“But here you are, safe,” he says at last. His tone is so reverent, it makes me nervous.
“After a fashion!” I say, to lighten him up, but he doesn’t smile.
“I would like to impress upon you that your mother and I were terrified. Please realize, this is the third time our town police chief has materialized at our front door on your behalf. Clem, honey, it is my sincerest, most heartfelt wish that this time will have been the last. The very arrival of this man’s car in our driveway again would do us in.” He’s still holding on to his flower, as if he’s not sure I deserve it. Condensation from the jar drips onto the floor and one of his boat moccasins (a new pair).
“Dad, it’s my wish, too,” I say, but I have to suppress the urge to giggle at his solemnity. Apology is no more my style than gushing about grief, love, and mortality is his.
He kisses me on the cheek and sets Mrs. Waterer beside Larney’s bouquet. He stops to finger one of the pink blooms, now fully open. “Souvenir d’un ami. Your young man is not undiscerning.”
Before leaving, he reaches inside his jacket. “This looks important,” he says. The envelope is addressed to me at Jerry’s, forwarded in his scrawl to Rhode Island, and I wonder if Dad saw the irony: his daughter bashed up in an ICU while there’s her name, Clement Jardine, typed on a clean white surface, placid as a stormless sea, c/o Mr. Beau Jardine, in whose care she has not been for some time. I’ll bet it made him feel awful, that c/o. It makes me want to say something reassuring, but I fail again, because he is out the door, with a taut wave, before I can think of a thing.
The return address is Jackson, Wyoming, and the letter inside—from someone whose name means nothing to me, Department of Game and Fish—tells me that he and his colleagues were “more than impressed” by our meeting and hope I will, taking into account the funding constraints we discussed, accept a position as research biologist on the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team and move myself out west by September. I concentrate hard, but no bells go off, no boards light up, no fireworks fill that dense black sky. I have flown across the country, seen a place I’ve always yearned to see, landed myself an impressive if poorly paid job, and right now I can’t remember a bit of it. I am not going to tell this to Dr. A. I can only hope dependable Larney will tell me about the sights I saw and, if I told him enough, about the people I more than impressed.
The sky matches Larney’s roses when the nurse shows up to take my tray. I tell her not to turn on the lights just yet.
Jerry answers the phone, like he always does, “Heya.”
“Hey yourself.” My fingers burn on the receiver, as if I’ve just come inside from a bitter cold day. I trample right over the pause: “Just us lately comatose invalids here, don’t mind us.” I stare at my laid-up wrist, at the bruise seeping from under the cast. I apply what I know about healing to its spectrum of yellows and blues.
“I heard you’re in the hospital. I’m sorry.” This is the voice I’ve heard, deep and careful, when he’s talking with difficult but wealthy clients.
“ ‘Sorry.’ Ah.” I look up; my room is nearly dark. When I switch on the reading lamp beside the bed, I switch on my reflection in the window. I’m a mess, except for the ivory satin pajamas that Larney brought when they let me out of purgatory. “Listen, Jerry, just tell me this. Back in, oh, late June, why would I have been hitchhiking outside Boston, madder than Croesus?”
He laughs briefly. “I think it’s ‘richer.’ “
“What’s richer?”
“Never mind.” He says gently, almost playfully, “Are you drinking?”
“Jerry, I have amnesia. I’m in the hospital. Cocktails are not one of the amenities offered. So help me out here. The last thing I know, I’m maybe moving in with you. Then it’s five weeks later, I’m at death’s door in the ICU, and you are nowhere in sight.”
“ICU … my God, the ICU—”
“As in, I see you dumped me when I wasn’t looking. Yes?”
“Bad timing, Clem. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Bad timing?”
“Your forgetting, I mean. This is …” He sighs loudly. “What a mess.”
My reflection grows more and more insistent. A winking jet soars through my bedridden self.
“Would it be a good idea or not for me to come right out and beg you to tell me what happened? Did I make too big an ass of myself? Or do I just pretend, oh well, oops, a chapter got ripped from my book.”
I get a second laugh from Jerry, still far from warm, but he tells me. Because he wants us to be friends. I glare at my reflection: Cold day in hell.
