“Thanks!” he says. “You need anything else? Ice? I could go and get you some ice for your ice bucket.”
“No thanks.”
“You know how to work everything in the room?”
Probably not. The alarm clocks they put in hotel rooms bypassed her level of competence years ago. The television she never bothers with. But she tells him yes, she’s all set. She’ll figure out what she needs to know, or she’ll get help later. She wants to lie down for a while now, and then she wants to take a walk with Esther. Since the time she was a little girl, sleep and nature have been fail-safe tonics. And besides, the dog will be left in the room tonight, and Candy wants to be sure Esther will be too worn-out to make trouble. This hotel is dog friendly and Candy wants to do her part to keep it that way. There is a room service menu for dogs: chicken and rice, or beef and gravy, or a hamburger. There are dog cookies in the shape of fire hydrants. You can order a tennis ball or a Kong toy, too. Candy brought Esther’s usual kibble, but maybe she’ll give her a treat tonight and get her a burger.
Her cellphone rings and she looks to see who’s calling. Cooper. She contemplates not answering. But he’ll know her plane has arrived, he always tracks her flights, and he’ll keep calling until she does answer. She opens the phone and says, “Hi.”
“You get there all right?” She can hardly hear him. He must be in the car and using his earpiece. It comes to her that she has no desire to know where he is or what he’s doing, but she nonetheless asks, “Where are you?”
“Just running some errands,” he says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. The flight was perfect; I actually arrived early. A lot of people are here already. I saw—”
“I mean, ’cause I was thinking, you didn’t plan on being there with all this stuff going on.”
“I’m fine, Coop. I was just going to take a nap.”
“Did you get something from me?”
“Oh! Yes! So sorry, of course; I got the most beautiful bouquet of flowers—they just arrived. Thank you.”
“Yeah, I told ’em, you know, spare no expense. Should be a pretty over-the-top bouquet.”
“It is.”
“Like a million different types of flowers.”
“Uh-huh, yes.”
He waits, and so finally she says, “There are roses and lilies, and gerbera daisies and delphinium—”
“Yeah, blue, did they send blue delphinium? I know you like the blue ones. That’s what I told them to send.”
She sees herself in the mirror across the room, her shoulders drooping, her mouth thin and drawn. In the hotel with her are the people she went to high school with, the ones who knew her when. She straightens herself so that she is standing tall, untucks the hair that has fallen down her collar, and tosses her head. “You know what, Coop? I’m so sorry, but I am just beat.”
“Well, I was just making sure the flowers I sent you had arrived. I wanted to make sure they were what I ordered. I paid enough for them.”
“I’ll bring them home and you can see them.”
“I doubt you can get them through security.” There is a kind of petulance in his voice.
“I’ll get them through,” she says. “The vase is the problem. But I’ll wrap them in wet newspaper and plastic; I’ll get them home. I’m going to lie down now, Coop. I’m tired. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“We’ll talk later tonight,” he says.
She turns off her cellphone and puts it in her purse, takes off her suit and lies on the bed. She realizes she has never turned off her cellphone when she’s been away from home. It’s not that radical—he knows what hotel she’s in. He can call the general number and ask to be connected to her room if he really needs her.
She picks up the hotel phone and asks for the front desk. “I wonder if you could hold my calls until further notice,” she says, and the man says, “My pleasure, Ms. Armstrong,” and as soon as he says it, she feels a thrilling zip of energy that all but eliminates her fatigue.
She lies back down anyway, and pats the space beside her for Esther to come up. But the bed is higher than the one at home, and so Candy has to reach down and help lift the dog. As she does, she notices a swelling on either side of Esther’s abdomen and now she feels a deep stab of fear. Esther noses around, snorting and turning in tight circles, and finally lies down. Candy presses lightly on the dog’s sides. Yes. A definite swelling, on both sides. Oh, please. It can’t be. She presses harder, and Esther raises her head and licks Candy’s hand.
