Not only has Stanley been fraternizing with the enemy, he also has been bearing tales.
“You explained about my wife? You don’t know anything about my wife to explain. Quit explaining my situation to people, Rubacek. Understand? As to my offer, he’s got nothing to consider. I didn’t make him any offer.”
Rubacek shrugged. “Save yourself some trouble. Give him a few bucks. He told me he’s saving for a trip to see his daughter. What the hell?”
“The road to hell is paved by compromise. Some people can’t appreciate principles.” Anyway, I’ve already paid that old ogre thirty bucks and what did it get me? Public electronic abuse.
Rubacek opens the door, ushers me into the hallway. We make our way amid gurneys, trolleys, wheelchairs, creeping patients. I’m leaving the hospital. I don’t want to. How did this happen?
“That Marsha a girlfriend?” asks Rubacek.
“No.”
“She seemed real worried about you. Wanted to know if it was serious.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said no. Said you were in for a rest.”
“What a diplomat.”
“She said something about a wedding.”
“So that’s it.” Trust Hideous Marsha. “That’s what she’s worried about. That I’ll be in Boot Hill before the glorious day dawns.”
“You got her in trouble, Ed?”
“Rest your evil little mind, Stanley.”
We continue down the hallway in silence, turn right, enter the waiting room, where a woman wearing a corsage sits at an information desk. Descending a ramp we arrive at the hospital entrance. Only now do I realize I haven’t a coat. When McMurtry bundled up my clothes my parka was forgotten and left behind in my apartment.
Stanley suggests I wait by the door. He’ll warm the car up and bring it around to the entrance. I watch him cross the road to the parking lot, straddle-legged on the ice. Where the glass of the door meets the metal frame the pane is scalloped with frost, finely veined like feathers. I watch Stanley start the car in the parking lot. It’ll be some time before it’s warm enough for a man in shirt sleeves.
I turn away from the door just as a middle-aged man and woman come down the ramp. He wears a shabby overcoat and an unfashionable suit. Her brand-new plaid housecoat and fuzzy pink slippers mark her as a patient. Her thin hair lies flattened on her scalp, the skin of her face is ravaged with milky splotches.
When the man catches sight of me he hesitates, as if considering going back, so I turn politely away, only to discover their reflections in the glass of the door. Encouraged by my back, they huddle in a corner by a direct-line phone to a taxicab company. It’s obvious they’ve come here seeking privacy, to talk. The woman must be on a general ward.
I try to look through the glass, past their reflections, to concentrate on the exhaust of Rubacek’s car unravelling in the wind like the strands of a thick, white hawser. But my eyes keep snagging on the figures in the glass.
I see the woman. She is speaking very quickly. The only word that is clear is the man’s name. She says it emphatically and distinctly. “John,” she says. And again, “John,” and once more, “John.”
“The tickets,” I catch him saying. He keeps mentioning tickets.
I reach out and flake a crescent of ice with my thumbnail. I wish they would go away.
I hear him say it again. “Tickets.” Followed by the wet, flabby sounds of spilling sorrow. Crying, he bows slightly and fumbles in his pockets for a handkerchief, a Kleenex, something.
The woman wraps him in the plaid arms of her housecoat.
“Tickets,” he says loudly. “I have the tickets.”
Her face is the colour of cream. Her eyes, wide and dark with knowledge, stare. I thrust the door open. It is a way of making the eyes disappear. Stepping outside is like wading into a cold lake; my skin flinches, my shoulders lift in my thin shirt. There is a taste of chilled metal in my mouth. I run. Halfway to the car I remember my heart.
14
While I, sweating and shaking, struggle up the narrow goat-track strewn with stones the colour and size of loaves of bread dough, I can hear someone calling my name. It can’t be Victoria because she has gone ahead of me, up there, and this voice is coming from another place, far off.
My face is stiffened by sunburn and dust. Behind me the untroubled sea stretches out to meet a sky that drips down into it like thin blue paint, running and blurring the horizon line. The shrubs and grasses and little gnarled trees on the hillside are dry, scorched, bitterly aromatic; they make the air hot and piquant. It stings my nostrils the way the feverish noise of flying insects stings my ears when they whir and click their wings in the molten light.
