by Robert Ward
Peter Cross wheeled his patient, James Thomas, out of the operating room. Thomas, a forty-eight-year-old insurance actuary, had just successfully come through a colostomy, and though Peter had given him a shot of morphine just as the operation ended, there was little doubt that James Thomas was going to be in a great deal of pain when he awoke. He thought of the same man just the other day, sitting up in his room, talking about getting back on his local bar’s basketball team … “the over forty league,” he had laughed.
Peter stared down at him … at his huge, hulking body … the kind of kid who used to scare him on the playground, who punched him because he couldn’t climb the ropes in school, the kind of kid he had wanted to be. He kept his hand over Thomas’s chin to keep the airway patent. He could feel Thomas’s breath on his palm—yes, the breath was there, jerking but there—and Peter felt as though he were being drawn out of himself, into Thomas’s body. He was staring right at the wound, the lacerations, and he was surrounded by Thomas’s membranes; the blood pulsated in Peter’s ears, and he felt something happening inside him, the Space crying out, wanting to be filled. He looked over at the nurse on duty … He saw the surgeon … Carpenter, waiting for them.
“How’s he doing?” Carpenter said.
“Fine,” Peter said, amazed that his voice sounded normal, for he could feel it inside him, swirling around like a screaming, whispering snow.
“Time to wake up, Mr. Thomas,” Peter said as they wheeled him into his place behind the curtain.
Thomas didn’t stir.
“Come on now, Jim,” Peter said, lightly slapping his face. “Time to wake up.”
Now Thomas began to come out of it a bit.
“He’ll be fine,” Peter said. “Just fine.”
“Sure,” Carpenter said. “Sure … okay, I’ve got another one right away … This is sheer lunacy. Can you handle this, Peter?”
“No problem,” Peter said.
Carpenter smiled and nodded good-bye, and Peter stood there looking down at Thomas.
“Yes,” Peter said. “You’re going to be fine … Fine …”
They were all around him—just outside the curtain. He reached into his pocket, felt for the syringe … Funny, he wondered why he had stuck it in his coat after the operation. The feeling wasn’t even conscious then … He smiled at the idea … He was getting his responses directly from the patients now. Cross rubbed the syringe between his thumb and forefinger. He took it out … hearing the chatter of the nurses and other doctors in the Recovery Room. He stared down at the syringe. Curare, a good, quick shot. He held Thomas by the arm.
“Has anybody seen Peter Cross?”
Peter jammed the syringe back into his pocket. He felt a cold sweat break out on his face.
“In there? Oh, thanks …”
He breathed in deeply and started to tap Thomas lightly on the side of the face.
“Okay, Jim. Time to wake up. Okay, Jim.”
“Well, hello.”
Peter looked up and saw Debby Hunter staring at him. She was dressed in a pair of tight Levis and a pink sweater, and had her sunglasses on top of her blond hair. She looked smashing, and he felt unable to speak.
“How’s he doing?” Debby said.
“Fine,” Peter said. “He’s doing just fine.”
“Terrific,” Debby said. “How are you?”
“Okay,” Peter said. His mouth was dry, and he thought of her voice at 3:00A.M…. He felt weak.
“Listen, Peter,” she said. “I don’t ordinarily do this kind of thing …”
She laughed and sucked in her breath.
“No?” Peter said, managing a smile.
“God, that’s the oldest line in the world. But it’s true, I really don’t ordinarily ask a man out. I like to think they’ll ask me. But … anyway … I know you are a big Poe fan, and there is this Poe revival up at the Eighty-Sixth Street Cinema. I think it’s two pretty good ones. Pit and the Pendulum and The Premature Burial.”
Peter stared back down at his patient, who was showing signs of coming to.
“There … that’s good, Jim. That’s good.”
“He’s okay?” Debby said.
“Yeah,” Peter said, in a voice so upbeat it surprised him. “He’s okay and I’m off … and, ah … I’ve got a very attractive date tonight.”
Debby sighed.
“Well, I tried,” she said.
Peter walked toward her and smiled.
“So if you’ll just go down to the cafeteria for about ten minutes while I scrub up … we can get going.”
Debby smiled and squeezed his arm.
“Terrific,” she said. “But if I faint, you’ve got to promise to bring me around.”
Peter laughed, turned James Thomas over to the Recovery Room nurse, and sat down at the little table to finish his tally of the drugs he had used during surgery and the amount of blood lost. As he wrote, he looked over at Debby, who was talking to another patient. God, she was beautiful … long and lean … and she had asked him out. He reached his hand into his pocket, ran his thumb and forefinger over the syringe. Then he got up, motioned to her that he’d be down in a minute, and hurried on down the hall to the locker room.
9
“God, I’m sorry,” Debby said as they left the theater.
But for Peter Cross, there was nothing at all to forgive. They had come into the theater too late for the first feature, but The Premature Burial had been exciting. Not that it was really any good. He agreed with Debby completely, the production was not much better than an old B-movie. But the scenes in the casket, the look on Mil-land’s face as they shoveled him into the earth, had contained real moments of genius, Peter thought. More important, seeing the images made his own impressions all the more vivid. He took from the scenes what he wanted, automatically and unconsciously filtering out the rest. The experience had been thrilling from beginning to end. And her presence there beside him … that, too, had been thrilling, though he didn’t know if he could tell her any of this.
