37
IT’S MIDMORNING BY THE time they bring Joy upstairs from the intensive-care unit. There are no private rooms available, and she’s put into a double already occupied by a woman who’s had a hysterectomy. The room seems funereal with the scent of flowers when Kenny comes in. The other woman, whose bed is closer to the door, is talking on the telephone. Joy’s bed is enclosed by a drawn curtain and he slips quickly into its tent-like privacy. She’s deeply asleep, or unconscious, and is still that threatening color. They’ve hooked her up to an intravenous solution that’s released slowly through the clear tubing, drop by trembling drop. He sits down in the chair next to the bed with excruciating care, as if the slightest sound might wake her. Shouldn’t he try to wake her?
Kenny hadn’t asked any of the right questions of the resident in the emergency room, who’d looked about fourteen and was in love with human emergency. He had a pack of Luckies in the breast pocket of his official white jacket. He’d said, with what seemed like pleasure, that Joy had actually died for a moment while they were pumping her out—a plunge in blood pressure, no breath, no heartbeat—and had then been revived. Everything fluctuated wildly on return, but now she appeared stable. What they had to look out for was pneumonia—she might have aspirated some vomit—and for the less likely possibility of brain damage caused by that brief deprivation of oxygen. Her kidney function was being monitored, too, but his educated guess was that she had passed safely through it.
The man’s casual, cheerful manner frightened and enraged Kenny. Who cared about his educated guesses. Wasn’t this a fucking hospital? Why was it staffed by teenagers wearing name tags that proclaimed them doctors?
But he found himself muttering his humble gratitude. Joy’s life had been saved, and no one harped on the fact that she had attempted suicide. The contents of her stomach were sent to the lab for analysis. The policemen asked a few questions and Kenny kept saying, “I don’t know. I just came home. I just walked in on it.” They filled out their forms and left. The real grilling would come later, he was sure, but at least he didn’t have to deal with it now. In the five-minute visits to the intensive-care, unit each hour, he could sit quietly next to Joy’s bed and watch the understated miracle of her breathing.
Later, he was summoned by a resident in psychiatry. It was evening by then. The doctor asked about Joy’s medical and emotional history, about the condition of their marriage. Everything was written down in a notebook, indelibly recorded. Kenny told the truth as best he could, looking into the other man’s eyes for traces of judgment or empathy. Neither could be readily perceived. And Kenny’s own mind wandered during the session. He thought: The children will have to be put to bed. Steven’s earache. He’d never called and said about the medicine. The boy’s sobbing on the telephone that afternoon. Molly in her underpants, screaming as he ran, hugging his neck too tightly. Daphne sitting in her car. Kenny blinked, jarred into attention. His exhaustion was making him superimpose images from other days, different places. He took the piece of paper the psychiatrist offered, with the names of three other psychiatrists on it, and put it in his pocket.
Afterward, Kenny slept for a while in a waiting room, with other clothed sleepers, the desperate stench of cigarettes and anxiety around them. Someone shook him awake to say that his wife had been taken upstairs.
The woman on the telephone says, “I have an ear-to-ear incision. They call it a bikini cut.” Her voice lowers to a stage whisper. “I wanted them to take it out the other way, but it was too big. Letterman said eleven hundred grams. How much is a gram?”
Nurses come in and take Joy’s blood pressure. She is so inert and hollowed out that it seems as if they’re trying to inflate her with the pump and cuff. They take her temperature too, and check her pulse rate. She sleeps through everything, like a fairy-tale princess.
At eleven o’clock, visiting hours begin, and the husband of the woman in the next bed comes to see her. Kenny hears her say gaily, “Roses! Where will I put them?” Then there’s a protracted silence, broken only by whispers and the rustling of fabric. He remembers parking somewhere dark in Brooklyn with a beautiful dark-haired girl. Another couple was in the backseat of Kenny’s mother’s car. They were all high-school seniors.
