She has to get back to the baby. She wishes they had let her bring him in with her, with his sweet smell and his luck of being the second-born, the one at ease. Was there some way to transmit the luck of one life into another?
The gurney, like one of those jamming grocery carts that do not seem built to go on their swiveling wheels, takes its awkward path to the elevator, carrying Elizabeth. The elevator doors close. Charlene puts the baby back in her arms and she sits in a chair uncomfortable for sitting with a baby because of the metal arms. Pushing the chair out of the way with her foot she lowers herself onto the blue-green carpet and leans back against the wall, letting the baby sink onto her legs. She looks up at the bulb in the lamp and closes her eyes. Her ears are ringing.
She can feel him against her legs and in her wrists and hands as she steadies him, but gradually she feels herself broadening out, her limbs going slack. She puts her head back, under the lamp. Behind her lids everything is dark, with the lightbulb still there in gold, moving slowly out of sight like a ship, and then fan-shapes, outlined in a bright blue-green, begin to rise and fall all over the background color. Now and then she can hear the movement of people around her and even the bubbling of the aquarium at the far end of the room. She watches the scene behind her eyelids. Now there are gold tracks all over the dark color. Everything is far off. She is not waiting. I’m here, she thinks. I’m in the Blue Grotto.
Later or Never
ON the days Lawrence could walk, Cam sat with him in the old grade school. His house had a ramp but there were days when he could do stairs, and they would negotiate the seams and curbs of two blocks of sidewalk and the school’s railed steps in order to drink coffee at a table in the entrance hall.
In place of the children who had worn the edge off the marble steps in two troughs, the high-ceilinged classrooms now held shops and restaurants. Sometimes those old children could be seen standing up close to photographs hung in the corridors, pointing themselves out, prim or devilish at their desks. “See those holes? Those are inkwells,” they would be saying with a hopeless pride, to kids who must be their grandchildren. Great-grandchildren. Cam thought the kids in the pictures looked like orphans. Dressed up, dark around the eyes, staring with grins and scowls into a time in which the classroom, the teacher, and they themselves in their bunched-up plaid shirts and bloused dresses did not exist. Yet there they were behind glass, jittering in rows like kids anywhere, waiting to be let out the doors and onto the buses lined up in one of the pictures on their bicycle-sized tires.
“Did they all wear white?” Cam wanted to know. “The girls?”
“Little brides,” said Lawrence, tipping back his head. “Brides of knowledge.” He raised one of his eyebrows at her.
“So how did you keep clean if you went to school in a white dress?”
“Clean wasn’t so big, then.”
Cam didn’t say, “How do you know?” After all, she asked these questions. And Lawrence had an interest in many subjects far afield of his own, which was French literature of some time period.
He was squinting out the open doors at the hedge that bounded the parking lot. He spoke a line in French. “A poem,” he explained.
“Yeah,” she said. She could have said, “I mean, look at your face. French poem.”
“The blue sky. The blue sky is God, the only difference being that it exists. The hedge, the sun over there? All in a poem.” This seemed to please and agitate him at the same time. She hoped he would not recite the poem.
The hedge was seething with tiny birds. His eyes were giving out on him but he always noticed the same things she did; like her, he was always on the lookout for something. Something sudden but expected.
For Lawrence, she could see later, the thing watched for would have been more specific than it was for her: some change in the course of what was happening to him. He had the kind of MS in which the body rapidly divorced the brain. She knew about it from a semester on disabilities; it was the worst form but there was a chance of reversal. She told him that. She should have known that instead of arguing he would bring in his poet. His poet was Mallarmé, the subject of his book, the one he had published as opposed to the two rubber-banded stacks of paper in liquor store boxes in the closet.
“Chance, yes,” he said. “Not a chance. A throw of the dice never will abolish chance. ‘Le hasard.’ Le hasard.” She knew hasard; she had a string of French words now. She knew when he was quoting; she knew when it was his poet because of the way he held up both weakened hands like a conductor, two fingertips of the right just meeting the thumb.
