Louise

by Louise Krug

  He wonders how she had been seduced by such a romantic cliché. He had seen the whole routine in a movie once and done it for other girls before Louise. He wonders if she’s lost all her irony.

  Claude hangs up feeling tired and hungry. Louise sends him a long email that he can hardly read, huge blocks of rageful text with almost every word misspelled—the result of her typing with one hand, and the drowsing effects of the medication, he guesses.

  •

  The Montecito planning commission is beginning to like him. Its sleek members invite him to play tennis and go on fundraising beach walks. A woman named J’Ayme (i.e., “Jamie”) Brenner, a realtor of beachfront houses for celebrities, asks him to brunch one Sunday. The place usually has an hour-long wait, but of course not for her. Over fruit, coffee, and smoked salmon, J’Ayme tells Claude about a star who is moving to the area and planting an organic herb garden.

  “Perfect story material, and you’re the only one who knows!” J’Ayme winks. “I’ll give you all my exclusives.” She leans across the table and asks Claude if she has something in one of her eyes. Her breasts hover over the salmon.

  The apartment is now Claude’s. He smokes inside, and leaves spilled corn chips on the floor. He plans to invite some guys from the office over soon to watch a basketball game. They’ll have beers, order a pizza.

  Claude goes to Butterfly Beach to write a story on a cancer benefit. Its mascot is a teddy bear. He is surrounded by women in bathing suits with metal belts and leather fringe. A woman in sunglasses and a white one-piece talks to him about the foundation. There is a large hole in the fabric that exposes her stomach. Claude nods and writes in his notebook. Trays of free drinks, called Teddy-tinis, are being passed around by sweaty waiters in tuxedos.

  “Cancer does not stop in a financial downturn,” the woman says to Claude.

  Claude thinks about touching her stomach. Her skin would be warm.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When I step outside to pick up a package on the front porch I think of what I must look like to the people who live on my mother’s street. My face is faded. My pink sweatpants are stained with cereal bits and coffee spills. I seldom wear a bra. I think about what would happen if Claude saw me like this. We would both be ashamed. I want him to be here but at the same time I do not. I don’t know what we would do. I don’t go on walks here like I did with my father in California. Iola is small and the houses are close together. It’s not like Santa Barbara with the boutiques and gardens and eucalyptus trees. No one walks anywhere unless they have a destination.

  The floor in my mother’s house is waxed oak. It is filled with heavy dark furniture that once belonged to my grandparents, and my mattress rests in a giant, carved maple frame. My arms and legs are shrinking from lack of use. They are all bruised, and the bruises look like fingerprints. My hip bones are purple from doorways and corners.

  While my mother is at work, I sit in the computer room upstairs. There is only a small desk, walls of books, and a roller chair that gets stuck in the carpet. For the first time, I do a Google search of “cavernous angioma.” What comes up scares me. On message boards, mothers write sad posts about children who have died from what I have, or who have severe brain damage from the craniotomy it takes to remove it. The Angioma Alliance puts on conferences all over the country. I imagine my family attending one, seeing hundreds of people who look just as dreary and wadded up as we do.

  At my mother’s I watch a lot of TV. The O.C. and Laguna Beach. Anything about wealthy teenagers in California with boyfriend problems. My mother thinks I’m torturing myself, but watching beautiful people with petty problems helps me feel superior, somehow.

  I find a stack of photo albums in the computer room and cannot resist looking through them. I hardly recognize that girl with a beer in her hand wearing a peacoat on a snowy balcony, or that one, dancing in a bright blue dress with a boy whose hands clutch her satin behind. So many pictures of me in Italy standing alone in front of some statue, some church, some ruins, grinning at nothing.

  I had grown up in the typical way and had typical photos to prove it, but they were not promises for a typical life.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It is early spring, and the big, empty sky is gray. There are no hills, and small black dots are cows. At the grocery store, real farmers with overalls and hats buy food just like everybody else.

  Janet washes Louise’s clothes: pajama pants and old T-shirts from Tom and Michael’s drawers. Michael, in his senior year of high school now, is hardly ever around. He brought a friend over a few weeks ago, and Louise had stayed in her room the whole night, shouting at Janet when she knocked on the door. Tom is away at college, a two-hour drive away. He says he will visit soon. Janet’s boyfriend lives even farther, and has a new grandbaby. So mostly it is just Janet and Louise.

  Janet stacks the dishes in the dishwasher. There is not much else for her to do.

  •

  Janet decides: Enough of this. She takes Louise to a physical therapist. No one has told her to do this, but it seems logical enough. Louise can tolerate being in a car now. The gym is a white, cinderblock building off the town’s main street. Weights, blocks, and bands sit in bins. The physical therapist looks like a college kid, but he says he is married with three children. Janet explains Louise’s situation, and the physical therapist says maybe he can help.

  He has Louise step up a set of wooden stairs built into the wall, then down. He has her curl weights, touch her toes, do squats against the wall. Janet is hopeful. She has always had confidence in athletics and sweat. She used to run half marathons and do aerobics, and now works out on the elliptical machine in her basement every day after work. She always pushed her children to do sports growing up because she thought it would make them grow into fit, disciplined adults. She didn’t want them to be lazy.

