“Have you seen a doctor?” I never thought I’d hear myself asking that. But squirrels were said to carry rabies. Luke must know. He was from rural Alabama; he knew more about animals than I did. In some parts of the South, I’d heard, they hunt squirrels and eat them.
Before he could reply, my downstairs neighbor, Helene, approached, dragging her loyal shopping cart. “What happened to your hand, Luke?” she demanded in her brisk way. She was taking his ailment far more seriously than she had taken mine. “Really? You must see a doctor for that. Some squirrels are rabid.”
For an instant I thought she said some squirrels were rabbits. I had to deconstruct the phrase in my ear.
“I had a shot,” said Luke patiently, to the relief of all.
“Why is your bandage that funny color?” I asked. “Is that old blood?”
“No, iodine. It’s no big deal, Laura. I’m gonna live a long while yet, you’ll see. The good Lord ain’t ready for the likes of me.”
“Some folks shoot squirrels,” said Vernon, “and the Humane Society people don’t like it. But to my way of thinking they’ve got the right idea.”
“There was a sick one on my window ledge all summer,” I said. “I had the hardest time getting rid of him—he made himself a little nest and every time I expected him to die there, he disappeared. But I think he’s finally moved out.”
Helene shrank back in disgust, and with good reason. She lived one floor below. Any creature evicted from my window ledge might well migrate to hers. Well, let her cringe. I still hadn’t forgiven her for that schoolteacher’s rebuke at the elevator three months ago.
“I wonder,” I went on, “if it could have been my squirrel that bit you.”
All three turned to me. Helene’s face was a caricature of droll shock—raised eyebrows and parted lips; even her tight gray curls seemed to stiffen. Luke arched his neck in a pose of dry amusement. Heat’s got her, I saw in their eyes.
“There’s lots of squirrels,” said Vernon gently, as if speaking to a slow child. “Hundreds around here. They breed like rabbits.”
Rabbits? They breed madly, being rabid.
Luke grinned and winked at me. “And they all look alike, too.”
At such moments he reminded me of Q. Possibly not even Q. could muster such ironic gallantry.
Another super appeared, a gangly white man whose blue uniform hung loosely from his bones. He was about to pass with a wave, when he caught sight of Luke’s bandaged hand. “Hey, Luke. What’s with the hand?”
“Yeah,” said Luke wearily. “I was settin’ over by the park keeping an eye on my car and eating my lunch and a squirrel come up, just like that, to get some food, and bites me.”
“D’jou get a shot? They can be rabid.” He pronounced it “ray-bid.”
“Got me a shot, yeah.”
Was it really such an absurd notion, about my squirrel? Had I driven him to vengeful acts against humanity?
We drifted off, leaving Luke to read his Amsterdam News and perhaps work out tomorrow’s parking pattern, like a chess master. Sitting on a bench across the street, I relished the oncoming cool of evening, exactly as I had envisioned from the window. A vision come true. A little triumph.
Down the block I spied Philip, the professor from next door whose wife and daughter had been sick last winter. He leaned into the window of a gypsy cab, talking exuberantly to the driver, the briefcase dangling from his hand making an odd contrast to his shorts and T-shirt. All at once his wife, Brenda, came darting from their building to run across the street, dodging traffic. How she ran—light, mercurial on sneakered feet, gliding compactly through the air. Did I ever run like that? She must have recovered from the mysterious disease. The daughter, too—no anxious mother would move so jubilantly.
Brenda joined him at the cab window When the car drove off a moment later, they headed in my direction. How was I, they asked cheerily, and I told. Too tired to pretend.
“That’s too bad.” Philip turned to Brenda. “It sounds just like what you and Lisa had. It was really frightening to watch.”
“Yes,” Brenda said, “dreadful. I know how you must feel. But you’ll get better.”
She sounded very sure, so sure that I felt a bit better on the spot, and not quite so ashamed of my lassitude. “You certainly seem fine,” I said. “I haven’t seen you around in ages.”
