Valerie Martin

by The Confessions of Edward Day (v5)

  “Good,” she replied through the dumpling.

  “It’s delicious, isn’t it?” Teddy said. “Wayne made them. He was up all night.” He raised his arm in an introductory flourish. “Chinese party food!”

  “One hour later you power hungry,” I quipped.

  “Now, Ed,” Teddy chided, “let’s not have any low ethnic humor.”

  I poured myself a Scotch. I felt uncomfortable and defensive, as if I was waiting for an audition. “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “This is the art scene,” Teddy said. “They’re a fascinating bunch. Painters aren’t like us at all. They have these funny things called identities.”

  “That sounds gloomy,” I said.

  “It isn’t very playful,” he agreed. “Wayne thinks it’s hilarious so of course they’re all in awe of him. Have you met Wayne?”

  Though this was a simple yes or no question, Mindy and I exchanged perplexed looks. “You two look lost,” Teddy said. “Grab a tray; go play waiters at a party.”

  I threw back my Scotch, took up a tray, and led the way into the scene. Clever Teddy had assigned me a role I knew I could play to perfection. A pod of guests opened before me and I lowered my tray skillfully before them. “Will you try one of these?” I offered. A lady with a prodigious nose snatched up a shrimp toast. “And here’s a napkin,” I offered. Our eyes met, I read her thought—what a handsome waiter! I raised my tray and moved on. Two hirsute young men, vacantly repeating the name “Cy Twombly” at each other, paused to load their flimsy napkins with treats. I looked past them into the kitchen where Mindy and Teddy still stood face-to-face over the dumplings. He was rubbing his hands together, his eyes cast down, his mouth slightly ajar. Mindy was talking earnestly, wagging her head with the force of her argument. Teddy took up a paper napkin and passed it to her. She dabbed her eyes with it, but she didn’t stop talking. Poor Mindy. Teddy had tried to help her out, but she had refused the part.

  My progress led me away from the painful confrontation going forward in the kitchen to the blithe and exotic author of that suffering. Wayne was leaning against a bookcase in conversation with a large blonde who pursed her lips skeptically when it was not her turn to talk. I eased my tray between them.

  “You’re Edward Day, aren’t you?” Wayne said.

  “No,” I replied. “I’m just a waiter.”

  He narrowed his impossibly narrow eyes at me, lifting the corners of his mouth. “That’s funny,” he said.

  “Why is it funny?” asked the pursing lady.

  “Because we didn’t hire any waiters.”

  “What makes you think I’m this Edward person?” I asked.

  “Teddy has a photo of you, at the beach house.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The beach house.”

  A surge in the conversational volume near the door caught Wayne’s attention. I had my back to it but I recognized a too-hearty laugh, followed by a squeal that could only be Mindy Banks in the rapture of greeting an old friend. “Now I’m confused,” Wayne said. “I think that could be Edward Day too.”

  “They do look alike,” his large friend agreed.

  I pulled my tray in close to my chest and turned to see Mr. and Mrs. Margate arriving at the festivities. Guy’s head, visible above the company, swiveled from left to right, taking in the scene. He had cut his hair short and was clean shaven. All I could see of Madeleine was her hair; Mindy’s fond embrace blocked the rest of her. “Take this, would you?” I said to Wayne, pressing the tray upon him.

  “No, no,” he protested. “I don’t want to be a waiter.”

  “Just put it down,” the large woman said testily.

  I took her advice, ditching the snacks on a nearby coffee table where they were instantly decimated by ravenous artists. I made for the door where Madeleine, having been released by Mindy, stood facing me. She was dressed in an off-the-shoulder blue peasant dress with a black Mexican shawl, very flattering, but what I noticed next was that she looked ill. She was what my mother called “green around the gills.” Her eyes, which had been so sparkling and mischievous only a few days before, were dull and sunk in dark circles. As I approached, she hunched over abruptly, pressing both hands against her abdomen. Her eyes closed, she took in a frantic gasp of air. I reached her side.

