“I have an appointment . . .” she said, almost a whisper.
“You try to do too much.”
If everyone would just be quiet, she thought. She opened her eyes. “Bring me the phone?”
“Let me call for you.”
Tony put his hand on her forehead, first the palm, then, turning it as if he were taking a child’s temperature, the back of his hand. I know you like the back of my hand, Greta thought. She tried to remember the back of her hand. Or his.
“No,” she said.
She felt herself sinking into the heavy, deadly sleep. No, Tony. You can’t call for me. She sensed Tony had turned, was leaving the room, but she could not make her eyes open again. She thought, Even the swooning misery of exhaustion, even the swooning misery of nausea, even the two miseries swooning together as they tremble before the ultimate swoon of death, even they cannot conquer the swooning misery of guilt.
“So, is this supposed to be bad?” Volfmann said.
Elizabeth was grateful they were on the phone, not in the same room. He was yelling. “It’s a fucking bodice ripper.”
“It’s fucking straight from Flaubert,” she said.
“And I’ve fucking told you a thousand fucking times that I didn’t hire fucking Flaubert. Because Flaubert is dead! Flaubert is a novelist. A dead novelist. And I don’t want a dead novelist. And if I did I wouldn’t hire you. I’d hire goddamned fucking Flaubert. Jesus fucking Christ. No wonder it’s bad. ‘Straight from Flaubert, straight from Flaubert . . .’” He imitated her voice.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Where’s that goddamned dyke when you need her, huh? What am I paying you people for? For shit? I make my own shit. I don’t need your shit.”
Elizabeth said nothing.
“Shit,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “Just fix it, Professor. Do you understand me?”
Elizabeth didn’t understand him at all. He was inexplicably patient one day, attentive and tender; cold and abusive the next.
“I’ll fix it,” she said.
Was it possible she had been attracted to this snarling bully? At least she hadn’t let him make her cry. That was a point of pride. She hung up, more angry than shaken, until she read the pages over. Then her anger flipped, like a switch, to shame, and she lay down and pulled a pillow over her head.
“Why are you in bed?” Harry asked. “With all your clothes on?”
“Because I’m an idiot.”
“Oh.”
He climbed in beside her.
“You’re very sweet,” she said. “Very, very sweet.” She put her arms around him and thought that this was the only love worthy of the name.
“You’re not an idiot,” he said, patting her back just the way Greta did. “You’re just being silly.”
Lotte’s cancer continued to spread, and she sat every day in her chair staring vacantly in the direction of the window. She stopped calling Greta. The phone pressed too painfully against her face. Kougi convinced her to try the speakerphone, but the crackling voice on the other end and her own shouting tired and depressed her. The newspaper bored her. Television was loud and vulgar and made little sense. She ordered a pair of slippers from Saks and felt better for an hour or so. Then the heaviness of the day descended back upon her shoulders. She ate Rice Krispies with slices of banana for breakfast. She ate Cream of Wheat for lunch. For dinner, she tried to swallow little pieces of poached chicken, but they made her gag and she settled for hot water with a drop of cranberry juice. Sometimes the cranberry juice gave her diarrhea, but Kougi said she had to try. She ate a Milano cookie every night. That was her greatest pleasure. Then she lay awake and prayed for all of her loved ones, one by one, going down the list. God, you cruel son of a bitch, take care of my daughter, Greta, what the hell is going on with her, damnit? Don’t you let anything happen to her, and all the while dirty gangster criminals like that Ali Baba who blew up the World Trade Center, and that lousy Woody Allen, what he did to his nice wife, she’s a beautiful woman, he should rot in hell . . .
Eventually, she would advance through the list until she got to herself.
Now listen to me, God. I’m old. I’ve done everything. I’ve seen everything. I’ve lived my life. But I’m not ready yet, goddamnit, and that’s just the way it is. Amen. No disrespect intended, excuse my French.
It had to happen sometime, Elizabeth knew that. Still, she missed Harry when he started going to school.
