Confessions of a Falling Woman

by Debra Dean

  “Mama, I think I’m going to just pass.” In the corner of my eye, I saw Henry lean forward apprehensively. Passing was obviously against the rules; we weren’t playing bridge. I turned back to the Queen and pushed on.

  “I don’t even know why I came down here. I really don’t have anything left to say. I thought I did, but I don’t. If you decide to stop drinking, fine. But it’s your own life, and I’m tired of messing in it.” I could hear the water rising over my voice. “I was tired of it years ago, Mama.”

  The Queen Mother continued to gaze impassively at the window.

  When Daddy had said his piece, Henry quietly explained to the Queen that there was a bed open for her at Serenity Lane and that, with her permission, the family would drive her over there. He asked her if she had anything to say.

  The room fell silent. We all waited on her. I guess everyone was still hoping she would give herself up, break down in sobs of relief or repentance or whatever. But when she did speak, her voice all cool and satiny, we came to our senses quick enough.

  She rose to her feet and fastened her eyes on Henry.

  “I can just imagine how difficult this must be for you, Mr. Bujone. I have always wondered how those psychiatrists did it. Day in, day out, mucking around in the private lives of complete strangers. Myself, I would simply die of shame. I hope your superiors will not regard this as a failing on your part. I would be happy to write a note expressing my sincere admiration of your abilities. Victoria, would you be so kind as to drive me home now?”

  With that, she nodded shortly to me and walked out of the room. We remained behind, slumped in our chairs like a bunch of balloons with the air let out. Henry Bujone, unwilling to admit defeat, launched into his stock of dim-witted platitudes, reminding us that we each had personal victories to take home with us that day. Some people should just be taken out and shot.

  When I came out to the parking lot, I saw her sitting in the backseat of Daddy’s Lincoln. I slipped into the driver’s seat and gripped the wheel to steady the tremor in my hands. If I had been wondering why I was selected to chauffeur, she solved the mystery for me.

  “I’ll thank you to remember that you have nothing more to say to me.”

  We drove silently through town, until I started to turn onto Hundred Oaks Avenue.

  “No, stay on the Acadian until Broussard.” It had been years since I’d lived there, but I still knew the way home. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the Queen sunk low into the plush velour seat, staring out the side window. I drove on, the windshield wipers clicking away the drizzle. When we got to Broussard, she commanded a left turn and then, just before City Park, “On the right here, please, Victoria.”

  It was the clinic I had been to the previous night. In the daylight, it looked shabbier: a sagging old Victorian house with a newer two-story wing grafted awkwardly onto its side. There were no identifying signs, just the red paint at the curb that spelled out Emergency Vehicles Only.

  I shut off the engine and raised my eyes to the rearview mirror. Her powdered face was streaked with tears. When I turned around, her eyes met mine for the first time that day, really for the first time I can remember.

  “You may tell everyone I have decided I need a rest. Your father and I were planning a week in Biloxi, but tell him I’ve changed my mind. It’s become such a touristy place, and I really feel I need some peace and quiet.”

  There wasn’t a quieter place on the planet than the inside of that car. Peace is harder to come by.

  “Mama,” I said. “I love you.” Just like that, like exhaling after too long a time underwater. And then it was quiet again. I listened to the clock on the dashboard ticking away, the sound of tires swishing by on the wet pavement. My eyes followed a drop of rain as it slid slowly down the length of the windshield, welding to another drop and then sliding again.

