The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  Was it his imagination or did the officers’ eyes harden?

  “If you are uncomfortable with a search…,” the second-in-command said.

  “There is nothing out of order here, as far as I can see,” David said apologetically.

  “That’s okay,” the front man said, shutting his notebook and tucking it away. “If you notice anything unusual, people loitering, that sort of thing, give us a call.” He handed David a card. “The phone number is on here.”

  When they were gone, David reset the security system and went back to his house. He rummaged through the blue bin for yesterday’s local paper, which he had not had the courage to read, and found the article almost immediately: Mugging at Santa Monica Place. That must be it. Security officers were called when an employee of Macy’s found a woman unconscious on the floor of the ladies’ room. He skimmed the article. Wallet, credit cards missing. No arrest. Victim has no recollection of the attack. There were no obvious signs of physical trauma. Doctors suspect that the assailant drugged his victim.

  David dropped the paper back into the bin. He was no longer in the mood for taking his Karmann Ghia out for a spin. He needed something more effective to cope with the anxiety puddling in his stomach like acid rain. The bad news had jumped the barrier of the TV screen and gone 3D. He could no longer confine it to the media. There was trouble next door. It was making its way through the hedge, breaking into his house, and slamming his body with a bone-deep impact. The news of the mugging left David knocked out and breathless. He slumped into his easy chair in the sunroom and took up an issue of the Times Literary Supplement, hoping the reviews were dry enough to mop up the inner mess.

  I MUST GO and visit Laura in hospital, he thought. It was the decent thing to do, an extension of the duties he had taken on, like looking after Nancy’s house and pet. No, not a duty. Don’t kid yourself, David. You want to see Laura, you are desperate to see her, talk to her, touch her. His desire for Laura was so strong it ripped through the weariness of his depression. What was he waiting for? He was waiting for the feeling of unease to go away. There was something distasteful about Laura sharing mental space with hospitals, with images of surgeons in green scrubs and staff wearing Crocs, the plastic bedside chairs, the steel contraptions with gauges and tubes, the fluorescent lights, the smell of disinfectant. Clean was good, of course, but sterility was disheartening. No, don’t lie to yourself, David. It wasn’t the sterility or the IV tubes or the disinfectant. It wasn’t any of those things that made him uneasy about visiting Laura. It was the memory of Jerry lying in a hospital bed in that same Medical Center.

  “The fact is, I am dying,” Jerry said, looking up at him from the bed, white face on white pillow. The dark circles under his eyes gave him a vulnerable softness, but his voice had a hard edge. “Let’s call a spade a spade, David,” he said hoarsely. Right. Let’s call a spade a spade. David’s objections to hospitals weren’t aesthetic. They were visceral. He didn’t want to walk through the lobby of the hospital, go up in the gurney-sized elevator, walk past the nurses’ station and be reminded of Jerry’s gaunt face and wasted body.

  I don’t want to get Laura mixed up in these memories, he thought. I don’t want to see her lying in a thin-sheeted bed jaundiced by neon light, with an ID bracelet on her wrist. I want to see her the way she was at Nancy’s party, her mouth a little petulant, holding herself very upright, hard and unyielding and tempting all at the same time.

  And what was he going to say to Laura when he got to the hospital, how was he going to explain his presence there? I came because Nancy told me to look after the house and its contents? The question of what to say to Laura put a stranglehold on him. For the next hour, he could not move. He sat rooted in the sunroom with the unfolded Times Literary Supplement on his knees weighing him down. He couldn’t pull his ass out of the chair or his foot off the floor. He had to give himself detailed orders, the kind you find in operating manuals. How to move your body and get from A to B, from his house to the hospital. Get out of the chair, David. March to the garage. Back out the car. Drive to the Medical Center. Park the car. He did, although the Karmann Ghia didn’t belong in a hospital parking lot. It was an insult to its beauty.

