The first thing he does today is wheel my bed around, so once again I’m looking out the window at the parking lot. “I prefer that patients face the light,” he says.
After I introduce him to Louisa, the drama king grabs his hand. “Larney Poole. I’m the one who got her into this pickle, I fear.” Pickle? Is this guy related to the Dr. Slocum of copacetic and noggin?
Dr. A. pats him on the shoulder and says, “I am quite sure your young woman does not believe sailing is checkers.”
We chuckle politely.
He turns to me and says, “It is what day today?”
Thursday, I tell him.
“Who are your visitors today? Tell me of your companions here.”
I try to draw out a speech on Louisa—how she lives in New York, she’s four years older, she’s an art critic at a magazine, her husband is a guy named Hugh who teaches American history at a prep school…
Dr. A. interrupts graciously. “And this young man?”
“Barney,” I say quickly, pleased that I’ve remembered his name. “He tried to bring me roses, but roses are taboo. Well, I guess you know that.” I crane my neck, which hurts like hell, but I need to see the waiting-room window. Still no Jerry. Instead, Mom. She waves a shopping bag in the air and grins. She’ll have to wait for someone to leave, since Gwen never bends the two-guests-only rule. “And hey, there’s our mom.” I point.
I can’t tell what Dr. A. is thinking. His tone is always so calm and professional. He says, “We know that you do not remember the accident which placed you here. This is not unusual.” He explains to Louisa and Barney what he has already told me. “The memory is not there to retrieve because it was never encoded in the primary instance. The trauma of the moment precluded any recording of events as they had come to pass. The tape, you may say, is not erased but blank. However, your actual memory loss of the entire preceding month—that you believe we are still in the month of June—this is of greater concern … Possibly it is a vestige of shock or of oxygen deprivation.” He turns back to me. “But if this young man was a vector in the accident, it is to my great curiosity whether you remember him.”
I take a good look at my admirer. The passion that gleams from every microscopic pore in his patrician face is way beyond flattering; anyone could see it’s been requited. Other than his madras bow tie, I guess I could see myself not turning him down. He is Newport handsome, with eyes not Jerry’s wild-yonder blue but the earnest blue of Lake Michigan as seen from that Milwaukee suite. My heart sinks; he is the inverse of Jerry. He is rebound material par excellence.
“You don’t, honeybee, do you?” he says. “Remember me.” He looks more amused than offended, even touched.
“I don’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t know you from Adam.”
I wait for him to look wounded or angry. But his expression remains bright, and then he actually laughs. As if I’ve just confessed undying love. He comes over and kisses me again, this time on the hand snagged by the IV. “Then you’ll be my Eve. I’ll have to convince you what a fine time we’ve been having, win you all over again. What a challenge—what a pleasure!”
Louisa says she has to make a phone call. Dr. A.’s beeper goes off. He says he has grand rounds but will return after lunch. This leaves me alone with the stranger who thinks he’s my boyfriend. Or the boyfriend I’ve mistaken for a stranger.
“Barney, I’m sorry, but who are you?”
“Larney,” he says. “I’m the guy who was lucky enough to offer you a ride before the rest of the world had a chance.”
I am trying to frame a question to this alarming statement when Mom joins us.
“Hello there, you dapper young man.”
“Hi, May.” He kisses her on the cheek.
“Did my daughter dent your uncle’s boat? Clement’s made of tougher steel than the hull of the Intrepid. Don’t you mess with her.”
“Mom, I’m right here. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
She reaches into her shopping bag. “Yes you are, sweetheart, and we have never been so grateful to know it, believe you me.” Mom wears large gold fox heads on her ears and a scarlet knit dress that few women her age could pull off. She’d never dream of a face-lift or color her silver hair, but years of posting in a saddle have preserved her tight hips and legs.
She sets on the chair a racehorse mystery by Dick Francis and a hot-off-the-presses book about the Exxon Valdez disaster. “But wait till you see this,” she says triumphantly. She plunks a book on my lap called Why the Reckless Survive. “I was relieved to see someone thinks that they do! A scientist, no less.” She points to the Ph.D. after the author’s name.
Larney laughs. He seems to laugh as readily as most people blink.
Mom points back at the shopping bag. “Bananas and grapes, clean undies, Jergens lotion. Am I a good mother?”
“Yes, but you’re making me nervous rushing around. Sit.”
“That’s because I’m temporary.” In her maddeningly androcentric way, she addresses herself to the man in the room. “I’m going to wash the grapes, and then I’m leaving you two alone and heading off for lunch at the Chilton Club. I talk too loud for the place, but they’ll just have to squirm their way through it. I give the maître d’ a naughty thrill. He loves me. He’s from Duluth; we talk about the Vikings between courses.”
After she leaves, Larney puts the books back in the bag and pulls the chair to the bed. He leans an elbow against my hip. “I’m not going to take advantage of your forgetfulness. I know I’m just a vacation in Bermuda. I know about your animal self. I know about the sperm king. But we were having a fabulous time. You’ll have to take my word on that.”
“What about my animal self?” (Though I want to ask, “What about the sperm king?”)
“How you’re giving in to it, letting it rule; those were your words.”
