’s ready,” she announced cheerfully. “And I’ve got some hors d’oeuvres, if you’re hungry.”
    “You don’t have to call me twice.”
    He crossed the living area and took a seat on one of the high-backed swivel chairs at the counter. In spite of the seriousness of the situation and the knowledge that Isabel probably