The woman whom Kiko adores is standing now, all smiles, watching Muriel talk. After telling Rose about Kiko’s other roles, Muriel turns to the older woman and speaks again in French, gesticulating. When the woman gesticulates back, I finally understand that she is deaf.
Preston says, “So tell us, please, what fonts of childhood fancy have shaped your son’s unique imagination.” Muriel translates, in French and with her hands.
Esteban’s mother. I watch now as she makes a small speech with her hands. It looks so much like knitting.
“All inspiration comes from God,” Muriel translates, “but Esteban was not like other boys. His favorite thing was the market in Port-au-Prince, all the beautiful cloths, helping her choose what to sew.”
“Ah,” says Preston. “Aha!”
“I haven’t met you,” I say, holding out a hand. Her name is Tatiana. She clasps my hand in both of hers and smiles, then gestures a phrase.
“She says you are the second messenger of great joy to this household,” says Muriel. Her belly, of course, was the first.
“We are all together, this makes me so glad!” I feel Esteban’s arm encompass my shoulders. Ray stands on my other side, and Mary glares fondly at Preston, who’s filled his martini glass with red wine.
When Tatiana signs at her son, I know from her sidelong glances that she is talking about me, saying kind things.
“She wants you to tell how you found me.” He giggles. “Me, the foundling!”
I tell her—Esteban translating now—how every year we go through thousands of slides, talk to hundreds of dealers, but how I saw Esteban’s work in the entrance to a public school.
She nods: Exactly as it should be. She looks at Ray, back at me.
“Do you have children, she wants to know.”
“No,” I say. Tatiana sees something in my face.
“You are afraid to have children? Too many people are afraid these days, afraid of life,” relays Esteban. Muriel, Preston, Mary, Rose, and Ray are watching me. I’m hoping Ray will come to my rescue, but Rose is the one who finally speaks. Like Tatiana, she’s come to her own conclusion.
“So maybe you can adopt.” In a nervous rush, she tells us how last month her sister adopted a lovely Chinese baby girl, how her sister says that any baby at all is a miracle, how when it’s put in your arms you can’t believe the love that springs from nowhere, a geyser of love, how it took two years and maybe a lot of paperwork, but what’s two years? “Like, time just rushes on by, doesn’t it?”
Preston jumps in with “People plan too much. I say, let the future unfold! Willy nilly! Onward the leering mazurka of life, the unknowns, tragedies, twists of fate …” Mary squeezes his elbow so hard he winces.
All I hear now are Kiko’s nails as she trots away across the floor. “Excuse me, but I must steal Louisa,” says Esteban. Like another dog, relieved to have a good master, I follow him.
He leads me back to the studio, shuts the door behind us, turns on the floodlights, and climbs a stepladder. He fusses with a fixture, aiming it at the tall tepee in the corner. Without looking down, he says, “My mother has cancer, too. It’s why she stays with us.” I say nothing; I’m focused on that “too.” Mary and Preston are the only people I’ve told at work.
“She didn’t want it, all this medicine. But I told her my child will have a grandmother to know and remember. Is her son selfish?” He looks over his shoulder from on high.
When he comes down, he circles the new piece, pulling off the tarps. He watches me look.
“Oh Esteban. It’s really something.”
“The red is not too much?”
“How could it not be red?” Blood, yes, on the verge of cliché, but blood as a rich, fresh force, not violation or loss.
We look together for a while. “My doctors say I’ll be fine.”
“The idea that you would be afraid of life!” He holds me to his side.
We share a cab with Preston, who can’t stop talking about how we wouldn’t be in the pickle we’re in, we wouldn’t have to live in mortal terror of some shabby abandoned satchel, if our cowering bureaucrats had refused to collude with the shah of Iran. Now we’re paying through the nose. “And that boy-president we’ve gone and elected?” he says. “Charisma to burn, but Arkansas? How would a godforsaken place like that prepare you to deal with Iran? Well, that place is pretty godforsaken, too; ha!”
Halfway across the Williamsburg Bridge, I say, “Preston, shut up.” Ray pulls his knee away from my hand. No one says a word for the rest of the ride, even when Preston gets out and hands Ray a ten. He won’t remember this or much else about the evening, but that’s not the point.