  THE AFTERLIFE OF LYLE STONE

  Lyle had been going to the records storage room and somehow had gotten lost, taken a wrong turn somewhere and was wandering down long gray-carpeted hallways with no doors. Music pulsed through the walls, an interminable cello rendition of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”; the fluorescent lights overhead buzzed a backbeat. He turned down one passageway after another, thinking eventually he would find a door or a familiar landmark or a person who could direct him back to the offices of Stickel, Porter, Rathburn & Webb. Then at the end of a particularly long corridor, there loomed a door, heavy double doors actually, with a brass plaque that said Conference Room J. He poked his head into the room and saw maybe a dozen people seated around an enormous mahogany conference table. Apparently he had interrupted a meeting, for the conversation ceased and all heads turned toward him. He was about to apologize when he recognized the faces: Chad Rathburn and two of the attorneys from Estate Planning, and his wife, Jen, was there also, looking very cool and pretty in a pink wool suit. Next to her, Dave Whitsop, Lyle’s biology class partner in the ninth grade, squeezed Jen’s arm and leaned in to mouth something in her ear. Around the far end of the table, he saw his friend Bill, a woman he had dated briefly in college, and his father, which was puzzling because the latter had been dead for eight years. He started to say something, but his father pursed his lips and shook his head almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it occurred to Lyle that he had done something wrong.

  “Lyle”—Chad Rathburn broke the silence—“come in.”

  There were no empty chairs around the table so Lyle shut the door behind him and remained standing obediently just inside it.

  “We’d hoped to give you an opportunity to explain yourself, but frankly”—here Chad glanced meaningfully at his watch—“frankly, we’ve already wasted a lot of time here and I’ve got a three o’clock. And I think your actions pretty much speak for themselves.”

  “Actions?”

  “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s certainly not the kind of performance we expect.”

  “I, I don’t understand.” Lyle felt panic like heat rash prickling over his body; he couldn’t remember preparing for this meeting.

  “Okay, I won’t mince words. After giving a good deal of consideration to the question of your future, and I think I speak for everyone here”—Chad slicked a palm over his balding skull—“there’s not much evidence.”

  The room rippled and swelled as though underwater. Lyle’s eyes darted around the table; the faces, lit from beneath by small banker’s lamps, glared back green and implacable. He noticed his daughter, still five or six years old, doodling on the legal pad in front of her.

  “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” The question popped out of his mouth as unexpectedly as a goldfish.

  “That boat’s already sailed, Lyle. I thought you grasped at least that much.” Eyebrows lifted in amusement, and Dave Whitsop smirked and muttered something about the pope’s being a Catholic.

  “Pay attention, son,” Lyle’s father ordered.

  “Actually, I think that about wraps it up.” Chad began gathering together a sheaf of papers spread out in front of him. “You can leave that way, Lyle.” He nodded toward a glass wall at the far end of the conference room. Lyle could see, through the panes, a bruised gray sky—no other buildings, nothing at all. He felt himself sliding involuntarily toward the window and when he peered out, he saw that the building was suspended in a roiling fog. He turned to Jen and pleaded with her; get me out of here, he heard his voice saying, but she returned his gaze impassively.

  “Don’t be dramatic, Lyle. Just go to hell.”

  Lyle was falling, a horrible blind free fall that turned his insides to water. Toppling backward, he flung out his arms like broken wings, desperately clawing at the rush of space, and he felt the sickening sensation of air moving right through them. He plunged down and down, endlessly through the void, his body and mind displaced by gaseous terror. At the outer fringes of his reeling, he heard a sound. It was the screeching alarm of crows. Caw, caw, caw. And then his eyes jerked open and he recognized the sou
nd as his own strangled whimpers.

  He was in hell. He was sure of that much, though he couldn’t see into the blackness. Something was wrapped around his torso like a winding sheet, preventing him from moving his limbs. He listened to his heart stutter frantically and replayed the horror of falling. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he noticed blood-red numbers blinking slowly out of the black: 4:08, they read. Trembling, he reached into the darkness toward the spot above the numbers where the light switch in his bedroom had been.

  What appeared resembled in its spareness the bedroom Jen had had redecorated five years ago. He was lying on a bed raised just a few inches above the bare floor, and he was twisted up in a white comforter. Other than the bed, there were few landmarks in the room for Lyle to seize on. “I see this room very Zen,” the decorator had crooned, before removing every throw pillow, every scrap of chintz and bit of color, even the framed photographs of their two children. The only purely decorative object that she’d allowed, an amorphous chunk of granite, was perched on a stand and lit with a halogen spot. Lyle recalled how he had been cowed into approval by the enormous price tag.

