by Jill Zeller
Funny, his mood, he thought, as he ordered a bottle of wine and showered and shaved, realizing his black stubble was noticeable—maybe that’s why people at the party were staring at him. Ensconcing himself the window, dragging a chair close so he could put his feet on the sill, he filled one of the glasses and drank. He was not sure he liked wine, but he knew Susan did, and she liked French wine, even though the one he ordered came from some obscure region in Northern California.
He found himself thinking of the Girl, not Susan, and Mom’s face when he asked her about it. Maybe this was the origin of his strange, reckless mood, but he knew that thoughts of her intruded into his mind at the oddest times, and it was ever since Grandfather Joel died and he thought about the photo of Grandmother and Grandfather Cleveland and what the Girl, then Susan, had said about them.
That the woman despised the man and was bitter than she had not outlived him. How could anyone know that from a photograph, one taken before the person died? Was it the way Grandmother Annette leaned toward Grandfather Joel smiling stiffly as he rested his hand on her shoulder? Grandma Annette was not a pretty woman, Hank could see, and Dad rarely spoke of her, so Hank had nothing to go on except the crazy dream-speech of two women, or one a girl just sixteen, and the other a woman wholly mature.
Now he remembered liking the Girl a lot the afternoon in his bedroom; now he could recall at least one walk along Sunset Boulevard, meeting after school for sodas down in Hollywood. He knew her—she was a good friend and funny. He liked her company. But he had nearly forgotten her existence. How as that possible? He wondered where she was now. Probably married, with five kids and a fat husband. Hank didn’t like the idea, even though there was no way she could have five kids in 3 years. The Girl, he knew, wasn’t going to do anything like that.
He’d forgotten his watch and couldn’t see the clock from where he was sitting, but he was too tired to get up to see if it was time to pick up Susan. Maybe it was the wine or the droning chant of the waves that sounded like Susan breathing that made him fall asleep.
When Hank woke up a minute later, he couldn’t remember where he was. His body stiffened and shook with rigors, and he stumbled out of the chair to the bed and wrapped himself in blankets. The window stood open, the bottle of wine empty and he felt queasy because of it; his head pounded and he wondered where the hell Susan was.
Then he remembered. I’m supposed to pick her up.
Cursing, he grappled for the phone and held it, trying to remember her number. Was it five-two or two-five? But he was too cold. In a minute, when he warmed up, he would remember. Waiting to be warm, he thought for the first time that maybe he was sick. This flu was going around, they said, lots of people sick, lots of people in the hospital.
His mouth felt drier than his grandfather’s ashes. He thought of going for a drink of water, but the bathroom seemed impossibly distant. The light from the bathroom through the open door was the only light in the room. That and blinking neon of Santa Monica Boulevard, a river of color streaming into the sea. The dizzying, shushing sea. His ears burned with the sea.
Finally, finally, he was warm. The shivers eased; warmth crept over him in waves, burned his skin, and he threw the covers off, tore off his shirt. He lay on the bed in just his slacks, stared at where the ceiling or the sky should be, and wondered about the Girl. Where was she? Why hadn’t she come? They had reservations at nine. He was going to wine and dine her. He was going to bring her back here and suck on her skin and taste her and press his fingers into her breasts.
Eleven
The roaring in Hank’s ears sounded as if he had somehow gotten down to the sea. Sand scraped his neck and chin; he was cold again, very cold; the rough wool blanket wrapped around him wasn’t enough.
A moment later he understood he was in the back seat of a car, covered with sand and a wool blanket, and the roar was the motor, purring and loud. He looked up and saw the driver in a printed scarf. The car shifted around corners; he saw colored lights dance their reflections across a ceiling of quilted fabric torn in two places.
Dozing again, Hank woke up when someone said his name. He was still in the back seat of the car, but it was no longer roaring. Whispering, shoving, someone crawled into the car and said his name again.
“Hank, you have to get up and come in the house. We have to get you to bed.”
