“He told me.”
“How did you know what you told me in the letter?”
“He’s been much more open over the last several months. He’s been
trying—I swear it, Robert—to get better.” As if to justify him, and herself. As if she bore responsibility for this.
“I believe you,” I said.
Periodically Jenny came into the kitchen, disturbing our vigil, and I snapped at her, or she saw our coiled singular energy—Irene’s and mine—and quietly withdrew. Every so often we went out on the back patio. Irene smoked cigarettes, I watered the fruit trees and the pots of cacti on the shelf of the wall.
We discounted leaving and making the rounds of clubs. I didn’t say what time he had left, but even if it had been earlier, when they were open, he could have ended up anywhere. Now, anyway, the clubs would be closed and the sprawl of LA dishearteningly daunting. He would either come back, or be brought somewhere eventually.
Just after two o’clock Irene tried Cedars-Sinai for the sixth time. As she talked her face composed, and her voice gained strength—“Yes, but you can’t tell me anything? No, a friend. He doesn’t have any family here, they’re in Boston. All right. Let’s go,” she said to me. “They would only say he arrived in an ambulance twenty minutes ago.”
How did a person walk out of a house and in less than twelve hours accomplish what I could only interpret, given the history, as deliberate? How had he so easily found someone to hurt him? What had he done to provoke it?
Cedars-Sinai loomed as we drove west on San Vicente, huge, black, with immense granite pillars. Smog hazed the sky. I knew the hospital, part of it called the Max Factor Family Tower. The street that led to the emergency room entrance was named for Gracie Allen.
At the hospital there was valet parking. The whole of it felt unreal, being here on a bright afternoon, not low-down New York, but LA; I suddenly realized how perfect it was—he had meant it for me. How ideal the setting.
The waiting room was practically empty. Blonde nurse. A middle-aged Hispanic man holding a hat stared down at the spotless linoleum floor. Yellow walls. Warm. A rich hospital. Several paintings, a glimpse through an open door of a white-sheeted gurney, empty and glaring.
I sat. Irene dealt with the nurse. She was told to sit down.
In a few minutes she tried again. We didn’t talk, we only waited for maybe half an hour until a doctor appeared from behind double doors and approached us. “Friends?” he said. “No, don’t get up.” He joined us, frowning, youngish but graying; he wore Adidas.
“He’s pretty badly beat up. Did you know where he was?” Irene shook her head. “West Hollywood, in the parking lot behind Musso and Frank’s.” An upscale, New York-style restaurant. “The police haven’t spoken to you?”
“No,” I said.
“They’ll want to.” The doctor’s frown deepened. “The trouble is he’d been there awhile. What we’ve got is a skull fracture and quite a severe hematoma of the brain.” Irene gasped.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s an abnormal pooling of blood along the brain’s margin. We have to remove the collection.”
“Surgery?” Irene said.
“Yes. I went over the CAT scan with the neurosurgeon. They’re prepping him now. Again, the trouble’s the time interval after the trauma. We’ll drain off the pressure and see.”
Irene leaned down as though feeling faint, and started to put her head down between her knees but then just collapsed, dropped over her legs like a doll.
“Nurse?” the doctor said and stood. “I’ll let you know,” he told me, while the nurse came over to Irene.
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“At least a couple of hours.”
“Honey?” the nurse said to Irene. Irene sat up. “You want to lie down a few minutes? Have you eaten today? Let’s get you some juice.” The nurse led her off through a door.
The man with the hat looked over at me. I focused on a planter as if it would hold me together. It felt like my heart would explode through my chest. For some reason I thought of a play I’d done in high school. Afterward, my mother, dressed to the nines and the typical center of attention, came back stage—it was hard for her to compliment me on my acting because an actor’s life wasn’t what she had wanted for me—and said, “Well, okay. I get it. I see,” and then smiled with tremendous pleasure. “You’re gonna be something. You’re gonna be something good.”
Gonna be something. Good.
The room tipped. I stood and walked to the door where Irene had gone, walked back, gathering myself.
In a little while she came out. We went down to the cafeteria.
“I’m going to call Patrick’s sister,” she said. She left and I surveyed the room: the people in white, the others like me, bearing up.
Irene returned, fuming. “She gave me his mother and father’s numbers. I reached them both. We’re to keep them informed.”
“Nobody’s coming?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Maybe a brother?”
“Fuck the brothers. I want a parent. I called your mother, she’s coming tomorrow.”
“Coming here?”
“She wants to. You know? He never missed one of his classes, not once. He had to be out in New Jersey three times a week and no matter what, he was there. The little kids loved him. She told me. He’d pick them up high in the air. They said it was like being up on a mountain.”
Oh, Patrick, I thought. On a mountain.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine.”
DAY STRETCHED INTO NIGHT. At nine o’clock the doctor emerged and said time would tell. Patrick was being taken to Intensive Care. We should go home. He wouldn’t wake up tonight.
“Can we see him?” Irene asked.
“If you have to.”
There were tubes everywhere. Monitors. He looked so long and ugly, his poor hawkish face white and discolored against the sheets.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” Irene said. “Do you think he will die?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean tonight.”