We were out to dinner in Boston, eating at a sidewalk table, when a panhandling gypsy offered to read my palm. Jerry had been waiting all week—a coward, he admits—to tell me about this woman he ran into, someone he knew in college. The gypsy gave him the only chance he saw. And you know what’s weird? Unlike all the things about my lost month that I have to fish from other people, the encounter with the gypsy I reel back in, here and now, on my own. Like some archetype who’s shown up in too many dreams, she wore the gold hoops, the garish peasant textiles, smelled too perfectly of garlic—the only glitch her local, car salesman accent. “A world explora” were her first words. “I see you in Africa, hon, I see you in Java, I see you with the Eskimos way up nawth. I see you everywaya.” She didn’t say how she could draw this travelogue from my cupped hand in hers, but I didn’t mind.
“And love, love, love. Hon, I see a tapestry of love. Hahtbreak, flirtations, wild lee-ay-zones, marriage, the gamut.” I smiled at Jerry when she said this. “See any offspring?” I asked, and I can imagine the goading edge to my voice. The gypsy shook her head. “Can’t see it clearly, hon. A toss-up. But see heeya?” She twisted my hand toward the candle and jabbed my palm with a long sharp nail. “Middla the life line, a break.” I leaned in, my hair mingling with hers. She was right. A miniature chasm, bisecting the line.
“What does it mean?”
She shrugged. “Could be a crisis, I nevva lie. A serious accident. Loss of a deeya one. Your house burnin’ down. But see heeya, the line goes on? Resurrection. A second wind.” She stood up and readjusted her shawl. “Time waits for no man. No woman neitha.” Without a wave or a nod, as if the prophecies ticked like minutes off a meter and my dime had run out, she walked on down the street, turning the nearest corner.
“A big crisis? That’s easy,” I said to Jerry. “The day you leave me.” The copper light from the candle made me happy, the way it flickered so fondly through his red beard. I was feeling romantic, smiling like a fool. I was a fool.
Jerry stared into the candle as well, but the glow it cast on his face did not illuminate a look of romance. “I’m sorry to be such an ass,” he said, “but I’ve got to put this on hold.”
“This? What do you mean by ‘this’?”
“Us,” he said sheepishly.
That’s when he told me about the woman, and that’s when I told him no one was putting me “on hold,” like some alternative phone call. I don’t remember that whole conversation (who’d want to?), but now, as he tells me his side of the story, I do remember the wildfire racing through my limbs as I fled down the sidewalk and, not long after, the even hotter rage when I discovered, clamoring through my purse in South Station, that the gypsy, that bitch, had lifted my wallet.
“So, is it back to California?” Dr. Slocum sits, as he does too often, on my bed. He visits at least twice a day, claims he’s writing me up as a special case of retrograde amnesia. The thing is, he’s stopped taking notes.
“Rhode Island for a little while. Till I get my head together.” I touch my bandage. “So to speak.”
He twiddles his stethoscope and nods. He shifts his weight toward me and clears his throat.
“Listen, don’t do it,” I say, as nicely as I can.
“Do what?”
“Ask me out to dinner, say you want to see me again, whatever. No matter what you have in mind, you’d be disa
ppointed.”
When he says nothing (what would he say?), I say, “Not good timing.”
He stands. “Well. Say it like it is.” He fingers his beeper, willing it to save his pride.
“You need a nap; go. I’m sorry to be such a jerk. I’ll see you later.” We both know I won’t.
“Got everything you need?” he asks.
“Within reason.”
“Sayonara,” with a smirk, is how he tells me good-bye.
I turn on my TV. Out blazes a football montage, men colliding over and over. Everywhere, everywhere: men, men. I leave it on but mute. Football in July? I feel more disoriented than ever.
I jump when the phone rings. Oh Jerry, change your mind roars to the front of my brain like a projection onto a movie screen. But it’s Louisa, calling from New York. She tells me, in a breathtaking rush, that not only is she not having a baby; she’s fallen in love and doesn’t know what to do. She wanted to tell me in person, but she chickened out. If you want advice, I tell her, take anyone’s but mine.
