by Jon Cohen
Kitty stared up at his window. He wasn’t there. Even when he’d landed in the tulip bed, he hadn’t been there, not for her. It never meant anything to him, her desire to see him, so that even when he fell to the ground before her, he had been invisible, would remain invisible, unseen except by those he invited to see.
Inside, Iris stood trembling in the dim hallway. “Mrs. Malone?” she called. “Louis? Louis Malone?”
Upstairs, Louis huddled on his bed.
Iris heard the springs creak.
“The door was open,” she called. “I hope you don’t mind I came in.”
No creaks this time, but of course he was there.
“I’ve come to see you. I’ve come about your arm.”
Nothing.
“Like we both agreed,” said Iris, her voice quieter now, almost to herself. “Like we both said.”
And then, his voice, weightless, drifting downstairs to her. She strained her ears toward the sound, as she had strained to listen when the Tube Man spoke. Louis’s voice had that same quality, of words escaping rather than delivered, whispered from lips that preferred to be still and silent.
“You’ll have to go away, I think,” came the voice.
Now it was Iris who didn’t answer.
“There’s no one here,” said the voice after a minute.
Iris moved toward the stairwell. “You asked me to come,” she said.
“I’m sorry. But I was mistaken.”
“You have to see me.”
“I can’t. Really, I can’t.”
“You have to see someone.” Iris put her foot on the first step. “No, I don’t think so. Thank you for coming, though. Goodbye now.”
“I’m on my way up.” Iris knew, as nurses seem to know, that it was time to approach. She knew that patients often feared the treatment they so desperately sought, that it was sometimes the nurse’s job to administer the treatment against all protests. Now, for the first time, she carried no dressings, or syringes, or medicines to her patient’s room, because she herself was the cure.
At the top of the stairs there were four doors, two on each side of the hallway. One was closed. She knocked lightly on it.
“Louis?”
She waited, and then said, “Louis, I’m coming in now.”
With a final act of boldness, the last in a series of bold acts that had begun when she made her first surprising overture to him in the Emergency Room, Iris opened the door and stepped into Louis’s room. She looked first where nurses always look, at the bed. It was empty. Then she moved her eyes to the other side of the large room, which was the only place he would be, before his window. His back was to her, his hand parting a white curtain just a little, just enough so he could see.
He said, in a voice quiet and even, a voice he might have used often, talking to himself, “I don’t look at calendars anymore. I can tell from Mrs. Bingsley’s red azalea, which is beginning to overflow into Carl Lerner’s yard—Carl doesn’t seem to mind, though—I can tell it’s the end of the first week of May. May sixth or seventh? June fifteenth, Mrs. Bingsley’s viburnum will flower, or thereabouts. Francine Koessler prunes her privet hedge June thirtieth and again the last week of August. Winter is harder. Bert Howard changes his Chevy wagon over to snow tires on December fifteenth, usually. Last year’s Thanksgiving snow threw him into a tizzy; I’ve never seen a man change a set of tires so fast.”
Louis made a sound which Iris thought must have been a small laugh muffled by his scarf. She stood still, watching his back, which swayed ever so lightly as his voice found its rhythm.
He went on. “That’s a good way to keep time when you’ve stayed inside for sixteen years, almost seventeen years, really. This window has been my calendar, and all that I’ve observed have been my increments of time. Sixteen years ago I watched Mrs. Bingsley plant that azalea, and now look at it. So, in a way, the passing of the days has been a blossoming for me, like the abundant red of Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea, not a marking of days on the calendar of someone else’s idea of time. My… time here, I’m trying to say,” Louis said softly, “has been full of happy moments, very small but very happy moments. Little tastes. Doesn’t the first bite of chocolate cake always taste the best? The shock of sweetness, the anticipation of more chocolate on the tongue? Well, at my window it’s all first bites, I’m never full, the chocolate never sours and swells my belly.”
Iris leaned against his bed and listened. She had never heard such talk.
