A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death
Page 10
“GREGORY IS ONE of the finest healers I know,” Reina told me quietly, late in the golden afternoon.
She’d prepared a voluptuous roast, soaking in blood and savory herbs. It was cooling on the counter, the one that always made me think of the phrase, “marbled flesh,” because of how veiny and mottled it was. I tried not to think too hard about the cannibalistic implications of that. Gregory sat in the living room, beerlessly watching the game.
“The knowledge that man has,” Reina went on. “He is one of the most knowledgeable men you will ever meet. He told me the reason he loves music so much is it’s one of the few things he tried to do and wasn’t good at.”
I had no idea what I was expected to do with this information. Was Gregory simply aware of his brilliance, like he knew the color of his hair; or was he an insufferable know-it-all? I couldn’t tell if I should sympathize, or congratulate. I kept my mouth shut.
“The power of his brain,” she concluded meaningfully.
Gregory was a doctor, like Zack—but not like Zack was a doctor. It is unlikely that the next cardiologist who listens to your heart will be covered with inkstains from clavicle to carpals. It is even more unlikely that he will be ideologically opposed to antibiotics and painkillers.
Zack had been a lover of the newest drugs, the latest diagnostic equipment, and the freshest female pharmaceutical representatives. But Gregory diagnosed his patients by touching them. He asked them detailed questions about their phobias and dreams. He watched them walk. There may have been the slightest stiffening of the middle finger in Reina’s decision to invite this tattooed healer to share the king-sized bed Zack Hill had bought.
“Healing is his life,” she told me now. She said it fiercely, like she was taking a vow or daring me to find a flaw in her new love’s diagnostic practices. When I maintained my policy of silence on the subject, she removed a slightly frosted beer from the freezer, popped the cap, and drifted off toward Gregory and the ball game on TV.
I sat tracing the angles of the joints in the bar. They were blended like brushstrokes into the grain. I thought about how I would make brushstrokes look like wood grain. Would it work if I dipped a stiff-bristled brush into lightly mixed colors? Or would it be more effective to layer the colors and blend them a little? It’s hard to blend things without blurring them; but you have to maintain some kind of separation. I looked up.
The roast bled gently on a bone china platter. Akana was gliding across the red tile floor, as soft and silent as a single beam of light. When she reached the marble counter, cold and fleshy with its liver spots and veins, she stood up on her hind legs. The movement was so fluid, it looked like the first step in a transformation from ordinary household wolf to something enchanted, vaguely human, with unappetizing morals and undeniable appetites. She placed her tapered paws upon the countertop, like a lady testing the finish of her manicure.
She was believably tall for a very small lady, standing on long slim legs. But there is always a flaw in the enchantment, a crack in the fugitive’s assumed identity. It can be as trivial as the mobster who was finally caught in a diner, exhorting the waitress in his own ringing tones to make sure his toast was buttered all the way to the edges. In Akana’s case, the giveaway would be the tail. It was swinging very slowly as she stood there like a queen, surveying the view from her elf-wolf’s height. It was her one bit of unsupportable vanity, the aspect of her wild nature that would get caught in a fence as she made her escape from the castle; would peep out unrestrained from underneath the ball gown; would catch the eye of the hunter who’d kill the prince’s bride for her snow-white pelt.
It wouldn’t be those eyes, as calm and calculating as a safe-cracker’s. It wouldn’t be the way she turned her head, cool and blond as Grace Kelly, pursuing a debonair thief. It wouldn’t even be the telescopic ears, which flickered with speaking eloquence when she saw me watching her. It would not be the steady way she met my gaze when she dipped her graceful head and began to lap the cooling blood. The bone china platter gleamed. The round red haunch exhaled a rich perfume.
I slid off the barstool and made my way upstairs. I was a wolf’s accomplice now. It cleared the fog a little, but didn’t clarify where either one of us belonged.
