He didn’t know what he felt, in that dark knit of vein and gland. “A lump,” she prompted further. “I felt it in the shower ten days ago and kept hoping it was my imagination.”
“I… I don’t know. There’s a… an inconsistency, but it might be just a naturally dense place.”
She put her hand on his and pressed his fingertips deeper. “There. Feel it?”
“Sort of. Does it hurt?”
“I’m not sure it’s supposed to. Do the other in the same place. Is it different, or the same?”
He obeyed, shutting his eyes to concentrate on the comparison, trying to envision the interior nub, the dark invader. “Not the same, I think. I don’t know; I can’t tell, honey. You should get to a doctor.”
“I’m scared to,” Lisa confessed, and the blue of her eyes showed it, anxious and bright amid her fading freckles.
Les hung there, one hand still cupping her healthy right breast. It was soft, warm, and heavy. This was the bee sting, the intimacy he had coveted, legitimately his at last; but he felt befouled by things of the body and wanted merely to turn away, while knowing he could not.
The Accelerating Expansion
of the Universe
WHY SHOULD IT BOTHER Martin Fairchild? In his long, literate lifetime he had read of many revisions of cosmic theory. Edwin Hubble’s discovery of a pervasive galactic red shift and therefore of universal expansion had occurred a few years before he was born; by the time of his young manhood, the theory of the Big Bang, with its overtones of Christian Creation by fiat—“Let there be light”—had prevailed over the rather more Buddhist steady-state theory claiming that space itself produced, out of nothingness, one hydrogen atom at a time. In recent decades, in astronomy as in finance, billions had replaced millions as the unit of measure: a billion galaxies, a billion stars in each. Ever stronger telescopes, including one suspended in space and named after Hubble, revealed a swarm of fuzzy ovals, each a Milky Way. Such revelations—stupefying for those who tried truly to conceive of the distances and time spans, the titanic amounts of brute matter accumulating, exploding, and dispersing throughout a not quite infinite vacancy seething with virtual particles—had held for Fairchild the far-fetched hope of a last turn: a culminating piece in the great skyey puzzle would vindicate Mankind’s sensation of central importance and disclose an attentive mercy lurking behind the heavenly arrangements.
But the fact, discovered by two independent teams of researchers, seemed to be that deep space showed not only no relenting in the speed of the farthest galaxies but instead a detectable acceleration, so that an eventual dispersion of everything into absolute cold and darkness could be confidently predicted. We are riding an aimless explosion to nowhere. Only an invisible, malevolent anti-gravity, a so-called Dark Force, explained it. Why should Fairchild take it personally? The universe would by a generous margin outlive him—that had always been true. But he had somehow relied on eternity, on there being an eternity even if he wasn’t invited to participate in it. The accelerating expansion of the universe imposed an ignominious finitude on the enclosing vastness. The old hypothetical structures—God, Paradise, the moral law within—now had utterly no base to stand on. Everything would melt away. He, though no mystic, had always taken a sneaky comfort in the idea of a universal pulse, an alternating Big Bang and Big Crunch, each time recasting all matter into an unimaginably small furnace, a sub-microscopic point of fresh beginning. Now this comfort was taken from him, and he drifted into a steady state—an estranging fever, scarcely detectable by those around him, of depression.
Fairchild had not hitherto really believed in his own aging. He could see in the mirror his multiplying white hairs, his deepening wrinkles, and feel his shortness of breath after exertion, his stiffness after sitting too long in a chair or a car; but these phenomena took place a safe distance from the center of his being. His inmost self felt essentially exempt from ruin.
His patient daily labors, with an ameliorating additive of pomp and prestige as his position at his firm improved, had accumulated an ample nest egg, enabling semiannual foreign travel with his wife. Their trips to Europe had gradually exhausted the more obvious tourist destinations—England, France, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia. She had never been to Spain, and he only once before, on a hurried student trip that had left little trace in his memory. After Madrid and the obligatory day flight to Bilbao to see Frank Gehry’s titanium whale, they came south into the land where the Moors for centuries raised lemons, erected filigreed mosques, and sang love songs around the plashing fountains in the courtyards.
