Although his neck was beginning to ache, he moved cautiously across the room to the shelf where the records were kept. The third album on the left towards the bottom was the original cast recording of Annie Get Your Gun. He admitted the music was dated and silly but he liked it none the less. There was, after all, no business like show business. He was living proof of that. He executed an awkward pirouette, took a healthy swallow of wine, and felt for the record like a blind man reading Braille. He fumbled with the cover and then with the machine. A few minutes later he was moving his arms in time to the tune as if to imitate enthusiastic singing. He did not remove the glass from his forehead.
She was beginning to find the sight of his Adam’s apple a bit disconcerting, but positioned as she was, in a room with staircases at every possible exit, she was unable to remove herself from the somewhat uncomfortable scene. She wondered if turning her wheelchair to face the wall would be interpreted as a violent gesture. She decided that, at the very least, it would appear discourteous. She began instead to sing halfheartedly along with the song. “Your favourite uncle died at dawn,” she sang quietly. “Top of that your Ma and Pa have parted / you’re broken-hearted / but you go on,” she continued. And as she continued his acrobatics seemed charming again, even the lurches. Such is the mysterious power of even the mildest form of participation.
He thought about the ceiling. When he was balancing it filled the entire sphere of his peripheral vision. The ceiling, he decided, was to him now what the floor had been at dancing school; the floor where he had watched his shoes collide with the patent leather attached to the feet of the girls in the class. They who were so much more graceful than he, they who were so much taller. From then on he attributed most of his problems with women to an inability to keep his feet in places where patent leather wasn’t. It had soured every relationship and chipped away at his confidence until he had avoided dancing girls altogether. And then one day he had discovered the lady in the wheelchair, and slowly he had begun to dance again, and not only to dance but to balance.
She thought about the hospital and how there was no music there; just the public address system constantly uttering the monotonous names of doctors. There weren’t any balancers either. Not unless you took into consideration those few unsteady individuals who had recently been released from crutches. They had practised a kind of delicate, fumbling dance, as if their very bodies were as fragile as the glass this man carried on his forehead. They should have had some music, she concluded in retrospect, while listening to the tune of her own vocal cords increase in volume.
He began to hear her song above the strings and trumpets of the recording. It sounded small and feeble, but it was there none the less. My goodness, she knows the words, he thought as he performed another lurching pirouette. He bent his knees beside the table, refilled his glass, quickly drank the contents, and filled it again. “There’s no people like show people,” he heard her warble in a voice that seemed to be getting stronger and then, “they smile when they are low.” He cracked his knuckles once or twice to show her that balancing wasn’t the only thing that he did well.
By now there was no doubt in her mind that she liked the song. There was also no doubt in her mind that she liked singing the song. Even his Adam’s apple was no longer an unpleasant sight when she was singing. In fact, it began to resemble the cheerful bouncing ball of a sing-along film. “Even with a turkey that you know will fold, you might be stranded out in the cold,” she sang with great vitality. As her mind discovered rhythm her hands beat time on the leather armrests of her wheelchair. She moved everything she could; her mouth, her forehead, her shoulders, her eyebrows, her arms, her stomach. She thought it was a shame that she couldn’t tap her patent leather shoes. Just after she had shouted “next day on your dressing room they’ve hung a star” and was about to bellow “let’s go on with the show,” his glass fell to the floor.
The next morning he was gone. This was no surprise to her. He was always gone the next morning. Gone, gone, gone. She counted the stains on her one-hundred-percent-wool rug … ten … no, eleven now. The most recent pool was a deeper, richer crimson than the rest, not having had the benefit of time to soften it. She was unable to understand why he had wept when his glass tumbled to the floor the previous evening. Surely not out of consideration for the carpet. Compositionally, in fact, this particular spill was rather well placed and enhanced the general scheme. He’ll get over it, she decided. He always did, and as far as she could gather, he always would.
Then she noticed the shoes. He was gone but his shoes were not. They lay, under the piano, where he had so casually tossed them just before he started balancing. You could tell that they had been abandoned. The laces looked tangled, confused, miserable. The tongues lolled obscenely like those of hanged men. One shoe lay on its side and looked as injured and pathetic as an animal that has recently been struck by a car. The other sat bolt upright as if listening for its master’s voice. How on earth, she wondered, did he ever get home?
Beyond her window lay a fresh, consistent inch of snow. It must have fallen while she was sleeping. It covered the lawns and the sidewalks. It covered the roofs and the roads. Although it was a cloudy day, reflected white light created the illusion of sunshine and brightened the interior of her home. It added a cheerful overtone to the spectacle of the deserted shoes.
His car had made tracks in the snow. The tracks moved out of the driveway, arced briefly, and advanced toward the end of the street. The long scars they made on the white surface of the road allowed bits of the asphalt to show through—indicating that this was not a cold, definite snow, but one that was likely to disappear by mid-afternoon. She thought that, perhaps, its only function was to remind her of the season and to illustrate the fact of the man’s departure: the empirical proof of something she had learned long ago through experience. A kind of resignation settled over her spirit.