The Mistress of the Wardrobe
IN THE YEARS I lived at Foxglove, I dressed like an understudy for parts I was utterly unqualified to play. I was the object of sartorial charity by a high-end whore, a doctor’s widow, and a pot-growing painter, none of whom was quite my size. So I rolled up the cuffs of my designer jeans and hacked a path through poison oak. I wore dress-sized Guatemalan shirts to dine by candlelight at Foxglove. And I wore Reina’s sassy pre-enhancement blouses everywhere. My shoes still fell apart around my feet like they were allergic to me.
If getting dressed were a university degree like any other performance art, then every dissertation would revolve around the disposal of purses and shoes. As in any discipline, among the advisors on this faculty there would be classicists and modernists, old school and new. The classically-minded view on purses is that a woman should carry a clutch containing a lipstick, a tampon, and one or two love letters. Across the hall you’ll find the modernists, who embody the belief that the woman who has it all is also nomadic, and should carry it with her wherever she goes.
“The tiny reticule,” Caitlin held, “is a badge of femininity. It’s like lacy panties without the itchy twat.” And she smirked, in a way that is only possible when one is fully feminine without the torment of vaginal itch.
Reina belonged to the oppositional school. The doctor’s widow packed a small duffel bag everywhere she went, jingling with buckles and straps. If Caitlin’s purse was a badge of femininity, Reina’s was the field office.
Costumes are strategic. Caitlin knew that. Reina knew it, too. Alizarin, with her closetful of woven things and slogan-bearing T-shirts, was also well aware of it. But I was barely beginning to catch on when the undisputed master of strategic costuming came to call at Foxglove.
Danica Morgan showed up at Reina’s door decades after any mortal could expect to be forgiven for caving in a little; for settling down with a nice enough man and watching the sun go down with a glass of good red wine. Both women were from the hills of Trinity County, which sounds like the perfect place of origin for rustic saints and ancient wrongs. They were descendants of the few remaining Wintu, native people who survived the onset of disease, hydraulic mining, and indentured servitude that swept the nations of Northern California in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their fathers chewed tobacco and their mothers wore boots, and even the children knew how to work. In their early twenties, they came to Mendocino County and began referring to their thrift-store finery as “consignment pieces.”
When Danica Morgan came in through the gate beneath the climbing rose, petals tumbled onto her hair and her Burberry coat, which must have been a very good fake. She looked as capable of striding into a house on fire as she did of modeling the boots she did it in. She would teach her daughters the secret of elegance, and it would be an act of courage. She would show them how to dress themselves, and it would be a metaphor for self-respect, clean living, and the virtues of leading an examined life.
She paused on the walkway when Reina came out, and the two of them stood in the sun. There was a quickening of similarities, an apartness that identifies people who share something not easily identified. They were as tall as professional athletes, with posture that looked like they had spent their girlhoods pacing drawing rooms with Greek and Latin dictionaries balanced on their heads.
Like Gregory, Danica maintained a wolf that trailed behind her in the morning as she made her coffee; prowled at her side as she pulled the weeds around her daffodils; and slept watchfully at the foot of her bed. It’s true that wolves don’t bark. But they make wild desperate squeaking sounds when they are lonely or afraid.
“I don’t use my sweetie boy for anything,” Danica explained, airing her vowels like a woman who is
used to being heard. “I keep him.” She paused. “For my pleasure.”
Meanwhile, the wolf at Foxglove plainly regarded Reina as a concubine, retained for her willingness to perform duties too indelicate for wolfish female dignity. Danica gave that wolf a steady-eyed stare, and Akana sat down demurely, in laughing imitation of what good doggies do. It was almost indecent, how graceful she was. She curled her tail around her slender flank and then across her paws, as if it gave her satisfaction to be touching it. As if it were not a part of her body, but a piece of finery bought at secret, devastating cost.
We had lunch on the patio, admiring the climbing rose. Danica sat down on Reina’s right, Gregory on her left. I dangled off on Gregory’s other side, a bystander in hand me downs who finally took a seat. I thought when Danica looked at him, the sharpness of her glance was softened by the interval containing Reina, so by the time it reached Gregory, it was shapeless and sad. I thought Gregory busied himself cutting his meat into a perfect grid of identical pieces so he wouldn’t have to see that look; that he was startled when Danica asked him quietly if he would like a roll; and then again when she passed him the butter with flawless cordiality.
