Layover

“A lot of deaths,” Michael was telling me, “are so stupid. Did you hear about that teenage girl couple of years ago? They couldn’t peel her off the bottom of the whirlpool. They couldn’t find the shut-off switch. Friend of mine did some work on a class-action suit on that and now the whirlpools come with all sorts of warnings, and everyone laughs. But she drowned in three feet of water, in a whirlpool. Stupid.”

  “Actually,” I told Michael, “I’ve got to use your phone.”

  And he nodded in a way that seemed to me knowing, almost proud, as if he had manufactured the reunion. Which in a sense, I believe, he had.

  But Ken wasn’t home. My own voice on the answering machine invited me to leave a message. Paged him but, when asked to enter the phone number, realized I yet again did not have one, on the bedroom cordless. Had to hang up, call into the other room to ask Michael, dial again. Was about to enter the number before I realized that leaving Michael’s phone number for my husband was not a phenomenally good idea.

  Eleven AM on a Sunday: racquetball with a pal? Reading the paper over cappuccino and crumb cake at a Barnes and Noble, looking up over his glasses every so often to explore the women he was now free to pursue? No. Not at a museum, not with a “friend.” Not having forget-your-troubles communion with the lawn: we pay people to do that. On call, probably.

  How far out of my life would I need to be cast before I couldn’t be reeled back to the predictable orbit? The Sunday paper in the damp grass. Ken’s lax hand on the steering wheel, patch of hair below each knuckle. Groan of garage door lifting.

  Ken’s smile. To a stranger it might look sarcastic. The teeth on the top, on one side, overlap where the orthodontist screwed up, and he still smiles like a teenager, to hide that, or even before that to hide the braces; as he smiles he hunches, too, a tall man’s shy self-effacement, as if any happiness needs to be hunkered down in. How far out of my life before the thought of those overlapping teeth engaged my tongue?

  This far. Like a child I wanted him now, this second.

  It’s not as if Ken had found a handy nurse to suck him off in a broom closet! He had chosen a grown-up, married physician he had known in college, with whom he had been discussing his confused guilt over his son’s death. Maybe even admitting his anger at his blank-eyed zombie-bride. No question I’d merely been going through the motions. Who could blame me? Why Ken, of course. That’s what a spouse is for.

  And Hillary—she’d fallen in love with him. As why shouldn’t she. Because he was nice, especially for an MD. Probably nicer than her husband. Tenderness is what she lacked in her life, despite the poet sawing away at the swelling violin strings of their family moments. Ken was gruff and crusty, but that made the tenderness more moving. She had cut him open like a grilled steak, let the blood run out.

  This was not a productive line of inquiry. Hillary I could think ill of ’til the cows came home, but I promised myself to do my husband the service of not oversimplifying him. Not making him transparent, an anatomy-lesson model of a man. Some woman had wanted him so much that she choked up, still, at the thought of him. Unlike death, desire is complicated. As I had now seen, personally. From the glass-ceiling, glass-floored house in which I currently tiptoed, barefoot, I would not cast stones.

  Because if Ken demanded what I was doing here, with Michael, I would not be able to answer. Would dislike having my motivation flattened to “payback” when I could not even answer to myself.

  I sat on the edge of Michael Davidoff’s bed and put my hands so they covered my whole face, like a hockey player’s caged mask. Through my fingers I allowed myself to peer at, admit what I wanted. When I got back to the hotel I wanted to find my husband leaning forward on a couch in the lobby, his dark eyes full of longing and forgiveness. Veins pulsing in his hands and forehead. I wanted to have the kind of sex one can have, with one’s husband, only in hotels. On Monday I wanted him to hold my hand lightly in the OB-GYN’s office as we discussed the treatment of the microadenoma. Then I wanted him to take me home. On the plane, our elbows sharing the armrest, Ken in his sky-blue work-shirt, which he never wears to work so it does not smell like the hospital. Just clean, free Ken-smell.

  Eventually Michael came in and leaned against the doorjamb. “You okay?”

