What happened?
We were cut off, I said.
Oh. That’s odd. Well, where were we?
You were in El Paso. Look, I can’t stay on. I’m expecting a call from my editor. It’s important.
At this hour? Okay. Did I run on again? Sorry. So, I’ll talk to you soon. I’ll call you in a couple of days.
I didn’t tell him I found him loathsome. That would only have strengthened the bond. No words could weaken it. His spell thrived on words, exchange. The way out was silence.
Months later when we were lovers again I wanted to ask, What did she do? Maybe I could learn it. I’m willing to learn. But Q. seemed very content—he himself was not what I’d call savage—and I never got around to asking.)
You’re afraid to have me stay, aren’t you? he says, still standing on Peter’s comer.
Yes.
What are you afraid of? That it will start all over again? That might not be so bad. You never seemed afraid before.
I hail a taxi cruising up the avenue about two blocks south. In less than a minute I’m out of here, out of danger. Did I really hear what I just heard? For a moment the mist clears, my legs are light. I could, maybe, fall into Q.’s arms and erase the past dozen years. . . . Oh, God! It takes the last dregs of my will to master the impulse.
Yes, I’m afraid it might start all over again, I say. I’m also afraid it might not. Or start and stop again.
Q. looks at me with utter comprehension. Maddening. If I leaned forward two inches. . . . No, he just wants a comfortable place to stay for two weeks. With me in it. The taxi pulls up.
Anyway, I say, I have a friend who’s around a lot.
Oh. A man, you mean. You didn’t tell me.
I open the taxi door. No, I say, you’re the one who tells stories.
(So many stories, fed to me like lotuses, that he makes me forget the story of my own life. Well, this time I’m heading home.)
Who is he? I want to know about him. What is he to you? Tell me, this is important.
I’ve got to go now. (I’m in the cab, I give the address, but Q.’s holding the door open.)
You’re very hard on me, Laura, he says, leaning inside.
Hard? I say, as the meter clicks on. Because I can’t fit you in? Because you expect me to be what I’m not. This is who I am now. I can’t change at this point.
How I wish I had it in me to make some perfect gesture, kiss him hard on the lips and say good-bye forever, memorably, or cast a glance so filled with chi that he staggers off in retreat—anything to mark this moment when I am actually standing firm and refusing Q. what he wants, not out of wisdom but some animal instinct of self-preservation. Instead I drop my purse and Q. deftly reaches in to pick it up.
“Well, Missus, we are ready?” asks the turbaned driver.
We never ate the grapes or cookies, I say.
Oh! Q. smacks his forehead dramatically. And they looked so good. Thank you for bringing them.
Eat them with Peter. ’Bye. I pull the door closed, leaving him disconsolate on the street.
Does this mean I am “getting over” Q.? Does the onset of one sickness obliterate the previous sickness? Or is it all the same sickness translated into different symptoms, behaving metaphorically? Whatever it is, I’m not fond of this new-found sanity. In the stories, the princess always risks it and takes in the frog. Two weeks of unadulterated Q., at my table, surely on my pillow, like being stoned. Yes, and then what?
As we slog through ear-splitting traffic, motorcycles being gunned and puling car alarms, plus the occasional pneumatic drill cracking the pavement, I lean back and stretch my legs in what might be the last Checker cab in New York. A clutch of police cars and an ambulance block the entrance to the Port Authority, and the next thing I know the taxi driver is tapping on the glass to rouse me. “Missus, missus! You have reached your destination. You are okay, missus?”
I can hardly wait to get back to bed, the only trusty lover. And to my squirrel.
It’s no longer there. I didn’t think it had the strength to leave. The last few times, it hardly responded to my taps, as if it no longer cared about such minor nuisances. Could his friends have carted him off to a sacred burial ground? Ants, they say, do something like that. Why not squirrels? Unless it simply decided to die elsewhere, on some other ledge, if you could call it a decision. But when I look closely I see that like his cousin rat, the squirrel has built a little nest of ivy—leaves, twigs, and pale-green berries—along with clumps of hair and scraps of tissue, suggesting he plans to return. I haven’t seen the last of him. I’ll have to clear out this nest as I did the other, the rat’s. Later. When I’m stronger.
