by Paul Hond
A chill of expectation shot through him. But he was met instead with an utterly blank tablet of concrete; and as he searched the ground, finding nothing, his heart dropped with the realization that it was gone, the blood was gone, washed away forever.
Mickey stood there dumbfounded. The absence of blood was haunting, even more than had he seen it in great splotches; it seemed to reflect something of his own guilty wish to be done with her. He tried to tell himself it was a vanishing act on her part. And besides, hadn’t he made it his business to stop by here? Albeit on the way to see another woman. But hadn’t he come with the solemn heart of a pilgrim?
Mickey returned to the van and drove on to Donna’s, but the visit had put a damper on his ambition. As he parked, he found himself in the grip of the same morbid desperation with which he had searched in vain for blood. He wanted to find in Donna a trace of something that might crush him—no, not crush him: deliver him: a word, a sign. How he dreaded the thought of finding nothing!
His heart pounded as he approached the building, a converted row house that—Mickey read the names by the buzzers—was home to a nutritionist, a yoga instructor, and, on the third floor, the Qi Healing Center. Mickey buzzed the third floor.
He was admitted without question; it was as if someone were expecting him. He walked up the long flights of steps and rang the doorbell. The door opened, and a young, pale girl with hair like rope and a ring in her nostril stood looking at him with surprise.
“Oh, I thought—may I help you?” she said.
“Yes,” said Mickey.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No. I was just here to see Donna Childs.”
“Would you like to make an appointment with her?”
“An appointment?” Mickey said.
“Your name?”
Mickey hesitated. It had been a long time since he’d uttered his name; but when he announced himself he felt, just as he had felt when entering the bakery yesterday, a jolt of expectation, as of some awareness in others of his small renown.
“I’ll get her,” said the girl. “Come in.”
Mickey entered the office. It wasn’t much: your basic reception area, behind which hung a simple white curtain with a slit down the middle, through which the girl disappeared. The walls of the office were bare, save for a sign with prices written out. Forty bucks an hour they wanted. Mickey placed his hands behind his back and puckered his lips in search of some absent tune.
The curtain parted again, and there she stood: it was like a vision. She wore a white robe tied at the waist, like one of those martial arts outfits Mickey remembered from the kung-fu programs he used to watch, years ago, on the old television from Diamond Electric—
He stopped himself, hurled himself into the moment. She was looking at him blankly: he tried to smile. The white fabric (her slippers, too, were white) seemed to shimmer against the darkness of her face, her hands, seemed to cool something fierce about her. Mickey could not speak.
“Hello,” Donna said uncertainly. “Are you here to make an appointment?”
“Well,” said Mickey. “You said to drop by anytime.” He smiled, trying to recall for her their last conversation, their tender moment in the bakery. “So—do you have any time?”
Donna remained aloof. “I usually don’t take walk-ins,” she said. “Most people call in advance.”
Mickey laughed automatically. “Just thought I’d take my chances.”
“What are you wearing?”
“What?”
“Underneath your coat. Because you need to be wearing comfortable clothes.”
“Oh, these are comfortable,” said Mickey. He was wearing his usual work clothes. A shirt and trousers. What could be more comfortable than that?
“Usually I ask that people wear loose-fitting clothes.”
“Well,” Mickey said. “I think I lost a couple of pounds getting up all those steps.”
Donna touched one of her braids—it was the next best thing to a smile—then quickly withdrew her hand. “I have another client coming in twenty minutes,” she said. “So we can do a short session now, or you can schedule something longer for later.”
“Short is fine,” said Mickey.
“This way,” Donna said. She turned and disappeared behind the curtain. Mickey followed her into a short corridor with doors on either side. Donna opened the door on the right.
“Nice place you have here,” said Mickey.
It was an empty room, save for a couple of rubber mats on the floor, a stack of bath towels and a portable stereo on a small table. There were no chairs.
“So,” said Mickey. “How’ve you been?”
“Good,” said Donna, closing the door. “I’ll need you to remove your coat, and also your shoes.”
“My shoes? You sure?” Mickey was thankful he’d put on clean socks this morning. Sometimes he didn’t.
“And lie down on the mat. On your front. And empty your pockets.”
Obviously, Mickey thought, she was perturbed with him, and this more than anything else—the small room, the likelihood of an intimate physical exchange—seemed to connect them, give them a thin cushion of history against which Mickey could relax. And yet the threat was implicit: he may well have lost his chance with her.
As Donna took his coat and hung it on a hook on the door, Mickey removed his shoes and placed his keys and wallet next to the mat. Then he stretched out on his stomach.
Donna got beside him and lowered herself to her knees.
“I do appreciate you taking me,” said Mickey. “On such short notice.”
“When did you come back?” Donna said. She jumped up and went to the stereo.
“Yesterday,” said Mickey. He awaited more.
Instead, there came a soft, meditative chanting of voices from the stereo.
“Head down, hands at your sides,” said Donna. “Palms facing the ceiling.”
Mickey obeyed.