Seville seemed a little short of charm, or perhaps the Fairchilds were tired of being charmed. They were fresh from Granada and Córdoba. In every cathedral and palace there lurked a gloomy Christian boast that the Moors, with their superior refinement and religious tolerance, had been expelled. The Alcázar Palace and the Cathedral of Santa Maria de la Sede were both, it seemed to Fairchild, bigger than they needed to be, and the streets of the old ghetto, which held their hotel, were narrow and heavily trafficked by buzzing mopeds and rickety delivery trucks that ignored the pedestrians-only signs.
Late one afternoon, the aging couple, having done its duty by the Casa de Pilatos, emerged with some relief from the ghetto’s quaint alleys onto a slightly broader thoroughfare. They had coffee at an outdoor table, and then headed back to their hotel. His sense of direction told him that the most direct route lay along a busy one-way street with a narrow sidewalk on one side. “You think?” his cautious wife asked. “Suppose I fall off into traffic?”
“Why would you fall off?” Fairchild scoffed. “I’ll be right behind you.”
It was true, the noisy stream of traffic did feel very close as they made their way single-file, Fairchild in the rear. Fiats and Vespas sped by, stirring the ubiquitous dust. He was watching his wife’s feet, or thinking of his own, when a sudden sensation of pressure pushed him off-balance, and down; there was no resisting this inexplicable force. He fell sideways, twisting. In the midst of his plunge he saw, inches from his eyes, the porous new-shaven cheek of a dark-haired young man; the man was grimacing with some terrible effort, with some ordeal that he, too, was undergoing.
Then Fairchild hit the asphalt, face-down. His arms were pinioned by the relentless force at his back, and he foresaw that his forehead would strike the street’s hard surface. No sooner had this thought been entertained by his brain than the sensation of a momentarily blinding blow on his brow told him that the worst was over, that he would survive.
Automobiles were braking behind him. He raised his head in time to see two men on a moped turn down a side street and, smartly leaning in unison, vanish. One of them had been his dark-haired companion in gravity’s terrible grip. The weight on his back was still there, but it lifted, cautiously, and began to talk to him in a female voice, and Fairchild realized that the irresistible weight had been his wife’s body. He lay some seconds longer on the street’s abrasive, dirty surface, in a position that obscurely felt privileged, while he relished the apparent fact that his skull had taken the blow without causing him to surrender consciousness: he was one tough old americano, he thought, as if his consciousness had become a detached, appraising witness.
Bit by bit, his swirl of sensations was retrospectively clarified. By the time he got to his feet, with the help of several hands, he understood that his wife’s shoulder bag had been snatched and the entangling strap had pulled her into him. The two of them had been welded together by the pressure as the dark-haired thief struggled to hold on to his prize without losing his seat on the speeding moped. Fairchild’s thumped brain, he noted with satisfaction, was in excellent order, working very fast. But it had not been fast enough for him to reach up and pull his assailant down with him. He would have liked, very much, to have done that—to have dragged this criminal down to the dirty asphalt with him, and pulverized his smooth-shaven face with his fists.
His wife, Carol, had once been a nurse; she still quickened to eme
rgencies. She was staring intently at his face. So, with less disguised alarm, were the several Spaniards who had gathered behind her. “I’m fine,” he said to his wife. He addressed the Spaniards: “Soy bueno. No problema.”
His wife said softly, in her soothing emergency voice, “Darling, don’t try to talk. Let’s take off your jacket.”
“My jacket?” A light-tan windbreaker, with a lining for warmth in the Spanish spring, it had been bought new for the trip. “Why?”
He wondered if he was supposed to be translating their exchanges to the gathered crowd. “¿Por qué?” he translated aloud.
“Keep calm,” she told him levelly, as if he were crazed. “I’ll help you, darling.”