  He glanced again at the clock: 4:10. Time didn’t pass in eternity, did it? Still, he couldn’t shake the sensation of being outside his body, a chill awareness as though his eyes were video cameras. Though he recognized every surface and object in the room, they were drained of the pulse of the familiar. He had the disturbing suspicion that if he were to step through the bedroom door, it would open back onto the nightmarish maze of corridors. That was what felt real: the looming conference room doors that had evaporated once he was inside, acne-blotched Dave Whitsop snickering at his discomfort, his wife’s placid composure when she told him to go to hell.

  Lyle remained motionless in bed and watched the sluggish advance of minutes until the clock read 6:00. Then he disentangled himself from the bedding and forced himself to his feet, mimicking as best he could his usual morning routine. Brush teeth, shower, shave, select a suit and shirt from the closet. Each closet and drawer that he opened contained exactly what it should have, though this did not soothe him. The reflection in the mirror when he shaved looked like the face of someone he knew but couldn’t quite put with a name. And when the door opened and Jen glided into the room, a strange voice leaped out of his throat, squeaking with hysteria.

  “Where were you? You were gone. I thought you were gone.”

  Jen glanced at him, her eyebrows arched. “I slept in the guest room. You know, if you could hear yourself snore, you’d do something about it.” He reached out to touch her, but she was disappearing into the bathroom.

  “I had a nightmare,” he said, but there was only the hollow thrumming of the shower.

  He couldn’t shake it. Lyle moved through the days and then weeks, enveloped in his nightmare. Driving to work on that first morning, he noted that the river of red lights snaking toward downtown Seattle in the predawn looked evil, like brimstone, and the air venting into his car smelled distinctly of sulfur. By the time he arrived at the glass monolith where his office was located and circled, level by level, into the concrete bowels of its parking garage, dampness was trickling from under his arms and down his ribs. He sat in his assigned space on Level 6 for nearly ten minutes, gripping the sweaty wheel and repeating like a mantra, “wake up and get ahold of yourself” before he was able to will himself out of the car, up the elevator, and through the reception area of Stickel, Porter, Rathburn & Webb. After that, he stopped parking underground and found a lot five blocks away.

  Slumped in his leather office chair, he would stare out the window at the skyline, shrouded in the perpetual drizzle of February. Occasionally, he would swivel around to again scrutinize the paper on his desk, but everything seemed to be written in code: “…except as provided in subsection (c) of this section, the trustee may avoid any transfer of an interest of the debtor in property to or for the benefit of a creditor, for or on account of an antecedent debt owed by the debtor before such transfer was made….” Somehow he would manage to decipher some of the scrit and even to construct a few similarly unintelligible sentences. Every hour or so, he would summon the courage to pick up the phone and return a call. Bewildered by the garbled rattle of voices on the other end, he could only guess at meanings and wondered if anyone noticed the strangled confusion of his replies. He would exhaust himself with these efforts and then, like Sisyphus, return the next morning to discover a fresh drift of pink message slips and another neat stack of documents.

  He was terrified to sleep, though after a few nights he hardly knew whether he drifted on one side or the other of consciousness. Even during the day, images from his nightmare rose up unbidden: the walls of Conference Room J wavering in the dim green light; Bill winking lewdly at his daughter and making paper airplanes that skittered to life across the surface of the table like insects; the grim set of his father’s jaw as he turned away from Lyle, refusing to answer when Lyle begged him to say what he had done wrong.

  His father, while he was alive, had indeed been a taciturn man, a trait Lyle realized he had probably inherited. But he was fairly certain his father would approve of the life he had made. Partner in a blue-chip firm, two kids tucked away in private colleges, a three-car garage stocked with German-made autos—Lyle could tick off a long list of possessions and accomplishments. Membership at Overlake Golf and Country. A Patek Philippe chronograph with the gold strap. The body fat ratio of a twenty-nine-year-old. Lyle stared out the window of his office, watching a gull wheel and scream through the dishwater sky. He tried to recall if he had once felt pleasure in any of it.

