Dream Houses

For many years, I’ve had a dream in which my house has no roof and I can see the stars and moon from my bed. There is always an element of anxiety in the exposure, and sometimes it’s really scary, the result of a skirmish or war. Mostly, though, I discover the public nature of my private space by accident. I turn a corner and realize my rooms aren’t enclosed, as I believed, but extend through hallways into a fuzzy area, like the lobby of a hotel. Strangers are floating around, in front of me or without my knowing, right there, outside and yet inside.

In a way, my house at Flux Factory is that dream come to life. My walls are translucent. When the lights are on, it glows. Shapes ghost by, beast or person, unclear. You can see the objects inside my house from outside, the closer the form is to the wall, the more distinct its outlines and colors. A barge of wood floats my bed high off the ground, and set underneath the mattress is a window spectators can look into and through which I can see them crouching along in a tunnel that clefts my domicile into two lobes of a brain. Sweeping up from my bed is a steep, carpeted slope that projects the inside of my house outside, through the kind of gaping, roofless opening I dream about. I sleep well. Granted, I know my neighbors, and the three of us have observed the quiet rule in our space. So far, I’m sleeping in the material form of my anxiety dream with less anxiety than in my apartment, with its solid, impermeable walls, where I have solitude. Maybe that’s how it always is with fear.

Though it’s far more elegant, Ranbir’s house reminds me of the forts I made in abandoned lots in childhood, out of crates and bricks and stuff, and it summons the houses under construction I used to play in when I was older in Lido Beach, where speculators went crazy building alongside the dunes. They were dangerous and irresistible: framed, but floorless in places, and open to the sky. We’d dare each other to leap from the second story into sand and soil mounded near two-by-fours. I jumped, because I was afraid, and the spaces became sexy. I didn’t break anything. There were early kisses in those lawless rooms.

Grant’s house is sprouting, and he reports he’s on a tear, producing “the freest writing I’ve ever done.” On Saturday when we moved in, the seed beds that cover the roof panels and create a garden in the front had the merest stubble. Now they are velvety fields of rye, clover, wheat grass, and vetch, tufting in patterns, like mini hedges in a maze. The lushness of the plantings combines with the rough but exacting carpentry to form a vibrating hub for our space. I once wrote a weird little fairy tale about a man turning into a tree. It wasn’t so nice for the man. I’ve had dreams, too, about floors made of grass—the outside and inside jumbled again but with different architectural elements. These dreams aren’t scary. They’re erotic, bodies plunked into growing aliveness, feeling the house as an extension of the flesh and vice versa, contained and uncontained, protected and unprotected. At the end of the movie Secretary, lovers who devote their lives to their sexual fantasies fling their naked bodies onto a marriage bed made of grass.

Last night was Flux Thursday, a weekly supper cooked by valiant and generous donors, followed by a presentation by a guest . . . a reading, a video, a slide show, a performance of an artwork in progress. This celebration was for Morgan, who successfully defended his philosophy dissertation at New School University and can now be addressed as Dr. outerborough fringe artspace macher terrible. The spread was plentiful and veg-centric. Nothing with a face or lips was served, unless you count an image of the Holy Virgin that appeared on top of one of the shitakes.

In my dream shared space, labor is divided equally between the penis people, the vagina people, and those with alternative genitalia. At Flux Factory, where everyone came of age in the grow light of feminism and other progressive rights movements, on paper chores aren’t parceled out according to gender. Everyone does a share of what’s required and also tolerates mess. Eighteen bodies plus their mates and friends and visitors carpet bathrooms with hair, track puddles from showers, fill garbage bags to overflowing, pile dishes with stuck food in sinks. Still, attempts are made, kudzu is hacked with machetes.

Sort of. There was all this food, platter after platter of sliced, oily veg dishes, cheese, fruit, pasta and mushrooms, bruschettas, a strawberry shortcake warship, I mean counters and tables covered with food, plus a zillion mismatched plates and pieces of flatware, glasses, and bottles of beer and wine. There were maybe thirty-five people max in and out, and after a couple of hours around fifteen were in the kitchen. The scene was a cyclone, a zoo. It was time to get in there scraping plates, covering leftovers, finding fridge space for them, emptying beer bottles, carrying stuff to the sink, setting up stations for washing, drying, and restocking. The women started to work. The men did not. The men needed to be asked to help, and then they did, some with more initiative and sense of purpose, others needing remedial instruction in the technologies of the sponge and paper towel. What the hell?