Dream of the Blue Room

by Michelle Richmond

  “How do you deal with it?” Dave asks.

  “At first I didn’t. I cried like a baby, spent a lot of time in bed with the remote control and Baywatch. I had to keep the TV on, because when it was quiet my mind went berserk. I’d just sit there envisioning myself in the end, wheelchair-bound, taking liquids through a feeding tube. After a couple of months, I did a reality check. I decided the best thing I can do is live a little more each day. That’s why I’m here—to spend my last days in the place I love.”

  “I read this book,” Stacy says, “about a guy with Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Having given up on the chopsticks, she picks up a piece of calamari with her fingers and pops it in her mouth. “It was really inspirational.”

  “I probably read it too,” Graham says. “For a while, I read everything that was published on the subject. I could recite the statistics in my sleep. Twenty percent survive five years. Ten percent make it ten years.” He catches my eye. “But I’m not planning to stick around until this disease turns me into an invalid.”

  “A few years back I was called out on an attempted suicide,” Dave says. “Forty-nine-year-old woman. She’d tried to hang herself from the light fixture in her dining room, but the rope broke and her daughter found her on the floor an hour later. Turns out she had ALS. Just didn’t want to live like that.”

  Stacy clears her throat. Graham glances around the table and says, “Cheer up, mates,” but there’s nothing cheerful in his voice. After that, no one says anything for a minute. Graham lifts his bowl and drinks off the last of his soup. The waitress is immediately by his side, ladling more into his bowl.

  “I’ll tell you what this disease has done for me. It has taught me to recalibrate pain. When I was nineteen, I spent six months in a body cast following a motorcycle accident. Now, those six months seem like a picnic. I’ve reached a new threshold, a new standard by which to judge all other pain. Let me demonstrate.” He says something to the waitress, who brings him a matchbook. Graham strikes the match against the side of the box, then holds it just below his open palm. The tip of the flame touches his skin, but he doesn’t flinch. He holds it there until the flame reaches the end of the match; I lean forward and blow it out.

  “Bravo,” Dave says.

  Graham holds his palm out for us to see. A small dot in the center of his broad hand is singed black. The entire waitstaff has gathered around to look. A pretty girl with a thin white scar stretching from her left eye to her cheek points at Graham and shouts words I can’t understand. The old woman says something that makes the staff and patrons laugh, then shoos everyone away from our table.

  “You get my point.” Graham shifts in his seat; his leg brushes mine. “That stunt I just pulled was uncomfortable, of course, but how bad can it be when you know it’s going to end in a few seconds? Chronic pain is an altogether different beast. There’s no getting out from under it. I look back at that nineteen-year-old boy in the body cast, and I envy him.”

  Dave spears a piece of pork. “I think we all envy ourselves at nineteen.”

  Dave, I know, sees Graham in terms of the particular case, the disease itself, in the impersonal light of reason. Dave is unencumbered by emotion. Each time he goes to work, he sees terrible things. His response to these things is professional, exact, rational. He looks at a young girl bleeding from a gunshot wound and thinks, “How can I help this girl survive?” If it is clear his patient will die, he thinks, “What can I do to make her comfortable for now, until it’s over?” I wonder sometimes if he looks at me and sees a useless person. While he’s saving lives, I’m telling women with platinum cards which handbag to wear with their tailored silk suits, which earrings to pair with the Hermès scarves. I wonder, sometimes, if this is why he moved out: I simply cannot compete with the ongoing drama of his job.

  “And you?” Graham says, looking at Dave.

  “Me?”

  “What’s the greatest degree of pain you’ve ever endured?”

  “That’s easy. A couple of years ago I had a cracked tooth. It became infected at the root. The dentist, Dr. De Salvo, dug around in there for more than an hour. When he went to pull the thing, it shattered. He had to yank each piece out individually. Because the infection was at the nerve, it all had to be done without any Novocain. By the time he was finished, I had passed out. When I came to, he was standing above me, apologizing. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Apparently, he’d left the nerve exposed. I went home pumped up on drugs, and sometime in the middle of the night the drugs wore off. Ouch.”