  Walking into the Medical Center, he had a sudden glimpse of himself reflected in the glass door, a man of no qualities with a polite half-smile on his face. That was what others saw, so unlike the David who suffered doubt, who was filled with angst and who procrastinated, who couldn’t rally his body or his spirit, the man who stayed in hiding. No, David kept a serene face. Who wants to put his raw and bloodied soul on display for all to see?

  He found Laura’s room, knocked, entered, allowed his eyes to move slowly upward from the vinyl floor past the first, empty bed, to the woman lying on the bed by the window, to her face. It was as bad as he had feared. She wasn’t Laura at all. Her complexion had gone from milky white to ashen. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones were protruding, giving her face a sharply sculpted look. The emaciated face, the shadowy eyes of a dying man. No! Her amber eyes weren’t shadowy. Don’t get those memories of Jerry mixed up with her. Still, he couldn’t deny it. Her eyes had lost their flintiness.

  “How are you, Laura?” he said. He had been afraid of that first meeting of their eyes, the first exchange of words, but his question came out natural after all, banal but natural.

  “I am fine, thank you. And how are you?” She didn’t sound natural. She looked dazed. Did she suffer from the same problem as David, was she in a video mash-up-confusion as well, trying to sort out the complexities of life? No, she was in worse shape than David. She sounded like someone reciting English for Beginners. The look in her eyes was blank, as if she couldn’t be bothered to remember him, didn’t want to recognize him.

  This was going to be even more awkward than he had feared. He pulled up a chair and sat down, uninvited. He couldn’t think of anything more to say. He was too dispirited by Laura’s stiffness and by the room itself, which tinkled with frozen time, the memory of Jerry, once fearless and a volcanic life force, suddenly silenced. David remembered how Jerry lay on the hospital bed, his long finely-tapering fingers resting on the blanket, no longer capable of gestures.

  David forced his attention back to the woman on the bed, Laura.

  “I read about the mugging in the local paper,” he said. “I wanted to see how you are doing.”

  She smiled at him wanly. “I’m on the mend,” she said. “The results of the toxicology tests have come back. It is xylene poisoning.”

  “What’s xylene?”

  “A type of solvent, but the doctors don’t know what to make of it.” They couldn’t explain how a mugger could overpower a person with xylene, she said. There was no quick way of administering it.

  Her accent was stronger than David remembered. She was dragging the words out, as if she wanted to make every syllable count. Was it the effect of toxic shock? A reversion to childhood, a throwback to the time when she came to the States, when English was a foreign language to her?

  “You are in touch with Zoltan?” he said.

  She shook her head. “I can’t get in touch with him. He is on a Nile cruise, I think, or maybe back in Cairo. I have lost the information. I don’t remember the details.”

  “I can help you with that,” he said. “Nancy left the contact information with me.”

  “Excuse me,” she said. “This is embarrassing, but I have forgotten your name. My memory is spotty, you know. It’s the effect of the toxins, the doctor says.”

  So it was toxic shock. That explained her vacant look.

  “I’m David,” he said. “Nancy’s neighbour. We met at the dinner party last week. Nancy told me you were going to Hungary and asked me to feed her cat until your return.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said quickly. “I did not make it to Hungary, as you can see. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, David. It feels dark in my brain.”


  Dark in her brain? Was that a metaphor, or was it that she couldn’t think of the right phrase? David felt sorry for her being stuck in some neurological limbo. He knew how it felt to be at a loss for words. Depression had that effect on him. The breakdown of his marriage, the death of Jerry, the world news — each catastrophe cut into his supply of vocabulary, curtailed his sentences, lengthened the pauses between words.

  “The last time I was in here, I came to see Jerry,” he said. “I still miss him. I imagine you do, too.”

  “Jerry?” she said, twitching her shoulders as if she wanted to shake off the name. “I do not want to talk of Jerry. I cannot.” She no longer looked helpless. A glint of the old Laura was back in her eyes, recalcitrant, pushing him away.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I brought up Jerry.” He was flustered. Why mention death to a convalescent? The empty bed beside Laura’s was bad enough. It, too, suggested a permanent absence.

