“How about all this snow,” Bonnie said, cheerfully. “We sure got clobbered.”
Fern agreed that it was a lot of snow. Her expression took on a ruminative quality. Unaccountably, she went back inside, taking the garbage with her.
“Bye,” Bonnie said to Eric. He made the hand sign for shooting himself in the head and she closed the apartment door behind her. A little while later she watched his car round the corner and its heaps of new-piled snow, and speed off.
And now she had to imagine him headed home, calling Jane, probably, to tell her he was on his way. His tired face wearing no particular expression, and then, once he reached his front door, rallying, turning into husband and daddy.
Should she feel shocked, or injured, or much of anything, that he’d cheated on Jane? She wished he had not told her, if only because it was one more bad secret. Why was she so surprised? Men screwed around, everybody knew it, Bonnie herself had done her share and more of sleazy sleeping and was not in a position to throw stones. She knew more than she wanted to about both their sexual temperaments, Jane’s and Eric’s. She got back into bed and willed herself to sleep, and when she woke up again it was after noon, and her head hurt from all the space that Jane and Eric had taken up in it.
Bonnie didn’t hear from either of them again for a few weeks. This was not unusual, since she and Jane might go a long, busy time without talking, let alone seeing each other. Finally, hating the sense of calculation that went along with it, Bonnie called Jane to say hello and catch up and not talk about sleeping with her husband. And how was every little thing?
Jane said, “Don’t ever get married.”
“OK,” Bonnie said. “Off the table. Care to say why?”
“I should have had the courage to be on my own. Live a solitary life. I think that would have suited me. Now there’s always always somebody here. Never mind. It’s too late now. Grace is having a princess moment. Everything is tiaras and twirly skirts. It’s supposed to be the new girl power. I’m not so sure. It seems kind of retro.”
“You don’t mean that, about wanting to be solitary. Single, maybe. Not solitary.”
“I meant both.”
“Like what, like a hermit or something? I’m not making fun, I’m trying to understand.”
Jane said, “I’m thinking. OK, not a hermit. There could be people walking around doing people things, going to work and running cash registers and mowing the grass. But I don’t want to have to talk to them. I want them on mute. That’s the fantasy.”
“Yeah, I can see how that doesn’t really jibe with family life.” Not that Bonnie wanted to spend a lot of time hashing over Jane’s family life.
“Eric’s going to call you,” Jane said.
What? “What?”
“He has some patient who got arrested for drugs, he wants to know what’s going to happen to the guy.”
“That’s nice of him,” Bonnie said, trying not to hiccup into the phone. “I mean of Eric. He’s a caring medical provider.”
“He’s such a Boy Scout. I don’t know if you can tell him anything helpful.”
“Well great,” Bonnie said. “Sure, have him call.”
“He takes things so personally,” Jane continued, as if this was a logical next thing to say.
“Don’t most of us? If things happen to a person, they have a personal reaction.”
“It’s limiting. It means that you’re confined to all these subjective things like your own experiences and opinions.”
“But those are the only things that give us authenticity and validity.” As always when arguing with Jane, Bonnie reached a point where she lost track of the issues and was only trying to keep her end of things going.
“I’m talking about the concept of detachment. Most people don’t understand it. I’ve come around to embrace it.”
“I’m not sure I understand it myself. Detachment?”
“It’s when you can, it’s hard to explain, get beyond yourself. Erase yourself, sort of. Not get hung up on your own ego. Your own little wants and needs.”
“Then what happens?”
“Other possibilities open up. Other currents. Harmonies of . . . spirit.”
“I’m sorry,” Bonnie said. “I’m not getting it. It sounds kind of moonbeamy. New Age.”
Jane sighed. “It figures. You are probably the most earthbound person I know.”
“Yup, that’s me.”
“Moonbeamy. That’s not even a word.”
Bonnie told her good-bye and got off the phone. She couldn’t help feeling there had been some shift or off-balance tilt in Jane since the Christmas crisis, or no doubt before then. The kind of thing that Eric called spooky. Or maybe it was only what Jane had said, detachment. Hearing the music of the spheres. Whatever.
She was nervous about Eric’s phone call, but she didn’t have to wait long for it. He called the next day, he might have only been waiting for Bonnie to get things rolling. “What’s this about a patient?”
“It’s not really for a patient.”
“Yeah, I wondered.” She hated that he’d come up with some lame, overcautious cover story just to make a phone call. “So what’s this really about?”
“You talked to her, right? You see how things are.”
Bonnie kept silent. There wasn’t any point in passing on Jane’s comments about the married state.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Does she want me to go away? Right now she tolerates me. I tell you, there’s not much worse than being tolerated. What about the kids?”
“I’m sorry,” Bonnie kept saying, and she was, because they both sounded miserable, in different ways, but what was expected of her? How was she meant to make anything better instead of worse, how would she not be implicated?
“Could we have lunch or something?” Eric asked. “I’m right downtown. Up to you.”