  He was escaping to the elevator one evening. The buzz of approaching helicopters was at his back and when he turned, Chad Rathburn’s face swam into view, magnified as though through aquarium glass. “Just the man I’m looking for,” Lyle heard, before Chad’s words dissolved again into a thwapping drone. Lyle cowered in mute terror, watching Chad’s lips move and nodding repeatedly to mime comprehension. He waited to see if Chad’s expression would darken into disapproval. After a gluey stretch of minutes, though, Chad merely clapped him on the back, a sadistic grin peeling open his face, and, turning on his heel, barked gleefully back down the hall. Perhaps, Lyle thought, no one noticed the change in him because there was nothing to notice. He tried to remember if his life had been different before.

  He wanted to tell Jen about the nightmare, about his fears that he was a dead man, but after that first morning when he had blurted out his terror, he could never find an appropriate moment to bring it up. Often, he would arrive home to find an aluminum tray of Guiltless Gourmet sweating on the kitchen counter, next to a note reminding him of her book club or an appointment with the massage therapist. Weekends were penciled solid with charity auctions or small get-togethers celebrating the birthdays and anniversaries of friends or one of the kids home from school. But even when they were alone together, he found it difficult to straddle the years of their habitual exchanges and confess to something so hugely awkward. One night while they were sitting in front of the television, he made an attempt. They were watching what Lyle supposed must be a situation comedy because at regular intervals the vapid chatter was interrupted by bursts of staccato laughter. The hollowness of the laughter chilled him, and he imagined an invisible throng of the damned guffawing and chuckling on cue. He glanced over at Jen and said, “Do you ever wonder if maybe everyone else is just pretending to have a good time?”

  “Hmm?” Jen was scratching items onto and off a list in her lap.

  “Are you happy, Jen?”

  “Of course,” she answered absently. Then her pen paused over the list and she raised her eyes over the rims of her reading glasses. Lyle thought he saw a glint of apprehension.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe it’s nothing. I just haven’t been feeling like my old self. I can hardly drag myself through the day. I had this nightmare, Jen. I was in hell….” He lapsed into silence, exhausted by the effort of wrenching out so
many words.

  Jen’s features relaxed into mild solicitude. “Maybe you should get Dr. Fiedler to give you something to help you sleep. If you’re not getting your rest, that can color your whole outlook.”

  Usually Lyle had the deli downstairs send up a club on dry toast, but one afternoon he told himself that what he needed was some fresh air. Shuffling through the chill drizzle, his steps turned down the hill toward the waterfront. He found himself at a tiny park, really just a square of pavement wedged between the piers, with two benches occupied by sleeping winos and a bronze plaque commemorating some founding fathers. Lyle stood at the iron railing and looked out at the bay and the sky, a single gray curtain of water. Already, the afternoon was so dim that the ferries lumbering in and out of the mist were lit up and glowing. As a boy, Lyle had aspired to become a ship’s captain, but his knee-buckling seasickness had put the kibosh on that idea. It had never occurred to him until just this moment that he might have worked the ferries trolling the calm inland waters of Puget Sound. He wondered if it was too late for such a thing, maybe not captaining, but working the decks perhaps. He could imagine himself dressed in a heavy work vest and boots, waving cars onto the deck and shoving wooden blocks under their front tires, casting the thick lines ashore, sipping on a cup of scalding coffee and whistling as he watched the skyline pull away behind him. He could also imagine Jen’s consternation and the ridicule of everyone he knew.

  But he might board a ferry anyway, if only as a passenger. Head across the water to the Olympic Mountains on the far side. It would be peaceful to go to sleep on one of those shrouded peaks, to freeze to death in a pillow of snow. He might take a ferry out to the peninsula, drive until he found a mountain, and then hike the rest of the way in. But he felt too lethargic to make the effort. He looked down at the oily slick of water beyond the railing, the paper cups and brown froth that slopped against the pilings, and briefly considered hoisting himself over the side. Even if he succeeded in killing himself, though (and this seemed unlikely given that the surface was only a few feet below and he was a strong swimmer), he greatly feared that it wouldn’t end his torment. After all, he was already dead. “That boat’s already sailed, Lyle. I thought you grasped at least that much.” Turning from the water, he trudged uphill toward the office. A ferry horn bellowed mournfully, sadder than a train’s whistle.