“Or try something new, if you want. Jacob Blaumann,” he said dreamily, “master of law! You could do your own television serial.”
“We just call them shows here,” Jacob said. “Cereal’s for eating.”
Jacob had actually grown fond of the schoolboy Briticisms. He liked to imagine Oliver as a young boarding-school student, lounging around like this on Saturdays and enjoying the occasional company of men. During the week he was hardly ever in the mood, but on Saturdays he was like a giggly teenager who’d stumbled onto this new, secret activity.
“I’ll be Jacob Blaumann, Master and Commander!” Jacob said, stretching his arms to frame the opening titles.
“A master . . . piece!” Oliver clapped and Jacob left to take a shower. Minutes later he tried hard not to hear Oliver whispering on the phone to someone through the tiled wall. “No, he’s seeming better, I think.”
Toward the end of March, Jacob was reassigned to afternoons, and this involved watching over Sissy Coltrane’s group in the art therapy “laboratory” (her term). Sissy led the group through middle-school-level exercises: sketching their shoes, sculpting little bowls, banging out campfire songs on tambourines. Ordinarily it was the sort of rotation that Jacob would have begged Oliver to get him out of, but Jacob didn’t complain. Through a haze of clay dust drifting up from misshapen pottery, he kept half an eye on Ella Yorke.
It wasn’t as if he was seeking out information on her, just taking note when something appeared. Paul, one of the other orderlies, told him she was seventeen and had been in and out of Anchorage House four times over the past two years. This time she’d been admitted during the Christmas rush and after her thirty-day evaluation had been cleared to stay. She was supposedly so smart that, despite having missed portions of her junior and senior years, she had graduated in the top 5 percent of her class and been accepted at Columbia. But after one semester she was back on medical leave.
This week Sissy had them work on self-portraits in acrylic paint. Everyone was given a little two-by-one-foot canvas and a hand mirror to work with. Ella had worked on her self-portrait, spending two whole days endlessly erasing lines and redrawing them, walking a few paces away to see how it looked from a distance, then rushing back to make some tiny adjustment. Once she spent the entire hour just mixing brown paint, adding a little more umber, a little more ochre, a little jet black, to get the shade right. She’d hold the brush up to her own hair for comparison.
Jane and Annabeth snickered. They had plastic garbage bags over their smocks and held their brushes far away, as if they were CDC agents and the paint were a deadly pathogen. Jacob had a terrible urge to paint polka dots all over Annabeth’s picture. The boys made slapdash efforts: cartoonish versions of themselves with stick-figure arms, carrying hockey sticks or driving race cars. There was an epic game of paper football flicking they were always trying to resume.
When everyone else was washing out their paintbrushes in the sink, Ella sat at the table, daubing paint onto the canvas, then stabbing it repeatedly into the jar of milky brown-black water. Then she took a final, displeased look at her painting and slumped forward, mashing her cheek silently into the moonscape of dried paint that covered the table.
Sissy was occupied by the girls at the sink, so Jacob went over to see if she was all right. “It doesn’t have to end up in the Met,” he said.
“It’s all out of proportion,” she replied. “These stupid plastic mirrors are so warped.”
Indeed, the cheap hand mirrors were rippled like puddles frozen in midbreeze.
“They won’t give us glass ones,” Ella muttered. “Somebody might, you know—”
Jacob nodded knowingly. “Try to find out who’s the fairest of them all?”
Ella laughed so loudly she seemed to even surprise herself. She lifted her head up and clamped one hand over her mouth, but Sissy wasn’t even looking.
Jacob leaned forward to examine the portrait more closely. The warping wasn’t the problem so much as the hollow grin—teeth gritted and lips pursed, as if the girl in the picture had just sucked a Warhead.
“Here’s your problem. This is not what a smile looks like. This is what it looks like when someone is being operated on without anesthesia.”
Ella’s smile grew so large that it overpowered her face, launching her cheeks up so high that they all but hid her dark brown eyes.
“See, there you go. Draw that.”