Bonnie didn’t like that it was up to her. Why should she have to be the gatekeeper, the traffic cop, the one who said yes when what was really needed was no? But Eric was freaking out about Jane freaking out, and trying to get this portion of his life under something resembling control, and if nothing else Bonnie was worried about him and so she said that yes, they could meet. Not lunch, though. Lunch always sounded like an excuse, another infinitely expandable cover story. She said they could go for a drink. Meaning one.
So at the end of her day, Bonnie took a bus down to the medical campus and walked along the narrow streets between the hospital buildings and parking garages. The skyscraper that housed, among other things, cardiology, was all sleek architecture and expansive space, the lobby so grand, all glass and tile, so much clever light, indirect or blazing or pooling underfoot, the effect so precisely and solidly rendered as to make the human body seem entirely breakable and inefficient by comparison.
She found the elevators and went up to the waiting area where she would meet Eric.
Here was a long wall of couches and chairs arranged in groupings that might either facilitate conversation or allow you to avoid it, whichever your purpose. It wasn’t crowded and Bonnie chose a seat off by herself. Of course Eric was not there yet. Many and urgent were the demands on his time. Who was she, or anyone, to compete with the hemorrhaging or convulsing patient, the heart struggling to manage a few more flabby beats? She thought she understood how Jane might have gotten used to the regular disappointment of his absences, might come in time to prefer it that way.
She didn’t like hospitals. She didn’t even like television shows set in hospitals. They were places where you got bad news, worse and worst news, where such news became routine and was routinely and briskly dealt with, when of course what you wanted, when you were in crisis, was for the entire place to stop in its tracks and indignant announcements made over the P.A. system. Here were machines that were far superior to the fallible subjects they were meant to
serve, machines that made such precise and deft intrusions, which sipped blood and sorted through cells and turned everything into measurements, tests to be passed or failed. As everyone failed, sooner or later.
Bonnie told herself she was being gloomy and melodramatic. Besides, wasn’t the newest catchphrase in health care “wellness,” the idea that medicine was meant to coax and encourage you to make informed and positive choices? Stay fit and healthy until you die!
Eric was late, and then later. Bored with sitting, Bonnie got up and went to the bank of windows at the far end of the room. The city sky was darkening to chilly twilight. April, and still no real warmth. Across the street, looking almost close enough to reach out to, was another medical building, the dimly lit windows opposite appearing to be some sort of lab, with workbenches and a great many untidy, bulky binders and files on the shelves above them. Although she watched for some time, no one came into the room. It struck her as melancholy, a kind of abandonment.
Bonnie considered giving up on Eric and going home. His problems weren’t going anywhere. They’d keep until next time. A heart doctor, such a joke! What good did it do him, rewiring everyone’s cardiac circuits, unplugging their arteries, if Jane’s heart had closed itself off to him? Why was anyone’s happiness so hard to come by? Why not disdain the body, as Jane did, since its pleasures never lasted?
She was slipping into the kind of bad and unhelpful mood that led nowhere, only fed on itself until it consumed anything hopeful, rational, or right, and just then, reflected in the dark glass, Eric came around a corner and scanned the room. Not seeing her at first, then finding her, and coming up behind her. Bonnie saw his face, vivid with relief and wanting, wanting her?
The impact of this made Bonnie take a step and lose her balance and sit down hard on the nearest aesthetically pleasing sectional couch.
“Well hello,” Eric said, amused, smiling down at her. He was wearing a set of blue scrubs, his picture ID hanging from a lanyard. Both the picture and his face showed his normal, friendly Labrador retriever expression. Had she seen right? Immediately Bonnie began to doubt herself. Her skirt had traveled up over her knees and she yanked it down.
“I guess I tripped over nothing. Ridiculous.” Meaning herself, of course, and every wrong thing she had ever done or said. “So this is your place. Nice.”
“Sorry I’m so late. I have a patient who hasn’t been doing very well, we had to do a procedure.”
“Of course.”
“It’ll take me just two more minutes to sign out and change.”
“Of course,” Bonnie said again, and watched him sprint back to the elevator. What was she doing here, why had he called her in the first place? She didn’t like the answers she was giving herself. She had come under false pretenses.
Then he was back. Bonnie joined him and they rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Other people crowded in on them and they had to stand close together, although they did not touch, and they smiled at each other, embarrassed, comradely smiles. Eric said hello to someone, a woman. Bonnie wondered if the women he’d slept with worked at the hospital, but she shut that thought down as quick as it came.
They came out into the lobby and crossed the floors to the entrance. He said, “I’m parked in the garage. There’s a place on North Clark, we can get a bite to eat there if you like.”
“Eric?”
They were out on the sidewalk now. Bonnie stopped just beyond the lighted entryway, and he had to stop also and look back at her, eyebrows raised, quizzical.
“This feels like a date.”
“I didn’t . . .” He managed to look both irritated and guilty. “You don’t have to think of it that way.”
“I’m thinking we should just say good night now.”
“Come on. I thought we could talk.”
“Go home and talk to Jane, why don’t you.”
“Because she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“Maybe you could try harder.”