They found themselves on the corner of 86th and Lexington, staring through the hazy, drizzling rain at the traffic lights and the pink marquee of the shop across the street.
“Well,” Peter said, “I’m famished. How about you? Would you like to get something to eat?”
“Yes,” she said, “I would. I’m hungry too.”
They crossed the street and Peter started to go in the coffee shop but suddenly changed his mind. He knew a little French place on Third Avenue. He hadn’t ever been there, but he had heard Dr. Beauregard talking about it one day. It was a crazy impulse, not like him at all. Ordinarily he paid very little attention to food, but tonight was different.
“Look,” he said suddenly. “Let’s get a cab. I know a much better place.”
“Sure, Peter,” she said happily.
He stepped out into the street to hail the Checker, and she took his arm.
The place was called Ça Va, and they found themselves a table in the back, beneath some hanging blue flowers. She smiled and took off her coat.
They ordered quiche and white wine, and Peter found himself talking. It happened suddenly. Right in the midst of his wondering if he could talk, he simply began, and he found that she was listening, really listening. The impact of this was too much for him, and he talked on.
“You know,” he said, “it wasn’t really bad. I mean they tried hard to capture the whole ambience. You were right, I did enjoy the sets and the costumes. They had things right. And that scene where he was buried, that was well done. It was fun for me.”
“See,” she said, “life isn’t all chemicals and gases and dying patients.”
Peter went on as if he hadn’t heard her.
“But they missed the point with Poe, you know. I’ve never seen a production that really got the point at all.”
“What is the point?” she said. “I thought it was simply to scare the hell out of you.”
“Do you really think so?” Peter said.
“Maybe there is more there,” she said, running her hand through her hair and smiling at him.
He smiled back.
Now he seemed positively carnivorous, and she realized that to Peter her intelligence was a measure of her sensuality. He could never go for a dumb broad just for the sex. And she found herself wanting to be as smart as he wanted her to be.
“There is a kind of sensuality to everything Poe writes,” she said, sipping her wine and smiling at him. “I know that was mixed up with it … the tremendous excitement I felt as a child reading his stories. It was an excitement that seemed to come from deep inside of me.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “Yes … that’s exactly how I saw it.”
He was excited now … he couldn’t help himself. Here was a girl—no, a woman with brains—and the sensitivity to understand his feelings toward Poe. She had the same feelings herself … God, he wanted to blurt things out to her as she sat across from him looking so fresh and perfect. The way the candlelight danced over her skin. Such soft skin … he wanted to put his hand across the table and touch her face, but he had to control himself. Still, she was smiling now … and his eyes dropped to her full breasts, which were made all the more appealing by her tight sweater. But it wasn’t merely physical—no, it was that she understood, she really did … he could teach her the rest … maybe he would risk it …
“You have experienced him,” Peter said. “You’ve really felt what’s there … the way I used to feel it when I read the stories to my mother …”
He stopped. He had never told anyone about that. He knew he shouldn’t go on. But perhaps she could understand, and he stared at her breasts again … until he became embarrassed by the length of his silence.
“Tell me about your mother,” she said.
“Well … we lived in this row house in Baltimore. My father had a sign company … he wanted to be an artist … and my mother acted for a while … she was quite beautiful, actually … I mean she was a beautiful person … not merely physically beautiful … she read and wrote poetry … but they had very little money … and then she got sick … cancer. She was only in her early forties, but she looked much younger. She seemed as young … and as fresh … as you. I mean that’s how I remember her …”
She smiled and drank her wine. Her face reflected in the crystal, and then he was talking, talking compulsively … she had such luminous blue eyes … he thought that Poe himself would have loved to see such eyes … and it had been so long since he talked to anyone about anything that mattered.
And when he was finished, Debby was smiling at him so warmly that he found himself basking in her friendliness, her loveliness, and he placed his hand on hers.
“Peter,” she said softly. “I feel very close to you … very close … Oh, I shouldn’t say that.”
“No,” he said. “It’s all right. I understand. I feel … the same way.”
“It’s just that I’ve been so lonely,” she said. “I’ve met so many people like … like that imbecile Harry Gardner … I know what you mean. It is almost as if they have had something cut out of them. All they can respond to are bright colors … football games … comic books … they seem all lively on the outside, but underneath you can see them.”
“The dead soul beneath the living skin,” Peter said.
“Yes,” Debby said. “But you’re not like that. You’re an extraordinary person.”
He found himself drawn to her so overwhelmingly that he wanted to hug her right across the table. Then he felt fear, but he told himself that it was all right … she was exquisite … perhaps since he had finished with Lorraine Bell he was more in tune with others who could share his own unique way of life. But he would have to take her along slowly—very slowly. Still, God, she was there, smiling at him, almost begging him.
“You live nearby?”
“Yes, Peter.”
“I wish … the night didn’t have to end,” he said.
“It doesn’t,” Debby said, taking his hand as they got up from the table.