I sigh. Would he mind just telling me how we met? He attacks the task with pleasure. I was hitchhiking south of Boston. The sun was setting. When I got into his car, he could tell I was very upset: heartbroken, angry, or both. When I told him where I was headed—to my parents’, God knows why—he said his destination was just ten minutes from there. He got me to talk about my policy work on conserving seals in the Northwest and convinced me to go to a cocktail party the next night (at the home of his uncle, skipper of the fateful boat). I showed up at the party in what Larney describes as a Minuteman missile of a sequined dress, a dress intended, in his opinion, for tearing off. I agreed to go home with him if he understood one thing. “You said, I remember exactly, ‘I’m in the market for a little amnesia.’ “
“Well hey, if I’m in the ‘Be careful what you wish for’ sweepstakes, I just won. So, did you tear it off—my dress?”
He closes his eyes. “I came close. I pictured all those popped sequins like shooting stars. But no.”
“Thank you. That dress is one thing I do remember. I got a third Visa card to buy it.” It was the dress I’d bought for my Ms. Accomplished weekend with Jerry. We laugh together as Larney holds the hand that emerges from my sling. He is smitten, and I know a good drug when I see it. The pleasure is surprisingly real.
“May I take you wherever you’re going, whenever they let you out?” he says. Because he sounds as if he’s sure I’ll say no, I tell him of course.
“What do you drive?” I ask, because cars so readily seduce me. Maybe I will remember his car.
“A blue SL convertible. You liked how it matched your dress. You told me what you needed right then was an expensive car and, if possible, a large cock. Again, I quote you verbatim. I’m nothing if not honest. You told me honest was just what the doctor ordered. You took my breath away.”
This is making me feel ill, but I press on. “One more question. This is important. Do I have a job yet?”
“No,” he says, “but you’re closing in on a good one, and damn it, it’s going to take you miles from me, way the hell out to the Rocky Mountains.”
This is when Louisa return
s. Larney says he’s sorry but he has to get back to “the firm.” (Law or brokerage, I assume, though his fanciful image of flying sequins makes me think interior design. He’s too sweet to be a lawyer.)
Louisa’s mood has cooled; she seems agitated, impatient, no longer my willing slave. She picks up one of the books and pages through it. She doesn’t sit down.
“Don’t stay if you need to get back home,” I say. “I’m not going to be a vegetable.”
She snaps the book shut. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Looking at her in profile, I notice (not meaning to, not out of spite) that her chin is beginning to sag, just barely. The four years between us once seemed like an eon. Now the gap feels uncomfortably slim.
“Sorry, but yes, I have to go back tonight. Sorry I’m so spacey. It’s just … a hospital’s not the most festive place to hang out.” As if she’s sensed my scrutiny, she unclips her hair, letting it fall around her face.
“Lou—did you ever talk to Jerry?”
“I spoke to someone named Sheryl and left a message. I’ll try again if you want.”
“At his house? This … Sheryl?”
“I called the number you gave me.”
“Did she know me?”
Louisa looks unambivalently irritated now. “She wasn’t extremely friendly. I assumed she would pass on the message. I said it was urgent.”
The neighbor who feeds Coleslaw? I’m leafing through the women I remember in his life.
“So,” Louisa says abruptly, “how many do you have in mothballs?”
“How many what?”
“Men.”
I’m about to ask why she’s picking a fight when suddenly I get it. Her nervous comings and goings? Nausea. Her instinct for combat? Hormones. Now she’s saying—in a kind of hiss, because we have to keep our voices down—”What I can’t believe is this guy Larney—this, in case you hadn’t noticed, outgoing, funny, gorgeous guy—how he doesn’t mind about … what did he call him? ‘The sperm czar’? Who I assume has got to be this Jerry I’m chasing down. Last I heard, you were still talking to Luke, still on the fence about Zip—whom I liked, you know, despite all his talk about inner power and yin food …”
I wait to be sure she’s wound down. “Last I checked, ‘talking’ and ‘on the fence’ aren’t fucking.”
“Did I say anything about fucking? I don’t care if you’re fucking them all. I’d just love to know how you keep them in tow.”
“Louisa, we’re not all blissfully married like you.” I don’t mean to insult her, but the look on her face tells me plainly that I did.
Gwen pokes her head in. “Ten minutes, you two.”
The minute Gwen’s gone, I say, “Lou, are you having a baby?”
I do a lot of reckless things, my mother is right, but I don’t hitchhike (mainly because it’s so boring and inefficient). If I was in fact hitching a ride—close to dark, on a highway—and if I looked heartbroken, angry, or both, I dread to think what it means. Years ago, in the rain, I hitched away from my very last breakup with Luke. He was devastated; I walked out like a guy, like a cad. No one will ever watch me weep from a broken heart. At my worst moments, I wonder if I know what a broken heart is—or a heart before it’s broken. Maybe broken is all I know.
When we were little, I was sick all the time. Not sick in bed or withering away, but I had a lot of violent allergies, as if life were constant provocation, my body itching for a fight. So I got just about all the attention, deserved or not. Anxious, most of it. The anxious devotion of my mother. Which grew, eventually, into proprietary devotion, because I liked the same things she liked: horses, dogs, working up a good sweat. Later, holding the fascination of men. People talk about “matches” between parents and children, the luck of the cosmic draw. Mom and I are a pretty good match.