“Of course,” said Louis, “I’m not a crazy man, I’m not happy every minute of the day. There have been sad times. Even”—he paused—“desperate times. But never here at my window. Not with Mrs. B.’s azalea in sight.” Without turning, he asked, “Iris, did you see her azalea as you approached my house?”
Iris frowned, embarrassed. She couldn’t recall anything she’d passed on the way to this house, let alone a particular azalea. “I’m afraid I didn’t. I was… preoccupied. I had other things on my mind.”
“I don’t, you see. Have other things on my mind. Just that azalea. And very little else: Bert’s snow tires, like I said, the pruning of a privet hedge, the March appearance of the yellow and white crocuses at the base of the streetlight in front of our house—those sorts of things. The azalea—and it could be the crocuses, or the hedge, or Bert on his knees before his tires that I’m talking about—because it is the only azalea I can see from here, it’s rare, to me, and as beautiful as a flower in Eden. Imagine having Eden outside of your bedroom window. Sometimes I can’t bear it, I can’t bear to look at a single red petal of a single flower on that abundantly flowered bush, and I have to close my eyes. And if I can’t bear my one azalea, how could I stand being out there among all the azaleas in Waverly, how would I survive that?”
Iris, who was a nurse, who saw differently, spoke. “But it’s not. It’s not Eden out there.”
Louis made a movement as if to turn to her, but then he didn’t and stared out his window again. “You’re right. You’re right, of course. How else does one explain Kitty Wilson? I’ve had a hard time imagining her as Eve.”
The laugh again, muted and distant. Iris, who’d been leaning against Louis’s bed, now sat down on it. I’m sitting on a man’s bed, she thought.
“No”—Louis touched a finger to his scarf, where his hidden mouth would be—“maybe it is Eden and Kitty is the serpent. There, that fits, doesn’t it? But whatever she is, I’m glad to have her, because like the azalea, which I admit I do prefer, she’s been a part of the landscape available to me from my window. She’s precious to me. I count on her. Just to show up, to show up and be Kitty, unswerving in her rabid curiosity. It’s funny to think that she has stared as intensely in my window as I have stared out of it. There’s been no joy in it for her, though. Even if I had stood naked before my window, unmasked, hat and scarf at my feet, it wouldn’t have been enough for her. She’d have feasted on my face, and then been hungry for more. That’s why I’ve never given her anything other than a teasing glimpse, so that she’d have something to nibble on for years, to sustain her.”
Louis plucked at the corner of the white curtain. “The less there has been for me to see, the more I’ve seen. On the way to your hospital last Wednesday, I looked out of the car window at all the azaleas in all the yards—white ones, pink, orange—and I couldn’t focus on any of them. The colors smeared and blurred, and the beauty in them was lost to me. I wondered, Is that how they look to the rest of the people in this car? Do I want an abundance of azaleas whose colors I can barely discern? Why clog my senses with more than I can appreciate? The red of Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea is before me only two weeks out of the year—but it lingers still through the seasons. Even in winter I can conjure that red. Have you ever seen an azalea blooming in the snow? I can even feel that red, sometimes, warming the panes on this window. If I were surrounded by azaleas on a daylight walk through Waverly, would I see them or feel them? By joining the world, would I lose it?”
Iris s
moothed her hand back and forth over the quilt that covered Louis’s bed. Stop your talking, she thought. Stop your talking and come sit beside me.
If Louis heard her shifting on the bed, he gave no indication. “God watches, you know,” he said. “I’m not sure whether I believe in him or not, but in the moments I do believe, I know that he is a watcher, like me. He chooses not to intervene in the world. Why not? Because he figures he’s done enough and the rest is up to us? Or he wouldn’t know where to begin? Or because he’s in awe of his own miracle? That’s how I picture him, his mouth slightly agape, his eyes wide in disbelief. I think he has his own azalea, his own view, his own window through which he peers at one thing at a time, because each one thing is an entire world—the red is a world and the petal is a world and the flower and finally the bush—all worlds, as full and abundant as the actual planet we think of as the world. Keeps him pretty busy, I guess. Keeps me pretty busy, anyway.
