Ecstasy

by Gwynne Forster

  Later, she told Laura, “You should have seen that little poodle looking down his nose at the low-class mutt. Well, I’ve heard of dogs taking on the personality of their masters and mistresses, but that’s the first time I’ve seen it. That dog did precisely what Alma would have done.”

  “I don’t suppose you know Jethro called here several times while you were in the hospital.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him if he had rocks in his bed, he’s the one that put ’em there, and he oughta leave you alone. When he had you, he was sniffin’ around Alma, and ever since he married her he’s been after you. He gives men a bad name, and I told the scoundrel as much.”

  Jeannetta curled up on the sofa in Laura’s living room, and glanced at Clayton, who sat nearby making a list of the records he needed from his safe-deposit box in a New York City bank. Her straight-laced sister Laura was actually living with a man to whom she wasn’t married. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Maybe I should tell Alma she’s mistaken about Jethro and me; I haven’t said a word to that man since he admitted to me that he’d gotten her pregnant.”

  “Forget it,” Laura snorted. “If your best friend sleeps with your fiancé, she deserves what she gets. I never could see what either of you wanted with him. ’Course, this is a small town, and you didn’t have a lot to choose from.”

  “My excuse is that I was twenty-three.”

  Clayton answered the phone. “She’s right here, Mason. Right. I’m getting it together now. And thanks, man.” He passed the phone to Jeannetta.

  “Hi. Could you call me on my phone in about two minutes?”

  “Ten minutes. There’s no need for you to rush. Later.”

  * * *

  She answered on the first ring. “Hi. I wasn’t sure you’d call.”

  “Why’s that? You’re still my patient...aren’t you?”

  Oh, Lord, was it like that now? Well, she was fighting for her happiness, and she wouldn’t sell short. “Yes, I’m your patient, Mason.” Uncertain of his mood or his reason for calling, she decided to let him lead the conversation.

  “Skip called me a few minutes ago.” She should have known he would, after his self-proclaimed role of caring for her in Mason’s absence.

  “He did? I thought he was in the office exploring the Internet.”

  “He wanted me to know that he’d taken you into town. How do you feel after that walk?”

  She winced at his impersonal tone. “I got tired, but I enjoyed it. Mason, I’m not sure I can handle this detached, doctor persona. How can you treat me as though I’m precious, coddling and loving me and then talk to me as though I’m only a case in your files?”

  “How can you give me so much of yourself, responding to me with every nerve in your body—and I’m not talking about making love, which you can’t recall—leading me to think I’m the most important person on earth to you, and then calmly tell me I’m not husband material? I’m thirty-seven years old, and it’s never occurred to me to ask any other woman to marry me.”

  “I didn’t say you’re not husband material; I promised to think about it.” She looked down at the telephone wire that had somehow gotten twisted around her arm. Just like my life, she thought.

  “Well, hell! You think it’s flattering to have been as close to a woman as I’ve been to you, and have her admit she doesn’t know whether she’d marry you? Woman, you’ve practically taken my clothes off of me, and I’m not including the times we made love. We’ve faced danger together; we’ve stood waist deep in nature, stripped of all sophistication, and we’ve laughed together.” She heard his harsh release of breath. “Jeannetta, don’t you remember sitting with me on the deck of the Southern Queen and watching God’s paintbrush lift the sun out of the South China Sea? I thought we were as close, that moment, as two people could be.”

  She groped for a chair and sat down. He’d told her more about himself in that minute than in all the weeks she’d known him. And yet, he’d said nothing personal about himself. How could she explain it without sounding foolish?

  “I don’t know how much has transpired that I can’t recall, Mason, but I do know that I love you, and have for some time. Something’s missing between us, something that I need, and it’s holding me back.”

  “What are you saying? What do you need? If I don’t know what it is, I can’t give it.”

  She leaned forward in the chair, placed her elbows on her knees, and propped up her chin with her left palm. He wouldn’t like it, but he deserved her honesty.

  “I don’t know what’s inside of you. I know what I see, but not who you are. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, but I don’t know any other way to say it.”

  “And yet you love me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  She knew that her answer would end the conversation, but she could only speak the truth. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, if and when you do know, share it with me. Will you?”

  Was it defeat, or frustration, that she detected in that remark? She couldn’t be sure, because it sounded so alien to him. Yet he’d said it.

  “Nothing’s going to change what’s in my heart.”

  She remembered to tell him about the strange images that had played in her mind. “Mason, do green malachite columns in a huge lobby-like enclosure, a lot of rainbows and waterfalls, say anything to you.”

  “Did you dream this, or did you envision it while you were awake?”

  From the urgency of his voice, she knew he thought it important.

  “I was trying to go to sleep, but these images stayed in my mind until I got an awful headache. Why?”

  “The lobby of the hotel at which we stayed in Zimbabwe had about six of those big round columns, and on our sight-seeing tour outside Harare, we went to Victoria Falls. It had I don’t know how many rainbows forming arcs above it. You’re beginning to remember, but your head ached because you pressed too hard. It’ll come.”