5
“Call the doctor at ten o’clock Monday morning for the results of the blood tests,” Cindy, the receptionist, said as I left.
“The doctor isn’t in now,” she said on Monday morning at ten. “You can call back at eleven.”
I took out the stack of pages I’d been working on, about Ev’s town, but couldn’t concentrate.
At eleven: “The doctor isn’t in now. Try him in an hour or so.” The voice sounded awfully stern for Cindy. It sounded like Cindy’s mother, or a Cindy considerably aged and hardened over the past week, like cheese.
“You told me to call at eleven.”
“He’s out on an emergency. Try at about one.”
I forced myself at least to read over what I’d written—an easy part, about the family house I’d soon be staying in with Jilly.
“The house rests on one of the town’s many low, rounded hills with the air of someone settled in for a long stay: an old Cape Cod house more roomy than it appears from outside, its lines as simple as the houses children draw in their first pictures, with square boxes for windows and a brick chimney rising firm and squat from the A-shaped roof.
Through gales and hurricanes and the intermittent sun of over a century, its shingles have weathered to a gray soft as cloud, and in the misty early mornings, the house seen from a distance seems no more than a denser patch of mist. Toward mid-morning, as the sun burns off the fog and brightens the salty air, the color of the house darkens, so that by early afternoon it stands clear against the deepening blue of a broad sky. The soil around the house is thin and dry, covered by low drab shrubs with here and there a cluster of flowers springing up as if by accident, blazing tiger lilies or daffodils or impatiens. Farther back is an ancient toolshed, upright and neat, and behind that the brush dissolves into woods. Similar houses nearby are screened from view by the trees.”
Not too bad, but I was in no state, to judge, couldn’t quite get my mind around it.
“The doctor isn’t in yet,” said the voice at one-fifteen. “Try again at about four-thirty.”
“But at four-thirty I’ll be out. I have an appointment.” Querulous. Very poor strategy.
“Well, keep trying, that’s all I can say.”
“Can’t you tell me the results?”
“No, only the doctor can do that.”
Could be pretty bad, if she wasn’t allowed to tell.
I pushed on. “Though it was built in 1877, the house is well sealed and well heated. It was built for comfort and tended to, despite the legacy of sadness that seeped through the family generation after generation the way damp seeps into the walls of other houses, making them moldy and chill. Indeed, the damp is hard to avoid, what with the sea to the east and the bay to the west and the river, as a bonus, running through the already watery town—the Pamet River, named for the Indians whose place this was before the Pilgrims landed some nine miles north.”
Pilgrims and Indians seemed very far away, maybe too far for my purposes. It was a relief to give up at four o’clock and join Mona at our favorite local hangout, the Café Athena. Every few days we would sit lengthily at one of the scarred wooden tables beside the open windows and watch Broadway’s passing scene; if friends went by we pulled them in to join us. The food was mediocre at best, in fact patrons had been known to brin
g their own. It took skill to catch the attention of the help—actors and graduate students so engrossed with their chatter at the kitchen door that they had to be coerced to stop by. The Athena had a collection of two tapes, repeated in alternation all day long: The Four Seasons and Handel’s Water Music. Outside, buses lumbered past, beggars lurched.
“Remind me,” I told Mona, “at four-thirty I have to make a phone call.”
“Okay. Speaking of phone calls, I just spoke to Madelyn Prescott yesterday. She’s coming to New York pretty soon and she’s going to stay with us for about nine days.”
“That’s a long time for a guest. Do you mind?”
“Not at all. She’s an ideal guest, a real pro. Last time I hardly knew she was there. She goes out in the morning and stays out all day and most nights doesn’t even show up for dinner. When she does she often makes her own food because she’s a vegetarian. She’s living near Santa Fe now. Raising llamas.”
