by Amy Lapwing
She put one of the chickens on the cutting board. A picture of him naked, descending on that woman, popped over the Juan Valdès image. She shook her head and shoulders and squinted with disgust. Feels like I just swallowed someone else’s spit. A whole bucketful.
The friends sat in the living room for coffee. They had all agreed no dessert, Thanksgiving was coming up, they would go crazy then. No one was brave enough to bring up what was on their minds. They talked instead of other teachers, particularly the ones with the biggest grants. They even had secretaries, some of them, and grad students by the stableful.
“Justina almost has a stableful,” said Pascale.
“You are despicable, my dear,” said Charles.
“Thank you. But I don’t think three qualifies me.”
“Especially when one could do the work that those three do,” said Pascale.
“You got that right.” She sipped her tea and savored it. “Ah! Gone are the days when my T.A. would not only grade my tests but write them too.”
“Who did that?” asked Pascale.
“James Benn.”
“He was good,” agreed Pascale. Denis opened his dozing eyes. “He’s coming to see us, did I tell you?” she continued. “The week before exams.”
“It’ll be nice to see him again,” said Justina, perhaps wistfully.
“He’s bringing a friend, a Jacques Chose. They go to a conference together after Thanksgiving.”
“What kind of conference does a computer programmer go to?” asked Charles.
“There’s tons of them,” said Justina. “Robin, my sort-of brother? Goes to this graphics one every year. It’s pretty fun, actually, they watch cartoons and tell each other how to make them.”
“James does graphics,” said Pascale.
“James is a man of many interests,” said Justina. “He told me so, once.”
The others thought about this a moment. Justina looked out at the mid-November day, the gray trees, the brown ground. Nothing was happening, leaf-turning had ended, snows had not yet begun. It was a pause in the action. It would advance to winter, in a month. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they were at the extreme of a pendulum swing and, at any moment, things would go back, back to what they had been. Nothing moved, not a leaf stirred, there was not even a squirrel in sight. It is so awful to care about him, to live in this still world and want him to come back and animate it again. I want to go to bed and sleep and when I wake up I won’t care.
Finally Charles thought of something to say. “Justina, will you show me your bedroom?”
Justina put her coffee mug aside. “Sure, Charles,” and he followed her upstairs.
Pascale said to Helena, “Should I ask?” Helena pulled one corner of her mouth up: don’t ask me.
Upstairs, Charles looked at the things on top of Michael’s dresser. As he expected, there were little piles of papers and cards. He found some gas station receipts, a few pink phone memos from the music department receptionist, and old ID cards. There were several expired auto insurance cards, an old driver’s license, an obsolete Jordan Marsh card, and a Red Cross card. “You-reeker!” exclaimed Charles. He picked up the card and smiled as he read it. He turned it over. “He hasn’t given blood since 1991.”
“I see,” lied Justina.
“You mind if I keep this?”
“It’s not mine.”
Charles put the card in his shirt pocket and smiled with satisfaction at Justina.
“Anything else I can help you with, Charles?” she asked, sitting on the bed.
He leaned an arm on the top of the dresser and rested one foot on the toe of its shoe. “It’s not nice to tease an old man, Justina.”
“Who says I’m teasing? Besides, you’re older. Not old. And you are terrific-looking. Did I ever tell you that?”
“No. Thank you. And thank you for your tempting offer, but I’m afraid I must pass.”
“How noble of you.”
“He needs all the help he can get, if he’s going to win his bet.”
“You want him to win.”
“Oh, yes.”
“If he does, it’ll only be on a technicality.”
He stepped forward with one arm outstretched. She walked out the door with him, his arm on her shoulders. She put her arm around his waist and he kissed her hair. They went back downstairs. Justina figured the Red Cross card had something to do with Michael getting tested. She did not see how Charles would manage it, but she did not mind him trying. She wanted him to, in fact. She hoped it would be negative: everyone would see what a fool he was.
