Layover

  No Love Lost. He was still seeing her, then, his poetess? Or just longed for her? Was she married too? Did she have kids? Did Hillary know? She didn’t seem to know. Was she humiliated, when this book came out? How could she not be? I read his bio again, paying attention to where he taught. Poked around for Gavins with Irish last names—a poet too, I assumed—to see where he taught, lest he invited Mike to his place of employ and introduced him to a colleague. No luck.

  Our poetess had brassy highlights in her hair. Her fingers were long and strong, with squarish nails. The nails had large white moons. She was a gardener. The nails therefore filled with dirt and so on. This is what Michael saw fit to reveal to me, his reader.

  To enter you

  I follow the mole through

  the night garden—

  Cock as mole? I was ready for puns about moles as spies, but no, it was a totally straight-faced poem about sex so good it “shakes the foundation.” This from the kind of sneaking-around husband that private detectives, I happened to know from a recent magazine article, nickname “The Shirt” (as opposed to “The Skirt”) when they follow him to his assignations, snapping photos for the divorce court. Gimme a break I thought, and felt a surge of sympathy for Dr. Katzenbach, especially as I poked among the female poets, searching out Michael’s squeeze.

  Hillary was right! While she was saving lives, the poetesses were protecting their lettuce from rabbits! They all gardened, it appeared. To the last woman they could call each plant on the planet by its Latin name. (Plant on the planet: I, too, could play this game.) Gardened, cooked pies from scratch, soothed babies, and fucked like bunnies, all the while quoting St. Augustine. They all missed their mommies or whatever relative had died, hopefully in a colorful fashion, even if it was a second cousin. What was this, 1830? Hadn’t any of these dames ever bought a white T-shirt at the Gap? Had a muffler fall off? Needed to pick up a prescription for an antibiotic?

  They made me proud to be a mathematician.

  The Irish men were just as bad. Same garbage—flowers, weather, oceans—except they fucked like ferrets and occasionally interrupted their accounts of their own virility with intonations about the IRA, Bosnia, or some other kind of political upheaval. Not believing their own rhetoric, that family mattered. Gotta get some bloodshed in there somewhere. As far as I was concerned, the Earth Mothery American poetesses and the bearded, bearish Irish poets deserved each other. Let them be partners in rhyme, screwing deep into the night in their fragrant gardens, competitively quoting luminaries to each other. Compared to the rest of these dopes, Michael, it appeared, was something of a crown prince. At least you could tell that he loved his kids, that they were more than props.

  By this point I had been in the bookstore for most of the afternoon. I’d taken out many slim volumes that were now scattered around me as I sat cross-legged on the floor. The people who passed smiled at me warmly—was I not a charming poster girl for the allure of the megachain? “Only two topics,” one of the poets quoted Yeats as having said, “can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood: sex and the dead.” For all their oozing and enthusing, these poets didn’t know jack shit about death. Put all of them together with ice queen Katzenbach and her cohorts at their conventions (“Atraumatic Aortic Transection: Diagnosis by Biplane Transesophageal Echocardiography”) and you might—just might—come up with one whole, balanced human being.

  Hillary and Michael deserved each other, should by all means stay married.

  This was not fair, I realized, to either the charming couple or poets in general, but I didn’t care. And I was very tired.

  According to the “Also by” page, Michael had published two other collections of poems, neither available here. For purposes of completeness, I felt that I should check them out. Presumably Hillary would occupy more mental space in past volumes. Consulted with the overeducated, lilac-crew-cutted, nose-ringed toddler at the computer and discovered that yes, the books were in print and yes, they could be ordered for me, albeit from an obscure distributor, and would arrive in a mere seven to ten days.

  That would be spiffy, if I had an address.

  “I’m just in town for business,” I said. The business of going bonkers.

  “Well, we could UPS them to you. Even overnight, if you’re in a hurry,” he added, with a half-smile to indicate the idiocy of anyone being in a hurry for poetry. (Not as if it were a software operating manual.)

  Nothing like trying to shop mail-order to make you confront the downside of homelessness.

  “Or,” he offered conspiratorially, “you could order them online, from amazon.com. Might be faster, actually.”

  Pay your employees minimum wage, you can’t expect loyalty.

  I bought Michael’s one available book with part of my rapidly dwindling cash, though I’d already read it cover to cover and expected no new revelations. Out of a sense of courtesy to its author.

  Had to take a taxi back to the hotel with the dregs of my cash. Saw that the phone was still off the hook. Thought: good. Threw myself facedown on the bed and willed a sleep that would wipe the afternoon clean, strip away all of it—Hillary and Ken, Hillary and Michael, Michael and the poetess, then the legions of poetesses, preaching a womanhood that was, I knew, a crock.

  Jolted from dreams of poetesses in diaphanous dresses (poetesses playing harps, poetesses picking cotton) by thunder on the hotel door. Knocking so violent it wound, in the serpentine dream, into Nazis, coming to take people away.

  Nefertiti! I should have complained to management days ago.

  Or maybe it was management. But we’d settled the room charges already.

  I could go to the ATM again, get more cash. I could do this. Only not just yet.