The girl he was with, whose name was Lorna, permitted him small, measured sexual favors. She was marked by boundaries he could approach but was not allowed to cross. Once, he glanced into the rearview mirror and the couple behind them had disappeared. But they were still there; they breathed like marathon runners, and there were other sounds. It’s absurd to be reminded of that now, to experience the same kind of envious longing. His stomach makes a mewling complaint. He realizes that he’s had nothing to eat for more than twenty-four hours, but he wants to be here when Joy opens her eyes.
Recently, he’s been reading to Steven from a large, illustrated book of fairy tales, the same ones he knows from his own childhood. Younger sons sent on impossible errands that are accomplished with the help of benevolent witches. Sleeping beauties roused by a single princely kiss. Snow White in her glass coffin, no mist of breath to cloud it. Cinderella, suitably rewarded for goodness and poverty. For the first time, he thinks of the wicked stepsisters. Perhaps they were maligned. Perhaps they, too, could be loved in spite of their large feet and selfish ways. And elder greedy sons not made to come home in empty-handed defeat. Why was everyone always granted only three wishes? It’s never enough.
Steven is too young to understand much of what he hears, but he loves the stories anyway, is also happily seduced by myth. Someday he will climb the ropes of a woman’s unbound hair and enter a tower, her castle.
Kenny looks at Joy and remembers the terms of the fairy-tale bargain he’d made for her life. He whispers her name and she doesn’t stir. He bends and places his lips on hers. Her breath has a rank, sweetish odor and taste—the morning kiss of marriage. She continues to sleep.
38
DAPHNE FINISHES HER ROUNDS and heads back to the kitchen. She helps the other women to put things away, to clear and sponge off surfaces. While she’s doing these ordinary chores, extraordinary, irrevocable events are happening elsewhere. She hates this awareness. It’s like thinking about breathing and losing its natural rhythm, or thinking about sleeping and then being unable to do so.
Right now, Kenny is probably planning how he will tell her one thing or another. It will be difficult, both the telling and the listening. She longs for protection from experience, from the necessity of ritual.
On the wall of her father’s office at the insurance company, there’s a sign: When the going gets tough, the tough get going! It’s a senseless motto. When the going gets tough, Daphne no longer wants to be a vessel of feeling.
One of the women is singing in a clear sweet voice, made even clearer and sweeter by the tiled walls, as if she’s singing in the shower. The song is sentimental and easy, yet it pierces the thin membrane of Daphne’s resistance because it is, in the most elementary way, about love. Maybe everything is, and she’ll be reminded forever by a relentless onslaught of innuendos. By books, movies, graffiti, the easy coupling of other people’s hands. How will she prepare her defense? She considers making a vow of chastity. If she never wraps her arms and legs around anyone, she will never be made bereft by their emptiness.
When her work is finished and she takes off the hairnet, the weight of her released hair is startling. She thinks of Kenny winding its length around his hand, trapping her with the calculation of love. It’s taken her ten years to grow this hair, and in an instant she decides to cut it. Not as a symbol of guilt or loss, but as a serious gesture of change. Short hair will modify her body’s signals of need. The need itself might become diminished. There are a thousand ways she can alter her fate.
On the way home, Daphne is glad that she lives in California, where life never shuts down. Even past midnight, it’s easy to find one of those large stores that carries everything, open and bustling with business. She needs a good pair of
shears for the job, not the dull ones she has at the apartment. She doesn’t want to just hack it all off and end up looking like those Frenchwomen who fraternized with Germans during World War II. Shoulder-length might be nice, and maybe an irregular fringe of bangs. When Kenny sees her, he’ll be shocked by how different she looks. As if his pressing news is not essential to her existence. See, I’m already someone else. Why are you telling me this story?
The scissors are in aisle 16C, toward the back of the store, between hardware and beauty supplies. There’s a dazzling selection, all of them blister-sealed and hanging on a cork display board. How will she decide among them? As she contemplates a choice, Daphne’s fingers find a strand of hair and they slide down its slippery length to her waist. She remembers her head resting in Mr. Axel’s lap and how his fumbling hand caught the hairnet and pulled it off. An accident of love. And she sees again, as in a revelation, the infinite varieties of attachment. In her outburst, she’d said that she wanted to die. Liar! But he’d believed her and called her back.