  The physical therapist stands a few feet away and watches a baseball game on TV.

  When the session is over the physical therapist gives them a laminated packet of illustrated exercises. The first three are noted to especially help patients with a rotator cuff injury. Janet and Louise look at one another. A rotator cuff injury?

  In the parking lot, a group of boys in basketball shorts glance at Louise, then quickly look away. There was a time when boys like that would have made something out of Louise.

  They don’t bother going back.

  DOCUMENTS

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Claude gets invited to a party at J’Ayme Brenner’s house. The celebrity realtor says she has more gossip that could turn into news for Claude. The house is a wood-shingle mansion with an infinity pool. The kitchen is a rich person’s idea of a pioneer cabin. J’Ayme makes Claude a plate of cheese and olives and watches him eat it. His boss is out by the pool, surrounded by leggy women who are all laughing. A man in white linen comes up and shakes Claude’s hand, saying he liked Claude’s article on the new iced-coffee cart downtown. J’Ayme nudges him.

  Claude is feeling pretty good.

  He guesses J’Ayme is in her late forties. She dresses much younger. Her hair is long and tiger-striped. Her nails, coppery. Shoes too.

  J’Ayme asks him about Louise. Claude tells her everything, he can’t help himself. They go to her computer, and Claude shows J’Ayme some of Louise’s craziest emails. There are too many to read. He replays some of Louise’s voicemails, and J’Ayme’s eyebrows raise at the swearing and crying. He tells himself it is okay to share his frustrations with someone. It’s not like Louise is keeping her complaints to herself.

  He turns circles in J’Ayme’s computer chair. “I’m no hero. I’m helping her as much as I can.”

  “Sounds like she wants you to have no life because hers is gone, too,” J’Ayme says.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say it’s gone—” Claude says. “I just don’t want to feel like the bad guy anymore.”

  J’Ayme stands behind Claude with her hands on his shoulders. “You have to look out for yourself,” she
says.

  Claude thinks about kissing J’Ayme. He knows that he could. But he wants to continue feeling like someone doing the right thing. He wants to keep conducting himself in a way that is superior to Louise. She could be handling things a little better, he thinks.

  J’Ayme wheels him around to face her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Janet gets tired of explaining to people what “cavernous angioma” means. People come at her from nowhere, asking questions, breathing on her in narrow office hallways and at the grocery store, where she is aching from cold in the dairy section, just wanting a jug of milk. When she is in a hurry, she calls it a stroke. This is not a lie, exactly. Both conditions involve the brain, blood, damage, and doctors. Other times at church potlucks she says that Louise has a blood clot that’s getting bigger and has to be removed. People know what a blood clot is because the elderly get them all the time, especially in their legs. Occasionally someone will ask if Louise has had an aneurysm, which is just about impossible because those are typically deadly, but Janet will just say yes, an aneurysm, that’s right.

  Other mothers complain about their in-laws. They show off pictures of their grandchildren. Janet cannot imagine when she will be able to do that.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Someone in Janet’s book club is having a makeup party. The woman says it’s the kind of makeup you can’t buy in drug or department stores—you need a representative with a sticker on her car. As the woman speaks, Janet stares at her spiky-stiff hair and jingly charm bracelets. Still, Janet thinks. Socializing will be good for Louise.

  Janet drives the two of them to the woman’s house with a wax-papered plate of cookies balanced on her knees. The plate keeps sliding off and bumping the gear shift, but she is afraid to ask Louise to hold them. Louise gets annoyed at everything these days. Her vision is still doubled. Her right hand is unusable and she still has trouble walking without her cane.

  “Isn’t it fun, being a girl?” Janet asks Louise.

  Louise looks the other way.

  The kitchen is full of brownies and women. The representative and her daughter, both in sparkly blusher and eye shadow, sit at the head of the table. The daughter is around Louise’s age, and has dyed black hair that flips at the sides. She sips a can of Diet Coke through a straw. The daughter says she and her husband are trying to get pregnant. They want a little girl. She asks Janet and Louise to pray for them.

  Some ladies gather around Louise and ask about the job she had in California, the one she was supposed to start the day she went to the ER.

  “Well, everything happens for a reason,” one of the ladies says, and the rest of them nod their heads in agreement. “God has a plan. You know, plenty of places need good writers. Even factories need someone to make sure their labels read like they should!” another says.

  “I’m going back to California,” Louise says. “My boyfriend’s there. He’s a journalist, too.”

  Janet turns away. She doesn’t need to see their expressions to know what they are thinking: What would a girl like Louise do out in California now?

  •

  The women have removed their makeup and now look like they have woken up in the middle of the night. At each place setting is a small bag filled with products and a hand mirror. The women are told to apply Shimmer Glimmer to their faces. Janet sees Louise clumsily slap the stuff on, too much, so her face looks slippery. She won’t look in the little compact mirror. She’s just smearing the stuff on her face.