It’s hard to say what motivates a wolf, if not the sight of yet another buttered roll passing in front of her face. Silently, Akana rose into a sinuous half-crouch between me and her master. She placed her dainty paws upon the tablecloth. Something in me leapt with joy to see what a marauder she was, with her air of wedding gowns and stolen diamonds. If Akana had a handbag, it would be a quiver full of arrows, lined with the skin of her prey. She began to angle her gently crumpled snout for Gregory’s shining plate, with all its little meat bits lined up in a row.
Then Gregory did something that was frankly astonishing. He arranged his face into a caricature of rage. One feature after another was meticulously distorted. First, the brows came together like a thunderclap. Then the nostrils flared and the lips went taut and white. His hairline rose. He brought this mask of hypothetical fury very close to Akana’s snout, with its long curved rows of sharp white teeth.
“Noooooo!” he cried, like his favorite pitcher had just walked a man, with all the bases loaded. He waved his arms like a referee gone mad, wildly indicating that the entire game was in ruins.
Akana flattened her ears and supplicated him with a liquid wail in her eyes, like a lady of great delicacy whose domineering husband insults her in front of company. Danica watched in absolute silence. Reina tore her roll into molecule-sized shreds. I watched the space between Gregory and Akana and tried not to breathe disruptively.
It was Danica who set the silence, and Danica who broke it. To the tune of a few clinking coffee things, she turned to her old friend and said, “Did I tell you I applied for a job at the Tribal Health Office?”
The atmosphere was choked with lupine shame. It seemed almost inappropriate to bring up something functional and sane, involving high levels of social responsibility and technical skill. But Reina lunged for it.
“Is Thelma still there?” she gasped, as if the presence of Thelma in her administrative capacity were the most pressing question that had ever occurred to her.
She turned to Gregory, who was now impassive, as if this awkward enthusing were clearly the result of low progesterone and should be passed over without comment.
“Thelma introduced us,” she explained, with relentless gaiety. “When my Monya and Dani’s Rita were going to the Tribal daycare. We both ended up working there, so we could be with our kids and bring home a paycheck. We had it all.” She laughed. “Dani went to war when it looked like we were about to lose our funding.”
“We both went to war,” Danica reminded her friend, but it was clear by how those green eyes flashed who had led the battle. “Thelma’s retired, but Denise is still there. Thelma’s still around, though. She goes out riding sometimes. That big, huge, ugly . . .”
“Her Indian warhorse!” Reina shrieked. “Mister Lovely! Too ugly to die. She used to pile all those kids onto his back. I swear every one of them was asleep before he made it across the yard. Every time. Thelma!” She basked in uncertain happiness for a few moments, looking like she didn’t quite know what to do with it. “So you’re going back,” she said quietly. “I’m sure they snapped you up so fast.”
“Well.” Her friend gave a slight, admonishing smile. “They haven’t called back yet.” Reina moved impatiently. “I had my interview,” Danica went on, airing her vowels again. “And she asked me something I wasn’t prepared for. I mean, it’s been so long since I had a real job interview. But I could do most of it from home, and I’d bring in a little extra money if Zellie and Trey stay with us, which I think they will, because . . .”
“Dani. The question. At the interview,” Reina pleaded, showing her teeth beseechingly.
“Oh,” Danica started. “Right. So, not Denise, but this other woman, whose name—this is terrible. I can’t remember. I wrote it down in my calendar, though, so I won’t look stupid if she calls . . .” She made a quick lunge for her purse. “It doesn’t matter right now.” She caught a glimpse of Reina’s tortured writhe. “So she asked me, to tell her, in my own words—” She paused.
Gregory gazed at her over his fork, as if he could not for the life of him imagine where all the progesterone had gone.
“What my greatest strength is,” Danica revealed at last. “And my greatest weakness.”