  “Jesus,” I said. “What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

  She clutched my arm and straightened, giving me a wan smile. “I’m not sure,” she said. She glanced about at the cheerful partygoers, none of whom had observed her distress. “I guess I shouldn’t have come. Guy tried to talk me out of it, but I wanted to see Teddy and his friend.”

  “Have you been sick?”

  “I was throwing up this morning, but that’s not unusual. I had a terrific headache last night. Now it’s gone but I’m getting these sharp pains. I don’t know what it is.”

  I laid my palm across her forehead; it was much too warm. “I think you have a fever. You need to lie down.”

  “It would be good if you get me to the bathroom,” she said.

  “This way,” I said, passing my arm around her shoulder. It was at this point that Guy desisted from ogling his potential audience and turned his attention to his wife.

  “Hello, Ed,” he said, encroaching upon us as we edged along the wall. “I thought you might be here.”

  “Madeleine’s sick,” I said. “She should be in bed.”

  “What?” he said. He squeezed himself in on her other side, bending over her so that his mouth was close to her ear, “Sweetie, are you feeling punk?” he whispered. It was so close to baby talk my hackles went up. Madeleine leaned into him and I was forced to loosen my hold on her.

  “I just need to get to the bathroom,” she said. This destination was nearby and fortunately empty when we arrived, cosseting Madeleine between us.

  “Should I come in with you?” Guy offered as she opened the door.

  “No,” she said, waving him away. “I’ll be fine. Just wait for me.”

  Guy and I stood on either side of the door, like fresh recruits in the Royal Guard, while the sounds of Madeleine retching, running water, flushing the toilet, and retching again drifted through. Word got out that a guest was vomiting in the bathroom and Teddy appeared, emanating concern. “What can I do?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Guy replied with an air of sufferance. “It can’t last much longer. She hasn’t eaten anything all day.”

  “Why did you bring her?” I snarled. “You can look at her and see she’s sick. She has a fever.”

  “I’m sure you know all about it,” he said.

  Another round of heaving and flushing sounds issued from the inner chamber.

  “Honey,” Guy addressed the door. “Can I do anything?”

  We heard the sound of water running, then silence. We men looked at one another, wide-eyed and helpless. Jasmine appeared, all competence in spite of the red dress. “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Madeleine’s sick in there,” Teddy said. “We don’t know what to do.”

  Jasmine tapped the door. “Madeleine,” she said. “Do you need help?”

  No answer. No sound at all.

  “Is it locked?” Jasmine asked, trying the knob, which turned easily. She opened the door a crack, peered in, then, casting us a look of frank dismay, slipped inside and closed it behind her.

  Wayne’s large blond friend bustled up, wanting to use the facility.

  “You’ll have to wait,” Guy informed her. “My wife is very ill.”

  She backed away, screwing up her mouth in her habitual moue, scrutinizing Guy and then me. “So which one of you is Edward Day?” she asked.

  The bathroom door opened narrowly and Jasmine’s head appeared in the gap. “Teddy,” she said. “Call 911. And then bring me some towels.”

  This was too much for me. “I’m coming in,” I said, pushing past Jasmine, who offered no resistance. She closed the door and leaned her back against it. Madeleine was slumped on the floor, propped against the
cabinet, holding a blood-soaked towel between her legs. Another one, wadded and cast aside, was so saturated it had formed a thick brownish pool at the edges.

  “Oh, darling,” I said, kneeling next to her.

  “My shoulder is killing me,” she said weakly, lifting her eyes to look at me. Her face was porcelain white, unearthly, her eyes unfocused, the pupils dilated. Jasmine opened the door again and Guy, bristling with importance, charged in.

  “The ambulance is on the way,” he announced.

  At the sight of him, Madeleine burst into sobs. The room was too small for four people so I got to my feet, making way for Guy. We brushed shoulders as he dropped to his knees beside his wife. “Oh, oh,” he wailed, “the baby, the baby.” Madeleine moaned, leaning into the towel with both hands. I backed away. Jasmine was wringing out a washcloth at the sink.