Then, as she was about to turn from the window to begin her day, something familiar caught her eye. Pressed into the snow, which lay on the pathway leading from her door to her driveway, were two, long, continuous lines. They might have been made by two children riding bicycles side by side in the snow. They might have been made by a sled. They might even have been made by a baby carriage. But she knew, as surely as she had walked across the room to the window, that they had been made, early that morning, by a departing wheelchair.
She pirouetted once on her patent leather shoes. Then she danced joyfully into the kitchen to make her breakfast. Later that day she would skip to the supermarket to buy a spray can filled with rug shampoo. But not until she’d taken his shoes to the Salvation Army.
Dreams
As might be expected, her wedding-night dreams were both weird and eventful, taking her in and out of countries that she didn’t even know existed. She would later attribute these flights of fancy to the after-effects of the food served at the reception. But that night the dreams gave her no time to ponder the reasons for their arrival. They just kept happening, one after another, until the one about the wheelchairs woke her up, shouting.
But not in fear, or at least not from any worry about her safety. She had felt, in fact, during the course of the dream, remarkably detached, as if she had been watching a play in which she had only one line; a line that was spoken from the wings. But when it came time for her to speak that line she was aware, even in the dream, that it came from some other, surer part of her brain, from those same heretofore-unrecognized countries.
“Don’t forget your seatbelts! Don’t forget your seatbelts!” she cried, waking both John and herself.
“Seatbelts!” he said. “What seatbelts?”
She confessed her dream. All the men she had known in her relatively short life had been presented to her in series, like credits at the end of a film. They were all in wheelchairs, but such wheelchairs! Suspended on thin strong ropes they gave their occupants the opportunity to swing back and forth against a clear blue sky. The men involved had lo
oked to her like strange trapeze artists or happy preschool children on playground swings. They were having, it appeared, a wonderful time. Then for reasons unknown even to herself, the cautionary business of the seatbelts had grabbed her vocal cords.
Having no personal use for interpretation of any kind John pronounced the dream absurd and therefore boring. She agreed; they laughed and fell easily back to sleep.
The next morning they jogged two miles along the beach. She was always surprised by the response that the sight of a naked pair of male legs awoke in her. It was honest visual pleasure combined with admiration for a supple functioning form bereft of excess. Male excess was distributed elsewhere, in the face, around the middle, but rarely in the legs. They were holy territory, uninhabited by fat cells. They were perfectly fabricated systems designed, perhaps, to carry primitive hunters quietly and swiftly through some complicated forest. Now they carried John across the sand, through the wind, and along the frothy edges of the sea. Later, in the city, they would carry him through the labyrinth of street and subway to an office every weekday for the rest of his life. She watched the large muscle at the back of his thigh flex and relax with the rhythm of running.
Over lunch, which was served on the terrace of the hotel, they discussed the gifts they had received and divided them into three categories: lovely, passable, and impossible. Yellow was her favourite colour, so all of the yellow paraphernalia slipped easily into the “lovely” category. The steadily increasing profusion of yellow objects had been, in fact, a great comfort to her in the week or so preceding the wedding. She imagined the one-bedroom apartment they had chosen filling up with radiant sunlight like the gold-leaf backgrounds she had seen in old paintings. She pictured herself bent over a sewing machine stitching yellow gingham curtains while stew bubbled in the yellow enamel pot on the stove. There was also in this picture an image of John, threading his way through the subway system, coming home, on his long lithe legs, to her. At night, she imagined, they would rub themselves all over with the gift of giant yellow bath towels, just before they slipped between the gift of flowered yellow stay-press sheets.
She thought of John’s legs rising without a ripple from the yellow bath mat at his feet.
In the category of “impossible” they placed such items as Blue Mountain pottery and salt and pepper shakers with the words salty and peppy burned into them.
In “passable” they placed such items as electric frying pans and waffle irons.
This kind of classification game was one they played often. It had the twofold positive effect of supplying them with conversational material and providing them with a well-ordered private universe. Where categories were concerned they agreed on everything: from music to cocktails, from politics to comic strips, from airports to laundromats. Their value systems were as assured and as tidy as the Holiday Inn at which they were staying. It was all very comforting.
Games notwithstanding, they were neither of them children. He had practised law for a full five years and had, just recently, been offered a partnership in the firm. In his usual practical, deliberate way he had waited a week or so before saying yes to the proposition. It was the same week that she had handed in her resignation to the paper, giving marriage as her excuse. She felt little regret at the prospect of abandoning her career. Although it had been the job she wanted, the job she had studied for, it had quickly passed through a phase of novelty and into the hazy realm of habit—like most of her affairs. A few days before she left, the girls in the office held a small shower for her. A lot of the accumulated yellow objects were a result of this event.
A combination of the beer they had consumed with lunch and their first morning of strong sunshine had made them feel sleepy. They decided to return to the room for a rest. The desk clerk smiled benignly as they passed through the lobby, his face altering to the odd grimace of a man barely able to suppress a wink. He was aware of their honeymoon status. She remembered passing through similar lobbies of similar hotels with men she had not been married to. The desk clerks there had remained tactfully aloof, the situation being less easy to classify.