Fairchild was beginning to find her officious; but in moving his lips to protest he tasted something warm and salty. He realized, as a walker in the woods realizes that a tickly swarm of midges have enveloped his head, that he was bleeding into his own mouth. His face had met the asphalt on the right eyebrow, the crest of bone there—a blood-packed site, he knew from his old sports injuries. He saw the light: his wife, the eminently practical nurse, was worried that he would bleed on the new windbreaker. It had not been expensive, but it evidently outweighed his wound, his drama, his near-tragedy. As she gently peeled the coat from his shoulders, the crowd behind her, and the cab driver who had braked in time to avoid running over him, started to offer advice, of which the most prominent word was policía. “Policía, policía,” they seemed to be chanting.
After removing his coat, Carol had picked his hip pocket, and now she handed him his own folded handkerchief and indicated that he should keep it pressed against his right orbital arch. On center stage amid the halted traffic, Fairchild stood tall; he gestured rather grandly with his free hand, like a matador disavowing a spectacular kill. “Policía,” he pronounced scornfully, and, unable to come up with the Spanish for “What can they do?,” expressed the opinion “¡Policía—nada!” From their alarmed faces, it could have been more happily put. Not long ago, under Franco, this had been a police state.
Traffic was beginning to honk; the cab driver needed to get on his way. This driver, wearing a wool jacket and tie in the formal, self-important European manner, was small and round-faced and visibly shaken by nearly running over an elderly American. His hand still held aloft, Fairchild told him, “Muchas gracias, señor—vaya con Dios.” The phrase had floated into his head from a Patti Page song popular when he was an adolescent. To the crowd he proclaimed, “¡Adiós, amigos!” This, too, was no doubt inadequate, but what he wanted to say in final benediction materialized in his head only in French: “Vous tous êtes très gentils.”
Fairchild felt exhilarated, striding through the antique streets holding a bloody handkerchief to his eyebrow while his wife—undamaged, younger than he—trotted beside him, holding his jacket, which, for all her concern, bore only a single drop of blood, now dried. “That son of a bitch,” he said, meaning the thief. “What all did you have in it?” he asked, meaning her shoulder bag.
“My wallet, without much money. The credit cards are the big nuisance. They can help me cancel them back at the hotel. If they have any hydrogen peroxide at the desk, I can get the blood out of the jacket. Lemon juice and salt might do.”
“Will you stop focusing on my blood? You knew when you married me I had blood.” Why be angry at her? ¿Por qué? As if in apology, he said, “You always hear of things like this, but I never thought it would happen to me.” He corrected himself: “To us.” She was teaching him, this late in his life, feminist inclusiveness.
Carol in turn explained, “I was so concerned with staying on the sidewalk I guess I forgot to switch the bag to my inside shoulder. Now I keep thinking of everything that was in it. The Instamatic full of shots of the Alhambra. My favorite scarf—you can’t get wool that lightweight any more. Marty, I feel sick. This is all just hitting me. The guidebook kept warning us about Gypsies. Did he look like a Gypsy to you? I never saw him.”
“Boy, I did. His face was right next to mine for a second. He didn’t wear an earring, just a very determined expression. I guess he thought you’d let go before you did.”
“I couldn’t believe somebody else wanted it,” she said. “It was so sudden, you don’t think. Thank you, by the way, for cushioning my fall. I didn’t even skin my knees.”
“Any time, my dear. That’s rotten about your perfect scarf.”
“He won’t know what it was worth to me. He’ll throw it away.”
La policía were already at the hotel. How had they known? “The cab driver reported the accident,” the smiling young clerk behind the desk explained. “Then the police called hotels in this area for a couple of your description.” How much of a police state was this, still?
The policeman himself, a phlegmatic bland man in his forties—colorless, as if a policeman’s experience had washed out of him all his natural tint and capacity for surprise—spoke no English; he didn’t risk his dignity by venturing even a phrase. He glanced at Fairchild’s clotted eyebrow and gave him a long bilingual form to fill out. Through the desk clerk, the policeman communicated an intention to take him away, though the victim protested, “Es nada. ¡Nada!” Mrs. Fairchild, the desk clerk translated with a pleased smile, was invited to come along.
In the back of the police car she confided, “The clerk was telling me while you were filling out the form about a woman who got thrown down and broke her hip, and in another incident a husband who tried to intervene and got stabbed and killed. So we were lucky.”