Four houses down, in a Mediterranean-style bungalow, there lived a pleasant family with a little girl named Alexandra. Harry and Alexandra were the same age and had become friends, splashing in the blow-up pool Alexandra’s parents kept in the front yard. Alexandra went to the Little Palms Play School every day from nine until one, and Harry had begged to join her there.
Elizabeth had, in fact, longed for Harry to be at school. So much better than hanging around sick people and parents who were always trying to sneak in an hour or two of work, stealing tourmaline rings, or sucking oysters with manic-depressive producers.
She watched a California jay, black and gray and a beautiful blue, sit on the branch of a skinny tree. It sat there, every day, on the same branch, at about noon and then again at four in the afternoon. And every day a squirrel would join the jay and chase it away from the branch. Then the jay would come back and dive at the squirrel, which would run away to the garden next door. They would repeat their dance for up to half an hour, then both disappear. Elizabeth watched the jay crack open a seed it held with its foot and her thoughts turned confusingly to Daniel Day-Lewis. Oh yes, painting with his left foot. That was such a good movie. Mrs. B would be nothing like that. Not only would her script be nothing like Madame Bovary, it would be nothing like My Left Foot. It would be nothing like so many good things.
The squirrel and the jay were noisily playing, and it was time, at last, to go and get Harry. There were a great number of feet in Madame Bovary, at any rate. She must remember to pay attention to them. What, for example, was she going to do with Hippolyte and his clubfoot? She couldn’t give him a clubfoot. Not in the twenty-first century. Not in Hollywood. It wouldn’t make any sense at all. And yet there had to be some ambitious medical project for Barbie to push her poor husband into. An ambitious medical project. Perhaps Charles Bovary could cure Grandma Lotte.
INT. HOSPITAL ROOM—DAY
A patient, her face wrapped in bandages like the Mummy, sits in a chair holding a mirror. Dr. Chuck Bovaine stands behind her unwrapping the bandages, slowly, slowly. ELIZABETH, sitting on the bed, watches. GRETA is in the bed.
The doctor pulls off the last bandage. WE SEE . . . (in black and white) Humphrey Bogart’s face . . .
Maybe he could help Greta instead. She had been so moody lately, mute and lethargic one minute, beaming and vibrant the next. Obviously she was making some sort of great life-affirming push, a bulwark against death. The traffic light turned green and Elizabeth accelerated too quickly. The tires squealed. And I didn’t say “death” because that’s what’s going to happen, you know, she thought.
Just yesterday, her mother had insisted on going shopping and then insisted they take Lotte with them. Greta, who dined out on horror stories of adolescent shopping fiascos with Lotte, who had worn cutoff jeans beneath her dress to her own bat mitzvah, and Lotte, who found it difficult to walk down to the lobby, who wore a long iridescent gray scarf wrapped loosely around her throat to hide her tumor. Shopping. Together. But it had worked out in the end. Lotte had plopped herself down in the security guard’s chair at Barneys and sent Elizabeth to fetch this and that for her to examine while Greta had uncharacteristically bought up a storm. Still, it might very easily have been a disaster, as Elizabeth had pointed out on the way home.
“Perhaps we’ll have a disaster next time, dear,” her mother had said soothingly.
Elizabeth pulled the car into the strip mall where the Little Palms Play School was. A nursery school in a strip mall. Well, why not?
She stood
outside, leaning against the car door, her eyes closed, soaking up the sun. Which will then give me skin cancer, she thought. But the sun was warm and gentle, and the glare did not penetrate the dark lenses of Elizabeth’s sunglasses or the lids of her closed eyes. The air was dry and just cool enough. There was no sense of autumn in the air, no sense of any season. Elizabeth felt the lightest breeze. Her lips felt the breeze and she thought, I’ve been kissed. Not by Volfmann, that ancient, churlish, dog-faced gargoyle. By a handsome stranger. Or, better yet, by Tim. Tim, who had a crush on her. What a herky-jerky imagination I have, she thought. Am I really so fickle? Then she wondered: Would Tim’s kiss be soft and romantic and young? Or hungry and young?
Elizabeth! Such clichés!