“Llamas? Like in Doctor Dolittle? Listen, let’s try waving at them. I’d love an iced tea.”
“Why don’t I just go up and ask. It’ll be quicker.” Mona slithered off in her feline way. “Yes, llamas,” she said, sitting down again. “It seems they’re very sweet and people do quite well raising them.”
“What for?”
“Well, people rent them for treks in the mountains. That son of thing. But she’s not that far along yet. They’re very expensive and she’s starting small, with just two, I believe. The idea is that when they’re ready she’ll breed them. They’re cuter than camels or mules, she says. Oh, she’s also a Buddhist now.”
“That figures. Llamas. Tibet. There are Buddhists in Tibet. The Dalai Lama. Remember we went to hear him speak at Columbia last fall? Compassion, he said. Overcoming anger.”
“Yes, that’s all well and good, but the kind of llamas she raises are from Peru, it so happens. How’s it going?” she asked Daria, the anthropology student bringing the drinks.
“They’re closing us in two weeks. Didn’t you see the notice on the door?”
“No. How come?” Mona’s usually composed face was stricken.
“Cineplex Odious is buying the movie next door and the whole building and they want everyone out. It’s not that they’re actually throwing us out, just, like, quadrupling the rent. What’s happening all over town.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I asked. “Protest or picket, like in the old days?”
“I think it’s too far gone for that,” said Daria.
“I’ll ask Tim. A friend of mine, a lawyer. Maybe he can suggest something.”
“I doubt if Tim would be much help,” said Mona with asperity. “He’s a corporate lawyer, remember? He’s on the other side.”
“I always forget. It must be denial. How about your brother Carl, then? Does he do cases like this, or just violence?”
“Thanks for the sentiment,” said Daria, “but I think it’s a done deal. You could speak to the owner, though, and find out for sure.” She nodded toward the carrot-haired balding man who usually sat in a corner drinking coffee, reading thick books and taking notes in a steno pad.
“I will,” said Mona. “What will happen to you?”
“I’ll go across the street to the Indian place, I guess. The only trouble is, you really have to work there.” She slouched away, pulling up her sagging jeans.
“This is very unsettling,” I said. “Two weeks! It’s like being evicted. We’ll have to find someplace else. So, about those llamas, can you also shear them for wool or am I thinking of alpacas?”
“You’re thinking of alpacas, Laura. I thought I might make a little dinner when Madelyn’s in town. Invite some of the people we used to know, see what they’re up to. Sort of a reunion.”
The downtown group where I met Q. We also did a season of summer stock on the Jersey shore—old favorites: Mrs. Warrens Profession. Guys and Dolls. Peter Pan. I was an Indian. I can’t remember who Madelyn was. Tinker Bell? Mona did the costumes, but left the theatre soon after—impossible while raising children, she said, with the husbands coming and going. She started her own business. Let Me Dress You was now a thriving concern with the lowest possible overhead; one room in her apartment held the treasures she gleaned from thrift shops all over town. She talked at length to her clients—wealthy East Siders to working-girl types newly arrived from the provinces—like a therapist doing an intake interview, took their measurements, then went out and found wardrobes to suit their desired identity. Help Recycle, she advertised. The Most Painless Makeover in New York. Most of the time she herself wore jeans and a T-shirt, as if scorning a busman’s holiday, but now and then she would turn up looking like one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens or Madame de Staël’s guests. “Identity is fluid,” said an Art Deco poster hanging in the alcove she called her dressing room. No inconsistencies bothered her, a postmodernist let loose in the world of fashion. Low fashion.
“So what do you think, Laura? Would that be fun? A little dinner?”
“Sure, very nice.”
How nice was questionable. I preferred to gossip about Madelyn rather than see her. Still, dinner at Mona’s was always worthwhile since she was a gourmet cook. And it seemed only fair that one should pay for unrestricted gossip (llamas!) by actually seeing the person, which in turn would provide more material for the data bank. . . .
Mona, the provident, checked her watch. “It’s four-thirty, Laura.”