His book had received one review, and she knew the name of the person who had written it. Lindenbaum. “He did say it wasn’t a biography, but by Jesús”—he always pronounced it the Spanish way and then apologized because Cam was Catholic—“the man knew his Mallarmé.”
“If it wasn’t a biography what was it?” At one time she had expected he would give her a copy of it but he never did. She knew where the copies were, in another box in the closet.
“Une vie.”
They had both seen the birds swoop in, dozens of them, and make themselves invisible in the hedge, so it seemed to be shifting of its own accord. “God of the weak,” Lawrence whispered. “God of the little birds, protect them now.” To Cam’s mother, the way he looked saying this would have been proof he was crazy. But Cam knew these prayers of his. He liked to put his palms together and roll up his eyes. It was something he did when they were watching the news. “Oh God, we ask that you turn the general, as he testifieth before the Congress, to stone. Also the attaché with the briefcase.”
“Fob,” he was explaining. “The prayer for the birds. Fob, who wrote about animal life.”
“Fob,” she said obediently.
“F-A-B-R-E. He’s saying a prayer that the owl won’t snatch the bird.” With his better hand he made a snatching motion. “Snatch the mouse. Fabre doesn’t hold it against the owl, even as he describes how it’s done. Every chew. Except of course an owl does not chew. He swallows. Vomits out the little bones et cetera.”
“Whatever it is, somebody’s gonna know all about it,” Cam said. “And then tell you.”
“You’re right.” He said it warmly, turning to face her. He liked exasperation. He was a child that way, always goading somebody, a teacher or a mother. She knew that.
“There’s that face,” he said, something his mother also said to Cam on occasion. “That baby look,” he said. “Know how a baby, certain kind of baby, won’t smile at you? That baby will . . . she’ll drink your blood before she’ll smile at you. You could turn inside out and she would just look. And you know she thinks you’re already inside out, you’re so ugly and frightening and you smell.”
“I don’t think that.”
“To a baby we smell like zoo animals. To a baby.” His face emptied, the way it often did when he remembered something not connected to a book, and he turned away, so she was able to do a mental drawing of his profile. His skin was sweaty and drained of blood, almost the gray of a pearl. A freshwater pearl, like her grandmother’s present. When she was in her cap and gown, her grandmother had fastened the strand for her. It barely met around her neck. It burst the same night, when she went off to drink beer with Ray Malala. Ray had been her friend since St. Benedict’s, the new fat boy in third grade, because both their fathers had died. By high school Ray was a DJ everybody wanted at parties, and a football player. By then being Samoan was a plus. He got her the place as the team water-girl. The guys liked her but they didn’t get around to going out with her. Ray, on the other hand, had acquired a fair amount of experience over the years. “All right, listen, Cami,” he told her when he took her home after graduation, “don’t you be doing no more stuff like that right now. Hear me? I’ll tell your brother. Here’s your beads.”
A freshwater pearl had dents, though, and Lawrence’s face, familiar to her eye and her mind’s eye, was uncommonly smooth, except for one crease between the eyebrows
. No one would read his age in the features, which, despite the cheeks rounded by prednisone, reminded her of the smooth, heavy-lidded face of Rose of Lima. He had the same look of secret pride and refusal. The picture of Rose in her First Communion book, Our Saints and How They Lived, was of a statue. The tapered plaster fingers didn’t even have knuckles; this was Rose before she dipped her hands in lime so as to scar them. Cam’s Communion class drawing of the face of Rose, sleepy and secretive under a crown of roses, had stayed on the refrigerator until it curled around the magnets. For weeks after her father’s funeral she would check it for a miracle. Rose of Lima’s miracles were not listed in Our Saints, though she had performed them or caused them to happen or she wouldn’t be a saint, and as not only Dominicans but Jesuits too had sworn, more angel than human. Even then, Cam knew herself to be half-pretending to expect, and finally faking the expectation, that Rose’s lowered eyes might open. If they had, it would have meant her father had arrived in heaven, if there was a heaven.