At home, Ray pours a scotch and spreads the plans for his kayak on the dining table. With a thick carpenter’s pencil, he makes notations.
I put on a nightgown. I sit in bed and try to read, but the rustling of Ray’s plans in the other room distracts me. I go in and stand beside him. “Yes?” he asks without looking up.
“I’ll miss you when you go.”
“Me, too.” He erases a figure on the plans, writes in a new number.
I unbutton the top of my nightgown. “Ray?”
He looks up. “You all right?”
“Ray, you never look.”
He sets down his pencil and turns in his chair to face me. “Show-and-tell?” He finishes opening my gown, smudging the buttonholes with graphite as he descends. He whistles. “Looks like World War Three.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
He tests my darkened nipple, first with a finger, then the tip of his tongue. “Crusty. Like burnt toast.” He curves a whole hand over the breast. “Ground zero!” he exclaims, and, as if he were six years old, imitates the explosion of a grenade.
“Stop, Ray. It’s me here,” I say. I long for the days when he could bruise me with tenderness, pull me under, make me forget anything. But Ray returns to his kayak.
When I woke up after my second surgery, the real one, I lay still for an hour, dizzy, sore, so thirsty I began to hallucinate. The recovery room was noisy and chaotic. In the next bed, an older man bellowed at the nurses, lashing out at their sympathy. I resolved not to ask for a thing. I made myself small and floated away on some inner sea. Another mirage of drinking, drinking anything—Gatorade, dishwater, soy sauce—then I opened my eyes and there was Ray’s face. He wore a blue gown, backward, crinkled at his throat. The look he gave me was one I didn’t know. Alarm? Pity? Relief? He held a tiny ribbed cup, the kind street vendors fill with gelato. He said, as if about to ask for a favor, “They said I could give you an ice cube. One.” For the next few weeks, he was full of kindnesses, small and sweet as that cup of ice.
“Are you angry with me?” I say now.
“Why would I be angry?”
“The taxi. Losing my temper at Preston.”
“People lose their temper.” His tone is like the night air pressing at the windows. It’s starting to snow again. Number fifteen.
“Sometimes you are so cold.”
“It’s a chore, Louisa. Being warm all the time, just for you. I want you to be … happy again, but …”
“But you’re no saint.”
“Committed scoundrel, that’s me.”
“You like those lines. Clever little sitcom punch lines.”
Slowly, Ray lifts his right hand above his plans and drops the pencil. “I’m going to bed.”
I remember, at the party, watching him from a distance, his arms dancing around to illustrate something. How happy he looked. He was describing the kayak.
“Isn’t it curious,” I say, and it’s too late to take back the meanness, “your building a boat for one. Not two. Forget about three.”
Ray speaks slowly. “Louisa, everything isn’t art, some precious gift-wrapped metaphor. Your life isn’t a biblical flood and I am certainly not your Noah.” He drains his scotch and walks around me. I follow him into our narrow kitchen with its bitter light and put my hands on his shoulder blades,
my cheek against his neck. He places the empty glass in the sink, so carefully it makes not a sound.
“Nobody apologize,” he says. “Everyone’s going a little nuts.”
In bed, Ray falls asleep right away.
Dr. Bloom says he’s counting on me to make what he calls the mature decision and brave the consequences. He said it plainly, none of his usual camp-counselor verve.
Sometimes I fantasize about Dr. Bloom. Nothing sexual—though it’s funny to think that he’s been inside my body, his tools like scrabbling beetles right near my heart—but I do envision his other life, its ordinary details. I’ve imagined Dr. Bloom serving an ace, carving a roast, combing his horseshoe of otter-smooth hair. I see him in fleece-lined moccasins, reading medical journals by a crackling Manhasset fire, a chestnut boxer asleep at his feet.
I lie awake a long time, assuming Ray is fast asleep until he says, “Game of cribbage?”
I can’t help laughing before I say, “Oh Ray, I could die.”
“Louisa, we’re all going to die.”
“But not before …” Before what? Before I’ve gone gray? Had two children, published a book, lived by the ocean, seen Tikal?