Was this his mother’s voice? Ragged and grief-stricken? He didn’t think so. Trying to focus, he thought he saw Susan’s pale face, watching him. She pulled on his arm, forced him to sit up.
Someone else reached in and grabbed his other arm, pulled him with a strong purposeful grip. Dad? Carl? What was Susan doing at his house? Had she driven him home?
But when he was in the car door and trying to stand up, he saw a familiar expanse of black lawn and a beehive-like structure along a fence. Looking up, he saw Susan, her face urgent, hurried. “Hank, we have to get you into the house.”
He forced himself to his feet, and a wave of dizziness took him, and the next moment he was leaning on the Girl; she helped him, strong and sure footed, his arm across her shoulders, toward Susan’s house. He looked for his bike, but it wasn’t there in its usual place beside the steps.
When he woke again, people filled his room, and voices rumbled, eager and clipped, whispering (Susan) shouting (himself). They bored into his head, planted bombs there, set them off in little explosions of pain. Ken Cleveland, intoning about the Holy Lands. Constance and Carlisle Cleveland, singing and dancing, their voices speeding up and slowing down. But the worst was his mother, her voice halting, words misspoken as if the muscles of her jaw and lips misfired. He pressed his hands over his ears, so as not to hear her; she sounded like grasshoppers rasping.
But there was one soft, soothing voice. It sang to him in Spanish. It was the Girl’s voice, a luscious contralto, accompanied by cool hands when he was fevered and warm hands when he was frozen.
Then the nightmare ended Hank opened his eyes, swimming up from a dream where he was on a bus crossing a bridge, but the end of the bridge was gone and the bus slid backward into the water and he held on to bare branches and tried to scream.
He lay in Susan’s bedroom. Outside her windows night hung. A shaded lamp burned on the bedside table covered with a towel and a neat array of medicines, hypo tray, a blue liquid in a bottle, a pile of wash cloths in a basin. His body felt like lettuce left out in the sun, limp and moist and transparent. But the headache was mercifully gone.
Looking at the window he always looked at after making love with Susan, Hank considered the lost time, how much lost time? And how did he get here? And what the hell happened to him?
Through the ajar bedroom door he could see the soft light of the living room. Voices murmured, the radio was on, and ironically, he recognized his father’s voice extolling the virtue of Brylcreme. It felt good, light, ethereal, as if he had just cycled a century.
A shadow moved in the doorway; it widened and Susan peeked in. “Hank?”
He nodded, watching her. She wore her hair wound up in a scarf, and a lose flannel shirt and capris. She came across the room and knelt on the floor next to him.
“Hank? How are you feeling?” Her cool hand brushed his forehead. His head itched.
“Like a toad run over by a truck.”
“You were very sick. The doctor said you had meningitis.”
A cold uneasiness swept through Hank’s chest. How could he have meningitis? How did he get it?
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “We were getting ready to take you to the hospital when you started to improve. The doctor didn’t want to move you.”
“How long? What day is it?” A number of concerns fluttered into Hank’s mind. His parents. The car.
“About two days. I found you Saturday night, late. You weren’t making any sense and I knew something was wrong.” A half-smile crimped her lips, and she looked embarrassed. Hank felt mortified. What had he said to her?
&nb
sp; “It’s Monday evening.”
Closing his eyes, Hank felt grateful for the soft coolness of the bed. He was tired already, but questions swirled in his mind and he wanted to ask them.
Susan answered them, without his having to ask. “I phoned your parents. The doctor didn’t want them coming here, in case, you know, they got infected. The nurse and I have been taking turns, taking care of you.” Her voice moved on, soft and luxurious, like a bath of satin. He listened, questions came and went, and then sleep came too.
When he woke again daylight filled the room, and Hank could see, from his place on the bed, the rectangle of familiar sky becoming blue as the sun ascended. The room was tidy, dresser drawers closed, clothes put away, the top of the dresser piled with towels and sheets and a bed pan. Hank worried for a moment about that function, and what was done about it while he was delirious. Rubber sheet underneath, he thought, and his face warmed at the thought of the nurse cleaning him up each time.