She moves her face close to Esther’s, looks into the dog’s eyes. “Are you okay?” Esther licks Candy’s nose and wags her stumpy tail. Candy pulls the dog closer to her and lies back down. Esther has been eating, drinking, sleeping, peeing, pooping. It’s nothing. It can’t be anything. It isn’t.
She thinks she can probably take a good half-hour nap, and then she and Esther will take a walk (she’ll watch the dog’s gait, any change in her level of endurance) and then she’ll get ready for the dinner and dance. She has a new dress for the occasion, one that she rather than Cooper selected.
She regards the mammoth bouquet on the dresser, the small white card stuck in it. She hasn’t even bothered to look at the card; that’s not right. Maybe, despite everything, he’s trying. Maybe he wrote something romantic, some overture meant to try to get them onto a different path. She gets off the bed and goes over to the dresser to pull the card out of the little envelope. “Call when you get this. Coop.”
She props the card against the vase, then throws it in the trash. She moves to the window and leans her head against it, considers again the information she was given by her doctor. She will seek a second opinion, even a third. But if she is dying, well, then she’s going to live first. On her own terms. On the nightstand is her purse and in it is a chocolate bar and she gets it out. She breaks off a large square and carefully positions it in the exact middle of her tongue. Then she moves herself to the exact middle of the bed to let the candy slowly melt. While it does, she runs her hands over her abdomen, then up across her breasts and down her arms. She touches herself in a way that has nothing to do with eroticism and everything to do with simply acknowledging—thanking!—a body that has been ignored for a very long time, by Cooper and by herself, too. Don’t go, she thinks.
At three-thirty, the bedside clock alarm goes off. Candy starts awake, then reaches over to shut the thing off. Who would set their alarm for three-thirty in the afternoon? Someone taking a nap, she supposes. Or someone like her, who distrusts the off switch and is wary of an alarm going off at five in the morning and so sets it for three-thirty in the afternoon. It makes Candy smile, thinking of someone else doing that, sitting on the side of the bed and fiddling with the alarm clock, arming themselves against what are supposed to be conveniences. She would like to meet someone like that; they could probably be friends, having lunch and complaining about the demise of hands-on reading and the way you can never get a live person on the line when you’re trying to take care of some pressing business matter. On one particularly bad day when Candy had to call about a problem with her refrigerator, she got a recording offering endless choices for things she didn’t want; and then she was rerouted to the beginning of the recording when she pressed 0. Same deal when she pressed *. And when she pressed #. Finally, Candy yelled into the phone, “I WANT A PERSON, I WANT A PERSON, THIS IS SO DEHUMANIZING, GIVE ME A PERSON!”
Later that afternoon, when she went out to deadhead the flowers in her garden, her neighbor Arthur was in his backyard. He saw her and waved, and Candy waved back. Then he came up to the fence and asked quietly, “Everything all right?” Candy flushed—he must have heard her screaming on the phone—and said brightly, “Yup!” It seems to her now that she might have shared with him her exasperation with recordings on the telephone and he would have understood. It seems like he would have nodded grimly and said, “It gets my goat, too, I’ll tell you. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket.” And then she could have sha
red with him her idea for being a person whose job is to simply be a real person on the line. Not to do anything; just to be a real live voice, for the relief of it all. He would have laughed at that, Arthur, and his bright blue eyes would have disappeared into his face the way they did when he laughed. Such a nice man, Arthur. A kind man.
Esther is sitting before her, staring expectantly in her pop-eyed way. Candy pets her, and checks to see if the lumps are still there or if they have somehow disappeared. Still there. How has she not noticed this before? She tells the dog, “Okay. I know. I’m going to take you out. Just let me take myself out, first.”
She uses the toilet, brushes her teeth, then goes to the window to look outside. Still sunny and warm, it appears, no one wearing a sweater or a jacket. She puts on a pair of white linen pants and a black linen blouse, a gold cuff bracelet, low-heeled sandals. She pushes the room key into her back pocket. Then she snaps Esther’s leash on and goes out into the hall.
Standing at the elevator is a man whose face she thinks she recognizes. “Pete?” she says. “Pete Decker?”
“Aw, Jesus, Candy Sullivan? The last time I saw you, you were drunk at our graduation party.”