After they made love John rolled over and lit a cigarette. Some of the smoke became trapped in the few beams of sun that had managed to penetrate the heavy curtains.
“Why wheelchairs?” he asked. “Why were they in wheelchairs?”
“Who?” she replied drowsily from the other side of the bed.
“Your boyfriends, your boyfriends in the dream.”
“Who knows?” she said, falling asleep. “Who ever knows in dreams?”
Later in the afternoon, when they awakened from their nap, John would decide to go for a swim. She would decide to sit on the balcony and write thank-you notes to her friends, the generous donors of “the lovely, the passable, and the impossible.” “Dear Lillian,” she would begin. Then something would capture her attention. It would be the sight of John walking down across the beach towards the water, walking on his beautiful spare legs. With his back turned he would be unaware that she was watching him. He would become smaller and smaller until, at last, he would collapse into the water. She would study the predictable repetitious motions of the waves surrounding him until, with a kind of slow horror, she would realize that the organized behaviour of the Atlantic was what the rest of her life would be, one week following another, expectations fulfilled in easy categories, and the hypnotic monotony of predictable responses. Oh, my God, she would think briefly—why does he seem to be having such a good time?
Then she would dismiss this and all other related thoughts from her mind forever and continue her thank-you note.
“Dear Lillian,” she would write, “John and I just love Blue Mountain pottery.”
Charity
When she arrived at the hospital they put her in a wheelchair. Under the circumstances this seemed somewhat absurd. Certainly there was something wrong with her. Yes, something was definitely wrong with her. But nothing, as far as she knew, was wrong with her legs. At least not yet. But then she remembered. In hospitals they always put you in a wheelchair. Regardless of what the problem was, if you could still sit up they put you in a wheelchair. Probably to assure you that you were sick, even if you weren’t.
But she was sick. Just that morning she had announced to him, between sobs, “Harold, I’m sick,” and then, when he didn’t respond, “I’m sick, Harold. Put me in the hospital!”
After that he had sighed, put down the newspaper, and walked across the room to the telephone. She had continued to sob, her face buried in her hands, but she had left a tiny crack between her fingers so that she could see what he was doing. He was fumbling through his address book looking for the phone number of the doctor.
“God, he’s slow!” she mumbled to no one in particular.
Eventually, and on the kindly advice of the family physician, he had taken her to the hospital. But let it be noted that he took his sweet time about it. It seemed to her that they had driven around each block six times before advancing to the next. She was probably right. He often played little tricks like this when he was taking her to the hospital. He hated taking her to the hospital. He thought it was ridiculous. She was perfectly aware of his feelings but she was also aware that they got there none the less. So there she sat in the wheelchair and there he stood at the admitting desk yawning over the same old tedious forms. She gathered together all the loathing she could muster and aimed it at the indentation just beneath his skull and in the centre of his shaved neck. To her amusement he brought his left hand up and scratched that very spot, just as he might have had an insect landed there.
She didn’t like him much and that was the truth. He didn’t like her much either, but then, what did he like? Certainly not his job at the Kleaning Cloth factory, which was boring and repetitious; certainly not his children who had, mercifully, all grown up and moved away; certainly not his dog who bit him daily, on his departure for and his arrival from the Kleaning Cloth factory, and certainly not these idiotic form
s he had to fill out every single time he brought her to the hospital. He also didn’t like the itchy feeling he got at the base of his neck each time he turned his back in her presence. The terrible truth about all these things was that they were, in his eyes, ridiculous as well. Not only was she ridiculous but everything connected to her was ridiculous: her tears were ridiculous, her meals were ridiculous, and whatever the hell was wrong with her was ridiculous. Her ridiculous doctors, in their ridiculous, kindly wisdom, could not bring themselves to tell him what was, in fact, wrong with her. Finally he stopped asking, and the minute he stopped asking he stopped caring.
Her suitcase, he knew, was filled with ridiculous negligées, which she had ordered, over the years, from the back sections of movie magazines and comic books kept especially for her hospital experiences. He handed this precious cargo to a nurse who had appeared, like a long-awaited taxi, around the corner. Then he turned to leave. Just as he was about to enter the revolving glass doors he heard the nurse chirp to his wife, “And how are we today?” He thought this was a ridiculous question to ask anyone who sat sobbing in a wheelchair.
When she was certain that he had gone she stopped sobbing. Soon she was gliding through green halls, in and out of elevators, past rooms filled with fragrant flowers. She looked forward, with great pleasure, to her lunch which she knew would arrive on silent rubber wheels and would include fluorescent pink Jello topped with Dream Whip. Once in her room she picked out a fluorescent pink negligée to wear, knowing that it would match the Jello. Then she slipped between the delicious, starched white sheets and relaxed against the smooth, firm fibre of the hospital mattress. Let the bastard pack his own Twinkies, she said to herself just before she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
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