But is there nothing to say ever? she wondered. Nothing to feel that isn’t reeking with the banality of other people’s experiences? That isn’t tagged like something at a garage sale? Can’t I even fantasize in peace?
She reverted irritably to Volfmann. His bottom lip pushed out just a bit. His mouth was just inches from hers. She could taste his words. She forgot she was angry at him. She forgot about clichés. She forgot her fantasy was prosaic. She kissed Volfmann and felt him pushing her back against the car.
“Mommy! Mommy!”
Elizabeth opened her eyes to see Harry, his arms wrapped deliriously around her legs, one hand dangling a dented piece of colored paper smeared with paint. Alexandra barreled after him, waving her own painting.
Elizabeth picked Harry up, buried her face in his hair. When she put him down and looked at the two of them, their hands stained purple and red and a hideous green, Volfmann ceased to exist. She smiled and praised their work and kissed them, reassured that one nursery school was much like another, strip mall or no.
“Into the car!” she said. She felt happy and carefree now. Harry and his friend Alexandra were all she had to think about. She watched the two children climb into their car seats in the back. She leaned in to buckle them up, giving Harry another kiss as she did so. She felt his cheek and closed her eyes, breathing him in. She felt a wet tongue on her cheek, a new smell.
Between Harry’s face and her own a small brown dog with a worried expression had inserted himself, wriggling and wagging his tail, jumping from one of them to the next, licking all three faces.
Elizabeth pulled the dog out of the car. The children were squealing in delight.
“Here’s your little dog,” she said to a mother parked beside her.
“Oh, he’s not mine.”
Elizabeth tried the other parents, then unbuckled the children and locked the car and brought the dog and Harry and Alexandra into each of the stores at the strip mall, but neither the Thai, taco, nor chicken restaurant had lost a little brown dog.
The dog had no collar. His ribs showed through his short coat. He looked at her with round, sad eyes and a fretful, wrinkled forehead. His body was too long for his legs, which were bowed. Chihuahua face, German shepherd coloring. His tail was too long for his body. One ear stood up and one flopped down.
No one claimed the dog. Of course no one claimed the dog. One look at the dog and anyone could tell no one would claim the dog. He was a sorry little stray, and had been a sorry little stray for a long, long time.
“You want to come home with us?” Elizabeth said.
Harry and Alexandra were delirious. They thought up names all the way home, each and every one from a television show or a movie or a book.
“Spot!” Harry said.
“He’s brown,” Alexandra replied.
“Clifford?”
“The doggie is brown.”
Elizabeth looked at the little dog, curled up in the passenger seat. Don’t pay any attention, stray dog. There will be no brand name for you. You have no breed. Why should you be stuck with a brand? We’ll call you something original and wonderful, something that fits you, something literary perhaps, or what about Wotan? The Wanderer.
Wotan? But how was Wotan any less derivative than Scooby-Doo? She was as bad as the children. Couldn’t she think for herself? So . . . what if she called him something plain, like, say, Jim? Yeah, and while you’re at it, buy a canoe, she thought. Jim. Might as well name the dog L.L. Bean.
When you got right down to it, what name wasn’t a brand? She thought what a shame it was that language had devolved from being a means of expression to being little more than a flag. Expressing oneself, once a naive occupation of her parents’ generation, had somehow devolved into waving that flag, conveying one’s place in the world, or the place one would like to hold. Pity. When everything in life was judged as an adornment rather than by its utility, when even a dog was seen as an accessory, when even its name was chosen as a mirror for one’s own aspirations, then what name was free, what name was personal, what name just a name? Fido? Certainly not. Fido was retro. Dog? No—merely ironic.
Elizabeth realized she was agonizing over this more than she had over naming Harry, which had not been inspired by the prince, no matter what Brett thought or Lotte hoped. She gave up. “We’ll name him after the first sign we see,” she said.
And so the dog was named Temple Ben Ami.
Every night, the minute Harry was carried, asleep, into his own bed, Temple would jump in beside Elizabeth. Every night, when Brett returned to bed, he threw the dog onto the floor and the dog jumped back up.