In time, like her brothers, she had a list of reasons not to go to Mass. Then she heard her mother start the car and drive off alone because of having a husband who was dead and kids who wouldn’t go with her to Mass, and that ruined the hour anyway. Years of Sundays. By the middle of high school she was doing better with her mother but she discovered she had let God dry out like a plant.
ONLY a certain kind of person, the kind you could be pretty sure would not pass by, would pause to figure out Lawrence’s looks. “There’s something the matter with that guy. He could be fifteen and look forty or he could be forty and look fifteen. And that girl with him. Fat.” Though Cam knew she was not fat, so why put the word in the mind of an observer? She was tall and solid but with large bones and a body mass index within the OK range, she knew that from her nutrition course. Not so big, in the eyes of some people. Pacific Islanders. That, she knew from Ray Malala. Columnar, Lawrence’s mother said. He often told her what his mother said, which was a way of taking her side against his mother. And in fact Lawrence was thirty-nine, so the observer’s second impression would have been the right one.
His mother’s name was Daisy. Cam knew it was a name his mother had given herself, the way she had given him the name Orion and left it up to him if he wanted to change it in high school. He named himself after T. E. Lawrence. Cam must have seen the movie? Peter O’Toole? Cam defended herself. Where would she have seen that?
“Of course I changed my mind, about Lawrence. But it was too late.”
Daisy was a small, pretty woman who must, since she had had Lawrence in her teens, be at least in her fifties. Cam listened for any mention of the parents who must have been around and had some feeling about what was going on, when their daughter was pregnant with Lawrence. She could imagine her own mother’s reaction. She could see her face. And her father’s, if he had been there—no way would he have let a boy who got his daughter pregnant dodge his responsibilities.
A designer, Daisy called herself. Her garden pieces in glass and cement and her elaborate stone figures mortared into walls cost a fortune and were featured in magazines. Cam admired them when Lawrence showed her photographs. The bulky figures were not exactly people. They were Daisy’s idea of myth, Lawrence said.
Daisy wore eye makeup, and leather pants with high heels, and did not look like someone with the muscles to work in stone or cement. Drawings. That’s what she said the figures were. They gave the effect of being trapped in the walls looking for a way out, but in a lazy, drugged way, like bears in a zoo. At the same time, their stone faces or muzzles or whatever they were, raised from the background and pointed skyward, wore half smiles, “to make rich people feel at ease,” Lawrence said.
“They’re sculptures,” Cam said with the confidence he expected of her where art was concerned.
“Reliefs,” Lawrence said. His mother wouldn’t use the word sculpture, because that would land her in the hell, she said, of galleries. People with MFAs writing up wall-cards.
“Did she want to be a sculptor?”
“Of course,” he said.
Daisy was a drinker, Lawrence said—as if that excused her from all the responsibilities she left to others—but she worked in her studio all day first. The idea had wandered into Cam’s head that Daisy might lead her into the presence of a white-haired couple on a yacht, holding martini glasses, who would say, “You must have a scholarship to”—what was a famous art school?—“right away.”
Often Daisy took men along on her travels, but she had no fear of going off on her own in pursuit of ideas for her designs, into deserts and ruins and villages where the women mixed bowls of paint and dipped their fingers and printed symbols onto the mud of their houses. She made friends with these faraway artists; she preferred them to people near at hand—like her son, Cam thought—and wrote them letters, without the least proof, Lawrence said, that they could read English.
Daisy had a lot of travel coming up in the fall and before she embarked on it she fired the other two shift nurses, both RNs, who took care of Lawrence, and hired Cam, who had no real degree, to live in. There was every reason to do this, Daisy said. Each nurse had had her own way of tormenting him. The older one, Iris, had her own physical complaints—her back prevented her from using the lunge belt to get him onto his feet on a bad day—and talked all day on her cell phone. The other one, Sharon, teased him, sampled his wines and used his computer. Sharon wore tight jeans and tanks and used a tanning bed; Cam saw the bend from the waist for something dropped, and the backward arch when sitting, for something out of reach. According to Daisy, Sharon had not bothered to remove her browsing history from his computer, showing that she had looked him up and done a search for his ex-wife with the different last name, and even his child. He had a son.