His callused fingers brushing my cheek are a shock. “Hey,” he says. Because here they are, the tears. He holds me from behind, no baseball trades to read about over my shoulder this time.
I am on a brick patio, looking across a lovely tree-filled yard at night. Dr. Bloom, barefoot and wearing white pajamas, stands beside me. Our arms touch. The air is searingly cold, and I want to ask where his shoes are, but he’s talking and I mustn’t interrupt. I’m paying for his time. “Look up,” he says. I obey. The sky is crisp, pricked through with stars. “That one is Hurtling Treasure.” He points. “There’s Methotrexate, Taco Arriba, Red Grooms.” I am outraged. I cut in: “Shut up. You don’t know the constellations. You’re a surgeon. You have to be a surgeon!” Dr. Bloom says, “It’s just a lot of connecting the dots. Anybody who can make kimonos can be a surgeon, believe me.” As he continues his ersatz tour of the heavens, he pivots like the beam from a lighthouse, always pointing. “Adopted, adopted, adopted,” he says to each star. I feel a rush of love and pity. How can I expect him to know outer space? All he knows is the inside of a human body—but he can find anything there. He needs my protection to get it just right. I reach out, and he lets me hold him; in my arms, he feels like a little boy, so bony and slight.
Waking is a vortex of words: constellations, consolations, consummations. Make it simple, Ray, I think. Though of course he never has.
“Party shoes!”
My next to last treatment; Patrice is centering my legs.
“A work party.” My red tights and black suede heels protrude brazenly from the hospital smock.
“A party’s a party … Off with the left shoulder, relax. Hon, you’re a pro at this.” Patrice has now coaxed my flesh into place, pushed my face to the side, twenty-nine times; it’s become a casual yet intimate task, one girlfriend brushing another’s hair. She says as she works, “My boys learned snow angels yesterday. I look out the window one minute and see them running around. Next thing, they’ve vanished, and lord do I have a stroke. I’m out there in my socks, freezing my butt off, calling their names, and boom! Up they pop. Yard’s nearly three feet deep! You never saw New Jersey so gorgeous.”
She pats my knees, and Juan comes in. As usual, no small talk from him. He handles the machine, not me.
The long loud buzzing begins. A sudden comfort, like bees browsing in a sumptuous garden. A sound I could sleep through, so different now.
After tomorrow, Blue, we won’t meet anymore. Do I wish we could go on and on; am I crazy?
I remember when I met Ray for the very last time. That’s what it was supposed to be. We’d been seeing each other in secret for only two months, and I thought I would die from the exhaustion of lying—or, rather, of not even having to use the lies I’d wrung myself out to invent, because my husband never mentioned my absences (long and flagrant), my rages (at his smallest imperfections), or my culinary binges (a nonstop hysteria of bouillabaisse, lemon mousse, roast duck, lamb tajine … by the end, a freezer full of crepes and sorbets, duxelles and shellfish stocks). We lay on Ray’s bed, fully dressed. I thought, Never ever ever again. I hadn’t told him it was over, only that Hugh had finally guessed, but Ray said, “It’s over,” and began to sob. I had never heard a man cry so hard. “Do you want it to be over?” I said. “No,” he said, and I said without thinking, “Then it won’t be.” Why I kept this promise before others (I exacted so much misery to keep it), I still can’t say. Maybe because I’d thought he would give me up easily and I was wrong.
When the buzzing stops, I look up into that secretive eye. Nothing new, just myself in the glass, a fish beneath rain-grizzled water. I reach up and touch my machine. His skin is unexpectedly warm.
Patrice says, “Now you go have fun.”
“Tomorrow’s my last day.”
She helps me down. “Everyone cries at the end. It’s just the weirdest thing.” She hands me a Kleenex.
In the changing room, I put on my red velvet dress, tight and sleeveless. I comb my hair and twist it against my skull.
Outside, it’s still light for a change, just barely. Dozens of clouds fill the sky above the park, pink as peonies. Across Fifth Avenue, Ray sits on a bench, reading his paper. I call his name and he looks up with delight. Do I give him this much pleasure, still?
But before he even steps into the street, he calls out, “Jim Abbott!”
“What?”
“The one-armed pitcher with the Angels. They bought him.” “Is that good?”
“Good enough for me.”