“Close your eyes.” Donna resumed her position. “And breathe deep.” Her voice hovered near. “Inhale.”
Mickey surrendered himself to Donna’s expertise, to the chanting voices. He breathed in, and felt her hands warming the muscles of his back.
“Exhale.”
Mickey exhaled.
“Inhale. We’re going to release your qi,” Donna said. “The vital life force. Exhale. Qi makes up the universe in the five elements:
“Wood. Inhale.
“Fire. Exhale.
“Earth. Inhale.
“Metal. Exhale.
“Water. That’s right, breathe on your own. Your entire body is relaxing now. Good. The qi flows throughout your body through what we call the meridians. Sometimes it gets blocked. So we go to points along the meridians and apply pressure to release it.”
Mickey felt her fingers dig deep into a space beneath his shoulder blades, pressing, pressing. She was on her knees, leaning over him, using her weight, distributing it. Mickey grimaced when there was pain, but didn’t dare yell out; there seemed to be an understanding between them, a trust. Mickey knew he was expected to cooperate, knew instinctively that he must breathe into the pain. His body had, it seemed, become theirs; she commanded as great a knowledge over it as he would want to himself, and though he had his doubts about this business with what she called the “vital life force”—blood it wasn’t, but rather, something invisible, an energy, it flowed, it got stuck, it went this way and that, up and down the meridians, whatever the hell they were—though he was, and always had been, a believer in doctors and blood tests and X rays, he had to admit that he felt a definite release of something, he wasn’t sure what, a tension maybe, but more than that, a pain, as of some hostile emotion that was eating away inside him, and he remembered Donna saying something about disease, yes, that time in his car, her saying how one could prevent disease, and it occurred to him that he had yet to tell Ben about Emi’s cancer, for that matter he had yet to tell Ben a lot of things.
“Relax,” Don
na said. “Breathe.” Her voice was so near that Mickey could feel the lightness of her breath, and it was this strange conflict of sensations—the thought of Emi, of Ben, on the one hand (but why tell him about the cancer—what would be the point?), and then, on the other, the exquisite comfort of Donna’s gentle voice, of her firm, knowing touch—which produced in Mickey a kind of panic, a fear that something might happen, that they were getting too close, that, just as they had lapsed into this hypnotic dance of breathing and touch, of the intuitive interplay between giver and receiver, so they were headed, now, for absolute danger: his breath quickened: her hands covered his scalp, his ears: he feared he might, right now, at her, their, compulsion, turn and grab her and smash his full rough lips against hers; and so it was out of a sort of mortal desperation that he invoked the one name that could possibly veer them off course.
“Did I mention,” he said, “that I saw Nelson this morning?”
“Nelson?” Donna’s hands stopped working.
“He stopped by the bakery,” Mickey said. “Had a job application for a nursery, wanted me to write a few words of recommendation. I didn’t know he was interested in plants.”
“What?” said Donna. She removed her hands from his body; the spell had been shattered. “A job application?”
Already Mickey regretted what he’d said; already he longed for what he’d just destroyed. “Yes,” he said. “For a nursery.”
Donna sighed. “I had a feeling that’s what this was all about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nelson,” she said. “You came to explain to me why he was let go. You could have just said so.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” said Mickey. He rolled over, away from her, and pulled himself up into a sitting position. Donna was on her knees, watching him closely.
“I thought,” said Donna, “that you were here to explain why Nelson was fired.”
“Fired? Nelson? I was told he quit.”
“Told?”
“Last night, when I came in, Benjie told me Nelson had decided to leave.”
Donna tilted her head. “So you mean to say that you knew nothing about this?”
“Not a thing,” said Mickey. He was shocked. “I’ve—been away.” A prickling heat spread out on his back. “You’re sure about this? Fired?”
“It happened a few days ago. Ben told me—” She stopped.
“What?” said Mickey. “What happened? What were you told?”
“Nelson wasn’t about to tell me anything,” said Donna, “so I went to talk to Ben. Of course he was careful about what he said. But I got the feeling that there was some kind of incident. Kind of thing where Nelson did something he shouldn’t. I couldn’t get any straight answers. I didn’t expect to. But I thought for sure that you knew. I didn’t think any of this could have happened without your consent.”
Mickey tried to recall if Nelson had behaved in an unusual way this morning, if there had been any signs that he himself should have noticed, but he was so overcome with anger and confusion and embarrassment that he could hardly think.
“Now what was this about a job application?” said Donna.
Mickey shook his head. “I’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said, and as he got hold of himself enough to tell her what little he knew about Nelson’s bid for a job at the Green Garden Nursery—and he could see, even as Donna listened to him, that he had been discredited in her eyes—as he tried his best to ease her doubts over whatever had happened to Nelson at the bakery (“I’m sure he’ll get the job,” he said, “I gave him some very high praise”), indeed, ease his own misgivings about it, his anger ran hotter than ever. Ben had misled him, lied, allowing him to make a goddamned fool of himself to Donna. What sort of father, Donna must be thinking, would allow his teenage son to run his business alone? What sort of employer, person, man?