There were no pictures of the son. Daisy never said the word grandson.
When Cam revealed to Daisy that her mother feared gossip because Cam was moving into a house with a man, Daisy grinned and said, “The poor dear.” At least I have a family, Cam thought. My mother doesn’t make me live with some slave so she can leave the country. I go see my grandmother. My parents were married.
“Your mom called me,” Daisy said early on, when Lawrence still had Iris and Sharon and they were seeing how Cam worked out on an eight-hour shift. That’s all that was legal, eight hours. But Daisy didn’t care what was legal. “Your mom called just to make sure everything was OK. She calls you Cami! Cami with an i?”
It was Daisy who had written the ad: “Mature, cultured companion for invalid. Medical credentials.”
HE bores her until she has to yawn and stretch, until she almost says, “I’m not one of your students,” but something in him so unsuspicious, so ignorant in proportion to his knowledge that it’s almost a kind of sweetness, stops her and lets her stand it. Not that he would notice whether she could stand it or not. Though at times his eyes will pass quickly over her like a flashlight. When she wore a plaid shirt of her brother’s, he said, “Don’t wear that.”
He has dropped his head back so he seems to be scanning the heavy school light fixtures strung on cables. She knows he is trying to fill his chest with air.
Just before he got sick—so even Daisy can’t claim that was her reason—his wife divorced him to marry someone else. Moved three thousand miles away, taking their son. Cam pictured a little boy having Lawrence’s wide greenish cloudy eyes, with a permanent crease between the brows, staring hopelessly and knowingly over his shoulder as a woman dragged him away. A blonde in glasses. Cam knew that much. She knew because the wife wasn’t the forbidden subject; from the beginning he had talked about her, a woman who couldn’t see a foot in front of her, and ran in marathons, and made him go to parties he hated. A woman with long blonde hair her students mentioned in their critiques because she played with it while she lectured. But a woman who lectured, a woman with a Ph.D. When Lawrence spoke of her it was the same as when he spoke of his mother. Women. Women who existed to torment or exhaust you until you sim
ply . . . simply . . . simply—here he conducted with his hands—put them out of your mind. Cam listened in the understanding that this was a race to which she did not belong and for which she did not have to answer.
But how old was he—five? ten?—the son looking back as he was dragged away?
HER drawing, when he looked at it, did not surprise Lawrence. She saw that. He had expected it.
Later her mother expressed the opinion that the drawing should have been entered in a contest before she ever let it out of her hands. “A contest. For one drawing,” Cam said. “Right. I didn’t want it anyways.”
Lawrence would have let her know about it with an eyebrow if she said “anyways.” Or “somewheres” or “lost for words” or “on accident.”
Now he had seen three of her drawings. “Don’t show these to my mother,” he said. “She’ll make suggestions.” Cam didn’t tell him Daisy had one of them, the one of him. It was the one he had let her do while he was in the chair by the window, why not, it was what he did all day, though by Jesús there ought to be a skull on the windowsill. He could sit forever looking out the window. Not only now, he said irritably. Not just this particular summer quarter when he was not teaching—as if he would teach again in the fall. Looking out the window was an occupation for all seasons. “Sickly spring, lucid winter, et cetera.”
She didn’t tell him she had met twice with Daisy, once for coffee while she was still working the morning shift, and once right before she moved in. The second time was in an old hotel, by the fireplace, for wine and what Daisy called snacks—perfect little dollhouse dinners on plates thinner than the heavy napkins. They had finished two bottles and ordered a third. Daisy did most of the drinking but Cam kept up her end. She was underage but nobody asked her. She didn’t look it, with her size and the kind of face she had, “not so much scowling as . . . solemn,” Daisy said, as if she had come to respect Cam’s choice of face.
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