“‘Once in love with Amy! Always in love with Amy!’”
What joy! It’s Professor Troy!
Amy the receptionist put her hands over her ears, her elbows sticking out, and waited for him to enter.
“‘Fascinated by her—’ Amy, what’s the matter? Don’t you like to be serenaded?” Charles stood pouting in front of her desk.
“Not as such,” said Amy.
“I bet you’ve never heard that song before.”
“I bet I have.”
He shook his head slightly and drew his lips back and breathed in through his teeth. “I shall never sing to you again.”
“Oh, go ahead, if you want.”
“No, you don’t like it. From now on, it’s strictly business.”
She nodded, mouth smiling, eyelids drooping.
“I would like you to look up someone’s email address, Amy, if you please.”
“Whose?”
“Derek Bartel. He’s a student.”
“If he’s a student, then it’s dee-bartel,” she said.
“How do you spell it?”
“‘D’ and then ‘Bartel,’ however you spell that.”
“Could you look it up, please, just to be sure?”
Amy sighed and turned to her computer. She swiftly scanned the directory of campus email addresses. “Dee-bartel,” she said, “see?”
Troy leaned a hand on her desk and looked at her screen. “That’s it? Just ‘dbartel?’”
“Yuh.”
Charles straightened up. “Thank you, Amy.” He went to the door and passed Hauser who came in humming. “No humming, Kurt.”
Hauser raised his eyebrows: hm?
“Amy doesn’t like it,” said Charles and he went out.
Hauser turned his quizzical expression on Amy but did not pause for an explanation, and whisked himself into his office.
Amy settled her chin on her hand and leaned on the desk. She checked her watch.
Charles hummed softly as he went to sit at his desk. He spun around and pressed Enter on his computer, slipped his glasses out of his breast pocket and put them on, and pressed Enter two more times for good measure. He clicked on the mailbox icon and a window popped up listing his email messages. He frowned and clicked on the ‘Mail’ menu item. A tiny menu appeared and then disappeared. He growled and clicked on ‘Mail’ again and remembered to hold down the mouse button. He chose ‘Send Mail’ and a mostly blank window popped up, except for the text fields ‘To:’ and ‘CC:’ and ‘Subject:’. He typed “dbartel” and then pressed the Tab key twice and typed “Did you know—” and pressed the Tab key again and typed “—Michael Calderon’s blood type is B? I have his Red Cross card, which I obtained from his wife. C. Troy.”
He moved the mouse cursor up next to the ‘CC:’ and let it blink there while he considered. He typed “calderon.” Then he pressed the backspace key until the name was erased. He pressed Enter and the window was overlaid with a small message window reading, “Message sent to dbartel.”
“‘That Amy’d rather be in love. With. Me.’” He picked up a stack of type-written papers and slapped them on his desk, took the top one and sat back in his chair and read, his lower teeth tugging at his moustache.
Chapter Fifteen
Long Time Wondering
Province Guanacaste. Town Cípara. Full name Derek Whitman Bartel Ramirez. Date of Birth October eighth, nineteen seventy
-five. Six pounds, 14 ounces. Single birth. Nine months gestation. Mother Teresa Ramirez Bartel. Date of Birth December first, nineteen forty-five. Cípara. Father Whitman Clement Bartel. Date of birth August fifteenth, nineteen forty-three. Dallas, Texas, EUA.
Nothing about blood types.
“You can’t tell me over the phone? All right. Send it to Kennemac Internal Medicine.” He gave the medical secretary his home address. “Could you do something else? Could you send my mother’s, I think she went there. Oh, okay.” Shit.
I could just ask her. She might wonder, but what the fuck? What if she won’t tell me? Then I’ll never find out. Maybe personnel at ODB? Maybe she had to take a physical to get the job. But they won’t tell me, just like the doctor’s in Atlanta. Maybe they’d tell her, though, over the phone. I could get a girl to call. If I could get a girl to speak to me.