“No,” he smiled, helping her on with her coat. “Why should it be over. There’s no reason for that at all.”
As they walked through the lobby of Debby’s building, Cross felt a terrible tightening in his stomach, a strange seizure of panic and near hysteria. What was he doing? Perhaps she had hypnotized him in some way—not with her mind—no, he was certain he was smarter than she, but with her body, her eyes, her breasts, and her legs. He saw her legs as she walked a couple of steps in front of him. Perfect, so damned perfect. He wanted her. He wanted her badly, but there was something happening inside of him, a voice telling him to stop right now. Beware. He tried looking away from her at the tiled walls. There was a mosaic of a man and a woman walking through a field of grass. God, it was tacky, tacky and cheap. He followed her dutifully, like a small child, to the elevator, and again he was overcome with the sensation that he wanted to bolt, but she looked at him and smiled, and he found himself smiling back. He felt the warmth spread through him.
She held his hand. The elevator arrived. Two men with blow-dried hair, tight red-and-blue body shirts, and huge gold link necklaces got off and brushed by him. He felt the sickness return. Why would she live here if she wasn’t one of those kind of people herself? Wasn’t it obvious? She was just another one of—what was it Harry called them? Hitter Chicks. Yeah, the Hitter Chicks, exactly like the ones who hung out in the café across the street. Only she was better at it, had put on a face filled with upstate shyness and innocence, and he had fallen for it, told her all the stuff about Poe, about his mother. Things he hadn’t ever meant to tell anyone. Now he was trapped in her apartment.
He began to feel sweat pouring from his neck and a grime-and-gut-wrenching slime in his groin. She had taken advantage of his loneliness. He wouldn’t forgive her.
The elevator stopped and they stepped into a narrow hallway painted with bright yellow flowers. Tacky. Horrible. Why hadn’t he bolted? But he kept walking with her, a step behind. He kept his eyes on her ass and her neck. God, she had a beautiful neck. Even now, raging with fear and resentment, he knew that he was going to go with her. He had to.
“Here we are,” Debby said, slipping her key into the lock.
She pushed open the door, walked assuredly through the dark room, and switched on the light.
“This is it,” she said, smiling and opening her arms as if to offer him the room.
Cross looked around. There was a feeling of warmth in the apartment unlike his own black-and-white-and-chrome. Debby had fixed the place up with a warm blue couch, an old-fashioned bookcase, two very comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs with deep blue corduroy covers. Hanging from the walls were plants, and in the fireplace were real logs. On the floor was a very tasteful Indian rug. It had a design on it—a cherry tree harboring two peacocks. So she did have taste—eclectic taste, but taste, sensibility. Perhaps he wasn’t wrong to confide in her. He had to calm himself, not dwell on things.
“Would you like a drink?” she said.
“Yes. I’ll have a Scotch.”
“Johnny Walker Red?”
“Fine.”
“I think I’ll have a Campari and soda.”
She walked around to the kitchen, and again he found himself following her. But he stopped at the bookcase. There were a couple of novels, mostly Book-of-the- Month Club stuff, but there was also The Collected Illustrated Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. He took out the book and looked through it. The pages looked fresh, unmarked.
“Did you just buy this?” he asked.
“Yes, Peter,” she said. “I just did. And if you want to know if I just bought it because I met you, the answer is partly yes
and partly no.”
She smiled seductively, warmly, and handed him a drink. Then she went and sat down on the couch. He followed her there. He felt foolish. He wondered if she knew that he felt as though he were following her around like a puppy. God, if she did, he couldn’t stand the embarrassment of it.
“I mean I do like you, Peter. I sensed it that day we had lunch. And tonight I’ve had such a wonderful time. I have to admit that liking you was what prompted me to buy Poe. But it wasn’t only that. It was what you said the first day about the experience. I had repressed that whole part of my childhood, the terror of being young and insecure, of feeling so out of it all the time. The Poe thing had something to do with that too. So after I talked to you, I got the book because it reminded me of things I had forgotten.”
Though he didn’t show it, Peter felt astonished. She was just about the best-looking woman he’d ever seen, and here she was, talking about her horrible childhood, of being “out of it.” He didn’t trust her. It was scarcely possible. Yet she seemed honest.
“I would have thought,” he said, holding his drink rather stiffly, “that anyone who looks like you do would have had an entirely satisfactory childhood.”
“Oh?” she said. “Thank you for the compliment, but it was murder. You see, I came from a working class section of Syracuse. I don’t know if you’ve ever been upstate, but you might as well be in Alabama or some place like that. There is tremendous ignorance there, a provinciality. People don’t like little girls to be smart. And I didn’t look like a girl at all, or at least I didn’t look like what the ads tell us teen-aged girls are supposed to look like. I had buck teeth, fixed by braces. I had bad skin, which fortunately didn’t scar. And I had big breasts on a small body. The boys used to grab at me and then laugh because I screamed. I was good at science, I was good at math, but in those days it was considered ridiculous to even think about medical school. Besides, my parents couldn’t begin to afford it, and I didn’t do that well in my other subjects. I didn’t do well because I was upset a lot of the time. I couldn’t concentrate. I don’t know why I’m telling you this …”