Kitty Burns Florey

I worked for ten years at the (now defunct, alas) Foundry Bookstore in New Haven, where we had a file drawer labeled NUGATORY GALLIMAUFRY. That's what this page is meant to be -- a little of everything: bio, photos, excerpts from books, and at this point I'm not sure what else. Stay tuned....

THE SLEEP SPECIALIST
PROLOGUE
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
1990

Hana sent me this clipping, Darnell. Cut from the Times, tucked into a sympathy card. What a way to find out. May Munro, Film Actress, 85. That’s the headline. Found dead.

May. I haven’t seen her since she ran out on me – how many? Fifty-some years ago. Seen her in the flesh, I mean. I’ve seen her in the movies, of course. Who hasn’t? Died in her sleep, it says, according to her daughter. Whatever that means: died in her sleep. And this photograph of her from the sixties, one of her last publicity shots: bruised-looking face, spiky eyelashes, and her smile – almost amused but not quite.

I remember that smile, those soft pink lips, her little teeth. We weren’t married long, but how could I forget all that, and her small eager hands, and her huge blue eyes. Her hair spread out over the pillow like some precious metal while she slept. I remember her sleeping.

She could always sleep, and I always had trouble. Even then, when I was young and healthy, sleep came rarely, with difficulty. It was like a distant land, Darnell, the Land of Oblivion – a place in a dream, beautiful and green, life-giving, where you long to go, that you glimpse far off and can never quite reach. I would approach it, I would climb the hills and descend into the valleys, with that blessed, blissful place always before me – and then wake with a start, my eyes staring wide into the dark, thrust back into the barren Land of Insomnia.

I’d struggled with this on and off all my life, but it was especially bad that first summer in New York. Many nights I would give up and go out, walking the streets of New York, thinking about my play, making up dialogue, until I was tired enough to go home.

I walked up Broadway into Harlem. I walked downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge and over it. I walked back from Brooklyn once when the dawn was breaking over my shoulder, up the river where Queens was, the sky smeared with rose and blue. But usually I just walked up Fifth Avenue, maybe up into the 90s, and down again by way of Park, past all those dark and shuttered mansions where people slept the sleep of the rich and where, one foggy morning before dawn, I stood at Park and 81st and watched two thieves break into a building from a second story balcony. I did nothing – watched them fiddle with the lock in perfect silence by the gray light from a lamp and let themselves in – and then I walked on. Another night I saw one man stick a knife into another and leave him for dead. Once I saw what I thought was a brown river running in the gutter and it turned out to be rats, an army of them, slinking along in the dark. I saw whores in fur coats, whores in diamonds, getting into taxis. And once, twice, I saw men with their arms around each other, men kissing, and one night a man dressed as a woman, long-legged and broad-shouldered, with thick black hair pinned back with diamond combs. And once I saw the police arrest a man, slamming him against the paddy wagon and hitting him in the stomach until he slumped over, then fell to the ground. A black man, Darnell. They picked him up and threw him into the back of the wagon, slammed the doors, and when I went over to where they had been I saw his blood bright as paint on the pavement.

On those nights I would get home at dawn or just before, sleeping three or four hours until it was time to get up. I was tired a lot of the time, but I was young, full of energy, and I had things to do. I was writing my first play, and it was going to redeem me. I thought much of myself; I believed in my future. I was probably somewhat ridiculous – wearing confidence like I wore my father’s old Panama hat. That old hat had a strange fate – I’ll tell you someday, maybe. But even, at times, when my body was exhausted and would have liked to stretch out on the bed those hot afternoons, my brain was full of schemes. And on most nights, when May and I had fallen into bed, whether or not we had performed our peculiar kind of lovemaking, I would fit myself into the groove of her back and her bent knees, and while she sank into sleep I would come irretrievably awake – as if she took the sleepiness from me and added it to her own.