  “He was crying like a baby,” I say.

  “This guy?” Stacy says. “Crying? That’s hard to believe.”

  What I remember most from that time is the intensity of feeling I had for Dave. Seeing him in pain made me look at him, at us, in a new way. Suddenly, this man who had always been so sure of himself in every situation was vulnerable. Dave had always been the rescuer, but during those brief days, he had to depend on me. Years before, my fondness for him had evolved into love because he was there when Amanda Ruth died; he had known exactly what to say, ushering me through those first horrible days and weeks after her murder. Although I hated seeing Dave in so much pain, I secretly relished his weakness. I watched over him like a careful mother. For the first time in our marriage, I felt that he needed me, that I was the one in control of the situation.

  “Well?” Graham says, nudging me with his elbow. “What was it for you? What event established your pain threshold?”

  “I was fourteen,” I say, trying to avoid Graham’s eyes, certain that my attraction toward him must show, that my voice comes out weak when I speak to him. “This was in Alabama. I was having my riding lesson—Miss Linda was teaching me how to canter—and my horse bucked, reared up, and fell on top of me. My pelvis was broken, both my hips fractured.”

  Dave is looking at me like I’m a stranger who just walked in off the street. Graham leans toward me. I’m wearing a sleeveless dress, and I can feel the rough fabric of his shirt against my shoulder. “Go on,” he says.

  “The ride to the hospital and the emergency room is a blur. But I have a clear memory of the orderlies transferring me to a cold metal table in the X-ray room. Then I was alone with just one nurse, a skeletal woman named Ramona who smelled like she’d been smoking nonstop for the last twenty years. ‘Okay, hon,’ she said. ‘Count to three now, and I’m gonna slide this thing here under your behind.’ She tricked me. On two she jerked my hip up and slid the X-ray plate underneath. Then she pressed down on my pelvis and flipped the switch. It hurt about a hundred times more than actually falling off the horse. Ramona did twelve different X rays, and each one seemed to last forever. So that’s my threshold. Nothing else has even compared.”

  “I’ve never heard that story before,” Dave says.

  “It was a long time ago.” I bite into a lotus paste bun. The seedy filling is sickeningly sweet and dense.

  Graham turns to Stacy. “Your turn.”

  “Nothing has happened to me.”

  “Come on. At some point in your life you’ve been in pain.”

  “Really,” she says. “I’ve had an uneventful life.”

  “Everyone has a story,” Dave insists.

  Stacy looks around the table uncertainly. All eyes are on her. “Okay. I’ll tell you a story, but it doesn’t leave this table. I’ve never told anyone.”

  “All the better,” Graham says.

  She takes a deep breath. “The worst pain I ever experienced was during childbirth. This was a couple of years ago. I’d not really been taking care of myself. I was involved with some dodgy people. Lots of drugs, even more drinking. By the time my due date came along the boyfriend wasn’t in the picture.”

  She’s picking at her fingernails, not looking at any of us. “So I’m there in the hospital, and I’ve been in labor for about eighteen hours, and nothing’s happening, and I just want it all to be over with. I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. The nurses are telling me to calm down, to brea
the, to take it easy, and my mom’s in the room, holding my hand, trying to be supportive, but I’m on painkillers and she thinks I can’t hear her when she says to the nurse, ‘I can’t believe she got herself into this mess.’ And I can’t believe I got myself into it either, and I’m thinking about Jimmy and his goddamn Ducati motorcycle, how we rode it all the way from Detroit to St. Louis that time and slept in crappy motel rooms that charged by the hour and shot up heroin and didn’t use any birth control, because we didn’t think of it, because neither of us really considered being alive long enough for it to matter.

  “So finally it’s time, I know it’s time because the nurses are all talking in loud panicky voices, and my mom’s in hysterics, but the baby’s not turned in the right direction and I hear a voice say, ‘We’re going to have to cut it out.’ So then they put this mask over my mouth and nose and my mom’s face fades out, and everything is all wavy and blue, like I’m at the bottom of a swimming pool. And after that I come to and there’s this baby in the room, and my mom’s just looking at the baby like it’s some sort of alien.”