As we start downtown, I look sideways at his clothes: black jeans, leather jacket over a tweedy sweater. The two of us mismatched as ever. I reach for his hand. He resists, but I hold on tight. Tomorrow he flies to Canada. He put it off as long as he could. Then I recognize the man heading toward us, a man in an orange turtleneck, coatless and hurrying. “Hello!” I say, blushing. I’m thinking how odd Dr. Bloom looks in such a loud color as I remember the last time I saw him—wearing pajamas.
“Louisa,” he says, without hesitation. “Don’t you look lovely.” He turns to Ray. “Riley—yes? The Hollywood stuntman, am I right?”
Ray shakes the doctor’s hand.
“Taking fine care of my star patient there. You keep that up, Riley.” Dr. Bloom looks back at me and displays a pair of quarters in his priceless right hand. “My wife’s meter.”
“Nice to see you,” I say.
A block later, Ray says, “Dr. Doom, yes? Vincent Price of oncology? Guy who sounds like Joe Pesci trapped in the body of Alvin the Chipmunk, yes?”
I stop. “Ray, what could you possibly have against him?”
Ray shrugs and walks on. But as I look at his back, it’s obvious, really. Brilliant as Dr. Bloom is, he’s not brilliant enough, not for Ray. Ray wants him to promise he’ll cure me for good: Skip all the pleasantries, buster, and do it. I’m no different, resenting Ray for not being stronger, as strong as he looks when he’s leaping, ducking, rolling over and over, jumping from planes, so certain he’ll hit the ground whole.
“Two favors. Please,” I say. Ray stops and turns around. Behind him looms the Guggenheim, a spacecraft aglow in the dusk.
“What,” he says bluntly, but he looks open to anything.
“Could you pick me up?”
He lifts me quickly, his leather sleeve cold behind my knees.
“And make your skunk face?”
It takes him only a second to remember. He purses his features into a rodent mask and snorts loudly, turning me in circles. I snort back. When he puts me down, I can’t stop laughing.
“We are certifiable,” says Ray. “We are out where the buses don’t run.”
In front of the museum, a knot of people wait to go in, stamping their feet like horses, their steamy breath rising in plumes. One at a time, they enter a revol
ving door that flashes back the headlights of limousines and taxis. When it’s our turn, when we pass into the warm sparkling cocoon of the party, separately and then together, I can still feel the weightlessness. Exactly what I wanted to feel yet still such a surprise.
I walk to the center and look straight up. At the top is a blue egg of twilight, electric against the white walls. “Like being inside a tulip,” I say.
“More like a missile silo,” says Ray. “Where’s the bar?”
I’m about to show him the way when something hits me. “How can a pitcher be one-armed?”
“Oh, he’s got two, but one is … There’s only the elbow and then this deformed hand—or I don’t know, maybe none. He wears his glove there.”
“But the wind-up, the balance …”
“Nobody makes a big deal of it.”
“I guess you couldn’t, could you,” I say. “Ray, this guy—will you point him out on TV? I want to see how he does it.”
“I just want him to save my team’s sorry ass. That’s all I want.”
I begin to see familiar faces. “I’m going to find Esteban’s piece before this place is mobbed. You find the drinks.” I set off, away from the crowd.
It stands in its own room: Coat of Many Colors, stately and vivid. It is made entirely of the fine, brightly colored wire the telephone company used before fiber optics. From a distance, it’s a pure passionate red, but close up, the wires are an orderly tangle flecked with fine stripes of orange, purple, fuchsia, blue. Woven like a basket, like a nest.
The coat is a bell-shaped goddess, wide sleeves beckoning. Back in Esteban’s studio, I saw it as a self-portrait: Esteban’s garish feminine warmth, his towering joy. But no, of course it’s his mother.
The few people in the room admire it from a distance. But I step right in, through the narrow entry. Light pierces the weave, casting a splintered radiance across my naked arms. Above me, the peak is a vortex of stars. Press my face against the side and I can just make out Ray, by the door, holding our drinks. He starts to circle the room. I lean out and wave.
I pull him in and take my champagne; it’s in a plastic flute, the kind with the base that always falls off. I raise it. “New pitcher, new season.”