One year at our annual Fourth of July cookout (I was in high school, Louisa in college), Mom was telling a bunch of our neighbors how I’d broken into the town pool. (I was still wearing that tea strainer over my eye.) She’d had a decent amount of gin, and her voice carried across the lawn: “When I answered my front door and saw Officer Graves, his ground-chuck nose on the other side of that screen, I remember thinking, Oh my God, my darling baby, my favorite child—don’t tell me what I can’t bear to hear, you son of a bitch! I would have ripped the man’s tonsils out with my bare hands, believe you me, if the words I feared had come out of his mouth.”
I looked myopically up from wherever I was in the crowd and happened to see Louisa’s face, wherever she was. Completely tuned in to our mother’s words, she was staring me down, the look on her face triumphantly sour. She’d always said I was our mother’s favorite, and I would deny what I knew to be true, because until then she never had proof. Here it is at last, said her look, what she’d been waiting for: justification she could bank against any future family injustice. Funny, though, how then we were free to be friends—carefully, but still. It was like the end of a game of musical chairs: over, all that wondering who’d get the seat; win or lose, the same relief.
Louisa’s still angry, but I’ve made a dent, because she laughs for about ten seconds. “Oh, I am anything but having a baby.”
“Well you are something. I don’t know what, but something.”
She hides her face again. “Something. Yes, I am something.”
I wait. “Well?”
“Clem, can I ask you a question?” She looks serious. “Do our lives, I mean ours in particular, revolve around men?”
“Pardon my intrusion.”
Louisa and I look over, startled. It’s Dr. A. “I had meant to observe the back of your head, Miss Jardine. Then I will entrust you again to your sister.”
As he snips gently at the bandage, he asks me random questions. His smell is so overwhelming, so lovely, that it takes me nearly a minute to recall how many playing cards there are in a deck, sides to a stop sign, states in the Union. His fingers touch my bare scalp. I tell him Tangier is a city or maybe a country, tangelo a fruit, tangent a geometric divergence. When he leaves, I say to Louisa, “What does that man smell like? It’s beautiful.”
“That’s vetiver,” says Louisa. “It’s nice, you’re right.”
Gwen pulls back my curtain. She taps her watch. “Time, girls.”
Larney’s roses await me. They are nicer than I thought—pungent and meaty, flowers of pedigree and substance. The card reads, With profound apologies & unswervingly tropical affections, Yours and yours only, L. At the top, a deft slash through J. LARNED QUINCY POOLE, indigo on ivory.
Thanks to Dr. Slocum, I have a private room at dormitory cost. After two sessions of dramatic pleading, the day nurse finally agreed to turn off the fluorescent light that runs like a racing stripe around the upper walls. So the light in my room is now sun, which swells and fades as the clouds come and go, the way a pupil widens and constricts. In a week, it’s the closest I’ve come to open air, which I desperately crave. I nap erratically, black holes of dreamless sleep that quench like rationed swigs of cold spring water. Each time I wake, my head aches with the labor of healing.
Dad is my first visitor here, exhausted from hurricane vigil. For half of every summer, hurricanes are to my father what national economists are to CEOs: whispering Disaster, disaster right in your ear, then half the time saying No, sorry, just joshing!
It’s the first time I’ve seen him since coming to, but Dr. Slocum tells me he was here on the second day of my delirium. Between tests, he sat by my gurney while Mom paced and cursed and bargained with my absent self. Now he carries a rose—a Mrs. Anthony Waterer—red as a cherry sno-cone. He loves reciting the names of his roses, most of them Baroness This, Comtesse That, Principessa Hooha. He carries my rose in a mason jar with a punctured lid, which he will have packed in a picnic cooler to keep it fresh for the two-hour drive.
It’s Dad who tells me exactly what happened, and the story seems to give a purpose to his presence that makes him less uncomfortable in mine.
/> The uncle had a crew member cancel before an important race, and Larney recruited me. Entering the last leg, a strong wind at our stern, we were neck and neck with another boat to port. When their bow began to veer toward ours, the skipper panicked: He tacked before us when we had the right of way. I was on the foredeck, raising the spinnaker, which unfurled against my face and snapped in the wind like gunfire, leaving me blind and deaf to all warnings. When the two boats collided and our bow rode up over theirs, I was smacked in the chest by their boom and hurled backward into the water. As I went in, the jib sheet snared my right arm, snapping the ulna; then my head slammed against the side of our boat. Larney dove in and passed me up to the other crew members. Somebody radioed for an ambulance. The paramedics, en route to the nearest ER, called in the medevac from Boston.
Though Dad inhabits the sailing world and lives a life many would kill for, in his dreams he’s just the plantsman he was schooled to be, pruning vines, cataloging spores, protecting fragile blooms from extinction. This old longing gives him a professorial tone when he tells tales, not the blow-me-down air of your average nautical windbag. As I eat my dinner, he reenacts methodically the way in which his youngest daughter almost died.