“I don’t want this dog in my bed.”
“You can judge a civilization by how they treat their dogs.”
Temple burrowed beneath the blanket, between them.
“Gandhi said that,” she added.
“Gandhi drank his own urine.”
Every day, Elizabeth shuttled from her mother’s to her grandmother’s and back. She lived out her days and sometimes her nights with them, yet her mother and her grandmother, as stationary and solid as furniture, were now drifting just out of her reach, her grandmother toward death, her mother toward uncertainty. She clung to them like a child.
The weather was unpleasant. It was hot, and the marine layer, as the residents of Venice so delicately called the fog, seemed never to lift. After Elizabeth dropped Harry off at nursery school, she made the drive to her parents’ in a lethargic daydream, making the turns automatically, so that when she arrived, she was momentarily confused.
“I’m losing it,” she said to Josh, who was spread out on the couch reading the newspaper.
“I’m hungry,” Josh said.
“I’ll make you an egg-salad sandwich,” Greta said, walking in from the kitchen. “Except for the smell. I forgot. I can’t stand the smell.” She looked a little green. “How about turkey? Except there is no turkey.”
“Anyway, you’re going out to lunch today,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t make Josh his lunch. Relax and enjoy yourself.” She glared at her brother.
“Yeah, relax,” he said.
“He’s not a baby,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, I’m not a baby.”
“He can get his own lunch,” she said.
Josh nodded agreeably. He smiled. He didn’t move. Greta looked from him to Elizabeth to the kitchen and back to Elizabeth. Elizabeth started toward the kitchen, thinking of the empty refrigerator. Two eggs, perhaps, some lactose-free milk, a couple of lemons. The sight of too much food in the refrigerator made her mother queasy.
“Hey, I know,” she said. “Why don’t I go out and get Josh a sandwich?”
She sat on a stool at a café by the beach, waiting for her order. She was glad to be alone. Her mother had looked so good today. She had color in her cheeks. Elizabeth leaned on the table, her chin in her hands. She was toying with the idea of an ice coffee when she heard a familiar voice.
“Hi,” said Tim. He sat beside her and ordered a chocolate milk shake.
Elizabeth examined his profile. His nose had a bump in the middle that she decided gave it, and him, character, though if anyone had asked her why, she would have been unable to answer. He was just a guy looking vaguely around, as if he’d lo
st something. He put one ankle on his knee, nearly knocking the table over. He jiggled his legs.
“I got a grant,” he said.
She thought of Volfmann, his dark, angry voice. She remembered her brief fantasy of Tim kissing her. Tim was giving her a crooked, bashful smile. His cheeks had gone pink.
“Congratulations,” she said.
He had very dark, long eyelashes, like a child Harry’s age.
“A big, fat research grant,” he said, the tentative, self-conscious smile opening into an enormous grin. “Now I can do some big, fat research.” He gazed at his hands, still smiling, as if they were the future. He looked up at her. “You don’t know what this means. I mean, it means I can do my work. I can’t do my work like you, on a piece of paper. I need equipment . . . space . . .”
He was more emotional than Elizabeth had ever seen him. He shook his head in disbelief. He took a folded letter out of his pocket. He shook it open and stared at it.
“Tim, did you just get that? Did you just find out?”
He nodded. “I came here to celebrate. They have really good milk shakes.” He offered her a sip. “You want one? My treat.”
“I got a dog,” she said. “A little, skinny dog. A little, skinny brown mutt with two back toes missing. He jumped in the car when I picked Harry up from nursery school. His name is Temple. Brett hates him.”
“Congratulations on your dog.”
She looked at the bag with Josh’s sandwich in it. She was enjoying sitting at the café doing nothing, talking about nothing.
“Maybe it’s the dog I should congratulate,” he said. “You know, finding a home.”
She ordered an ice coffee at last. “I hope Josh isn’t getting too hungry.”
“Can I have his sandwich?” Tim asked. “Come on. We’ll get him another. He won’t know.”
Elizabeth glanced at him quickly, then looked away.
She Is Me Page 20