“I’ve often thought that my injury, my face, though the cause of my confinement, is also the source of my freedom. The less we have, the freer we are. Had I spent all these years living… normally… what chains would I have forged for myself by now? What pain have I avoided, or not caused, by keeping to myself?”
Iris stood up. “Stop!” she said. “It’s not Eden and it’s not all chains. You’re not sure what it is, because you haven’t been out there for sixteen years.”
Now Louis slowly turned from his window toward her. “True. And you have been out there for those sixteen years,” he said mildly. “Have they been good? Can you tell me what I’ve missed?”
Iris looked at him hard. “Shit, I don’t know. You missed a bunch of things.”
“I can tell you precisely what you missed. You missed Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea.” He gestured with his good hand. “Come here. Come take a look.”
Iris moved on her short legs across the room to him. When she stood beside him the room swayed, just a little. He pulled the curtain back, and Iris immediately squinted, as if from the sudden brightness of the sun. But it wasn’t the sun that made her squint, it was something brighter still, more intense. Across the street Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea was ablaze with color.
“It’s so red,” Iris gasped.
“Isn’t it?” said Louis softly, at her side. “Sometimes I have to look away.”
“But that’s not the way things are.”
“It’s the way they are to me,” said Louis. “It’s the way they are when you really see them.”
“My God.” Iris pointed. “And who’s that? She just jumped behind a bush. Did you see her eyeliner? Aqua. It glittered like aqua diamonds.”
“Kitty Wilson. She’s always been a little heavy with the makeup.”
“Diamonds.”
“There you are.”
Iris jerked the curtain closed. “And that’s what you’ve been looking at for sixteen years?”
“Yep.”
“No wonder you jumped.”
Louis tilted his head and looked at her from behind his scarf and hat. “You think I jumped?” He touched his chest.
“I would have.”
“Why?”
“To see if that’s really the way things are.”
“And after jumping, if you found out that’s not the way things are…?”
Iris was way out of her territory and had been since he’d begun talking. She tried to pull the talk in her direction. “I’ve come to see about your arm. That’s what I know about all this jumping—you broke your arm.” She pulled him across the room and made him sit on his bed. She felt a lot better seeing him in bed—nurses understand people better when they are in bed. “So,” she said, feeling Louis’s hand where it poked out of the cast, “you been having any problems with your fingers swelling?”
“No,” said Louis, looking at her.
“Fingers going dusky?”
“No. Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Pain or tingling?”
“In my forearm, where it broke. Throbs a lot.”
“Perfectly normal. Keep it elevated on a pillow when you sleep. And don’t stand for long periods, especially without wearing your sling. Where is your sling, anyway?”
“Downstairs,” said Louis sheepishly.
“We don’t hand them out as souvenirs of your visit to the Emergency Room, you know.”
Louis shrugged, then looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Iris said quickly. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just, well, I want you to get better.”
“I know,” said Louis softly. “It was kind of you to come.”
“It was kind of you to ask me.”
“I scared you with all of my talk. I’m scary enough as it is.”
“You don’t scare me.”
“I scare everybody.” Louis looked directly into her eyes as he spoke the words. “I’m the monster of Waverly.”
Iris didn’t even blink. In fact, she smiled. “How do you do,” she said, reaching for his good hand. “I’m the monster of Barnum Memorial Hospital. I guess I’ve come to the right place.”
They held hands for what seemed a very long time, until at last a shyness returned to them and they released each other.
“Let me take you outside,” said Iris.
“Oh, Iris.” Louis paced the room.
“We’ll go out together. We’ll step across the street and take a look at Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea.”
“It’s not that easy.” Louis felt his heart race.
“No one will bother us. Who would dare bother a couple of monsters like us?”