  Through my fingers, he elided into his son at the pool, reporting that we’d almost been found out by his mother. For an ominous second I flirted with the idea of telling Michael about Zachary, then decided that was not my job, and anyhow what would I say? That episode would have to be written off. Hillary Katzenbach and the Other Michael, after all, not to mention all those tittering couples at the hotel, engaged in similar activities without grief and life-threatening illness. It was only sex.

  Later I might have time to feel guilty that I did not bother to care how Michael felt when I announced that I had to return, at once, to the hotel. He volunteered to walk me there. I declined. We had a short conversation about how long I’d be in town, when I might return, how and when I would contact, or be contacted by, Dr. Sharon Rieff.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t done Michael Davidoff any favors. This weekend wouldn’t help him cozy up to his lady lawyer. He would see her for another nine months, a year, during which she would more and more often—postcoitally, say, aiming for a tone that wasn’t too strident—go over the game plan of Their Future Together. In her early to mid-thirties, not even sure if she wanted to make partner or quit and raise the kids that Michael, I knew, would never agree to have. Any woman with an ounce of sense could see that. He wasn’t interested! That, finally, was probably why he had agreed to sleep with me. Because now he could confess it to the lawyer and soon she would go the way of Sharon Rieff, angrily longing for him. With any luck, they would eventually manage to stay friends.

  The sensible thing for Michael, of course, would be to find a self-sufficient divorcée about my age, preferably with an established career of her own, her kids grown and gone. But he would not do that. Not after Mar. She’d crippled him as surely as he’d crippled her. He’d stick with the perky thirty-two-year-olds. When challenged on this, he would use as proof that he would consider an equal, should the right one present herself: Me.

  The houseguest who had the sense not to overstay her welcome.

  I caught myself dismissing him. Had managed, in the seconds this scenario presented itself, to even find him ugly. His coloration not auburn but a drunkard’s outright red. His posture pompous—self-satisfaction coming off him like a smell. Strong as coconut tanning lotion. Come on, I scolded myself, anything could happen to him. With the amount he works he might stall his midlife crisis, his face-off with the cosmic emptiness, but he would get there eventually. Even if health problems had to force him there. And then he would have a real relationship. But no: at fifty-three, he would capitulate and finally marry one of those thirty-year-olds. A plain, cheerful, uncomplicated one—a dental hygienist. And to no one’s surprise, because isn’t this story as trite as any other, he would then have children, whom he might, in his dotage, even enjoy. Zachary’s son calling his granddad’s son uncle, as they dig for worms together in the yard.

  And who was I to say that wasn’t the marriage he was meant for? That everything else—me included—was what would help him get there?

  Michael Davidoff took my face in both hands and planted on me a kiss with all the trappings of deep feeling, as skilled as any movie star’s. I missed my husband far too much to process it. But I knew I would remember it, even inhabit it, in memory. The way the bride and groom are always absent at their own wedding but reconstruct it, later, from the pictures.

  My walk back to the hotel was a gauntlet of street people. Trembling and Tourettey, cajoling and cursing, like extras from a Bosch painting. They were staking out their assigned panhandling spots, not planted as a personal warning to me, although a surprising number were dirty-haired, dentally challenged females. Once upon a time, I was a very successful career woman. And my husband was a surgeon…

  In my pre
vious life, I kept all my loose change in the front pocket of my purse, and would bestow it on the unfortunates along my route until the change ran out. For all I knew, that change was now all I had. It had been days since I had attempted to ascertain my fortunes. Michael had kept me as you’d keep a child. I had not attempted to withdraw more cash from an ATM since the Victoria’s Secret shopping day. Instinctively, I’d been afraid to: did not want to have to resent my husband if he had further cut me off from my own money; did not know what the balances were in our joint accounts; had no idea whether Ken had managed to pay bills, my job in the marital division of labor (as most things were that did not directly involve slicing people open, and, actually, the residents did even that for him, devoted little sous-chefs); had not, obviously, run Quicken, or done any on-line banking; was existing as surely as those street people on the resources on hand, albeit with a much cozier safety net.