Now I think my difficulty with sleep is nothing but a habit: insomnia has worn its grooves into me and there’s no smoothing them out. But in those days my brain just kept burning along no matter what I did to my body. It was as if I had to stay awake for some reason – like a vigil. And maybe that’s what it was, after all. I was keeping watch over the last summer of my youth.

*

“Look at this, Darnell. May died. My wife, May Munro.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Sinclair.”

“I don’t know if I ever told you I was married to her.”

“I think you did mention that one time, if I recall.”

“They give me one sentence, which is probably more than I deserve. Listen: In the thirties, she was briefly married to playwright Robert Sinclair (Fish Out of Water, Afternoon Coffee, The Monkey Tree, on which the 1964 hit musical was based); they divorced in 1936, when she married Howard Mackenzie.”

“Says she was 85 years old. Older than you.”

“Oh yes. By five years. It was mortifying to her. She used to say: When I’m thirty, I’ll start lying about my age. Of course, when she was thirty she had already left me and gone out to Hollywood.”

“I saw some of her movies on TV. Mighty pretty lady.”

“Yes. Pretty. She was indeed.”

Pretty was always the word. Not beautiful, but that blander, more comfortable adjective: pretty. So pretty: everything round, soft, eager. The kind of prettiness that doesn’t wear well, that doesn’t come from the bones, it’s all in the flesh. Maybe that’s what makes women like that so sweet, so sad: it can’t last, so gobble it up now before it spoils.

“It don’t say what she died of. Died in her sleep is all.”

“I guess it was just old age, Darnell. Heart, probably.”

It’s not what I would want for myself: to slip away in the middle of a dream. And how would it happen, really? Would death enter the dream? Would you dream your death and then – just stop? Brain, breath, blood: shut down. The dream I had, once, of climbing out of a pit, or a well, something deep and dark, when I tried to climb out and kept falling back, trying and falling back, and I could see the light up above but could never reach it, until I finally woke up. Sweating, my breath coming short. Would dying in your sleep be like that? To fall back one last time to darkness, silence, nothing. How strange, how unimaginable. And to miss that experience, to sleep through it. It doesn’t seem right. Because it has to be – doesn’t it, Darnell? – an important one. As important as being born. It doesn’t seem fair that you miss your birth. But death – that’s something you can be awake for if you’re lucky. Awake, following it to the end: that seems the right way. But merciful for May, I think, who loved to sleep, who loved her dreams so much. I dreamed the room was full of owls, I dreamed I was floating above the city in the night and I could see all the lights, I dreamed Carlotta and I were walking two little black dogs up Second Avenue. I remember how her hair, spread out on the pillow, seemed to gather up the light and hold it, so that when I went in to wake her, those hot evenings, at suppertime, the room would be nearly dark but her hair would gleam golden, the hair on her head and the hair between her pale white legs, everything gold and white. I can see her as if these fifty-some years have been given back to me, as if she’s asleep in the next room. She didn’t need that sleep: she just wanted it, loved it, craved it like a bottle or a drug.

*

“What do you think, Darnell? Would you want to die in your sleep?”

“I don’t like to think about dying, Mr. Sinclair.”

“Well, you’re young enough not to have to.”

“Ain’t nobody that young.”

*

Hana dear. Thanks for the card, and the clipping. It’s sad, I suppose, though I have to say I don’t feel much. It was a long time ago. (I was gratified to see my name on the list of husbands.) I hope you are keeping well. Will you get down here this year? You know I would like to see you, any time you can come.

“If you’d mail this in the morning, I’d appreciate it.”

“Will do, Mr. Sinclair.”

I love these evenings when we have dinner in the courtyard, when you push my chair out here and light the candles. I love the sounds of the night. The cicadas’ dry rasping. A cat complaining or in heat. Music, always: church bells, the cantina band competing with somebody’s radio, Pepita singing in the courtyard next door when she waters the plants. Almost nothing has changed since I used to visit this town with Arthur, all those years ago. I wish I hadn’t waited until I was in my seventies to come here to live. How often have I thought that? The alien sweetness of the life throbbing here, the endless music, the warmth that gets into my bones. And you, Darnell, so silent, sitting on the stone bench across from me. Do you like this quiet? Hate it? Do you even notice it?