  Stacy is crying, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “So I tell the nurse I want to hold the baby and my mom says, ‘Sweetheart, we’ve discussed this,’ but I say, ‘No, I want to hold her,’ and the nurse hands her to me, and I’m thinking how amazing it is that here’s this perfect baby girl, and she doesn’t look at all fucked up like I expected her to, she doesn’t look like she could have come from me. ‘Just let me have her for a few days,’ I said. ‘Please.’ I was thinking about taking her home to my mom’s house, and putting her in a little crib. I didn’t want to keep her forever, of course, my parents and I had already discussed that, how I was too young, how I had to get my life together, all that. But I was thinking how perfect it would be to have her there with me for just a little while. ‘That’s not a good idea,’ the nurse said. Then my mom said, ‘Get it together, Stacy.’”

  Stacy is sobbing uncontrollably, and she’s looking at us as if we’re the jury, or the nurse, or her mother, as if we have some say over how things turn out. “I never took her home. I held her for a little while and then the nurse took her, and someone wheeled me back to my room. The next day I was back at my parents’ house, eating mashed potatoes and roast beef at their table, and every time I breathed it felt like the stitches would rip apart, and my dad was talking about stock options, and not once did anyone mention the baby.”

  Dave hands a napkin to Stacy, who wipes her eyes. As he leans over and whispers something in her ear, I know in some deep sick part of my stomach that Dave is lost to me for the rest of the trip. Like the woman he saved from the burning car on the Palisades, Stacy offers him something I can’t—raw and undisguised need. Dave is moved by need in the same way other men are moved by beauty.

  She glances around the table at us, tries to smile, and says, “So that’s my story.”

  It’s nearly midnight by the time we’re finished with dinner. Graham hails a taxi, a tiny van with makeshift seating. He sits in a plastic lawn chair beside the driver, and Dave settles onto an old ice chest in the back. Between them is a poorly upholstered seat barely big enough for two, which Stacy and I share. The van has only one headlight. As we careen through the night, bumping and braking and shifting and screeching, the road visible through a hole the size of my shoe in the van’s rusty bottom, I hold on tight to the back of the driver’s seat, my heart pounding. In the back, Dave seems to be enjoying the ride, letting out a whoop every time we hit a bump. Once, when it seems we’re about to topple over, Stacy grabs my arm for balance.

  The taxi lets us off at the dock. Graham stays behind to pay, and as Stacy begins to walk ahead, Dave says to me quietly, “She needs to talk this thing through.”

  “Okay,” I say, which is what I always say, every time his pager goes off at 2 a.m., every time the woman from Chelsea calls. “Hi Jenny. It’s me again. Sorry to call so late.”

  Dave hurries ahead to catch Stacy. She stops, says something to him I can’t hear. The two of them step onto the floating dock that leads to the Red Victoria. With every step, I feel him leaving me not only in body, but in mind. By the time he reaches the ship, he will have entirely forgotten me.

  Graham exchanges a few pleasant words with the driver, and then, as if it is the most natural thing in the world, he takes my hand. “Look,” he says, turning around to face Nanjing. The whole city is aglitter with lights, the full moon glows red, the river rolls past, the boards of the dock creak and whine.

  “It could be any city, couldn’t it?”

  He’s right. This could be any city, any country. At night it ceases, somehow, to be China. In this light, I don’t feel so far from home. Stacy and Dave have been swallowed up by the fog. Their voices carry toward us, then fade. Graham lets go of my hand and puts one arm around me.

  “Is it just me?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Am I fooling myself to think you might feel something too?”

  “I can’t answer that.” The night is warm and heavy, a drop of sweat slides down my spine. My heart speeds up, my breath comes quickly. I’m afraid to say anything, afraid that when I do, I will be delivering myself to him entirely. Finally, I look up at him. “What happens next?”

  “We have thirteen days. Let’s make the most of it. Of course, there’s the matter of your husband. He’s a nice fellow.”