“Do you want to stay?” I had to work the next day.
We went back to the waiting room and sat until eleven, when there was no change. We decided to go.
We drove home through a hot wind. Foreign smells of the greenery wended their way through exhaust.
“What happened?” she said. “Oh my God, what happened?”
“Irene—”
“What did he do? Where did he go?”
“We’ll see, we’ll find out. Take it easy.”
“It’s horrible, horrible. How? How could he do this?”
I didn’t want her breaking down while I was driving. I took her hand, manipulating the steering wheel with the other. “Hang on, we’re almost there.”
I pulled up at the house and stopped. She burst from the car, went around it and into the street. I got out. The street was deserted and dark. The lights of the houses above and below us twinkled like terrible stars.
“Come inside,” I said. She began weeping, then gasping and choking.
I got her up the steps and inside. Jenny asked what she could do. She brought Irene water. I sat with Irene on the couch in the living room.
“I’ll be upstairs,” Jenny said and disappeared.
“I don’t understand,” Irene said.
“He got lost,” I said. “He got very lost. What he did—it was part of a culture that he got caught in. It escalated. Maybe the danger, the fights, were an exorcism. Or maybe that’s how it started, a pressure valve for release. But then it spun out of control. It got worse, and it kept throwing him back in the past. Endlessly. Maybe by then the fights themselves were what he had to escape and when he couldn’t stop, maybe he almost wanted to die.”
I could hear the clock ticking.
“Maybe what you said about me is right,” she said. “That I was hiding in him. I was
desperate myself and I wanted just to forget, and that blinded me to what I should have done. How I could have helped him.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “You did what you thought was right.”
“I’m a coward,” she said. “I always have been.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Since my mother died I’ve been afraid. I’ve tried not to be.”
“Maybe that’s courage,” I said. “The effort.”
“How will I do this? If he lives, if he dies. My God.” She put her head in her hands.
“I’m with you now,” I said. “I’m doing it with you.”
AT THE END of the next day I came out of the studio and the abrasive sunshine caught me as in a searchlight, a criminal caught. The metal of the car handle was warm to the touch.
How would she do this? she’d said. How would I? How would I ever do anything again? Liar, thinking of how in silence I had listened to her blame herself. How I had blamed him, deserted him, given up on them both. I had understood him, and yet I did nothing, and worse. I’d sickened at the sight of his failure, as if it were a contagious disease. I’d counseled him to face up! Buck up! Sympathy, I wouldn’t even give him that. As if I did not know the word. And her. Beautiful her, to think of the qualities in her I had loved and been so threatened by. The sensitivity in her. The passion. Mercurial, quicksilver. An actress. Her ability to identify, to absorb. As if I didn’t know what an actress was! Did not want, did not desire, what an actress would naturally be. Rather a bank clerk, a diplomat? Somebody reasonable? And as if I did not myself love make-believe, as if I had not learned as a child that for me—for Irene, for Patrick—it was the oxygen I needed to breathe. Who cared why that was? Oversized feelings, oversized needs, incidents in a life that needed to be reenacted, reinhabited, for a tenuous but new resolution. An attempt to transform. Or simply to see that the difficult, large moments in life, the fraught, deciding moments that made and broke people meant something.
Yet how precarious. How what we loved turned. How treacherous it had proved in the end. To live out of love and deep need instead of for money or, God forbid, what others thought, and to meet massive rejection. To be overlooked and alone. I recalled Irene wondering if it was wrong to love things too much. Could loving too little ever be right?
But she had become so unhappy. And he could die. And I’d given up everything to be here in a place where I didn’t belong.
But diving down into the mess of it, life’s complications, the tiny, worrying, contradictory whirl of a soul—did not this itself exact its own price?
It could.
But please, I realized. Where else was there to go?
I felt somehow glad. I thought he would live.
I’D CALLED IN TWICE during the day and there’d been no change. My mother was in the waiting room outside of Intensive Care with Irene.
“He woke up!” Irene said. “I talked to him,” and they both laughed.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“He—” Irene laughed.
“Sorry,” my mother said. “It’s been a long day. We’re slaphappy.”
“He asked for a priest,” Irene said.
“Drama queen to the end,” my mother said.
“Guess you had to be there,” I said. “Did you get him one?”
“Yes, there was a priest here in the hospital,” Irene said.
The laughter gave out.
“The news has been hopeful,” Irene said. “There hasn’t been any seizure activity, and they think tomorrow they’ll be able to test for other things—memory deficits, vision, hearing.”
“There could be that?” I said.
“The doctor is hopeful,” Irene said. “A cop was here. But they don’t know anything. Only what happened based on the injuries. The cop couldn’t talk to Patrick, he wasn’t awake long enough. I guess he’ll come back some other time. I told him anything I thought would help. Was that all right?” she asked, doubtfully.
“Of course,” I said, looking at her, at the haunting openness of her face, her tired eyes, the echoes they held of so many dreams.
“Go on in,” my mother said. “You can stay half an hour.”
I went in. He looked much worse. The discolorations from the impact of surgery and from the fight had intensified, but the tube in his mouth was gone.