“Iris, you’re not a monster, don’t say that.”
“I know exactly what I am. And if I’m not a monster I’m damn close to being one. People don’t scream when they see me, but I’ve heard them laugh—to my mind there’s not much difference between the two.”
“They’d scream if they saw me.”
“So don’t let them. Fuck ’em. Whose business is it? I’m not asking you to expose yourself to all the peepers. Wrap yourself up in your quilt there if you want to, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to get you outside on a spring day, to step across the street and look at a bush.”
“I’d like to.”
“Then come on.” She held out her hand.
“But not yet.”
“Louis, if I’ve survived this long out there, you can stand it for five minutes. You made it on Wednesday, didn’t you?”
“Those were extraordinary circumstances.”
“This is extraordinary circumstances! Do you have any idea what it took for someone like me to come here, to come here and now ask you outside, like, like on some kind of date? And you’re going to turn me down?”
Louis was quiet a moment. Then he said, “You know, it’s very strange. My mother and I, we live alone here and very quietly. Yet today both of us have received separate invitations to go outside, to step into the sunshine. My mother accepted her invitation. She’s out now with her new friend, walking the streets of Waverly. It was nice to see that, to see her happy.”
“Don’t you think she’d like to see you happy, to see you go outside?”
“I’m not unhappy.”
“Louis, you’re in need of some fresh air,” Iris said to him in her blunt way. “Several years of fresh air, in my opinion. Now, we can go back and forth on this thing forever, but let’s not. Let me just say what I’m going to say, then you say what you want to say, and I’ll either walk on outside with you or without you.” Iris’s throat was tight and her mouth was very dry. “Listening to you, it sounds like you know a whole lot. You’ve thought a lot about things. Well, I’m not like that. Things don’t, I don’t know, things just don’t occur to me. I understand only after doing something over and over. I’m a nurse, and what I’ve done over and over is take care of people; I know how to take care of a person. I know what’s healthy. People should listen to me, because I only speak when I know what I’m talking about. Of course, they don’t always listen. I say to my patients,
take your heart medicine, or do your back exercises, or cut down on your salt intake. Simple stuff, which I wouldn’t mention unless I was right. Now here I am with you, looking at you, and it comes to me, like with one of my patients, it comes to me that what you need is to step outside with me, right now. Walk down the stairs and out the front door with me. Because if you don’t—and this is the thing I know, this is the thing that scares me—you’ll jump right out this window again. And it may be your neck that breaks next time. You’ll jump because the world is pulling you. You’ve been looking at it for too long. You’ve made it into something too beautiful and too precious and you got to get to it, but you’ve stayed here in your room so long, you’ve forgotten how. It’s a pressure inside you, you don’t even feel it, but it’s there. You’ll be standing here someday, looking outside, and the next thing you know you won’t be—the pressure will blow you right out this window. So what I’m saying to you is: Let off some of that pressure. Come on. Come with me. Don’t give me a thousand reasons not to. Just come.”
Iris pressed her teeth to her lower lip and moved away from him. She took several steps toward the door, then turned once more to face him. Louis looked as if he was about to move, his body leaned in her direction. But then he hesitated. “Why are you doing this, Iris?”
Because, she thought, gazing into his masked eyes, because you are my Lawrence, my beautiful Peter O’Toole, my date to the prom, my one and only, my first and last desperate chance. That’s why. I don’t care who you are or what you look like: I’ll take you. And you are the only one who will take me. I am your rarest flower, and I’m blooming now, this instant, and only you have the power to see it, you who see everything, you who transform the ordinary into glorious beauty. Look at me with your window eyes and see that I am redder than your blazing azalea, greener than the emerald leaves sparkling on your trees, brighter than the dazzling yellow of your crocuses.
Iris, who never cried, knew that she was about to. Iris, who never let circumstances escape her control, trembled as she waited for him to refuse her offer. She closed her eyes because she could not endure it.