“You going over tonight, then?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Sinclair. Not tonight.”

I try to get you to talk, Darnell, because I love to watch your mouth: like two smooth slices of a peach. Then the night grows slowly darker, and you blend into it, you become almost invisible. You absorb the darkness the way May used to absorb the light, and when you light a cigar I watch the glow, the way it pulses slightly in the darkness. The sweet burning smell. Your strong white teeth that look so strangely thick and solid. The sound of your breath as you inhale, exhale. I can hear how much you enjoy this one small daily cigar. How young you are. And how did it happen, finally, that they accepted you down at the cantina? I know that, for months, no one talked to you, or acknowledged your presence except to shut up when you went in. Gradually, it got better. That’s all you would say. It’s better now. You don’t tell me why, or how. Did you, silent Darnell, actually talk to the men in the cantina? Did you ever challenge them? Did anyone call you names? Is there a Spanish word for nigger? In Spanish, Negro seems harmless – just a word, a color. But I can’t stretch my imagination into the cantina, and all you say is that gradually people quit staring at you, started being friendlier. It’s better.

“When you think about it, Darnell, nobody really knows that for a fact. Do they? That someone died in their sleep. Just because you wake up in the morning and find them dead, looking peaceful. They could have been wide awake when it happened.”

“I suppose that’s true, Mr. Sinclair.”

I wonder if you are thinking about this. But you don’t like to think about dying.

Eventually you put your cigar out, carefully, in the little painted tin ashtray you bought down at the mercado for six pesos, and, as I knew you would, you say, “Maybe I’ll be going across the street, after all, Mr. Sinclair. Just for a few minutes, if it’s okay with you.”

“Of course. I’m quite comfortable here.”

“Be back in half an hour.”

“That would be good.”

I’m here with the night sounds, the night music.
I don’t mind thinking about dying. I think about my own death, which is coming to me soon, it’s chasing me, it’s at my back. Time’s winged chariot. I think about May’s death, and then about her life. If I could write a play about that summer at the Alhambra Gardens with May, with Orson Price, I might do it – but knowing, the whole time I was writing, that real life – for me, anyway – can never be as sacred and true as what’s invented. And, inevitably, it would be a sad, dirty little play, more like one of Joe Orton’s than one of mine, but I think it would have a certain compelling dramatic tension, and if I could figure out the ending, Darnell, if I knew what the hell happened to me that summer and could put it into a play, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.

I was born in Syracuse, NY, an only child -- a quiet kid, obsessed with books, devoted to my cat, very close to my parents, and shy except when I was with my best friends. I went to the same Syracuse parochial school from 1st to 12th grades -- St. John the Baptist Academy, which inspired SISTER BERNADETTE'S BARKING DOG. I have a B.A. from Boston University and an M.A. from Syracuse, both in English literature.

After college, I married and moved to New Haven, Connecticut. My daughter, Katherine, was born there. She now lives with her husband and daughter in northern California, where she is a law professor.

I've been a reporter, worked in a bookstore, written catalog copy for a book distributor, and done freelance editing. After I left New Haven, I lived in the Williamsburg/ Greenpoint section of Brooklyn for twelve years with my second husband, Ron Savage -- a painter and craftsman. Ron and I left the city in 2006 to spend winters in central Connecticut and summers in a little house in the woods of upstate New York. Thanks to the wonders of technology, I work long-distance as an editor for Muze, Inc., in New York City, where I have been for thirteen years.

When I'm not writing or editing, I read, take long walks, cook for friends, play the piano (badly as ever), mess around in the garden, keep a voluminous diary (as I have done for over 30 years), work at fixing up both our old houses, hang out with the cats, and write indignant letters to the Times.