“She can go a long time without talking these days. All right, look, I’ll give you a ride home. No compromising food or beverage. God.”
He stalked off toward the garage and Bonnie followed, miserably. There seemed no way in which anything between them could come out right. Too many layers of hurt and sex and trouble. They walked up a long concrete ramp to Eric’s gray Honda. He used the remote to click the doors open, though he didn’t bother opening Bonnie’s for her. Fine, be that way. She got in, settled herself, fastened the seat belt. Eric started the car and put the heat on full blast so that a whoosh of roaring air, cold then hot, blew over her. In protest, Bonnie rolled her window down.
They came out of the garage too fast, because he was driving mad, but Bonnie was damned if she was going to say anything and braced herself against the floor and the door.
He turned north on Michigan Avenue and took it all the way up to Lake Shore Drive and then they were hurtling along the lakefront, the startling darkness of the water on one side and the constellation of city lights on the other. She was ready to wait him out as long as she had to but he said, in his normal voice, “Every time I drive along the lake, I think about how it’s free. The poorest, most miserable people in the city can come down here and enjoy the water.”
“A lot of them do,” Bonnie said. “It’s made for some bad crowd control situations.”
“I keep forgetting you’re sort of a cop.”
“A liaison. No enforcement powers. I keep forgetting you’re a brilliant and highly trained cardiac surgeon.”
“Sort of.”
They drove on, slower now, Eric’s automotive tantrum over. He said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep trying to get you in the middle of me and Jane’s problems.”
“I’m already right in the middle. You couldn’t get me any more in the middle if you measured it out.”
Eric took the Belmont exit, and they passed under the viaduct and out into traffic again. They crossed the Inner Drive, and then he pulled over to the curb and shut the engine off. “Let’s just sit here a minute,” he said, and Bonnie didn’t answer, only looked out the window to where there was nothing to see. Her own sorrowful heart beat and beat. It was as if something had already been decided. As if everything that was about to happen had already happened.
She felt his hand touch her face, turning her chin to look at him, and then they were kissing, and in spite of the impossible weight of everything that was wrong and would continue to go wrong, they did not stop. Who were you once you took that step outside of yourself, beyond what you had always believed yourself to be? What name did you call yourself, and to what name did you answer?
They sat on the edge of Bonnie’s bed, clothed at first, taking their time. Their hands turned more purposeful. Their clothes loosened. “Let me see you,” Eric said, and she stood before him to finish undressing. He put both hands beneath her breasts, cupping their weight, and she knelt between his legs. His hands pushed her hair away from her face so that he could use her mouth. After a time he pulled her onto the bed next to him and put one hand on her head, guiding it, while with the other he explored and entered her with his fingers.
She couldn’t keep her concentration then and raised up off of him. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Roll over.” He moved himself to one side of the bed and pulled at her hips and rearranged them so that she was face down in the mattress, her arms and legs outstretched. She tried to rise up on her knees to meet him but he spread himself on top of her so that his mouth was at her ear. “Stay still,” he whispered. “Don’t move.”
She stayed as still as she could while he fit his penis into her. Pushing at first, then finding his path and sliding full in. It was the most extraordinary sensation, feeling him in her and wanting to move and having to keep herself from doing so. His breath warmed her neck. “Stay just like this,” he whispered.
“All
right.” Nerves plucked and raced within her, ready to spark.
“Remember this. Whatever happens. Remember how good this is.”
“I will,” she said, and then he started to move within her and everything began all over again.
But how are you? How are you really? Are you lonely? How could you not be, how could I not be?
family time
Robbie said he was hungry right now, and Jane said they had to wait for Daddy. Robbie said he did not want to wait and he wanted macaroni and cheese. Jane said that he could not always eat macaroni and cheese. Robbie said what was that smell, it smelled yucky. Jane said it was dinner and there was nothing wrong with it. She cut up some apple slices and put them on a paper plate and told him he could eat them if he was hungry and Robbie said he was not hungry for apples. “Then you aren’t that hungry.” Jane sent him off to watch television. “You share those with your sister if she wants any,” Jane told him, but she didn’t hear any answer back from him, only the television’s happy noise.
She supposed she could call Eric and try to find out when he might get home, but either he wouldn’t know or wouldn’t answer his phone. There were times when he knew he would be too late to eat with them, and then he did call, but more often Jane kept a hopeless vigil in the kitchen, monitoring the food until she judged it was just on the verge of overcooked, or sometimes past that. Telling the children another five minutes and then another, until the effort collapsed in on itself and she fed them a hurry-up meal, just the three of them, and covered Eric’s food with aluminum foil so that it could be reheated later.
She was taking a different antidepressant now, one considered more suitable for moms. There had been some concern about side effects from the original prescription, meaning she had alarmed people by talking too much about the death of the self and the all-encompassing spirit. Her new pills made life both easier and harder. Easier to keep up with the things you had to do to get through a day. Harder to remember why any of it might be important. It was like living in a very busy train station with people constantly coming and going, while you yourself went nowhere.
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 22