  But I realized, as I entered the hotel, that I had not even managed yet to ascertain how my room had finally been secured, after the initial difficulty. Clearly it had been secured. Room service had been sent to me, and a house doctor. Still, I determined that I would take care of any potential problems now, and got in line at the desk.

  At my feet, waiting for his mother, who was settling up her bill ahead of me in line, was a child about the age that Evan would have been. The boy had spread out a fistful of coins on the rug and was presiding over them, gleefully counting out loud. So thrilled with his mastery of the bounty, so full of hope about more to come! Adults can’t feel this kind of pleasure in money, even juggling frequent-flyer miles for upgrades. For a moment I allowed myself to dwell on his hands, their unstudied voluptuousness. But now his mother was hurrying him along. “Come on, you can count in the cab.” But I’m almost done! The coins, carefully sorted by size, scooped up. Kid indignant.

  This whole scene stabbed me like new sutures. I got control of myself just as my eyes fuzzed, so that the coins glinted watery, as if through wishing-well water.

  “Ma’am?”

  Mother and child stormed off in a ragged Cubist cloud of belongings—brass straps on her fine luggage; his transparent Gameboy, electronic guts thrillingly open to view. My turn at the desk. My file retrieved.

  The clerk squinted at the saga of my file. He even looked up to take my measure, suspiciously, as an immigration official might. “You have house doctor charges here,” he informed me.

  “Right.”

  “It appears,” the clerk reported, “that the first night was paid cash, and then we didn’t have a credit-card imprint, and there was—and then we got one.”

  “From whom?”

  “You, I assume.”

  “’Fraid not.”

  He investigated further, then delivered this news: “The manager approved taking a plate number over the phone.”

  “From whom?”

  “It wouldn’t necessarily say. Wait. Here—Dr. Daniel Kramer.”

  My kind, efficient therapist had given his very own credit-card number to secure in my behalf an undisturbed stay? Unbelievable. Especially given the amount of the charges—the Four Seasons is hardly cheap.

  Waste of money, though presumably accommodations at a private mental hospital are far pricier.

  This clerk, considerably more agreeable than the last, said that it would be no problem to transfer the charges to my own plate instead. They wouldn’t need a plate; just the number and expiration date would get them an approval code.

  Not a single message awaited me in the room. Not Ken. Not even Kramer, ascertaining that I was still alive.

  I plugged in my computer, eager. No e-mail. No personal, no professional—zip. But it was the weekend.

  I counted my money. Almost $100. Enough to get to the airport, although not enough to pay for a ticket home.

  If I were to die like this—just shrivel up, vanish—it would have been more dignified, and certainly more lively, to do it as a road movie. If all I was going to do was screw strangers, might as well vary the backdrops (St. Louis’s Golden Arch, the Golden Gate Bridge) rather than just peel off my gray-green suit (not much of a costume drama, either) on the same old bed, same old bathroom.

  I sat on the exact place on the bed where I’d sat at Michael’s, hating myself, and called Ken again.

  “Mea culpa, okay?” I said, hating the nasal sound of my voice. Then the trump card: “Should have, by tomorrow, workup results on pituitary microadenoma. If I don’t answer, I’m at the pool.”

  Suddenly I felt as full of pep and possibility as a caged guinea pig.

  It’s these rooms! I thought, alarmed, as you will notice, halfway through a long flight, how stuffy the plane is. Put your palm, hopeful, to the air nozzle above you—nothing. Go home, Ignatia had commanded in Pittsburgh. Air no good here. She was right, even if it had taken me—what? A month?—to long for the comforts of home, where the windows actually opened.

  Only then did I realize I had not seen a pool for almost a week. Had not even remembered swimming. In my hurry to return to the hotel, to receive Ken’s call, I had not even thought to ask Michael if he belonged to a health club. Of course he would! He would go three times a week for comfort and kinship as people used to go to church! Was probably there now, at this very second.

  My bathing suit was hanging by one strap over the shower head where I had left it, stiff and crusty, so redolent of chlorine despite the washing that it was hard to believe the fabric was not being reconfigured on a molecular level.