I hear my name again and am suddenly awake in my bedroom, awake in weak, northern sunshine.
“Ed, how do you spell ‘perpetrator’?”
Dazed, I roll on my side to consult the alarm clock. After so much sleep my limbs stir heavily between the sheets; there is a locus of lethargy in the small of my back. The clock says a quarter to three. When did I drop off again? An hour ago? Two?
“Hey, are you alive in there?” Rubacek is calling from the kitchen. Probably still grimly scribbling on those smudged sheets of foolscap spotted with erasure marks that resemble inky fingerprints.
“What do you want?” My mouth is parched and I feel feverish. Dog-like I paw at the stifling bedclothes with one foot, trying to drag them off me.
“How do you spell ‘perpetrator’? Is it e-r or is it o-r?”
“P-E-R-P-E-T-R-A-T-O-R,” I shout.
God, how many hours have I been out? Last night I was in bed by nine, slept until ten this morning, rose, staggered to the bathroom, lurched back in here to collapse, insensible, until twelve, when Stanley served me a baloney and sweet pickle sandwich. It was his way of saying he forgave me for last night’s contretemps. I don’t feel particularly guilty, though. Stanley has a mind akin to certain faces, the kind that seem to invite a slap.
I was asleep again by one o’clock. I’ve logged sixteen or seventeen hours and I feel on the verge of nodding off again. A consequence of the heart?
“You going to get up now, or what?” he calls, voice pitched to carry down the block.
“Not just yet.”
Disapproving silence. “You ought to get up, Ed.”
“Why?”
“It’s a sign of depression, not getting out of bed.”
“Well, so maybe I’m depressed.”
“That’s why you ought to get up.”
I attempt to correct Rubacek’s logic. “It’s not that I’m depressed because I don’t get up, Stanley,” I shout; “I don’t get up because I’m depressed. Let’s not confuse cause and effect, okay?”
“That’s for sure, Ed. Now you get up and you’ll feel one hundred per cent better.”
I give it up and turn over on my left side. The heart starts tram-polining on the mattress. Not good. I flop over on my back and wait for another sally from Rubacek. Nothing. He has obviously turned his attention back to his manuscript.
Where was I dreaming of? It must have been an island in the Aegean. A vision constructed from those travel brochures and books Victoria and I pored over in the early seventies, a vision tarred up with choice bits from The Magus. Yes, it had to have been Greece.
But why were we climbing in my dream? What were we climbing to? Monks. That was it. We were trying to reach the monastery on the brow of the hill.
In the beginning Victoria and I are standing on the packed sand of the beach. I am loaded with her cameras, and the straps have chafed my shoulders raw. I feel uncomfortable leaning back to look up at the cliff of crumbling grey rock from which snakish shrubs grow sinuously wherever they find a pocket of poor soil in which to anchor roots. The limbs of the bushes strain out of the shadow of the scarp, stretching to catch a bit of sun. The monastery squats at the top of this cliff, its white cupola glistening like a mound of sugar. Behind us the sea slops and creeps, sighing
along the sand to wind warmly around our ankles.
We prepare to climb, but not up the rock face. With the capricious logic of dreams, the white dome has shifted to my right and somehow the sea has fallen far, far beneath where I stand with my ankles still wet with foam. Looking back I see waves chopping shoreward. They look like wrinkles in cellophane. I feel peculiar. Distances and perspectives have altered. I turn to comment on this to Victoria and discover she is moving up the slope. She is moving much too easily and nimbly. Ordinarily Victoria is clumsy and cautious. Now her toes jam into the loose soil, a flexible ankle boosts, a knee lifts, a haunch bulges, and she rises, rises.
I scramble after her, trying to pull myself up by clutching at bushes studded with thorns or dressed in sticky leaves that strip off in my hands. Victoria’s camera cases swing back and forth, bunting my hips. The trail begins to twist around large outcroppings of rock which have burst out of the hillside like fractured bone through dirty skin. Victoria disappears again and again behind these boulders and I must trot to avoid losing sight of her altogether. With panic I realize that each brief moment I lose sight of her she miraculously covers incredible distances, distances beyond human capability. Each time her figure reappears it has dwindled, the intervening space between us produces arresting effects; now she shimmers behind a gauze of heat.