  “I should be going,” he said. “I’m tiring you.” Again he felt he had said the wrong thing. He no longer knew what was appropriate. He wished he had the gift of chit-chat, for this occasion at least.

  He pushed back his chair.

  “Don’t go,” she said. “It is nice to have company. I am bored here, but everything is an effort. To read. To talk.”

  “I can imagine,” he said, settling back. “I guess I should do the talking.”

  He would have preferred the perfect accord of silence with its large space to think and imagine, but she said “Yes, talk to me,” and he obediently launched into conversation, brought out sentences of an indeterminate nature. He wished he could be gossipy and tell her tabloid crazy stuff, inane stories to make her smile, but he could think only of serious words, the kind that weigh a person down. He carried on nevertheless. It was clear that Laura wanted words, any words, to replenish her vocabulary, to make up for what the toxic shock had destroyed. She looked at him with concentrated attention, her lips slightly parted, expectant, taking in everything he said. She was grateful for every word, grateful when he offered to phone Zoltan on her behalf and come back the next day for another visit.

  “THAT’S BIZARRE,” Zoltan said when David reached him at his hotel in Cairo and told him of the mugging. David pictured him in a red T-shirt, the one he had been wearing in Nancy’s backyard, imagined him acting out shock, throwing up his hands, opening his eyes wide. There was static electricity on the line, and Zoltan’s voice came across the phone with an echo. Bizarre… Bizarre...

  “A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Zoltan said. “None of this would have happened if Laura had gone to Hungary as planned, if she hadn’t changed her mind at the last moment.”

  “What do you mean, ‘changed her mind’?” David said.

  There was a pause as Zoltan let the echo die down. “She phoned me from the airport and said she couldn’t go through with it. She was feeling panicky about seeing her mother. She didn’t tell you she cancelled the flight?”

  “No, I had no idea. I thought Laura had missed her flight because of the mugging. She didn’t say anything about cancelling her trip. She has no recollection of what happened on the day she was mugged.”

  “I’ll book the first available flight and get back to L.A.”

  “No need to change your plans,” David said quickly. “Everything is under control.” He gave Zoltan a quick rundown, medical bulletin style: The crisis point had passed. Laura’s condition was improving. She was on a sodium-free diet of carbohydrates and gaining weight. Gaps remained in her memory, and an odd stiffness in her language, but her blood count was up. The kidneys showed signs of recovery.

  “That’s good to know,” Zoltan said, “but I’d better get back.”

  “When were you supposed to come back?”

  “On Monday. Nancy and I were going to fly to Vienna tonight. I’d planned to stay with her for a couple of days.”

  “Well, then it’s not worth changing your arrangements. I can look after Laura until you are back.”

  “That’s too much trouble…”

  “No trouble at all.”

  David wanted to take care of Laura. He wasn’t sure of his motives. The pull Laura had on him was no longer erotic or romantic. It had turned into something more complicated, one of those messy human interactions that was hard to define.Maybe it was pity for Laura tangled up with memories of Jerry. Or maybe the afterglow of the attraction he had felt for Laura when he first met her and looked into her cat eyes had turned into sympathy for the diminished version of Laura in the hospital bed. He still felt the occasional lurch and tightening of the crotch when he looked at her, but the frisson was caused by a simulacrum, the woman at the party with NO written all over her face, who had given him a look of dismissal. The Laura at the hospital was different, softer. Illness had mellowed her and melted her reserve. The edge was gone from her voice. Perhaps they could be friends. He needed a friend. In any case, the hospital visits seemed to improve his mood. They got him out of the house, out of his slump.

  He went back to the Medical Center the next day and told her about his telephone conversation with Zoltan.

  “He was going to come back on the first available flight,” he said, “but I told him there was no need to change his plans. I’d look after things here until Monday. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said. “Let him have his holiday. He cannot help me here.”