I sat in the chair and thought about how I’d taken everything for granted. My stellar life. Believing in my intrepid will. When by the accidents of timing, gender, and fate, he and Irene had suffered more. Because he was tall and unusual looking. A child could have seen that.
He slept.
Where had he gotten the faith in himself that he had?
He was so fucking big.
When I went out Irene was asleep on a couch.
“Let her rest a bit,” my mother said. “Coffee?” We went down the hall to the machine. My mother looked older. She’d cut her dark hair, and with it swept back from her face her features had a new elegance and fragility.
“How’s David?” I asked.
“Just fine.”
“Mom? How much do you know about this?”
“A lot.”
“You knew he’d been—?”
“He told me. We were together a lot at the studio.”
“You didn’t even mention to me that he was working for you.”
“You seemed to have problems with him. I thought you’d object.”
“Christ,” I said.
“Who cares now?” she said. “Let it go. Robert?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Right.
“For instance, what did he tell you?” I said.
“Something I talked about with Irene today,” she said soberly. “Most of it she didn’t know, and you wouldn’t either. After the accident, after he had come back to New York with Maria—he disappeared with Benton. They were in San Francisco.”
I had been gazing at the floor. I looked up at her.
“I take it they were involved in more of what began in New York,” she said. “But Patrick had a breakdown, and Benton deserted him. Patrick went into a psychiatric hospital for several months. I don’t have many details about it, when Patrick told me I didn’t ask any questions. When he told me it was almost—in expiation.”
I could see that.
“But while he was in the hospital a man he had known casually started coming to visit and they became close. His name was Roger. A good man, a wonderful person, and when Patrick was better they were together for a while.”
“So Roger is a real person,” I said. “A lawyer?”
“Yes, a lawyer. And he said they traveled together and that Roger helped him with another operation on his knee, and I gathered that they stayed in touch after Patrick returned to New York.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes, they did,” and then the reality of the hospital reasserted itself, the walls glared and screamed. I got up and threw away my cup, and came back. “I deserted him too,” I said.
“He didn’t think that,” she said. “Will you take some advice? It’s been my experience that most of us don’t even know how much we can help. If he recovers, you may be the one person who really can. Or maybe not. But maybe you can. Remember that.”
JENNY WAS GONE when we got back. There was a note on the kitchen table.
Hey, Robert,
I’m over at my friend Kelly’s. I thought I should give you some space. I hope Patrick’s okay. I hope you and Irene can work out, whatever. Go for it, Robert. You should be happy. I’m fine. I have most of my stuff, so we’ll talk in a couple of weeks? Good luck.
Jenny
There was a PS at the bottom, Kelly’s number in case I needed it. That was the saddest part of the note. I folded it and put it in back of a drawer. My mother went upstairs for a bath and to bed. Irene went out to buy groceries. I sat in the kitchen attempting to study a script.
Of course Patrick had talked to my mother, and had trusted her. Like him, she was a dancer and had
had to give it up. I had never considered how it must have been for her, I’d only judged her for not going back to it later. And I’d never considered in my swaggering ignorant youth what a tough life dancing, acting, show business could be. Or I’d dismissed its toughness with stupid faux sophistication. Yeah, sure it’s tough, so what? So what isn’t? I hadn’t the vaguest idea of the consequences it could have.
I thought of Benton. The hardness that must have prompted his actions, the pain that had to have surged underneath. I thought of the dead boy, Jimmy. Patrick smashed up in the car.
Irene.
Me.
I wished that, just once, I had seen my mother dance.
I put down the script and went for the gin.
When Irene came back I sat in the living room in the dark. “Don’t turn on the light,” I said.
“I’ve got a chicken and—”
“I don’t want to eat,” I said.
She sat down on the couch.
“You have to understand,” I said. “I had this—deep—conviction of being on the outside, of everything. I couldn’t be there anymore. That’s why I had to succeed, why I left. Why I took the job here when a part of me knew that I shouldn’t. Not only because of you, but him.” She didn’t say anything. “And I knew why you didn’t come. I knew the day you told me. But I couldn’t accept it. Because I had thought I was finally—getting in, and I was more cut off and alone than ever.” I heard a distant purring of traffic. “And when you wrote me the letter I felt like I’d died. It felt too late. To get over you, I couldn’t call him. Then when you called in March, I thought that if I got involved I wouldn’t survive. It was stupid, I see that, but I didn’t know. You were ripped out of my life—the one person—I loved. The one woman. I loved him too. But everything had gotten turned—inside out.”
“I know all this, Robert,” she said.
“No, you don’t.” I smelled flowers. “I’d decided that my loving the two of you never helped, never made any difference.”
“It wasn’t all your fault,” she said.
“Listen. On Saturday night we went to bed. I woke up at four in the morning and heard Patrick on the stairs.”
I felt her attention in the dark.
“I got up. I stood at the top of the stairs and listened to him leave. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t think anything would actually happen. But I knew it could. I keep asking myself why I didn’t go after him. Didn’t talk to him. Wake you up. Whatever I needed to do. I thought he was ruining you. Did I think I was saving you by letting him go? No. I couldn’t have you, and he did. That’s what it was. That’s it.”
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