Ella froze, picked up her mirror quickly and looked into it. “I look like a . . . like a . . .”
“What?”
“Like a mental patient.”
Jacob laughed so fast that he had to cover his mouth. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like that at work, or even alone with Oliver.
But Ella didn’t seem to see the humor in it. She dropped her head back onto the table. “No wonder my love life’s such a drag.”
“Well, you really can’t judge a smile in captivity like that,” Jacob said. “They’re much nicer in the wild. See, there. Like that.”
Ella stared into the mirror again. “It’s a vicious cycle. I look in the mirror, hate what I see, then paint what I see, hate what I paint, look back in the mirror at myself hating what I painted. It’s actually a perfect analogue for the major depressive experience.”
“The major depressive experience? You make it sound like a semester in Spain.”
“This basically is my study abroad.”
Jacob looked over at Sissy, who was now showing someone the proper way to Saran Wrap a paint palette to keep it fresh for the next day.
“I had a friend who was an artist,” he said, immediately annoyed at himself for using the past tense, “and she told me self-portraits aren’t really about faces but what’s going on behind the faces.”
Ella considered this. “If I painted that, they’d seriously freak.”
“So?”
“So then they’ll think I’m still depressed, and I won’t be able to start school again in the summer session so I can catch up on all the bullshit that I’m missing every stupid awful second that I’m stuck in here trying to get myself to be fucking normal.”
And with that Ella grabbed the jar of painty water and dumped its bilious contents directly over her self-portrait. The murky black water tidal-waved in all directions, mostly back onto her own lap, and she jumped up, as startled as if it hadn’t been she who’d poured it out. Shadows leaked into the paper, thick drops running down the length of the self-portrait and off the edge. Already it was pooling heavily under her stool on the floor.
“What happened?” Sissy shouted, rushing over.
Ella gently lifted the soggy edges of the portrait. Its agonized smile now peered out from behind a thick gray fog, but the smile on Ella’s own face was nothing short of spectacular—cheeks rising so high that they fully engulfed her eyes.
“Darling, what happened?” Sissy asked again.
“Clumsy me,” Jacob said quickly. “My fault.”
Which, he supposed, in a way, it was.
APRIL
After that, Jacob began noticing Ella almost everywhere. She seemed to have only one friend—Maura, a mousy girl with greasy hair who wedged herself across from Ella during mealtimes. Ella seemed to politely tolerate her presence, though something told Jacob that she’d be far happier sitting alone with her book than discussing the weather, the ABC primetime lineup, and what nail polish they’d wear again when they finally got home. But steadily Jacob noticed that Ella (and often Maura) was looking at him, then quickly away.
During group sessions with Dr. Feingold, Ella began to sit in the chair closest to the chessboard where Jacob stationed himself. When he led the patients down the hall after sessions, she invariably walked at the front of the line. In the common room, he would rotate positions periodically, to try to keep an eye on the rowdiest groups of patients. Slowly he became
aware that whenever he moved locations, she followed, orbiting him like a moon. During meals Jacob would sit with the other orderlies at a long table near the side of the room, and wherever he sat, whichever direction he faced, Ella would sit one table over, no more than a few feet away.
“Someone’s got a little crush on you,” remarked Paul.
“What?” Jacob asked. “A what?”
Paul smirked and made rapping motions with his hands. “A little infatuation with your situation. A yen for your zen, man. Some uncomplicated admiration. Some pokey little puppy love. A hankering for your—”
Jacob didn’t want to know how he’d finish that rhyme.
“Die in a fire, Paul.” He stood to leave despite Paul’s assurances he’d only been kidding.
It was pouring outside, and Jacob didn’t feel much like a walk anyway, so he spent the rest of the break in his bathroom stall, quiet except for the echoes of his sandwich being eaten.