  “I hope so. I want to remember...everything.”

  “Not any more than I want you to recall it.”

  Chapter 11

  Mason left his lawyer’s Wall Street office, took the Lexington train to Ninety-sixth Street, and walked the block to Steve’s apartment. At the corner, he stopped at a bank to arrange an income for Mabel, and the aroma of hot coffee greeted him as he entered.

  “What’s this?” he asked the bank officer with whom he was discussing opening an account for Mabel. His gaze locked on a man, obviously homeless, who filled a bag with muffins and brioches, poured himself a cup of steaming coffee, and left without saying a word or even resting his glance anywhere but the food-laden counter.

  “That must be his seventh or eight trip in here today. We asked him what he was doing with it, and he said he had some friends who couldn’t get around as well as he, and he wanted to help them.”

  “How old would you say he is?” Mason asked the woman.

  “He looks forty-five or more, but from his sprightliness, I’d say he’s probably in his late thirties. The coffee and breads are for the customers, but the manager told us that he needs it more, and we should let him help himself until it’s all gone.

  Mason finished his business and followed the man out. When asked where he lived, the man replied, “Under the elevated up by a hundred and eight street.”

  “I got what was coming to me,” the man said in response to the empathy he must have seen in Mason’s expression. “I’m supposed to be an engineer, but I wanted to make a fast buck, and I let myself get lured into the brokerage business. The firm engineered some unsavory deals and got kicked off the stock exchange, I was out of a job, lost my apartment, and my wife took a walk. If you can’t get cleaned up decently, you can’t look for a job. You know
the rest.”

  “I wish I knew of a way out of this for you,” Mason said, thinking that he’d been lucky that he hadn’t floundered as a travel manager, and that he could still practice his craft.

  “Don’t sweat it,” the man replied. “There’s a way up, but I have to decide to take it, and I haven’t done that yet. You stay cool, man.” Mason walked on, realizing for the first time what a gamble he’d taken with his life, and the measure of his good fortune in not having to pay for what he now saw as a gargantuan error.

  * * *

  When Steve opened the door, Mason regarded his brother carefully. He hadn’t gone beyond high school, but he’d made a decent living, enough to support them and to send his younger brother through school.

  “Steve, you’re forty-two years old, and you could have a much easier and more fulfilling life if you’d come into partnership with me. Managing your emergency office-machine repair service wears you out, because half the time your workers don’t show up, or one of them ruins something and you have to do the job, sometimes three jobs in one night. The travel agency is a money-making concern, because I’ve been there to manage it, and I can’t do that when I restart my practice. I won’t have time.” He explained his plan to open his office two days for the rich, two for those of modest means, and one day for people unable to pay.

  Steve nodded. “Pop would be proud of you for that. When are you going to start?”

  “I told you that, until I can discharge Jeannetta, I won’t take on another patient.”

  “When do you think that’ll be?”

  Mason shrugged both shoulders and fingered the keys in his right pants pocket.

  “Soon, I hope. She has flashes of recall, and that means she’s on the way.” He leaned back in the chair and locked his hands behind his head, but his words were barely audible. “I asked her to marry me, and she turned me down.”

  Steve gawked. “You asked her to... Good Lord. And she...” He released a piercing whistle. “You love her, or you want to protect her?”

  “Both.” He understood Steve’s look of perplexity, because he couldn’t figure it out either.

  “Did you ask her why?”

  “Yeah,” he said, shifting his long body into a slouch, “but her reason didn’t make sense to me. Look, man, it won’t kill me; if I could go back into that operating theater and perform that surgery with that bunch eyeing every move I made and waiting for me to make a mistake, I can take anything.”

  Steve leaned against the roll-top desk, put his hands in his pockets, crossed his ankles, and looked at his brother.

  “I hope you don’t think there’s any similarity between that and not having the woman you love. Before this gets cleared up, you’ll find that you’re the problem. You probably know a lot more about women than I do, Mason, but the ones who trailed around after you when you got to be a famous surgeon were pretty shallow. They wanted to be seen with you, to have you escort them to the Jack and Jill gala, the Urban League banquet, or some Delta or AKA shindig. For that, they’d accept whatever you offered and give you anything you asked for. Jeannetta Rollins is different—she’s demanding more. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll bet it’s something you’ve never had to give up. Bring her down here sometime. I want to meet her.”

  Mason spread his palms on his knee caps and grinned at the picture he’d conjured up. Imagine bringing Jeannetta Rollins anywhere.

  “I’ll ask her nicely.”

  Steve laughed. “Bully for her. You’re not giving up on her, are you?”

  Mason pushed himself up to a standing position, stretched luxuriously, and shook his head. “Man, you know me better than that. Problem is, I don’t have a clue as to what she wants that I don’t give her.” He reached down for his briefcase, but straightened up without lifting it. “When she has her full memory, I’ll know better where things stand with us.” And I’ll know whether she loved me or merely used me, he said to himself. Steve detained him when he would have left.

  “I didn’t get to see Mabel over the weekend; how is she?”