“Good for us,” Fairchild said, beginning to feel weary. His eyebrow hurt. The invigoration of shock was wearing off. They were being taken, he realized, out of the tourist region, into the real Seville, its ordinary neighborhoods and everyday institutions, its places for working and shopping, living and dying. They passed down streets of restaurants, past banks and a department store, all still bustling in the growing dark, at an hour when an American city would be shutting up shop. The silent policeman parked at what must be the hospital. The building had a six-story Beaux-Arts core, with a post-Franco modern wing. Within, all was brightly lit but with a milkier, subtler light than an American hospital would have employed. Such dramas as galvanize hospitals on American television were not occurring here. Instead, there was quiet in the halls. Most of the desks in sight were empty. No one seemed to speak English. Nor did the policeman offer anyone in his own language a long explanation of Fairchild’s case—his abrupt crisis, his heroic survival.
Two uniformed women, possibly nuns, one in green and one in white, interviewed the victim. Fairchild pointed at his wound and explained, “Dos hombres jovenes—Vespa, vroom, vrrrooom! Mi esposa”—at a loss for words to describe how Carol had been tugged down, he pantomimed a grab at his own shoulder, then did a toppling motion with his forearm—“la señora, boom! y me con la.” The women nodded sympathetically, and went away, and eventually brought a man down the echoing hall. Feminist though he was becoming, Fairchild was relieved to see a man taking charge. The word hidalgo came to his mind; the man was a somebody. He was short and fair and squarish—a blond descendant of the Visigoths, with a toothbrush mustache and an air of courteous amusement. He was a doctor. He examined Fairchild’s bloody eyebrow and gestured for him to sit on a high, sheeted bed. Fairchild liked his gestures, firm but unhurried, with an Iberian touch of ceremony.
The patient’s comprehension of Spanish was improving; he understood that the doctor was asking the nurse for Novocain, and that the nurse came back, rather breathlessly reporting that no Novocain could be found. The doctor urbanely shrugged, but his eyes declined to join his patient’s in a wink at such female incompetence. When at last, after much distant chatter and clatter, the anesthetic was found, Fairchild lay back and shut his eyes. He felt a paper mask being lowered onto his face. In her solicitous nurse’s voice Carol described in his ear what was happening to him: “Now, Marty, he has the needle, you’re going to feel a pinch, he’s injecting all around
the gash, don’t move your head suddenly. Now he has some gauze, he’s going to wipe out your eyebrow, don’t make that funny face, keep your face still.”
Through his numbness Fairchild felt the tug of the stitches, and the latex-gloved fingertips lightly pressing on his brow. How kind this doctor, and the policeman, and this entire post-Fascist nation were! When the operation was over, he produced his wallet, holding credit cards and a pastel salad of euro bills, but his attempt at payment was waved away. Instead, a flamboyantly signed document, giving his wound an official status, was handed to him. A slight, ceremonious smile tweaked the toothbrush mustache. “One week,” the doctor said, in his lone effort at English, “stitches out.”
In a week, his black eye faded, Fairchild was back in the United States, where his own doctor, a youth no older than the Gypsy robber, marvelled that the stitches were silk. “In this country,” he explained, “you never see silk stitches any more.”
Why was this unlucky event—being mugged and injured in a foreign land—so pleasing to Fairchild? It was, he supposed, the element of contact. In his universe of accelerating expansion, he enjoyed less and less contact. Retired, he had lost contact with his old associates, full of sociable promises though their partings had been. His children were adult and far-flung, and the grandchildren within his reach had only polite interest in the stale treats—the moronic kiddie movies, the expeditions to cacophonous bowling alleys indelibly smelling of the last century’s cigarettes—that he could offer. His old poker group, which used to crowd eight around a dining-room table, had increasing difficulty mustering the minimum five players, and his old golf foursome had been dispersed to infirmity and Florida if not to the grave. One partner remained who shared Fairchild’s old-fashioned aversion to riding a golf cart and was willing to walk with him; then on a winter morning this friend’s handsome photograph, twenty years out of date, popped up in the obituary section of the Boston Globe.