“Well, what did you say? Your greatest weakness.” Reina scoffed, appalled at the temerity of this woman whose name was not even worth remembering.
“Well, I told her, it’s a long time since I had a job interview,” Danica reminded her patiently. “I have to think about it for a second. So I did. I sat there for a second, and then I said, I have to confess.” She took a deep breath, like a woman who is undaunted either by the truth or the unknown, but takes a deep breath before them so as not to create hard feelings among the other mortals. “I’m not a very good speller. But: I have spell-check.” We all breathed a sigh of relief. “And: I adopt children,” she said next, with quiet, controlled ferocity. She had a trained actor’s faculty for changing the shape of the space around her as she spoke.
“Is that a strength or a weakness?” Gregory quipped, as if he couldn’t feel it, the sudden shift in the atmospheric pressure of the story.
“I believe that every child deserves a safe, clean, loving home,” Danica continued, as if he hadn’t said a thing. He withered into insignificance, but didn’t seem to notice that, either. “And I happen to have a house with five bedrooms in it!” she exclaimed, carefully pointing her eyes away from the house that Zack built.
“I’ve seen it,” Reina murmured, heartfelt as an amen chorus.
“What am I going to do with all that room?” Danica demanded, as if she were anticipating being called to account for her weakness and her sins. “I walk around asking myself: there are children here in Mendocino County who have nothing. Nothing! Rennie, you’ve seen them at the daycare . . .”
Reina nodded soberly.
“Coming in with no breakfast, snot all over their faces,” Danica continued softly. Her voice was almost seductive as she described the wretched condition of the poverty-stricken children. “No spiritual training,” she threw in, lighting her eyes on Reina, whose face made a motion of badly-suppressed distaste. “So here I am in this great big house with acreage, with orchards, with apples and walnuts and this vegetable garden that practically grows itself, and I’m not going to share that? With children who have nothing? Forget my lousy spelling. These kids are my weakness. I would lay down my life for any one of them.” And she laid it down before us there, daring us to pick it up and be weak with her. “And,” she added, defying any one of us to stop her, “I’m not done yet.”
What the Mistress of the Wardrobe Knew
DANICA MORGAN DID not divide her life into eras. She did not pursue a passion or a lover with single-minded zeal for years and then abruptly decide to do something else. But she had been a g
uest of honor at all of Reina’s weddings. She’d sat in the front row when her oldest friend graduated from nursing school. When Reina ran marathons, Danica was there at the midpoint with a small cup of water, laughing and standing in the shade. And Dani was at Foxglove, the day that Zack Hill died.
“She knew,” Reina told me, when Danica and Gregory were both gone and the place was a little less wolfish. “She walked in that door and took one look at him and she just knew that was the day. She put her hand on his chest and looked him right in the eye and whispered, let’s finish this.” Her own eyes were brimming with secrets as she said it. “She helped me wash his body,” she murmured, barely moving her lips so not a drop of those secrets was spilled.
Now she frowned into the fireplace, where the ashes of early spring were waiting for the fall. “She’s really mad at me about Gregory,” she ventured, after a silence long enough to contain multiple segues.
“Why is she mad?” I asked, aware that as I did so, I was falling into orbit around this woman whose generosity had a gravitational pull to it. It was the most natural thing in the world, to be this woman’s sidekick; to involve myself in her alliances.
“She just doesn’t think he’s the right man for me.” She gave a sluggish little sigh, as if the subject held no interest for her, though she had brought it up. “Did she seem a little . . . on, to you?” she asked suddenly, fastening her eyes on my face. I felt myself flinch.
“On to me?” I joked, to cover it. “What, she knows about my tax havens?”
“On a mission,” she clarified, staring moodily into the fireplace again.
“She does seem a little mission oriented,” I agreed, with some caution. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to join her on another round of relationship crises. But I had gotten into the habit of being Reina’s witness now. It was enervating and compelling, like binge-watching the third or fourth season of a television show without ever finding out how it all got started in the first place.