  “She won’t make it,” Mason said with a sad shake of his head. “She’s used up that extra something that makes people live when medical science says they shouldn’t. I’m going to start adoption proceedings. Skip wants it badly, and I’m not turning him over to Family Services and heaven knows what kind of foster home. I want him with me.”

  “You’d better hurry up and do it while Mabel can help you. Skip’s a great kid; if you wouldn’t adopt him, I would. Get a lawyer.”

  “I did that this morning. He’s drawing up an affidavit for Mabel’s signature, and he’ll take it from there. But I won’t feel easy ’til I have those adoption papers in my safe-deposit box.”

  “Skip will be one happy boy; when he’s with me, he can’t seem to talk about anything but wanting you to be his dad.”

  Mason had to laugh. “He says I’ll have him to take care of me when I’m old.”

  “And you will, too, so don’t sell him short.”

  Mason frowned and looked toward the ceiling. “Well, I’ve cast the die; I’m going to be a father.” He took in his brother’s broad grin. “What’s so amusing?”

  Steve laughed. “Don’t worry about your approaching fatherhood; Skip will give you all the advice you need.”

  Approaching fatherhood wasn’t his worry; his main problem was the widening chasm between himself and the woman he’d come to love with every fiber of his being. The woman who seemed comfortable knowing that they had slipped away from each other.

  * * *

  Jeannetta wanted to telephone Mason, but what could she say to him? That she’d changed her mind about being his wife? The phone rang. She turned over in bed, struggled to release herself from the tangled sheet and the twisted gown that clutched her tired body. She pulled the coverlet from the floor where she’d kicked it as she wrestled with sleeplessness, knocked the pillow off her head, and tried to sit up. She peeped at the clock as she lifted the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi. I awakened you, and I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have thought you’d turn in so early. Any problems?”

  “No, but you said I’m not to read or to write much, though I did write for a few minutes yesterday afternoon, and I’m not to watch TV, so what’s left? The bed.”

  “Don’t trash it. The bed’s probably been the scene of more awesome, mind-altering experiences that any other place on this planet. If the company’s right...there’s no limit. Trust me.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “What does that mean? Oh, yes, I said the wrong word.”

  Jeannetta stood up. “In a game of words, you’d probably win, but I’m after something more meaningful.”

  “I’d ask what, if I wasn’t sure you’d dress it up so much that I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Did you call me to pick a fight?” She poked her tongue at the mouth piece. “Because if you did, I’m hanging up and going back to bed.”

  “That wasn’t my intention, but I won’t back away from one. In fact, honey, a good fight with you would do me a world of good right now.”

  “Too bad; I’m not going to accommodate you.” She had a sense that he was warming up to a good verbal sparring, but she ached all over from bouncing around in the bed trying to sleep, and she wasn’t in the mood for it.

  “Don’t want to fight, huh? How about making love? Would you do that if I were there right now?”

  “And disobey my doctor, who thinks that a little thing, so mild by comparison, as a tongue darting in and out of my mouth, would raise my blood pressure to crisis level?”

  “Don’t get out of line there,” he growled. “I can stay at fever pitch for longer than it takes me to get from here to Pilgrim, and then let’s see how brave you’ll be.”

  “You don�
��t scare me. If I stood within thirty yards of a horde of wild elephants and didn’t trem...Mason. Mason, when was I that close to elephants? I’ve got to get dressed and find Clayton. Maybe he was with me.”

  “I was with you, Jeannetta. We were on a preserve in Zimbabwe outside Harare. You and I.” Excitement streaked through at the urgency in his voice. “What else did you see, baby?”

  “I don’t know...there are some monkeys, a male and a female, and they seem to be intimate...I...do you think it’s all coming back?”

  “Yeah. You’re on your way. I read your last tests, the ones taken in Pilgrim and transferred here electronically. They’re very encouraging. Read or write about an hour at a time, no more than four hours per day altogether, and wait a while for TV. Don’t walk alone too much, and try to avoid the midday sun.”

  He could switch from hot to cold faster than a hailstorm. She’d love to cuff him. “Thanks, doctor.” If he heard the sarcasm, so much the better.

  “Wait a minute there.” She knew she’d annoyed him, because he spoke rapidly with no inflection. “Are you saying I’m just your doctor? Nothing more than that?”

  “Oh, Mason, how can you ask such a question?” If she hadn’t already known that academic degrees didn’t give men an understanding of women, he’d have convinced her.

  “Why shouldn’t I ask? You turned me down.”

  She took a deep breath and weighed her words carefully. After all, she didn’t want to drive him from her, only to help him understand.

  “I don’t know you, Mason, and I can’t marry a man whom I don’t truly know. I don’t understand what goes on inside of you. I know that you want to protect me, to take care of me, and I appreciate that, but it isn’t what I need. I don’t need you to be my fail-safe in case I stumble.” His silence cut like hot acid, but she had to tell him. “I can take care of myself. I appreciate all that you’ve done more than I can express it but, unless and until you offer me what I need, my answer is no.”