  “Is it a miscarriage?” I asked her.

  “I think it’s worse than that,” she replied.

  The turbulent intrusion of EMTs dangling stethoscopes and unfurling a nifty stretcher is reliably the death of a party. Barks of “Stand back” and “Out” were the extent of their contribution to the festive repartee, and they didn’t stop to sample the dumplings. Guy, who was still on his knees on the bathroom floor, was the object of the second command. “What is it?” he whimpered as he backed out the door. “What’s happening to her?” I was standing just outside and I could see Madeleine, collapsed sideways, eerily still, her eyes glazed, the greenish tinge around her mouth definitively shifted to blue. “She’s going into shock,” the female of the rescue team informed us, and before you could say “hypovolemic” they had her on the stretcher and were heading for the street. “I’m her husband,” Guy repeated, escorting them, like Moses, through the parting sea of wide-eyed guests. “Come with us,” Ms. Medic ordered and they were out the door. A dazed group, myself among them, spilled out into the hall, clutching our drinks and watching mutely as the rescued and the rescuers disappeared into the elevator. Teddy put his arm around me. “That was awful,” he said.

  “Where will they take her?” I asked.

  “St. Vincent’s, I guess. It’s the closest.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Twelfth and Seventh Avenue.”

  “That’s good. I can walk over.”

  “Maybe you should wait a little while so they can get her admitted,” he advised. “They don’t encourage you to visit the emergency room unless you have to, if you see what I mean.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. The guests filed back inside, several making straight to the kitchen for refills. The talk was about who had seen what part of what had just happened. One claimed he knew nothing until the medics burst through the door and he thought, at first, it was some kind of raid. Another had noticed an odd gathering of concerned faces near the bathroom door and concluded the toilet was overflowing. Jasmine, looking like some fetishist’s fantasy, passed through the hall in her red dress and high heels hoisting a mop and a bucket full of bloody towels. “I’ll put this in the closet for now,” she said to Teddy. “We can deal with it later.”

  As his sister passed with her grisly trophy, Wayne, who was driving a corkscrew into a bottle of wine, lifted his upper lip in a sneer of disgust. “Just get it out of sight,” he snapped, thereby earning my eternal enmity. The cork came free with a cheery pop. “Let’s get back to the fun part,” he said, nimbly dispensing the golden liquid among the glasses pressed upon him.

  I set my glass in the sink. When I looked up I saw that Teddy was watching me and that he had deciphered my feelings about his paramour. His brow was furrowed, his eyes full and sad, his lips pressed in a thin line, as if to keep in words that might best be reconsidered. He was a social creature to his bones and it was important to him that his friends accepted his new love, his new life, his new self. He looked uncomfortable and on edge, whereas Wayne was having a fine time and appeared perfectly at ease. No good will come of it, I thought, ducking back into the living room. Wayne’s paintings now covered most of the wall space and made the room feel dark and cramped. The partygoers were trying to get back in the swing of things, but it was heavy going. I picked up a dumpling from a tray near the door on my way out.

  Difficult as it is to imagine now, nobody had a computer in those days, so finding someone in a hospital involved a lot of phoning and consultation with charts attached to clipboards. At length I was informed that Madeleine was on the fifth floor and directed to an elevator which would take me to a desk where I could make further inquiries. At this stop, a space station manned by aliens, I was told that Madeleine was in surgery. If I wished, I could proceed to the waiting room down the hall, first right, then straight ahead. I did so wish. After a longish stroll, past many doors opening upon scenes of human suffering unfolding in front of televised scenes of human suffering, I came to a glass-fronted room in which Guy Margate was pacing manically up and down.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” he announced upon my entrance. “It’s making me crazy. Do you have any cigarettes?”

  I had, in fact, an unopened pack. “I’m trying to cut down,” I said as I tore off the cellophane wrapper and pulled out the bit of foil.

  “Now is not the time,” said Guy. He produced a flip-top lighter and we lit up companionably.