  As I tried to swim at the Four Seasons pool under the eye of the same bored guard, among the squeals of splashing children, my life felt reduced to absurdity. Stern in my goggles and bathing cap, I was a deep-sea diver in the rain collecting in a pothole. The only way this could pass for a real pool was in the amount of chlorine used—just as well, if diapered infants are going to piss therein. Real pool, real life: could not clear my brain of the thought that I had neither. Each lap I fantasized that if I did another lap, stretched out the time I was away from the room, the message button would be blinking when I returned. Undulating light like an earring in a belly dancer’s navel.

  Each lap, pushing off: Ken!

  But he had not called.

  Waiting to hear from the Doctor, then the Doctor. Waiting for phones to ring. Waiting for periods to come or waiting, conversely, for pregnancy. Women wait. Waiting for calls, from men or children, women are on call, like doctors. The red eye of the message light, the feminine pink flush of the positive pregnancy test. All my life I had been pecking at expectation like a laboratory pigeon.

  What choice did I have, though? For a while after Evan died, I had carried around a Zen book. It was the only thing that comforted me, that seemed to make any sense. But then I decided I didn’t have enough strength for that kind of peaceful passivity, that it was too much to ask of myself, and settled back into itchy desire, disappointment.

  Back in the room I flipped on CNN to their bizarre anchor—why was her hair so long? Was this sophomore year in college? And why was she always smirking? Why did she always look as if, the minute the camera was no longer trained on her face, she would burst into merriment? Did she not understand that the news was serious business?

  “A twenty-eight-year-old woman was electrocuted today,” she said—this was in Baltimore, at a hotel, hardly fleabag but a reputable chain I had often used myself—“when she used her key card to admit herself to her room. She had been coming from the hotel’s swimming pool.” There had been no other electrical problems, and nothing was obvious.

  They were investigating.

  I heard this sitting wet-haired, in my bathing suit, on the bed, the key card still in my hand.

  A current strong enough to kill had come through a wall and traveled up an innocuous square of plastic to a damp hand. It did not quite seem possible, although the anchor’s face registered her usual restrained amusement, no more or less. Her eyes flashing occasionally (“Where am I?”). They did not show a picture of the dead wo
man. I sat through a whole other cycle of third-world strife and sex scandal to hear it again, at the quarter hour, the anchor meeting my eye as if to challenge: “It will be hard for you not to take this as a message, although the message is awfully dumb. ‘There is danger everywhere’? ‘Live each moment as if it is your last’?”

  No new information was provided. The same three, four sentences, unsatisfying as a lap across a hotel pool. I tried the real, top-of-the-hour CNN show to see if hotel electrocution was explored in more detail there, but it was not even mentioned. Thus I used up almost an hour and only thought on twenty or thirty occasions that Ken had not yet called. Only imagined a baker’s dozen of scenarios of how I would pick up the phone, what I would say, what he would say, and what did it matter anyway because we would still have to play out the hand of the marriage in real time, not CNN time or time as it exists in the kind of novels with plots, in which events intervene that determine fate.

  Not that there wasn’t fate. But it only brought death. And death was not a story. Only the end of a story. The rest of us just wait—has-beens and wanna-bes, like Tiny Tim in his hotel room in Minneapolis, dyeing his hair and plotting his comeback.

  By now my bathing suit and hair were dry. I stared at the phone like a child, willing it to ring, and it did.

  “Ken?”

  Ken: “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Then the electric silence I’d imagined. A current in which we could each imagine the other alive in time on the other end. In my head his tentative hey was an elevator door decisively opening, as on old episodes of Star Trek: at first, nothing, but then Ken’s DNA recombining itself so that he appeared, whole and arms folded in front of him in his clean green scrubs or no, since this was just in my head, why not naked, the dark hair on his chest swirling in a pattern like the whorl of stars in a Van Gogh sky. In my head I just buried my head in his chest, wordless.

  Ken gave me time to do this. Then said: “Sweet.”