I can’t follow any faster. There is the danger to my heart. My short spurts of running are strictly rationed, no unnecessary galloping.
I hurry around the base of a huge shattered stone, pawing and stumbling to catch a glimpse of a contracting figure that bobs, jerks, is gone. A few sobbing breaths before hustling into a quick march, then I break into a rolling half-run.
I call, “Victoria!” She doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. The hillside has, in any case, grown noisier. Insects zither madly in the patchy grass, gusts of hot wind crackle and rattle in desiccated leaves and branches with a fiery sound, and when I call they snatch her name out of my mouth with a burning hand and cast it like a stone into the sea behind me, leaving my mouth gaping, mute.
After her. Faster. The heart, I remind myself. My back goes rigid in anticipation of the dreadful squeezing that will cause the heart to shed pain the way a sponge sheds water, a gush behind the breastbone.
Rest, I remind myself. But I can barely make her out now, only black stick legs and arms, a dot for a head, twitching up the hillside. Shrinking. She is not that small. This must be a distortion of air or altitude.
The hot air is beaten by bells. I swing around in confusion and stare down on a sea grown enormous. While I climbed, it crept around me; now it laps on three sides. A great briny-green gorget for the throat of the island. The bells cease. I look up. The white dome shimmers; inside, monks with grizzled beards and sweat on their faces stare up the bell tower. They can see stars.
The dot and the stick legs are gone. Victoria is lost. Hurry, I urge myself, beginning to climb. Hurry. Hurry.
And then came the voice that woke me. Voices? I sit up in bed and listen. There are two voices now. Rubacek is talking to someone. Someone has come into the apartment.
I ease myself quietly back down on the mattress and lie absolutely still and quiet. I have my suspicions it is old McMurtry out there and I don’t want to draw any of his fire if I can avoid it.
They are keeping their voices low. No matter how hard I try, I can’t make anything out of the subdued murmuring that floats to me from my living room. The conversation is certainly one I’m not meant to hear, maybe a discussion of my mental health. Or maybe they are bandying about figures for war reparations, assessing the damage I did the other night. They can amuse themselves as they wish. I couldn’t care less.
I hear footsteps in the hallway. They’re coming. Shit. I draw an arm over my face, commence to snore sonorously.
There is diffident knocking at the door. They wait for an answer, repeat the knocking. I bray, I flute, I strangle, I gargle for all I’m worth. Peeking under the crook of my arm I see the door inching open; a slab of Stanley’s face is gradually revealed: strands of blond hair, eye, nose, bisected mouth. “Ed!” he stage-whispers. “Ed!”
I continue to lustily spew a geyser of noise at the ceiling. On a less raucous inhalation I hear Stanley scratching at the door with his fingernails, like a goddamn dog. “Ed!” he sings out. “Rise and shine! Wakey-wakey!”
It is perfectly clear there is no point in shamming anything short of a coma. Rubacek will persist.
“What do you want?” I snap, flinging my forearm off my face.
“You busy, Ed?”
“Jesus.”
“You got a visitor, Ed.”
“Tell him I’m not receiving. Tell him to go away.”
“Ta-ra!” bugles Stanley and throws open my bedroom door with a ceremonial flourish. “Surprise!”
And who stands revealed? Not the hoary-headed and time-twisted old codger I expect, but Marsha, Hideous Marsha, looking like the last Romanov princess in an astrakhan pillbox hat.
“Surprised?” inquires Stanley hopefully.
“I said I don’t want visitors. I don’t feel so hot.”
Hideous gives me the kind of smile that can strip varnish off old furniture and then turns to Rubacek. “Maybe I should speak to him alone, Stan.”
“Try and get him to get up,” pleads Stan. “I told him he’s going to get depressed.” Marsha nods knowingly and, reassured, Rubacek eases out of the room, closes the door softly behind him.