Once more, she touches her hair, slowly, turning an end of it into a loose curl. She picks the curl up and tickles herself with it just under the nose. Walking into the hardware section, she finds a saw blade in which she can see her reflection with its comical mustache—and around her head that nimbus of glory. To take scissors to it seems now like an act of self-destruction, not as terrible as Joy’s, but with its own kind of violent intention.
Daphne continues down the hardware aisle until she comes to the subsection of Home Beautification. Again, there are myriad options, but she makes up her mind quickly. One gallon should do it, and she’ll need a roller and a tray and a drop cloth.
In the apartment, she ties a kerchief around her head to protect her hair, and puts on best-loved jeans that have frayed past the salvation of mending. After the furniture is pushed against the walls, she moves her stepladder to the center of the room.
She scratches at the stars with her fingernails, and then with a razor blade. They’re permanently adhered to the ceiling. There is nothing to do but paint over them. She pours the paint into the tray and lays the roller carefully into it. Not that she’s happy, but she hums. At least two coats of this rosy-pink color will be necessary to cover the darkness. As she begins to apply the paint, the stars are obliterated, one by one, the way real ones are by the spreading dawn.
39
KENNY BATHES HIS CHILDREN before their nap, although they were bathed only that morning by the neighbor who cared for them in his absence. They’re very playful in the tub, splashing and glancing at each other with sly interest. Steven no longer complains about his earache. Molly’s perfect brow is smooth and untroubled. So far, neither of them has asked any questions about the past two days, or about their mother. How much is the protective forgetfulness of babyhood, and how much a shrewd evasion of what is impossibly scary?
When Kenny went next door to pick them up, his neighbor demanded her ransom of information. She pulled him into her kitchen, out of the children’s earshot, and waited for her payoff.
“A mistake, Barbara,” he said. “A lousy mess. I can’t talk about it right now. I think everything will be all right.”
Reluctantly, she moved aside and let him pass.
The children are wrinkling up, but he doesn’t care. If not fish, they’re at least amphibian. He caresses them with lather, and turns the faucet on from time to time to keep the water temperature constant. If there was enough room, he’d slip out of his smelly clothes and get in there with them. He feels as if he hasn’t seen them for weeks.
Kenny had planned, on the way home from the hospital, what he would say to them. He’d had an impulse of honesty, tempered by caution. Joy had been the one who was always reading aloud to him about the grave responsibilities of parenting. For a long time after Steven was born, she’d drag out her dog-eared copies of Spock and Gesell, and look up Teething, Night Terrors, and Strangers, Fear of. Kenny has a bitterly ironic image of her thumbing another index, searching under S for Suicide, Parent’s Failed Attempt at. He is newly astounded that she was willing to undo everything this way. It arouses his fury and his awe.
“Steven? Molly?” he says. “Do you remember yesterday when Mommy was sleeping?”
“Hey, look at me, Daddy,” Steven says. “I’m swimming.” He flails his arms, soaking the front of Kenny’s shirt. “Uh-oh, I’m drowning!” And he plunges his head under the sudsy water.
“Drowning!” Molly echoes, shutting her star-tipped eyelids, submerging only her chin.
When he’s toweling them dry, Kenny tries again. “Mommy will be coming home soon, you know,” he says.
“I know that, dummy,” Steven answers, closing the subject.
When they’re bedded down, Kenny undresses and climbs into their tepid bathwater, with their rubber toys in a small flotilla around him. He sips from a can of beer, then balances it on the edge of the tub.
The baby-sitter from the agency arrives at two. She’s a forbidding-looking giantess who can’t seem to remember the children’s names. More trauma. But he doesn’t want the further intrusion of neighbors and friends, and he must see Daphne before she leaves for work.
Driving toward Ventura, he refuses recollections of previous trips in this direction. He’s possessed by a fierce discipline, not too different from the one that used to help him dissolve thoughts of Daphne as he drove away from her.