“I know what your advice would be,” she says. “ ‘Burn those bridges! Choose hellfire over tundra!’ ”
“I guess that’s how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news.”
“I’m sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone … outside my life. Get it out of my head, to keep from going nuts, but somewhere safe.”
She sees me as safe? This brings tears to my eyes.
“I trust you, Clem. Are you pissed?”
“Come on, Lou. I’m flattered. But Lou—what a mess.” Isn’t that what Jerry said? Then she does what I guess she intended to do from the start, no matter what my reaction. She tells me about the guy, eyelash by eyelash, cuticle by cuticle (a man every inch the animal her husband is not). Gutless, I listen. I wonder if the gypsy put a curse on me, too—just in case I canceled all three of my Visas.
“I think I’m moving out,” she says.
“Oh no,” I say. “Don’t do that. That’s crazy!”
“I have to!”
I take a deep breath. “I thought you wanted my advice.”
I have to wait a few seconds before she says, “I thought I knew what you would tell me. I guess I was wrong. It’s okay.”
Everyone seems to know who I am, and what I think, but me. After Louisa hangs up, I think instantly of her husband. I feel more sorrow for him than I do for Louisa, which isn’t right—not morally, but because I have no real bond with Hugh. Am I suddenly the queen of empathy? No. It’s more that I need Louisa to be with this placid, loyal man. I needed her to make that choice in the first place—and I need her now, though it’s none of my business, not to unmake it. Please stay married and have that baby, I’m thinking. Please have several. I wish I could blame all this craziness on drugs, yet my head, however sore, is clearer than I want to admit.
Dr. A. examines me one last time. When he comes in, I am as thrilled to see him as if this were a date—even though, after so many meetings, he’s still immune to chat. “Miss Jardine,” he greets me. “I know you are expectant to depart, but will you please take your seat on the bed?”
His hands close around the back of my skull as usual. As usual, I’m surprised how little I resent the confinement. The heels of his hands, resting on my cheekbones, smell as green as ever, but today a little less arid, as if they’ve come straight from pruning young trees. Ah, horticulture. Perhaps that explains why I’m charmed by this fusty man who I’m guessing drives a dog-eared Civic and, come winter, wears wool socks in bed to console his Mediterranean feet. It’s Freudian after all.
He asks me to define archipelago, estuary, fjord. Piece of cake. Then he asks for the names of the oceans and the Great Lakes. I leave out Ontario. “Listen, doctor, you’ll never discharge anyone with tests like this,” I say. “Schools over here haven’t taught geography in years.”
He jots on his clipboard. “Dr. Slocum has told me you are a scholar of the water.” He rips off a form and hands it to me. “Your father, how is he?”
“Dad? Dad’s fine. You met Dad?”
“Oh, you will not remember, of course,” he says. “The day he was here with you—a long day—he was massaging your feet while we attended to your head. At one moment, I was resolute that he thought you were to die. I could not say otherwise, though I felt your case to be hopeful. Before he drove that long way home, I asked him to languish in my office and take a little drink. He told me you were so very small when you were born. He said it was the first time he ever prayed since he himself was a child. This day, he said, was the second. He said prayer is—I remember exactly—pointless but indispensable. The membrane of sanity. I told him that a doctor would be obliged to agree. It made a strike upon me.” He taps his head with a finger. He gives me one of his rare smiles. “You will please thank him for the beneficent roses.”
I wait for him to go on, but he looks at his watch and hands me his card. He says that if I have any unusual headaches, I am please to call. Without hesitancy. His first name, which did not fit on his badge, is Anastasias. Anastasias Athanassiou. Live forever: that’s what his last name means, according to Dr. Slocum.
Larney has brought me a silk scarf to wrap my patchy head in, a dowdy yet sumptuous thing printed with sailor’s knots. Probably his mother’s. It looks silly with the jeans and Peter Tosh T-shirt he’s fetched from my parents’ house, but I am too touched to refuse. In the parking lot, I get a few stares.
He helps me into his car. “You are something, honeybee, you are a tough one,” he says when he gets in beside me. (You might wonder how it is that I let him go on using his silly endearment. I let him because it’s true. Yes I carry sweet stuff, but yes I wander far afield, and yes I sting.)