  “So what do you know?” I asked.

  “She needs a blood transfusion. I picked that up from the medics. I haven’t seen a doctor.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  “Have you ever ridden in an ambulance?” he asked. “It’s totally weird.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s completely weird.”

  “It must be,” I agreed.

  He puffed at his cigarette, paced to an ashtray on a couch-side table, and tapped off the ash. “What did Teddy say?”

  “He said it was awful.”

  He charged back to the door, looking out at the empty hall. “I can’t stand this,” he said.

  “Just keep walking,” I said.

  He headed for the water fountain. “You’re calm. Why is that?”

  “I’m not calm,” I said. “I just don’t find walking up and down like a caged animal helps much.”

  “You should try it.”

  I stalked to the door and back to the couches, crossing Guy’s path as he went from the fountain to the wall. “No,” I said. “This doesn’t work for me. I’m going to sit down and jigger my leg.” Which is what I did.

  “Be my guest,” Guy said, moving on.

  “Was she conscious?” I asked.

  “No. I think they knocked her out in the ambulance.”

  “And they didn’t say anything about what was wrong.”

  “They said she’d lost a lot of blood.”

  “I’ll say,” I said.

  “I had to sign papers, releases, you know, about how they’re not responsible if she dies. But she won’t die. I’m sure she won’t die.”

  “Don’t even say that.”

  “You’re right. That’s bad luck. She’s strong.”

  “She is.”

  “But she’s anemic. That means not enough blood.”

  “It means not enough red blood cells. But there’s the same amount of blood.”

  “So she has a normal amount of blood.”

  “I would think so.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette. “I feel helpless. That’s what’s making me crazy.”

  “Have another cigarette,” I said, brandishing the pack.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it,” I said. Guy pulled out his lighter and we lit up again.

  By the time the blood-stained doctor from Mars opened the door, we were down to three cigarettes. He stepped inside, rested his hands on his hips, and looked from Guy to me and back again. “Which one of you is the husband?” he inquired.

  “That’s me,” Guy replied, whirling upon him. “For God’s sake, tell me she’s not going to die.”

/>   “She’s not going to die,” he said firmly.

  Tears sprang from Guy’s eyes. “Thank God,” he said. “What happened to her? What did you do?”

  What happened to Madeleine, the doctor explained, was an ectopic pregnancy which—-Jasmine was right—is a lot worse than a miscarriage. I now know it means the fertilized embryo has lodged in the fallopian tube instead of in the uterus where it belongs, and if you are a pregnant woman and you have bleeding, abdominal pain on one side, and, for some strange reason having to do with nerves, severe pain in one shoulder, get yourself to a hospital pronto. Madeleine, our medical expert informed us, had nearly died. Sometime between her upright entrance at Teddy’s party and her prostrate exit on the stretcher, the fallopian tube had burst. “Of course we had to terminate the pregnancy,” the doctor explained. “It was a mess in there. The tube was destroyed, fibroids all over the place; I saved the ovaries, but I had to take the uterus. She won’t be able to conceive again.”

  “Oh no,” Guy whispered at this news. “Oh, that’s terrible. Did you hear that?” he said, turning to me.

  “I did,” I replied.

  The doctor agreed that it was too bad. But, he assured us, the surgery was successful, the patient was young and strong, and in a few weeks she would be fine. She was stable though still unconscious and Guy was welcome to sit in the room with her until she came to.

  “Let’s go,” Guy said, breaking for the door. The doctor raised his eyebrows at me and followed the eager husband. “I’ll phone you,” Guy called back to me as he and the doctor disappeared down the hall.

  I went back to the couch, sat down, and broke into a cold sweat.

  What actors know about emotions is that they come in pairs, often in direct opposition to each other. That’s what it is to be conflicted. We want what we should not want and we know it. We desire that which is dangerous or forbidden and might cause us to suffer. We fear success, embrace failure. We strive to be independent, longing at the same time to surrender to a burning passion. We hold ourselves aloof from the people we need and seek the approval of those who have no use for us.