Marsha sits on the edge of my bed, plucks off her hat, and bounces her hair around with the palm of her hand. “An interesting addition to your domestic scene, Ed. I trust your relationship with Conan the Barbarian is platonic?”
“What’s it to you?”
“To me? Nothing. It’s just difficult to keep abreast of developments in your life. You’re so unpredictable.”
“I’m not.”
“I’m not, he says. Well, this is certainly a new one. And he is a lusciously proportioned number. Mr. Beefcake tells me that you’ve come away from your hospital stay with the novel idea you’ve had a coronary, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Is that why you’re still in bed in the middle of the afternoon?”
“It’s none of your business what I’m doing in bed.”
“And the heart attack?”
“I know what I felt. Doctors have been known to be wrong.”
“Could it be,” says Hideous, “that you’re trying to lure Victoria back with this bogus affliction? You wouldn’t be concocting one of your famous guilt numbers would you, Ed?”
“I’m sick.”
“No argument here.” Marsha knowingly taps her forehead with a lurid red fingernail.
An interesting notion, Marsha’s. Would Victoria come back if she knew I was ill? Maybe. My eyes mist at the thought of Victoria back in charge. She’d put me on a program. There’d be a diet and exercise. In months she’d have me better than new, the heart as sound and solid as oak.
Marsha lights a cigarette, then looks around for a place to put the spent match. She finally reaches out and deposits it on the top of the dresser.
“Is that out?”
“You worry too much, Ed,” she says. “And by the way, it’s not necessary to keep the blankets clutched under your chin like that. I’ve been exposed to the sight of a man’s nipples before.”
“The reason I mention the match is I don’t want burn marks on my furniture, thank you very much.”
Marsha looks sceptically at my scarred and battered chest of drawers. Then she glances at the Allied Van Lines cardboard wardrobe. She points to it. “Like that priceless period piece?”
“I would prefer if you didn’t smoke,” I say on the spur of the moment. Just now I’ve decided to renounce cigarettes. They’re bad for the heart.
“Sorry, Ed. I prefer the smell of tobacco smoke to the smell in this room. The air in here is fetid. The place smells of marsh gas.”
“No one invited you to sample the air in this room.”
>
“God,” says Marsha, casting her eyes about the room, taking in the compost heap of soiled clothes in the corner; the mugs incubating scum in a finger of coffee; the water glasses with a milky rime in their bottom, the precipitate of evaporated Scotch, “when you determine to hit bottom, you plunge, don’t you? When do you intend to shovel this place out?”
“Mind your own business.”
“I am, in a way. I’m glad I dropped by,” she sighs; “I didn’t think you could be trusted.”
“Trusted to do what?”
“Ed,” says Marsha, “you’re a pig. Where’s your suit?”
“Trusted to do what?”
She’s on her feet now, rummaging in my closet. “To make yourself presentable at my baby brother’s wedding. That’s what. Have you hung it up? Is it hung up at least?” she asks, zinging hangers along the bar.
“Get out of there. Take your hands off my personal stuff.”
“God, is this it?” she asks, hauling out my ensemble and holding it at arm’s length, a fisherman sizing up the catch.
“Yeah, that’s my suit.”
“When did you buy this” – she hesitates over the word deliberately – “suit?”
“1972.”
“Ed, the pants are flared. There are buttons on the side pockets of the jacket. Is this a yoke at the back? More buttons,” she mutters, discovering one on the breast pocket. “There are buttons all over this thing. What is this?”
“It’s my security suit,” I volunteer. “A nice number to wear to the midway. It’s pickpocket-proof.”
“Ed,” says Marsha, “is this a cowboy suit?”
“Western wear.”
“Oh my God,” she says, “you were going to wear a cowboy suit to my brother’s wedding?”
“It’s conservatively styled,” I remark. It is, too. My father bought me these duds when he arranged the job interview for his boy Ed with an old friend at the local TV station. The job was reading the farm news. I didn’t get it.
“Look, Ed, Dale Evans might think your suit is a model of restraint – I don’t. You aren’t wearing it.” She throws it across the foot of the bed. “God, I just knew to expect something like this.”
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