I smile. Am I something? What is that something? Why does everyone insist all the time on my toughness? How blind can they be? I take one of the inventories that have become second nature in the past week: I am confused, weary, ashamed of things I will never recall, but I am glad to feel the sun, then glad to be riding in a fast expensive car, top down, along a shining river. Though ultimately I will be in no one’s care but my own, and that’s just as well, today I find myself c/o J. Larned Quincy Poole and glad about that, too.
After a mile or so, I say, “Larney, what does the J stand for?”
“Jephthah. A great-great-grandfather. Name like a mouthful of gauze.”
“Well, Jephthah, you are one charming guy. You know what? In the hospital, I got asked the definition of chivalry—long story. But it’s you: you’re the definition. And I have a feeling you saved my life.” I can tell he knows my honest praise is the beginning of a respectful letdown, fair and square. It’s my way of saying that he’s made, as Dr. A. would put it, a strike upon me.
When we turn south, he reaches across the rearview mirror and lowers the visor, to shield me from the sun. After I thank him, he says, “You’re welcome,” both reflexively and with a bottomless heart. I pretend that dust has blown in my eyes.
He says, “If you’re tired, just sleep. Please.”
At the touch of a chrome toggle, my seat swoons slowly back. How sweet such tiny empirical pleasures feel at a moment like this. As I turn on my good side to search for a semblance of comfort, my cheek soothed by the warm leather, I see on the backseat a blue plastic bag labeled PERSONAL BELONGINGS. It contains, I imagine, nothing I owned before the accident: just the books, underwear, and lotion my mother bought me; the satin pajamas from Larney, now flecked with coffee and saline. Stowed there as well are my sister’s secret longing, my father’s fears, and this stranger’s curious devotion, so worthy it pains me. I close my eyes and relabel the bag THINGS ENTRUSTED TO ME … WE WILL SEE HOW WISELY. Then I’m off, scholar of the water winging toward a lofty, land-locked retreat.
Coat of Many Colors
FEBRUARY 1993
My machine has a name. Right up there on his brow, flashy chrome on T-bird turquoise, as if he were some kind of potentate: Theratek 9. I’ve dreamed up nicknames, to m
ake our appointments feel like liaisons. On good days I call him Nine, Lucky Nine, Big Blue. When we’re alone together in his underground vault, I lie beneath his single square unblinking eye, my reflection submerged in his gaze, and I tease him: Hey Nine, what time do you get off? Do you get off, big man? Don’t you crave the sunshine, the trees, the open sky? Haven’t you earned at least a window, Lucky, a view of the park?
He’s the still-waters type, so I don’t expect answers.
On bleak days I think of him as Thanatek, death to fend off death. I don’t speak to him then. I submit, paralyzed, sometimes forgetting to breathe. A rabbit under a hedge, crisscrossed by the shadow of a spiraling hawk.
And then there are days when his rapt presence transcends the mechanism, when all its rude, ragged noises fade away. He becomes a titanic blue swan, and when the lights go out and he arcs his musclebound neck over and around me, I close my eyes and surrender, ripe as a jet-age Leda.
Be good to yourself. Take it easy. Savor small moments of joy. People are full of advice. If I had my choice, easy is definitely how I would take it. I would wear a deep groove from my apartment to my office to the hospital, then back home. A simple triangular path, no detours. But life must do what it does—go on—so today, between lunch and radiation, I take the subway to Queens to interview Esteban for the “New Talent” issue. This is our annual fanfare, photo finish to one more season in the art world. As one of my colleagues likes to say, we spend the entire winter mowing down swaths of ambition, naïve and bitter alike. Preston, our publisher, calls them the hatchlings, those two dozen souls lucky enough to make the last cut. Ray, the man I live with, called them lambs to the slaughter, loudly declaring how happy he is not to have pursued a career in the arts, how arbitrary success can be. This is funny, since he works in a business that considers itself very much an art, and it’s one where success is decidedly skewed: the movies. “Yes, but I am not an artist,” said Ray. “I’m a grunt. I just follow directions.” Ray is a stuntman.