“Oh, yes, we both came back to life. But for a while there—” A dramatic moan. “We didn’t know what was wrong and it seemed it would never go away. I thought, okay, my life was over, but I felt worse for Lisa because she’d hardly lived yet.” She smiled and shook her head. “We’d lie around watching soap operas on TV and sometimes even that was too strenuous.”
“Well, I’m not quite that bad.”
“Believe me, you’ll get better. It took us a few months. Sort of like a pregnancy, you know? The beginning is the pits, then you gradually pick up and feel more like yourself, only a trifle slow. I started going to work half days and Lisa went to school half days and we rested the other half. Little by little we worked our way back.”
“You have no idea how encouraging that is. Some people really scare me, you wouldn’t believe. . . . You didn’t get injections of vitamin C by any chance, did you?”
“No, we just waited.”
“Well, thanks, I mean it. It’s a great help. I must tell you, when I saw you run across the street just now, I was thinking how energetic you looked and feeling envious.”
“You’ll be doing that soon. What it was, I was rushing to have a look at that nice cab driver before he went away.”
“I left my briefcase in that cab this afternoon,” said Philip, “and the driver found my name in it and called up and came all the way back to give it to me. Isn’t that amazing? I had everything in there, lecture notes, student papers. I never thought I’d get it back.”
“You’re lucky,” I said. “Something like that happened to me too, years ago. I lost some work in a taxi, an old journal I’d kept in college. I was frantic, but then the taxi company looked me up in the phone book and called. They didn’t bring it the way yours did, though. I had to go to Brooklyn, the end of the subway line, to pick it up.”
Q. went with me. He didn’t want me going out there alone, he said, to who knew what kind of neighborhood. You outlanders always imagine the worst, I said. The place is right near Brooklyn College. I know the area. Well, I’ll go anyway, he said. I want to make sure you don’t lose it on the way back—I don’t trust you. Besides, I’ve never seen a taxi depot, or whatever they call it. It could be useful some day.
On the train he told me, You see, Laura, you’re fated to write this book. It’s not just me urging you. Your subconscious can resist with every weapon it’s got—what do you think losing it means?—but in the end you’ll have to drop the acting and give yourself to it.
Years later, under the eye of the goddess in the Mexican restaurant, as the dog stirred from sleep and I forced out one truth after another, I said, You didn’t want me traveling to the depths of Brooklyn by myself, you didn’t trust me to write the book without you, but you didn’t mind leaving me to live the rest of my life without you. Did you think that was any easier?
“When I got to the taxi place,” I told Philip and Brenda, “I found this huge room with old wooden desks and half a dozen burly guys sitting on top of them, looking as if something was very funny. One of them said, ‘So, you must be the writer.’ I remember I was so embarrassed thinking maybe they’d read my sophomoric drafts. As if they cared! Anyway, I got it back.”
And someday, playing a taxi driver, Q. would use the look and feel of that room and think of me. How could we exorcise each other, with so many details stored in the cells?
I guess I went on a bit too long. Brenda’s body made small twitches of leave-taking. “Well, try to have faith that you’ll get better, Laura. I looked a lot worse than you do and I got better.”
I envisioned her lying languidly on a sofa in an old bathrobe, her Afro in disarr
ay, her eyelids heavy, watching a soap opera and finally murmuring, No, turn it off, it’s too much of a strain. I wished she would stay at my side indefinitely, repeating, You’ll get better, at five-minute intervals. A taut, dark savior in running shorts.
“Laura, if you’re going to be sitting here awhile, could I leave my briefcase with you? We were just going to do our evening run.”
“Sure.” They were off, slowly, then picking up speed, joining the sweaty parade, as the fiery sun was extinguished in the river leaving a trail of lavender smoke. Like a pregnancy? I couldn’t say. I never got far enough, but I felt fine while it lasted. This was my fourth month; with luck I would be delivered of a book.
The oncoming cool felt good. I gave thanks, the sort of gratitude old people whose evenings were numbered might feel, the very people on the neighboring benches, some with paid companions: whatever our terrors and infirmities, for the moment it suffices to sit in the draining pinkish light, in the filtering cool, with the trees, the river, the sailboats aglow.