The door was still ajar. The house was quiet; he wondered what time it was, and whose shift it was to look after Hank. He was thirsty, and saw to his relief a half-full glass of water with a glass straw in it on the bedside table.
Getting up on one elbow, he was astonished at his weakness. His hand shook as he grasped the glass and sucked all the water from it. Breathless, Hank lay back, thinking, remembering how irritable and tired he was a day or so before he became sick.
He thought he would experiment with sitting up, test his strength. Pushing on the bed, he strained to raise himself, was able to at least lean back against the headboard, and feeling it behind him remembered Susan’s hands gripping the head board as she came.
Hank felt a stirring in his groin but nothing happened there, and he didn’t worry yet. He was still very sick, he presumed. Leaning against the head board with a better view of the room felt good.
Susan came through the doorway again. She was wearing the same outfit of last night, face looking crushed as if she had just woken up. She must have been sleeping on the couch in the living room.
“Oh, you’re awake. You hungry?”
Hank shook his head, although he could feel a mild interest in food stirring in his stomach. “Thirsty.”
She vanished, returning with a pitcher of water and filled the glass. He drank greedily, watching her.
This time she sat on the bed, glanced back at the open doorway, then touched his forehead again. “We need to get you into the shower. Your hair.”
Hank could feel the oily itch of his head, but he didn’t care. All he wanted to do now was kiss Susan, taste her lips and the pale skin of her face.
As if she could read the wish on his face, Susan shook her head, and gave him an indulgent smile.
“Poor baby.” she lowered her voice. “We can’t. The nurse, and Joseph.”
Her reluctance disappointed but it was enough that he was here; she had found him and brought him to her house, not home to his crazy family. And the thought of home and Dad and Mother brought a fresh set of worries.
“Don’t worry about the car. Your brother picked it up Sunday.”
Hank gazed at her, wondering. She didn’t have to do all this. She could have just cut him out of her life. But she was making him a part of her life, a secreted, compartmentalized room for him and him alone.
“You talked to my parents?”
Nodding, Susan rubbed her neck. Crescent lines formed under her eyes, cupping them with weariness.
“Your mom. She wanted to come down here, to nurse you, but the doctor talked her out of it. You were contagious, you know.”
Numerous thoughts shifted through Hank, and he couldn’t concentrate on one before the other fled away.
“She wanted to come here? My mother?”
“She sounded very upset, on the phone.” Susan tilted her head, narrowed her eyes. “She was very nice and listened to reason.”
Hank wondered if Susan was secretly relieved that his mother, my-god-his-mother didn’t show up on the doorstep of Hank’s 32-year-old lover. He wondered what Mom, Connie and Carl, even Dad, were thinking about where he was recovering from his illness. Carl and Connie would dope out that Hank was with the girlfriend he was shacking up with at the Lady Windemere, but Mom—she might think that too, but Hank was utterly relieved to believe that Mom could have no idea about Susan’s age.
They spoke no more of that. Hank reached, took her hand. Her cuticles were still stained with red and yellow. He wondered if she had time to work in her workshop with himself, the sick asshole, in the house. It was logical that he be here, more than appropriate. There was a nurse in the house, too. Settling back into the pillow, he felt his body relax into the sheets as if he were being absorbed into the mattress.
He must have fallen asleep because time again slipped away and Hank could tell that it was afternoon from the slant of the sun. Twisting, he could almost see the front yard, Bermuda grass and palm, golden from afternoon light. Someone had come in the room while he was sleeping, he thought he remembered, and placed a pill on the bedside hypo tray. And someone had gently shaken him, turned him, and gave him a shot in his butt. Penicillin, he presumed, the miracle drug.
Now he saw the nurse walking on the lawn, a woman in white with a little round white cap on her head, black hair massed underneath, pulled into a tight bun. She was slender, small, but he could tell she was strong, by the way she stood, holding a fan of pampas grass heads.