Aaron. He can ask some girl.
That evening he made his request to Aaron.
“I’ll get right on it, dude, whoa! Did you see that kick? Awesome! Where should she call?”
“Shit! I should have found out before. I’ll get back to you.”
Next day Derek called ODB personnel in Boston and asked where he should call to obtain a copy of his health record. They gave him a number in Dallas. After lunch he went to the Red Cross office in Dunster and gave blood. He told the nurse who gave him the AIDS form that he had never given blood before. Could he get a donor card? Sure. Could he get it today? They’d send it and he should get it in about four weeks. Could he call someone before that? He really wanted to know his blood type. The nurse asked another nurse who asked another nurse, and they came up with the number of that office. He should call in a week.
He lay on the padded table, his berth taking up the base position of a U of three tables, and watched the bag fill up beneath the person to his left. He pumped his fist upon the plastic cylinder the nurse had given him, to speed things up, the nurse had said he was getting off to a slow start. He wanted to just take a spoonful and take it to someone who could put a smear of it under a microscope and just tell him. Could someone in Biology do that? Didn’t they do an experiment like that in the tenth grade? Everybody had to stab themselves and get a drop of blood and perform a test on it and find out their blood type. All the girls went to the boys to get stabbed, squinching up their faces like they were going to get their finger cut off. Seems like he was A. Or was it B? AB? Shit.
He ate shortbread cookies with a homeless man and an office worker. Here he was, sitting here, a big skin full of blood and he had no idea what kind it was. His tablemates seemed so happy to be there, smiling at each other, with nothing to say, like kindergarteners waiting for the mother substitute to make something happen. The attendant offered him some Hi C for the third time, her eyebrows in a peak of concern. He drank a paper cupful and left.
He skipped his two o’clock and went to the Life Sciences building. He did not know who to talk to, he did not take Bio. He asked the receptionist who the Biology profs were and went looking for one. Apted was out. Sinclair too. He knocked on Fried’s door. Bingo.
“Sit down. I’m sorry, tell me your name again?”
No flicker of recognition when Derek told him his name, thank God.
“What can I do for you, Derek?”
“If a person has a blood type of, say, A, what blood types do his parents have?”
Professor Fried launched into an explanation of the genetics of blood types. Derek took notes. He could tell this might take a long time. He asked the professor for the specifics, for three possibilities, an offspring of type A, type B, or type AB blood.
“What if the child is O?”
“Then the parents could be anything, except neither one can be AB.”
Derek finished scrawling it all down. By tomorrow he would know what his mother was. And in a week he would know what he was. One more week of the guy.
No, wait, if it turns out they all three have types that could make them related, then they would need the more advanced DNA testing. How could he get Miguel to submit to that? He’d just have to be a pain in the butt about it, keep pushing him on it till he did it. Or till he got the hell out of their lives. Which would be just fine, good riddance, you cheating bastard.
Aaron delivered the information that evening, thanks to one of the Tau Nu Little Sisters. His mother was type O. Okay, thought Derek, then I have to be O or B for him to be my father. I thought I was A. Or was it B? AB? Fuck!
Derek called the Red Cross office next day, just in case they had processed his donation. He needed to call the donor card department, this number. Derek hung up and dialed again.
“I know I’ve seen that name. Just a sec. Yeah, Derek Bartel. Got it right here. I was going to send it out end of the week with the others, we do them in batches, saves postage, don’t ask me why.”
“Could you just tell me my blood type?”
The guy said, “Aw, I don’t know—” like it was some big secret and he was some big muckity-muck with the authority to withhold information. “Just kidding!”
“Thanks,” said Derek, and he verified his address with the donor card man.
People were skipping his class. It was an affront, skipping was not an option. You had to be home, sick in bed, before he considered it cause enough to not come to Concert Chorus. You have a cold, so what? Come and listen, learn the music in your head. He stood at the music stand and called the roll for the first time since the first day of class.