On the bench opposite sat a pair no younger than the others but different, not passed over into static anonymity, still in the process of becoming. Like a couple in love, they seemed, their bodies listing toward each other, eyes brightly rapt in a dialogue spiced with gestures and touches—listening, responding, listening again—a spontaneous, skilled pas de deux. Could it have been this way for fifty years? Or had they only just met, having divorced or buried earlier mates? Had they been happy with the others, too—willfully happy people—or had the others been preparation for this evident romance, the way Mona sees her patchy erotic past?
The man was tall and sinewy, with a burnished face, craggy nose and fine lips, his hair the pure white that looks soft as silk and strong as steel. He wore tan Bermuda shorts that showed veiny, muscled legs, and he held a cane. Not the newfangled chrome kind with ugly claws for balance, but a wooden cane with a curved handle. Through will or luck, he had ceded nothing essential to age. No withdrawal on his face. Even if his blood at this very moment was gathering to flood his brain and sweep him off to his long home, he was not offering valedictions.
The woman’s girlish sandals were very like the pair I wore out fourteen years ago, walking off Q. as if he were a bad trip. Her tanned legs were admirable. (The legs are the last to go, my mother often said, looking down at her own with wry pleasure.) She had on a denim skirt and a loose white shirt, maybe one of his shirts—the collar had that starchy men’s look. Her oval face was lively, the face of a sober young woman who lightened in spirit as she aged, though thin lines etched a dimension of wisdom. And her full lips had no sour downturn at the outer edges, so common in old people, signifying disappointment with the return on one’s investment. In my father’s family, we age first around the mouth. The lips narrow and sink at the corners in rancor, settling, day by day, into permanent brackets, so that a smile requires coaxing the drooping muscles. I’d seen the start of it, these last months, on my own lips, and would stand at the mirror forcing the corners up in an artificial smile. When I let go they slipped back down in the rancorous curve.
The old couple was so absorbed and alone, I might have been peering through the slatted blinds of their bedroom. Now and then they paused in their talk to glance at the kids on the grass. Not minding grandchildren, I was sure, or seeking easy sentiment. Registering life, taking in data. Ev and I grown old might have strolled along the Drive, too, even watched children at play, but not in such intimacy. We’d have looked like two solitaries who agreed to walk in step for company’s sake. We’d never had that look of belonging unmistakably together. No. No party guest scanning the room and figuring out pairs would ever have matched us.
They got up—not creaking but calmly unfolding—and walked on hand in hand, the man setting the cane lightly down at every other step. Who were they? How did they do it? If not for their net of privacy, the invisible cords linking them (though unlike Grace’s couple tied together, they were surely permitted to touch), I might have gone up and asked. How come you have what we all once wanted but learned the hard way is impossible, an illusion? How dare you show it?
The light was nearly gone when I handed Philip back his briefcase and went inside. Thanks to Brenda and the river, I was feeling slightly better. I even had feeling to spare.
“Peter, it’s Laura,” I said, settling into the chair with the phone. “I wanted to see how you were, and how Arthur’s doing.”
“He’s about the same. Maybe a little weaker. Some days he’s lucid. Right now he has an ingrown toenail that’s bothering him.”
“An ingrown toenail?”
“Yes, and he insists he wants a podiatrist to come over and take care of it. It’s strange, he never saw a podiatrist in his life. Now he’s fixated on this toenail. I get so harried, I can’t think straight. Maybe I should find someone to come and treat it, though I doubt if any doctor would want to. Still, if it would relieve a minor pain . . . Does that strike you as absurd?”
“No, why not? If that’s what he wants.”
“He also has a cataract.”
“Isn’t he a little young for that?”
“Everything deteriorates faster with this illness.”
“You’re not thinking of a cataract operation at this point, Peter? I mean...”
“No, no, of course not. But one does begin to lose one’s bearings. How are you feeling, by the way? All better, I trust?”