Why would she be out on the lawn in her uniform, standing to face the setting sun? From the yard, if one stood on tiptoe, one could catch a sliver of the silver sea, always present and breathing. Perhaps she was looking at the sunset.
Wondering where Joseph was, where Susan was, Hank got his answer. Into view came the wheelchair along the buckling sidewalk under the palm. Joseph’s two white casts stuck out as he wheeled himself along. The nurse watched him, her back to Hank’s window. Joseph waved an arm and made a face at her. She nodded, encouraging. Maybe this was the first time Joseph had gotten out of the house since he was discharged from the hospital.
Hank drifted off to sleep again, and when he woke it was night time. Susan came through the door with a tray.
She set it down on the bed—it perched uneasily on Hank’s knees, and she had spilled the soup. It looked like canned noodle soup, beside it a handful of saltines. It smelled wonderful, and Hank was hungry for it.
He sat up, leaned against the headboard, sipped the soup. The strange thing was, after a few bites, his appetite vanished completely. Nibbling on crackers, he watched Susan as she walked around the room, dropping used towels on the floor, making straight lines of things, shifting things into orderly rows.
The door opened and Joseph shoved his way in, banging the doorway, cursing.
Susan said, “Joseph, you shouldn’t bother Hank. He’s not anywhere up to visitors yet.”
Hank wondered if his mother knew the crisis over and he was, no longer, according to Susan, contagious. Everyone in the house seemed healthy—the doctor was more worried about workers at the hotel, and Hank’s family. But fortunately, no one at home was sick, either. Sadly, the driver whose place Hank took that evening had died.
“This is nothing to sneeze at,” the doctor had told Susan.
“The doc’s coming tomorrow to check on you. Better behave yourself.” This from Joseph, who wheeled closer. His chair made a rhythmic squeak. “Have to speak to that nurse about oiling this. Nurses have a specialty in wheelchair engineering, did you know that?”
Shaking her head, Susan left them alone.
Joseph had gained a little weight, and his color improved. Hank wondered what he looked like himself, after this Victorian illness, being cared for at home by his mistress.
“You look like shit.” Joseph leaned forward, squinted as he looked Hank up and down. Fiddling in his robe pocket, he produced two cigarettes. “The old doc will kill us—loses so many patients that way—if he catches us smoking.”
He handed one to Hank, who
took it. Hank ran it under his nose as an executive would a cigar. The odor of the tobacco made his throat ache.
Joseph said, “I know you quit, but after what you’ve been through, you need this.”
Hank wondered where his special lighter had gone to. His clothing seemed to be nowhere in sight—he wore a regulation hospital gown and cotton draw-string pants, probably procured by the nurse. But Joseph produced a polished Zippo and had it glowing under Hank’s cigarette.
Susan didn’t like smoking, and while Hank obeyed her demand, Joseph showed no signs of quitting any time soon, which must have been an irritation for her. Hank drew in the smoke, feeling his body come alive, as if strength pumped back into his muscles from wherever it had leaked to.
“Meningitis. Just after I shipped out, I heard it went through Camp Hood. Three guys died.” He squinted as the smoke licked his face. “Of course, if I hadn’t shipped out, maybe I’d be dead now too.”
He said this in a conversational way, and Hank tried to smile, but he didn’t think it was funny.
Joseph continued, “Instead I checked out. That’s what one of the orderlies used to say to me, back at the hospital. Here I was in a ward of a whole bunch of guys who ‘checked out’. You know, lights on, nobody home. Only I didn’t belong there. Nothing was wrong with me. Nothing that a memory eraser wouldn’t cure.”
“I could invent one for you.”
Joseph’s eyebrows went up. “What are you, a boy genius? If so, what I need is this: a time machine. That’s the only way I think it could be done. Send me back in a time machine. I could assassinate Hitler, and things would be different. But I’d have to get Hirohito too.”
Hank waited, not sure what to say. Joseph stared at him, and Hank got the feeling that he wasn’t really seeing him, that he was off somewhere else.