“Oh, thanks.” The doctor was in! Yes, I’d wait. The phone was on the wall across the room at the bar, where the sounds of buses and car alarms were less acute, but three seated men were bellowing over some baseball contretemps, while the gang of graduate student and dancer waiters tittered over someone’s audition for Miss Saigon, not to mention the Vivaldi tape. Autumn. When the doctor came on I could barely hear him.
“It looks like you do have something,” he began.
“Leukemia or hepatitis?” I wanted to say it first myself. “AIDS? Lupus?”
“No, nothing like that.” I caught something about mononucleosis. Not mono itself but a relative of. Often its aftermath, like the dessert. This doctor of Ev’s was a poet manqué, another metaphor maker. My just deserts?
“But I never had mono. Not that I know of.”
“You had it sometime in the past. You have the antibodies. You just weren’t aware of it.”
So much for my powers of awareness, in which I took such pride. Still, what a relief. Just then the espresso machine began roaring and I strained to hear. A little-understood virus, I gathered.
“It usually takes about four to six months.” His next words were pulverized along with the Colombian coffee beans.
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well. Could you repeat that, please?”
“I said, don’t be surprised or alarmed if you get strange aches and pains or feel very fatigued.”
“Oh.”
More fractured words. I felt rather heady, knowing I had something mysterious and tenacious though not fatal. Neurasthenia, it sounded like. All those Victorian heroines we thought were stifled by the patriarchal system—was it just a virus? Would this discovery bring down Women’s Studies?
“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing. I’m in a bar. I tried calling earlier several times, but I couldn’t reach you.”
He didn’t say—or perhaps he did for all I knew—If you’re so sick what are you doing in a bar?, but he might have thought it. Standing firm and persisting, I thought in reply. Continuing.
I caught something about “titers.” Or was it “’taters”? Should I eat potatoes instead of watercress? Was he Southern? Irish? My titers were high, he seemed to be saying. I didn’t know what titers were but I couldn’t ask him to repeat again, not that it would have done any good, what with the Four Seasons and the waiters and all the rest. I’d look it up later. Or ask Tony, my stepson. Surely he was a doctor by now, or far enough along to know the lingo. I hated to ask him anything, seeing that he’d been angry at me since
he was eleven, but this wasn’t much.
“Is there anything I can take for it?”
“I’m sorry to say there isn’t a thing I can do for you. We don’t know enough about this. Take good care of yourself. Get plenty of rest and wait it out. It’ll pass. Don’t treat yourself like an invalid. On the other hand, don’t overdo things. And don’t let anyone try to tell you you’re malingering. It’s really a virus. Your titers are very high.”
No, it definitely wasn’t about potatoes.
I couldn’t help feeling a kind of pride about those titers, whatever they were. “Thank you,” I said, as if he’d paid me a compliment. But he sensibly took this as a close to our conversation.
“Call me if you have any other questions.”
Happily he had no odd questions himself.
“So?” inquired Mona.
She was both skeptical and concerned. A bonus: she knew about titers. She’d been a chemistry major in college, a tidbit I hadn’t known. Good for the data bank.
“They keep diluting your blood—titration, it’s called—and the number of titers is how many dilutions in which the blood still shows traces of the virus. Or of the antibodies, to be precise. So how many titers did you have?”
“I couldn’t hear the number exactly. It was too noisy. In the low two hundreds, maybe? Does that sound reasonable?”
Mona’s green eyes widened. I didn’t really care how many. I was more intrigued by the wonderful metaphor. How many dilutions would it take to get the image of Ev’s bloody neck out of me, or Q.’s vacillations, or Tony’s resentment, and a dozen other sickening components? If I put myself through a wringer would I come out dry and pure, an amnesiac like Ronald Colman in Random Harvest? (Tim and I watched that a few weeks ago; he has a flair for choosing old films.)
Mona didn’t say anything soothing or encouraging. That wasn’t her style. But she did invite me to come home with her and stay for dinner.
The Fatigue Artist Page 11