  “Go away,” I said, not loudly enough. “Can’t you see the sign?” But in fact I had not managed to hang the PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign from the rearview mirror of the doorknob, because I could see it from the bed, on my side of the room. “Later!” I tried to say, more forcefully.

  But after further knocking there was a rattle of keys and the door exploded to reveal two men.

  They seemed gargantuan, but I was, of course, lying down, face still pressed into the bedspread.

  Both were in suits. One reddish and red-haired, unhealthy-looking—eater of too much beef, drinker of too much beer—with a hotel name tag. The other black, young, very handsome, with a briefcase.

  “Are you okay?” the reddish one asked, apologetically.

  When I didn’t answer fast enough he said “your phone” and pointed to the phone. I swung myself upright.

  Then he said, “Dr. Kramer was concerned. Your line has been busy all afternoon.”

  “I was out, actually.”

  Which they could have easily confirmed, since a maid had gotten in to clean. (Cleaned, but tactfully left my phone off the hook? That made no sense.)

  “Well, we didn’t know. The line was busy, then—I’m sorry. This is Dr. Taller.” Or something like taller.

  The doctor nodded once, crisply.

  I was dressed, luckily. “I’m really fine,” I said.

  “Mind if I—?” the doctor asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s probably a good idea.”

  “I’ll leave you two then,” the manager said, backing out of the room. “Mind if I?” I smiled at the doctor, pointing to the bathroom.

  “No, no,” he said. Sonorous voice. Aware of it, too. A sense of great diplomacy and restraint in both the voice and his posture—an angry man acting calm. “Of course.”

  The bathroom gave me time to brush my hair in the mirror and contemplate the news that Kramer had called the health cops on me. Wouldn’t want me to wind up like Norma Jean, though how I’d accomplish this was unclear (massive quantities of antacids? Send something out to be cleaned, tie my head in the bag? Electrocute myself in the tub, with the Four Seasons’ blow-dryer?), when my whole reason for calling Kramer to begin with had been to acquire meds, get calmly home. But I found that
I didn’t mind. Was grateful, actually, appreciated his concern.

  When I came out the doctor nodded at me again, beckoned me over.

  While I was gone he had begun to unpack his case on my little table, from which breakfast had been cleared but not Zachary’s note, still propped on the bud vase with its one sad carnation. How had I mistaken the black box for a briefcase? I sat docilely in one of the twin armchairs and stared with admiration at all of the briefcase’s compartments, tidy as an airplane meal tray—slots for stethoscopes and pumps, one-use needles wrapped in plastic.

  “How are you feeling,” he said.

  “Tired.”

  Without wasting time on bedside manner the doctor gathered some numbers. Stuck a thermometer in my mouth, took my pressure, listened to my heart, flashed a light in my eyes, nose, and throat. “Swallow.” Felt my glands with two hands, grave as a healer. “Any tenderness?” Whenever he touched me he looked away, as if to both touch me and look at me simultaneously was cheating.

  An intern or resident, would be my guess; I would have expected some retired family doctor. Usually I would try to draw him out a bit, but I didn’t have the energy. Besides I did not need him to be too cordial. He was in my hotel room; I could smell the vanilla in his aftershave. We were close enough.

  “Last period?” he asked. Everyone sure was curious about my menstrual cycles.

  “Five, six weeks ago, give or take, this round at least. How soon would the urine test pick up pregnancy?”

  “You think you might be pregnant?”

  “That might explain the fatigue, I guess.”

  He made a note. “Lots of other reasons for fatigue,” he said. “Any weight gain or loss?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “I’ve been on the road. No scales in hotel rooms. Nothing significant, though.”

  “Your appetite?”

  “Excellent.”

  “Sleeping?”

  “Tons.”

  “More than usual?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any pain?”

  “You mean other than psychic?”

  He didn’t even crack a smile. “No,” I said, chastened. “Just exhausted. Bone-weary. Think you could take some blood, check iron, run some thyroid numbers? Because I’m having some not-too-acceptable swings. From real energetic to flat wiped out. That suggests thyroid, right?”

  He shook his head, no. “Do those tests back home, with your own doctor.”

  “But if I need—”

  “Then go to the ER. Couple excellent ones within walking distance. I was only sent, really, to make sure you weren’t dying or dead.”

  “As a courtesy,” I said tartly. He nodded, yes.

  “And if I were?”

  “Dying? Well,” he said, “I’d get you to the ER.”

  “Couldn’t you even do a pregnancy test?”

  “Sure I could, but what would be the point? Why wouldn’t you walk to the corner, buy a kit? Work just as well, on morning urine.”

  What is a doctor good for, anyhow. They might as well have sent the maid.

  “Meanwhile, your doctor thought maybe you could use some Valium.”

  “Sure,” I said, defeated.

  He handed me a prescription for five-milligram Valium—I was unlikely to overdose on that number—and his card. He appeared to be a bona fide physician, in private practice.

  Gregory Talliver. A married man, or a bachelor with a fake ring. “This is, I trust, a sideline for you,” I said.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Come here often? Interesting problems? Old guys having heart attacks atop their mistresses?”