The bath, a sandwich, and the time with his children have shored Kenny up. But he’s considerably older than he was yesterday, and the manic energy he was once able to summon for his double life doesn’t seem possible anymore. He wonders how he’ll even tolerate the demands of an ordinary one once again.
When he’d planned on leaving Joy, all the qualities in her he’d loved at another time rushed back to admonish and seduce him: the serious intensity she brought to everything; that early sexual nerve; her courage in childbirth; her beauty. As he turned away from her, he found himself admiring, with a sense of loss, her quickness with numbers, the way she held a cigarette, and the sea color of her eyes.
Now he must do the opposite with Daphne. It’s time to acknowledge her various failings, to help him turn away from her as if it’s a reasonable thing to do. Sometimes she’s childlike in ways that only lovesickness can make charming. Ingenuousness, he knows, would finally drive him nuts. As would the careless clutter of unwashed dishes, the spills of dusting powder, the spine-bent books. That day in the parking lot at the college, she had hesitated too long before going away with Kenny. And she had referred to him as an “old friend.” He remembers setting aside a freeze-frame of the moment, for different purposes. It will have to serve him now in breaking away. There is so much more to actively adore about her, to lust after, to mourn. But he’ll do enough of that when he and Joy are lying next to each other again, and moving into the separateness of thought before sleep.
She had awakened today just as he was starting to doze in the bedside chair. She’d stared at him blankly for a moment, and he watched recognition and the gradual process of recall change the shape and expression of her eyes. “I’m here,” he’d said, taking her hand, and she nodded and seemed to go back to sleep. But only minutes later she looked at him again, clearly focused this time. “Me, too,” she said.
Their marriage will soon become a ménage a trois of man, woman, and therapist. As they were once joined by clergy and left to it, they will attempt to be rejoined by the trespass of a lingering third party. He supposes it’s only another paradox of the new intimacy. And it will work out, or it won’t.
But, oh, Daphne! Her insignificant failings fall away like the encumbrance of clothing. Dear love. Old friend. It pains him to think that she’s unready for his news, that he’s speeding toward her as a messenger of betrayal.
Under the picture of Kenny in his high-school yearbook, someone had bestowed the title “Ladykiller.” He seems to be working overtime at the fulfillment of adolescent prophecy.
Daphne doesn
’t even expect him, and he hasn’t rehearsed this scene because it has remained unimaginable. But when he knocks on her door, she is already opening it to let him in.
40
MRS. FELDMAN’S FEARS ABOUT a new roommate were not unjustified.
A week after her sister’s death, a Miss Crane is brought into 225. She’s senile, but in a different way than Mrs. Bernstein was. Often, Daphne is struck by the individual turns of senility. Something of the earlier personality must strongly inform the later one. Obsessions vary. A man who’s always lived in California insists that the Mayor of Chicago has gotten him into this mess. He demands that telegrams of protest be sent, and letters to the newspaper. A few of the patients hide things against possible thievery: underwear, scraps of food, carefully folded brown paper bags. Others are haunted by their dead that refuse to go away; strangers assume lost faces and names. As she makes her rounds, Daphne is sometimes greeted as Gertrude, or Mother. She has fleeting considerations of reincarnation.
Miss Crane’s crusade and cry are singular. She is simply intolerant of all activities that involve or affect her in any way. “I’m too old,” she says. It is her constant refrain when they put the lights on in the morning and shut them off at night. When they wash or feed her. As soon as she’s touched by anyone for any reason, she shrieks, “Stop that! I’m too old! I’m too old!”
Mrs. Feldman’s resentment of Mrs. McBride is diverted to Miss Crane. She is truly the one who has usurped her sister’s place. She’s even sleeping in Pearl’s bed! And she continually admits that she’s outlived her functional self. “Shut up,” Mrs. Feldman tells Miss Crane, giving her yet another provocation for her recital. She is also too old to be told to shut up.
In the Palomar Arms Page 22