  “You mean that nice fellow who just walked away with another woman?”

  “I don’t want to go stepping on any toes.”

  “He moved out two months ago.”

  “In a selfish way I’m glad to hear it. Did you see it coming?”

  “Not really. One night he came home late, set a bag of take-out Chinese on the counter, and said, ‘This isn’t working.’”

  I remember how flat Dave’s voice sounded, devoid of emotion. He might as well have been telling me the newspaper hadn’t come that morning, or that the Chinese restaurant had raised its prices. What made it worse was that I’d been waiting up for him, and I was wearing a new lace nightgown, trying to entice him. If he noticed the nightgown, he didn’t mention it. I wonder if somehow the nightgown itself inspired him to put an end to everything that night. Maybe when he saw it, he realized I was trying to make things work; maybe that scared him.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I just dumped the cartons of rice and broccoli beef on the plate. We sat on the sofa and watched TV and ate without talking. Conan O’Brien was interviewing this four-year-old kid who could nibble Kraft cheese singles into the shapes of all fifty states.

  “He didn’t want to make this trip, but I begged him. I convinced him we should make one last-ditch effort to stay together.” I feel sick at my stomach, remembering how I showed up one evening at Dave’s place across the park. I was haggard from lack of sleep. I sat on the sofa for more than an hour, clutching his hand, rattling off a list of reasons I thought we should work it out. I asked him if he still loved me. He paused for two minutes. I know it was two, because I was watching the clock, the minute hand sweeping slowly over the white face. “I do,” he said finally.

  “Then you owe it to us to try, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I can’t make any promises.”

  I describe this scene to Graham. He listens silently. At the end of the story, I find myself laughing at the image of myself on the sofa, halfway through a box of Kleenex, begging. “Humiliating, isn’t it?”

  “So, this last-ditch effort to save your marriage. Is it working?”

  “Every now and then Dave will do something—look at me in a certain way, or make some comment—that makes me think he still cares. But then he’ll be so distant, and I’ll think there’s no hope for us. Maybe we’re missing something that married couples are supposed to have. I’m not sure what it is, exactly.”

  “At least you tried. There’s something to be said for that.”

  “Have you ever been married?”


  “For about ten minutes when I was twenty-five.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was selfish with my time, my space. And travel. I loved to travel, and I didn’t want to be held back. I really enjoyed my solitude. It worked out okay, too, until recently. Then I got sick, and I started wishing I had somebody. Maybe I should have settled down with someone a long time ago. Then she’d be with me now. I wouldn’t have to face this alone.”

  He squeezes my shoulder. I don’t know how to respond, so I just put my arms around his waist and hold him. It feels strange to be holding a man who is not my husband.

  “If we’re not careful the ship will leave us,” I say finally.

  “That wouldn’t be so bad. Me, you, Nanjing, some fancy foreigners’ hotel.”

  I move away from him and walk down the dock. He follows. “I just told you my life story. Don’t I even get a kiss?”

  “I’ve been married for twelve years,” I say over my shoulder. “Give me time.”

  When I glance back, his hands are in his pockets and he’s looking at the ground, walking slowly, like a man who isn’t ready to reach his destination. “That’s the one thing I don’t have.”

  Back in our cabin, lying in bed, Dave says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the horse accident?”

  “I never thought of it. Compared to what you see every day on the job, it’s nothing.” I think of stab wounds, car wrecks, domestic violence. I think of the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center, and of Dave in his ambulance, heading toward the disaster three years ago, and the sick feeling in my gut when I saw live pictures on TV of the towers collapsing, people fleeing, their faces and clothes and hair covered in a surreal pink-gray ash. At the time, pacing back and forth in our apartment, fearing for Dave’s life, waiting desperately for the phone to ring, I loved him more than ever. I told God that, if He’d just bring Dave home to me, I’d patch up everything, love my husband forever, forge a new devotion. For some months afterward, the commitment held. But eventually the old malaise took hold of us, the bickering returned, and it was a struggle to stay together in that apartment, each of us trying, but failing, to hide our discontent.