  Right. Her father couldn’t help her. When you are no longer a child, can anyone help you?

  He patiently listened to Laura’s slow speech, her meticulously crafted sentences, phrases put together from the remnants of her memory.

  “They will discharge me on Saturday,” she said. “Dr. Mahler tells me I am well enough to leave the hospital.”

  “I’ll pick you up,” he said.

  “Thank you. That is very kind of you, but I could take a taxi.” Her voice was hollow, full of submerged vowels. She gave him a rueful look full of regrets, as if the mugging had been her fault and could have been avoided.

  “No, that’s okay,” he said quickly and repeated his offer. “I’ll pick you up. Do they want you back for checkups?”

  “I have one appointment for next week. They want to see how the medicine works. And Dr. Mahler says it is important to do mental rehab.” She choked on “rehab” as if she was unsure of the pronunciation. “I must talk, Dr. Mahler says. I must read books to bring back the language, but everything tires me out.”

  “Do you want me to read to you once you are home? We could make it a routine. A lesson a day, you know.”

  “Yes, I would like that. Perhaps we could read poetry. It is good to get back into the rhythm of the language.”

  On Saturday, he drove Laura home. She passed her fingertips over the leather interior of his Karmann Ghia and said, “Nice.” He had a sudden sense of intimacy, wanted to feel her fingertips on his arm, on his cheek, on his neck. She was very quiet, almost as if she had changed her mind and didn’t want to go home. Or didn’t want to go to her new home. Perhaps that was the problem.

  “This isn’t a good time for you to move,” David said.

  “Move?” she said. Perhaps she had forgotten the word or some of its connotations.

  “Move from your old place to Nancy’s guest house,” he said.

  “No, that is fine,” she said, “I need my own space. I was sharing an apartment with Zoltan, you know. Or have I told you already?”

  “No, you didn’t tell me.” He noticed she called her father “Zoltan.” Did therapists encourage offspring to call them by their first name to blur the paternal relationship and make it seem more like friendship? Or was it the other way round, and did their children opt for first names because they wanted to put distance between themselves and their therapeutic parent?

  “Could we stop somewhere to b
uy food?” Laura said. The illness had darkened her voice, given it a deep, almost hypnotic resonance. He rather liked the new timbre.

  At Vons, she wandered the aisles as if she had never been to a supermarket. She picked up a pomegranate, turned it in her hand, brought it up to her face — to smell it, to get a closer look? — and put it back. Her hand hovered over the grapes, withdrew. She trawled the dairy section, stopping, bending forward to read the labels. Did she need to refresh her memory about the names of everyday things?

  In line at the checkout, she keenly watched the transactions. In the parking lot, she looked on with alert eyes as he put the bags into the car. Every movement seemed a revelation to her. It was as if she had to relearn life.

  They pulled into Nancy’s driveway and walked through the gate to the cabana. He unlocked the door. She stood on the threshold and scanned the space.

  “Do you need help with anything?” he said.

  She looked at him uncertainly. “I think I must get organized.”

  Her eyes were sending him away, but he hovered.

  “Let me help you put the groceries away,” he said.

  The galley kitchen in the hall off the front room was equipped with a toaster oven, a small fridge, a microwave, and a coffee maker. David worked silently, opening and shutting cupboards and drawers, putting the groceries away haphazardly, under Laura’s watchful eye.

  “I see you haven’t unpacked your books yet,” he said, waiting for her to explain the absence of books. He expected her to say something like “They are in storage” or “They are in the closet,” if there were closets in the further reaches of the cabana. But she said nothing. She gave him a blank look, as if the lack of books had just occurred to her.

  “Would you like me to bring over some books?” he said, taking both of her hands, pulling her toward him, into a hug of undetermined quality, fatherly-friendly or copping a feel, he wasn’t sure. She offered neither resistance nor cooperation. It was a strangely bloodless embrace, a trial touching of bodies.