She laughs. “Right back at you. How are you?” Oh, it’s nice to see him. Pete Decker, all grown up. He looks fine—graying hair, a few wrinkles, a little looseness at the jawline, but he really looks fine.
“I’m great!” he says, and she can see that he is taking in her collateral damage in the same way she just quickly assessed his. He bends down to pat Esther. “How you doing there, Sparky?” He looks up at Candy. “What’s his name?”
“Esther. She’s a girl.”
He laughs. “Great name. Great-looking dog. I like bulldogs, they always put you in a good mood.” He leans closer to Candy to say, “You look fantastic!”
“Thanks. You do, too.”
The elevator comes, and Pete holds the door for her and Esther, then steps in after them.
“You play golf?” Candy asks, as they lean on opposite walls of the elevator.
Pete looks down at his yellow knit shirt, with its little embroidered golfer teeing off at nipple level. “Well, yeah, I do; but I don’t usually wear golf clothes. This was just… I spilled something on my clothes at the airport, whole cup of Coke, some kid knocked into me, so I had to quick buy a change of clothes. I was wearing jeans and a blue Zegna shirt. You know. These pants don’t even fit me.” He pulls with some pride at the waistband to show her the pants are too big, and Candy nods. They are also a bit short, she sees.
“I’m going to try to quick buy a suit somewhere,” he says.
“Your suit got wet, too?”
He looks confused. “Oh. No! That, I… Would you believe it, I forgot to pack it!” He smacks his forehead. “Left it hanging in my closet!”
The elevator doors open, and Pete looks to the right and the left before he exits. “You seen anybody yet?” he asks. “’sides me, I mean. Course, I’m all you need to see!”
She smiles. Same old Pete. She tells him, “Just Pam, when I registered.” But now she sees a couple standing outside, about fifty feet from the entrance. “Is that anybody?”
Pete squints. “I think that’s… Oh my God, I think that’s Lester Hessenpfeffer and Mary Alice Mayhew! Isn’t it?”
Candy looks again. “I think you’re right!”
“There’s a match made in heaven!” He shakes his head.
Candy starts to say she always liked them both but felt inhibited in the old days from showing it, and why had they all been like that? But Pete’s in a hurry and steps briskly down the hall, and Candy decides the people to talk to are Lester and Mary Alice, not Pete. She suspects if she asked Pete about why they marginalized people in that awful way back then, he’d say, “Well they were nerds.” And then he’d look over at them and probably say, “Still are, come on.”
But Lester and Mary Alice are engrossed in what appears to be a rather personal conversation, standing there with their heads bent close together, and she decides not to bother them. She’ll tell them tonight, one way or another, that she regrets not having gotten to know them better in high school. She’ll ask Lester for a dance. If she drinks enough, she may ask Mary Alice for one, too. It comes to her that she’d like to tell her the News, that Mary Alice would be the kind of person you’d want for your friend, if things got bad. Or even if they didn’t. How can she feel this way, when she has not exchanged a word with Mary Alice in all these years? She never talked to her much when they were in school together, either. Still, she has this feeling about her.
Candy goes out the far door of the hotel and into the sunshine. She’ll walk Esther for as long as there’s time. Then she’ll come back and get ready.
She takes a few steps, then suddenly stops and says, “Essie!” The dog looks up at her. She reaches down to pet her, avoiding touching her abdomen. “Good girl,” she says. “You’re a good girl! You ready?”
A snort.
“You ready?”
A few steps backward, and she barks.
“Okay!” Candy says. “Me, too. Me, too. Let’s go.”
FOURTEEN
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE THE DINNER IS SCHEDULED TO start, Pete Decker gets off the elevator and runs smack into his wife and that nincompoop, Fred Preston. Fred is wearing a suit you’d wear to a funeral: something muddy-colored and plain, with no style at all, and his tie is a nightmare. What is that, cats on there? Not that Pete should talk. Damn it. He was not able to find a suit, and so he’s stuck wearing these stupid golf clothes. His shirt is untucked to disguise the fact that the pants are so loose at the waist. He, Pete Decker, Mr. GQ, looks like hell. That’s right. He looks worse than Fred! But to put a new spin on an old axiom, even in tacky golf clothes, tomorrow morning he’ll still be Pete Decker and Fred Preston will be the dickwad that he is, no matter what he wears. Nora has stopped in her tracks to stare at Pete, and he raises his hand in a little wave. “Hey,” he says.