“Paul Fortinbras?”
Paul raised his hand. Mr. C did not look up. “Ho.”
“Kate Hall?”
“Here.”
“Grace Hardy?” No answer. He looked up over his glasses, her seat was empty, again. “She sick?” he asked.
“I think,” said Magda, “she’s dropping.”
“Dropping?”
“Withdrawing? From the course?”
He pushed his lower jaw out, the bottom teeth jutting ahead of the upper. Wasn’t it too late to do that? “Joseph Kelly?”
“Yo.”
He did not interrupt their singing for the niggling things, too much soprano here, not enough bass there, too rapid a crescendo, too abrupt a diminuendo. He let them sing, rationalizing to himself that at least they were learning the notes this way. He did not want her for a student. Why did it bother him that she was dropping his course?
He wanted to be done with this class so he could practice. This weekend Teresa would help him at the piano. It was so much easier with her. He felt so expressive with her, the way she looked at him when he sang, as though she knew, better than he, how the music made him feel. He could sing into those eyes for hours. He did not want to think about the tedium of teaching. So a student was withdrawing. It did not matter, he himself would be withdrawing at the end of the year. Sooner, if Teresa found something interesting for him. She was talking to the director of the National Lyric Opera back home. He did not really want to go back to Costa Rica, back to where he had started, the small pond. Big feesh. He wanted to go to some company in the states, that would be progress. But the director at the opera remembered him, Michael had worked with him off and on over the years, as a voice coach. It’s a contact, let’s see where it will lead, she had said. He was putting his trust in her. She understood musicians and she understood business; she knew how to do things.
She had a confidence she did not have when he first knew her. She had believed in him, then, but she did not know about moving in the world, as she did now. Really, perhaps it was better that he was with her now, trying to make it in opera, than back then. Perhaps he had simply not been ready to be a singer, then, whether she had been with him or not. But the feeling was exactly the same: he was outside the world he wanted to be in, he would crash through if he had to. And the public would cheer him, once they heard him. ‘Miguel Calderón, where have you been all our lives?’ So what if this girl was so thin-skinned she could not take a little disappointment? He could not work with her, he did not
want to be a music teacher anymore.
The men were singing the second verse of the “Fortune plango vulnera,” already familiar to them as the oft-used movement in thrilling movie trailers whose final music is still in development. They had become too loud, spoiling the contrast when the women came in. The women tried to compensate by yelling fortissimo
“But from my happy
Flower-strewn paradise
Am I now chased
And stripped of all my glory.”
He let the chorus go on, unchecked, to the third verse. But wasn’t he a generous person? He could not leave with a bitter taste. He must deal with the girl.
“Derek, you need to talk to Grace,” said Michael at dinner that night.
The boy turned his chewing face to him.
“You need to apologize to her.”
Derek swallowed with difficulty. “What?”
“You hurt her feelings. You should apologize.”
Derek turned an incredulous look on his mother.
“Papá’s right,” she said, “just write her a letter apologizing for the misunderstanding.”
“I can’t believe this,” said Derek.
“You can’t leave it the way it is,” said Michael. “You took her out, she had a bad time, so, you apologize.”
“That slut tried to put me in jail!”
“Derek—” said Teresa.
“Do as I say!” cried Michael.
“Say what?”
“Be a man and do the right thing,” said Michael.
“Oh, I get it,” said Derek, “you know more about right and wrong than I do.” He slipped in a glance at his mother.
She said, “Do what your father says, Derek.”
“I don’t have to,” announced the son.
Michael glanced at Teresa who was looking from one to the other. She shook her head slightly.
Derek snorted a laugh. “Well, that felt good, I must say.”
“Stop it, now,” said Teresa.
“Sorry, Mom, I guess I just can’t help it, I’m so relieved. The stress has just been a bear.”