“Yes, thanks,” I lied. Someday it might not be a lie.
“Have you heard from Quinn lately?” he asked.
“He called last month from Washington, visiting his father. He sounded fine. I should give him a call, I guess. I promised.”
“I haven’t heard a thing since he left, not that I expected to. You know Quinn. Out of sight, out of mind. He didn’t use to be that way when he was married to Susan, at least not until the end. I oughtn’t to complain, though. He was a tremendous help when I moved. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. Q. can be very useful. But as they say,” I added breezily, “nobody’s indispensable.”
“I find Arthur indispensable.”
“Of course. That was thoughtless. It’s just a stupid cliché. Please give him my love, and let me know how—”
“He doesn’t want a regular funeral service, he told me long ago. Just a few close friends. He has no family except a sister in London.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help . . . ,” I said lamely.
“If you really mean it, there is something. I need people to cover for me in the store so I can tend to him. I can’t afford to hire anyone else at the moment. Even a few hours a week would make a difference.”
I couldn’t hesitate. People really mean it, or they don’t. “Sure. I don’t know much about rare books, though.”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s a full-time clerk who’ll show you what to do. Just sound literate.”
“Okay, tell me what days would be best.”
After I hung up, I went to the window. I didn’t expect to find him anymore, and he was so inert, I thought he was dead. (Rabies?) But when I knelt down I could see his back rising and falling ever so slightly, in a rapid rhythm. Small animals breathe very fast, Jilly told me when she had hamsters. This must be how mothers felt, checking on a sick infant. Still breathing? Thank God! Hanging on.
Something loosened in me. Let him be. Let him live here, even die here. He’s chosen this place, he’s made himself mine. I yield to the Tao of squirreldom, as the Tai Chi teacher might say. No more rubber gloves and paper bag and scissors for cutting away the tough-stemmed ivy. Not until I had to carry his body to the basement and stuff it in a black plastic bag to be tossed into the maw of the garbage truck that awakened me at six-thirty every other morning, chewing thunderously under my bedroom window, fee, fi, fo, fum.
With luck he might not die on my window ledge at all but curled beneath a tree in the park, or wherever squirrels ought to die. Odd that you ne
ver see their remains, the way you see dead pigeons on the streets, often flattened to two dimensions under the wheels of traffic and etched into the asphalt like fossils. Squirrels, no.
I knelt at the French doors like someone at prayer. A Taoist prayer, an affirmation of how things are: He is still alive, we are all still alive. He might even recover, it’s not out of the question. If he’s the one who bit Luke, there’s some spirit in him. Maybe all he needs is to rest undisturbed, not having his bed destroyed each time he creeps off to forage for food.
Whatever his fate, I withdrew from it, leaving my window ledge to his discretion.
“So, what did you have this week?” The witch’s greeting. “Did you get the vaginal infection?”
“No such luck. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. At night, that is. During the day I sleep fine. Some nights I woke every hour with my heart pounding and a weird kind of energy. I had to get up and move around.”
“Sleep disorders. That’s common when the immune system is off.”
“I also kept breaking out in a sweat every so often. It felt like what my former editor described when she went through menopause. You’re not going to cause menopause, are you? Because I’m far from ready.”
“No, no,” with a merry laugh. “There are ways to make you stop menstruating, but don’t worry, I haven’t gone near that. Let me see your tongue. Oh, it looks much better. Less heat. And your pulses?” She pressed her fingers into my inner forearm. “Have you had any alcohol lately?”
I gasped. Mona and I had met in another local café yesterday in our continuing quest to replace the Athena. I’d been in good spirits; during my insomnia I’d managed to type up everything in my notebook, making a nice stack of pages. When I paced around in the dark hours, I felt myself warming up to write. My mind moved nimbly, rubbing against-the contours of words and phrases, shaping sentences, sound molding itself to syntax like clay on an armature. To celebrate I’d risked a glass of wine.
“How did you know?”
She smiled. “Oh, I can feel it in the liver pulses.”
The Fatigue Artist Page 31