  He smiled. “Mostly stomach flus. A bad shrimp. A couple of bad drug reactions, from visiting rock stars. And a zit, once, from a famous opera singer doing a one-night gig with the Philadelphia Orchestra.”

  “A zit,” I said.

  “A big one, right at the tip of her nose,” he offered, in her defense.

  “Do your services appear on my hotel bill,” I asked, “along with breakfast?”

  “You got it. But I’ll give you a bill, for insurance purposes.” He was writing that up now, with gusto. Handed it to me.

  Diagnosis? 780.7. “Fatigue.”

  “‘Fatigue,’” I said. “Less of a diagnosis than the global human condition.”

  He looked at me now, fully and with curiosity, for the first time. “You kind of seem okay,” he declared. “Your ‘doctor,’ I think”—he said the word with only barely contained contempt for the psychological establishment—“overreacted somewhat.”

  I found myself comforted to hear him say so, although he had not really paid enough attention to warrant an opinion. But I suppose I had demonstrated mental health in the way most important to men: I’d shown an interest in his work.

  This is not what I’d hoped for, from a doctor’s visit. I hoped that within a day or so I would have a diagnosis. I would not study the phone’s winking eye, but would sleep, or eat, or swim, and would be pleasantly surprised by a voice-mail message from this Dr. Talliver informing me that my thyroid levels were low, or high, so all I needed to do to be right as rain was take this tiny pill.

  When will I see an effect, doctor, I could hear myself saying. Oh, almost instantly. Certainly within twenty-four hours.

  Why, married to a doctor, would I think that?

  And why, if I sought magic bullets, had I refused to even consider Prozac, which would have the added bonus of reducing, as side effect, my surges of inappropriate middle-aged lust?

  Just to take the edge off, everyone on antidepressants had repeatedly assured me. I had given up telling these folks I didn’t want the edge off. They took this to mean I was in some kind of retro Protestant denial. Or clinging to my pain, like some uncrossedover ghost. You could watch their eyes follow the cue cards of these hypotheses in their brains, like rookie newscasters. Who knows. Maybe they were right. But I felt, strongly, that treating me for depression was like giving chemotherapy for a cardiac arrest.

  Or like eating a handful of amoxicillin, then getting screened for strep. Why obscure the edge? The edge was the condition.

  I stood on the edge. It wasn’t exactly high, or dark, or sharp, and I was not only not barefoot, but wore big, sturdy shoes. Lug soles. All the same, there was danger, of the most-accidents-happen-at-home variety. Not speeding on the highway but pulling out of the parking space at the grocery store. Highways most dangerous not in floods, but when just slightly wet.

  The nature of my attempt to be vigilant, to exercise a certain kind of Zen mind-control and self-awareness, to not merely obscure the edge but to conquer it, was such that I thought if I studied the prescription for Valium—looked at the loops of Dr. Talliver’s letters, watched myself walk to a pharmacy, get the prescription filled, master the childproof lid, maybe even ask for a paper-cone cup of water right there at the counter to wash one down—it should be as good as taking the drug. Similarly, if I thought warmly of my husband, I could, by a kind of telepathy, communicate to him that I was not angry, not really. I didn’t imagine Ken so much as gestate him. He was very, very small, plus out of focus. But I was growing him in my brain—my own brain fetus.

  Ken, I told and didn’t tell him, on that edge of sleep upon which I spent so much time, I will be home soon. I am just going to finish my business here.

  I am not sure exactly when it became clear to me that my business included Zachary’s father. But the hotel room had Yellow Pages nestled in the end table with the Bible, and he was not hard to find. I assured myself that I would get an appointment with him, when I stressed that it was an emergency. His office was so close I could even walk.

  Walking but not running through the city, clicking steadily on people I passed, I could use the new X-ray vision I wasn’t even sure I had, until I imaged Zach’s future, to see straight to strangers’ souls. As a salesman I could always quickly calibrate someone’s center of gravity from his walk—see how speed, caution, skittishness, or thrust are used as defenses,
see where and how he was rooted, how he could be yanked free. I had lost this talent for a while, after the death; like a war survivor, I could hear only my own nightmare sirens. But then I’d discovered grief’s trade secret: once you burrow that deep into yourself, you simply have a better nose for pain. Truth is, hardly anyone is happy. Not even the people with nothing wrong. They’re all hunkered down in the bunker of self, in self’s fragile failure.

  Dan Kramer’s take on all of this—for of course I’d tried to discuss it with him—had been something on the order of No Man Is an Island. On the contrary, I’d argued. Every man is. Yes yes, he had said, but. A cognitive therapist was our man Dan; he wanted to help me see the glass as half-full. Under this theory, pain could help me “grow.” Right. Run over the dog and what do you have? A three-legged dog. Very elegant. “I’m not sure exactly what we’re disagreeing about,” Dan Kramer had said, rather petulantly. “Are we all essentially stranded in our own pain? Sure. Run over, beaten with a newspaper, caged at the SPCA. Pick your metaphor. But: we go on, no? On we go.”

  So on I went to test my skills on a man who truly was an island, a veritable fortress. Zachary’s dad was going to be my tough nut to crack, the case that broke grief’s back.