Not that she didn’t seem, well, better since he’d spoken to her in the art lab that day. Her “Portrait of Ella in Gray” was now hanging up in the common room to everyone’s frank admiration. And he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d never laid a finger on her, even when she’d jumped up from spilling the jar—and this was more than he could say for some of the actual doctors. Little Dr. Rutherford, with his gross mustache, had allegedly had a three-year affair with a former patient, a gifted trombonist with a drinking problem, yet he was still working down on Ward II as if nothing had ever happened. Dr. Parker, a behaviorist with a husband and kids at home, had last year started sleeping with a janitor in the little-used fourth-floor library. And Dr. Harrison, who still ran Ward I, had actually married a former patient of his from another hospital where he’d worked in the early 1970s. Everybody knew about it. They had an annual Christmas party at their house in Greenwich; Oliver had gone many times.
It always seemed to Jacob that Oliver lived vicariously through these stories at the same time that he lived in constant terror of them—a good lawsuit being all that stood between Anchorage House and total collapse. In honest moments, Jacob even wondered if Oliver didn’t enjoy sleeping with him so much as doing so beneath a Sword of Damocles.
For the hundredth time, Jacob thought about walking out on the job, on Oliver, on this life. Of decking Paul in the mouth before he did. Of calling Sara, only he had no idea where to begin. She was still after him about his address for the Save the Date card. She wanted to know if she could mail it to Oliver’s place, or to Anchorage House—did he have a mailbox there? Jacob just said he was looking into it.
As he passed by the art room, he checked to see that Sissy wasn’t inside, then walked slowly around the room, pausing in the far corner by the bowls, pencil cups, and coffee mugs that the patients had made last month. They couldn’t keep them in their rooms, now that they’d been fired, because they might shatter them and harm themselves with the jagged bits, so these eminently functional artworks sat here, functionless, until their makers headed home. Jacob casually inspected Ella’s mug. He smiled proudly. What a perfectly sane mug! A golden pattern was carved around the top edge—no, not a pattern but some kind of incoherent lettering. At first he thought maybe she was insane after all, but upon closer inspection, he realized that it wasn’t merely Greek to him. It was Greek, Όλυσσεύ, repeated all the way around.
Jacob hadn’t read those ancient letters in years, but he knew the name of the epic hero of the Odyssey when he saw it. Odysseus. There had been a time in his life when he’d been able to recite whole sections of it from memory (Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course), usually while quite drunk at the sort of jugular parties that nobody ever threw anymore. Four semesters of Attic Greek, studying crumbling dusty books in forgotten corners of the library, translating words that had been translated a million times before. Words that were meaningless claptrap to everyone else in his universe, as if poetry alone weren’t a dead-enough, lost-enough language. Sometimes it seemed as if he’d spent twenty-some years working his ass off to ensure he’d have practically nothing in common with anyone.
“Jacob?” The lights came buzzing on as Sissy Coltrane blew into the room.
“Hey there,” he said with a forced wave, well aware that he was holding Ella’s mug awkwardly in his other hand.
“Looking for something?”
“Pencils,” Jacob blurted out. “We’re all out. Over in the lounge. Dr. Boujedra said I should come in here to see if you had any extra.”
Sissy fished around in a drawer until she produced a fistful of pencils. “Oliver’s usually so good at keeping the supplies on order,” she said. “That’s Ella’s mug there. She’s got quite an eye. Smart, too. Oliver told me she got some kind of Presidential Scholarship last year, right before she came back.”
She had called Oliver “Oliver” twice now.
“What’s her deal?” Jacob asked, while Sissy crossed to a refrigerator in the corner where she kept open paint jars. She pulled out a brown paper bag with a greasy spot on one side. “She’s so smiley most of the time. You sure she’s not kind of coo-coo?”
Sissy pulled out a fat, cold egg roll. “Jacob, you know I can’t discuss that kind of thing.”
Jacob rolled his eyes. As if she and “Oliver” and Paul and everyone else didn’t spend half their lives gossiping about which patients saw chartreuse elephants and which had been arrested for pulling the emergency brakes on the subway and which had been found naked on the roof, covered in glue and feathers torn from pillows, trying to fly to Mars.