Mickey rose slowly and unsteadily to his feet. Whatever Donna had accomplished with her massage was now ruined: his nerves were shot. Where a moment before, he had been prone on a mat with Donna’s hands in his hair, he was now standing tense as a soldier, facing that woman through the bitter knowledge that her son—her only child, for whom she worried and fretted and prayed—had been dismissed from his place of business without his even knowing it. Oh sure, the situation could be rectified, that would be easy enough, but Mickey felt as though he’d been caught out in a tremendous lie. As an employer he’d been less than faithful: he ought to have been in touch.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, patting down his hair.
“Maybe,” said Donna, “it’s for the best.”
Mickey wasn’t sure he understood. Did she mean to say that she preferred there be no such connection between the families, no conflicts of interest that might disrupt a potential romance? Or was she simply washing her hands of the Lerners—of him—once and for goddamned all?
She said, “My client should be here any minute.”
Mickey couldn’t read her. They stood on opposite sides of the mat, two strangers. Mickey bent down and picked up his keys and wallet, which he opened. “The massage was very nice,” he said miserably, extracting some bills.
“That’s not necessary,” Donna said without inflection.
“I won’t hear of it,” said Mickey. For ten or so minutes he figured twenty dollars—a little extra on account of Nelson. “I insist. Payment for services rendered, absolutely.” He regretted that it had all come down, somehow, to money; and yet so much seemed to hinge on her acceptance of it.
“No,” said Donna, eyeing his hand, and it seemed to Mickey that there was real horror in her plea, that if he persisted she might let out a scream.
There came a knock at the door, and at once the tension deflated; the arrival of an inquiring third party seemed to put them in temporary cahoots.
“Yes?” said Donna.
The door opened and the girl with the ropelike hair stuck her head in. “Your two o’clock is here,” she said, and retreated, closing the door.
Donna looked at her watch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I have to get back to work.”
It seemed incredible to Mickey that she was turning him out like this. For there was something between them—he’d felt it—the way her hands touched him, that tenderness, her fingers, her breath. And yet here he was, folding his wallet in pathetic defeat. “I’m sorry about all of this,” he said stupidly as he stuffed the wallet in his pocket. He turned to remove his coat from the hook. “The truth is, I did come here to talk, but not about Nelson.” He wondered why he said it; it all seemed so pointless now.
“Talk?” said Donna. “About what?”
Mickey turned to her. “I just wanted to apologize for—well, I think we were supposed to get together one time,” he said feigning a fuzzy recollection. “Just after Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, yes,” said Donna, as if it were something she too had forgotten. She glanced at her watch. “Yes. I just assumed something came up.”
“It did,” said Mickey. “I had to get away. I’d been through a lot. I should have called you. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Donna eyed him curiously. “You don’t have to apologize for that,” she said. “I think you’re right—it was a bad time. I wasn’t thinking too straight myself.”
“Well,” Mickey said. His instinct was to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, but his huge mortification held him weighted to the spot. “At the time,” he said, now feeling his nerve spring up in him like a cornered rat, thinking too that in a way he had been freed by her indifference, that it no longer mattered, that he could say anything he damn well pleased—“I was very confused. I know it sounds crazy, but I was attracted to you—no, I don’t mean that that was crazy, it wasn’t, you’re an attractive woman, and I’m not trying to flatter you or seduce you or anything like that, I’m just stating the facts. I thought you were good-looking and warm and bright and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little interested. And to feel that way about someo
ne so soon after losing my wife, well, you can imagine that I felt pretty guilty about it, though any person might say it was a perfectly natural thing, me being needy and so forth and looking to latch on to someone. But I really don’t think that was the case. And so I sort of went off the deep end a little bit—it wasn’t just you, of course, it was a lot of things—and decided to just get away from everything and everybody, and try to find some peace.”
Mickey exhaled.
He had launched into this speech, it was true, in the belief that he had nothing to lose, but along with that there had been—and only now did he realize it—a small but potent expectation that his candor would be returned. He stood there, defenseless, waiting for something to happen.
Donna looked at him, and Mickey could see in her eyes that though she was moved, she was determined, on principle, to stick to her guns. “I’m sorry,” she said bravely, “for what you’ve gone through. I hope the time away did you good.”
“And I hope I didn’t shock or offend you,” Mickey said. “I’m sorry if I did.”
“No,” said Donna readily. She assembled a tense smile. “I’m not offended.” Again she checked her watch. “I’m sorry, but I do have someone waiting outside.” There was the slightest pause, in which it seemed she might suggest they take this up another time, but her smile disappeared and was then brightly reestablished, as though the plug to her face had jiggled momentarily in the wall.
“Right,” said Mickey. “Come to think of it, I should get back to the store.” He hesitated, still waiting for that elusive something to occur. “Lots of work to catch up on.” He thought to make some last, tantalizing comment about Nelson being welcome back should things fall through with the nursery, but that would only remind her—as if she needed to be reminded!—of his own mismanagement, of the general muddled incompetence that had brought him here unannounced in the first place.