“Pete! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in the hospital?”
He shrugs. “Yeah, funniest thing. Right after you left, the doc came in and sprang me after all.”
God, Nora looks good. She’s wearing some blue-green dress with a short skirt that shows off her legs, and her shoulders are bare. She looks beautiful. She has on a necklace he didn’t give her and hopes Fred didn’t, either; he hopes she bought it for herself. It’s blue-green, too, something made of glass or crystal or some such thing, and it has a very classy and contemporary look, like the jewelry Hillary Clinton wore when she was running for president. It’s a youthful look. He remembers how Nora used to comment on how swell Her Hillaryness looked every time she spoke on the campaign trail, and he would think, Yeah, well, maybe you should pay attention to the content and not the costume, but the truth was that Nora did pay attention; she retained more about what the candidates said than he did. Another thing he’ll do when he moves back in is give her the respect she deserves.
Fred reaches out his hand, and Pete reluctantly (though graciously!) shakes it. “Nice to see you, Pete,” Fred says, and Pete says, “You, too,” and aren’t they both full of shit.
“Play a few rounds today?” Fred asks, smirking, and Pete looks down at himself and says, “Yeah, the airline lost my bag, what can you do.” He feels himself blushing and tightens his buttocks as though that might stop it.
“Well, we’d better get going,” Nora says, and there is—is there?—just the softest hint of regret in her eyes. Pete guesses that she wishes she were with him, that she has begun to feel exactly what he wanted her to, on account of all the memories being stirred up. He stares back at her, his high school sweetheart, the girl who wore his letter jacket, his wife, the mother of his children, his friend, and he feels two parallel lines in his throat begin to ache.
“Hey, Nora,” he says. “Can I just… Can I talk to you in private for just a second?”
She hesitates, and Fred takes her arm and says, “We were just going in, Pet
e.”
And God bless Nora, she pulls her arm away and says, “It’s okay, Fred. You go ahead, and I’ll be right there.”
“I really don’t know anyone, Nora,” Fred says. “This is, after all, your high school reunion.”
Right, Pete thinks. Hers and mine. Not yours. He wonders how Fred got a ticket, anyway. That damn Pam Pottsman. She probably just told him he could come for free, giggling the whole time.
Nora’s right eye twitches, which it always does when she’s getting annoyed. Not that Fred knows this. Or anything else. She says, “Well, could you just wait for me at the entrance to the ballroom? You might try speaking to someone. They’re all friendly people.” Her tone softens, then, and she says, “Just give me a second, okay? I’ll be right there.”
Oh, man, this is suddenly the happiest day of Pete’s life. He won’t take her from Fred right away. Let them have dinner, then he’ll request that the DJ play “The Way You Look Tonight,” which was the first song he and Nora screwed to, and then he’ll walk right over and ask her to dance. She might get weepy, that would be good. But in any case, they’ll dance a little and then he’ll say, “Why don’t you dump the excess baggage and come upstairs with me?” and maybe she will. He bets she will.
Nora comes over to him and he says softly, “How you doing, babe?”
She crosses her arms and sighs, and he sees that the scenario he just imagined is not going to happen. She’s with another man. She’s wearing a dress he’s never seen before. A new scent.
He blows air out of his cheeks. “Okay, well, I don’t have anything, you know, special. I just wanted to say that you look so beautiful. You really do.”
“Well… Thank you. Thanks, Pete.” She starts to walk away.
This can’t be it! There’s got to be something he can say that will get to her! He gently takes her arm and says, “Nora? I also wanted—” The cellphone in his pocket vibrates, making a buzzing sound, and he tries to ignore it, but she hears it, too.
The Last Time I Saw You Page 13