“Not such a strange case. We’ve tried all kinds of medications, but she still becomes severely depressed by the strangest things. Oliver described it really well the other day—what did he call it? Oh yes, he said it’s like a hypersensitivity. An ‘extreme adjustment disorder.’ Like an acute stress disorder, only the stressors aren’t unreasonable or unidentifiable things.”
“So they’re just—actually stressful?” He hated the way she kept saying “we.”
“Yes, but not stressful to the extent that she experiences them. For instance, going into a deep depressive funk for weeks because—I don’t know, a houseplant dies. Or she saw a Christian Children’s Fund commercial on TV. Those ones with Sally Struthers?”
“Finding Sally Struthers depressing is cause for rehabilitation?”
Sissy eyed him warily. “Well, yes. If you can’t get out of bed for three days afterward. You or me, we’d feel bad for a minute, maybe two, and we’d move on. With Ella? Well, you know what brought her back here this time, after doing terrifically for six months without trouble? She saw one of those St. Jude’s posters on a bus. You know, with the little bald chemo children? Apparently she just lost it. Began weeping and didn’t stop for two days, even after her boyfriend drove her back up here.”
Jacob hoped his eyes hadn’t widened too much on the word boyfriend.
“So how long before she goes home?”
Sissy set her egg roll down and pulled out a white carton full of lo mein. Then she snapped apart a pair of chopsticks, and then to get the stray splinters of wood off, she rubbed them against each other like a Cub Scout trying to start a fire.
“You know how it works. She can stay here until someone stops paying for it. Or until she’s ready for the world, I guess.”
“Who’s ever ready for it?”
Sissy looked exasperated, its own reward. “Why are you so interested?”
“I’m not really. Just, she talked to me the other day, and she seemed—I don’t know—she seemed fine. Made me wonder what she’s doing here is all. Hey, where’d you order from?”
“Pardon?”
“Is that from Szechuan Garden, in Stamford?”
She looked down at her half-chewed roll. Jacob glanced at the colorful assortment of cabbage and carrot inside, and the smooth brown spiraling of the wrapper.
“Stamford? No. Of course not. I live in Katonah,” she said. “I don’t know. I just order off the menu on my fridge. Hunan Palace? Dynasty Pagoda? I can’t remember.”
MAY
Then one day Ella was gone. Not in Feingold’s group and not in art therapy. Not lining up for decaf coffee at seven on the dot. Jacob overheard a despondent Maura mumbling to another girl that Ella’s parents had come over the weekend to pick her up and take her on a Wonderland Cruise for two weeks before going back to start the summer session at Columbia. Her mug was gone from the rack, though “Self-Portrait in Gray” still hung on the wall in the common room—left behind, perhaps overlooked in her rush to get back to her real life. He liked to think she’d left it there for him. A way of saying thank you. Goodbye.
“There, there,” Paul said, when he saw Jacob moping over his roast beef sandwich, “plenty of other crazy fish in the sea.”
Jacob wanted to lay into him—tell him that for one thing he was gay, and for another not everything always had to be about sex, despite what The Real World: San Diego and the CW’s Vampire Hookups might suggest. Not everyone was so lonely and desperate that they leaped into bed with the first willing partner. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, and sometimes a skyscraper was just an efficient way of arranging offices given limited surface area. But Jacob barely mustered a good eye roll before heading off to eat his lunch in the bathroom again.
He hadn’t meant to look Ella up on Facebook. He didn’t even have a Facebook account. He felt this was important to stress. When he had to—when he really had to—he used Irene’s account, which she had hardly used herself, never even bothering to upload a profile picture, so that now it displayed just a ghostly outline of a woman’s head. She had given him her password, and he used it only in cases of emergency. As he looked at messages for her, he wondered who else might have been there. Then he thought of Ella and couldn’t remember—was it York or Yorke? So he’d tried typing it out, there in the little search bar—Ella York . . . no, no . . . Ella Yorke. Yes. That was it. And without thinking, he emphatically hit the enter key.
Why We Came to the City Page 27