  Next comes hair, and this requires individual counseling. The mother and daughter team go from woman to woman, talking strategy. They get to Louise and say, “May I?” and pull out her ponytail, unsnagging the hair from the elastic band of the eye patch. The daughter fluffs and flutters Louise’s hair so the elastic band is hidden. Her fake nails click.

  Janet remembers getting a phone call from Louise when she first moved to California. Louise had been sitting under the dryer at Lazlo’s Salon and Spa, where she was getting her hair done by Lazlo himself. Louise told her that Lazlo’s clients were all rich and famous, but that Claude had a connection from his newspaper gig. That day Louise received a full set of foils, a deep conditioning treatment, and a sexy shag cut. She’d been there three hours and they still weren’t done! Janet had shaken her head at the time, thinking her daughter a bit frivolous.

  Janet wonders now if she hadn’t been a little jealous.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  At night, Claude plays tennis by himself against a wall at the Coral Club—he is a complimentary member now, thanks to a story he wrote on the club’s thriving business. He thinks about his phone call with Louise earlier. She said she’d found a surgeon, a famous neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Claude had let her talk and talk. The time difference meant that he, in California, was three hours earlier than she. Louise had already watched her fill of TV for the day, eaten, and was now in bed. He was still full of energy.

  Claude had told her, softly, that he didn’t think he should come. “I won’t be any help, baby. I’ll lose my job. You’ll be back here before we know it.” Louise had hung up on him. He called her back and she’d called him horrible names. He’d mostly stayed silent. He’s used to her being miserable now. In fact, he can’t really remember her ever being in a good mood. Even the night of the premiere, the night her foot first went numb, they’d been fighting in the car. He’d been late to pick her up, and she’d slammed the car door on the way in. She had a toothpaste stain on her shirt. She had been frowning.

  He knows that if he goes to the clinic and sits in chairs with Janet and the rest of Louise’s family, if he shares a hotel room with her bearded brother, Tom, and teenage Michael, if he eats hospital food in a booth with Warner and Elizabeth, that he will be a good boyfriend in their eyes. They’ll assume he’s in it for the long haul. He imagines himself sitting by her bed for months. He imagines her crossed eye. None of this is going away soon.

  •

  Claude’s parents met in France at a dinner party and got married soon after. “Still very much in love,” they say frequently and without prompting. Claude’s parents now live in Atlanta. He and Louise had spent Christmas with them, and their house had been heavily scented with pink sweeping curtains and a white carpet. His father had cooked king crab. They picked the meat out of the claws with small, gold forks, and dipped the chunks into pots of butter. His mother, a beautiful French woman with black hair, had only eaten crackers. She hadn’t said much.

  Claude had once told Louise, after drinking too many strawberry margaritas, that he thought his father had cheated. He wasn’t a hundred percent, and it was years ago, when his father was traveling to Germany a lot for work. Claude said there was no way his mother knew; if something like that ever happened she’d leave his father forever. Claude always regretted telling Louise this because he sensed it made Louise think less of his father, and maybe less of him.

  •

  Claude thinks of J’Ayme. Thank god that didn’t happen, he thinks, and thwacks the ball as hard as he can.

  PART TWO:

  THE SURGERIES

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Things in the brain move around like prizes in a Jell-O salad. This is the analogy that the surgeon gives Janet, Warner, Elizabeth, Louise, Tom, and Michael as he explains the difficulties of the upcoming operation. It is the day before the surgery, and they are all crammed in an examination room at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The surgeon draws diagrams on a notepad that illustrate how he is planning on entering the base of Louise’s skull. He circles an area. “Here is the prize,” the surgeon says. Louise is cheerfully watching the surgeon scribble. She is wearing her eye patch and holding her cane. Janet watches her.

  Everyone but Janet oohs and aahs and narrows their eyes in concentration as the surgeon speaks. Janet cannot engage. She cannot think of her daughter’s brain as Jell-O salad, which belongs in the grocery store next to the hummus and cheese. It is rainbow colored and comes in a clear
plastic mold. It’s the fruit-flavored stuff at picnics that nobody eats. Janet never made it for her children. She made cookies sometimes, and brown birthday cakes. She made crisps and cobblers.

  Janet doesn’t like the idea of food prizes, either. She has heard of marriage proposals that happen at restaurants where the ring is in the center of a crème brûlée, or at the bottom of a bubbling champagne glass. But Janet always thinks of what could go wrong in situations like that. The ring could break someone’s tooth, or be swallowed. If the woman finds the ring in her dessert it will be covered with sticky goo. It will have to be rinsed off and cleaned before it is put on the finger. Janet cannot see the fun in that.

  •

  Janet is getting tired of hearing from the doctors that Louise’s cavernous angioma is in the worst possible place it could be, in the pons, which is attached to the brain stem. This is not helpful, she thinks. They are already scared enough. They already walk around the hallways in a daze, confused by doctors who carry sandwiches in plastic baggies and doors that open into gilded chapels. Too many times Janet has gotten off the elevator looking for an ATM and ended up in an unlabeled corridor, clueless about how she got there or how to get back. The cavernous angioma is causing them to buy things like travel pillows so they can sleep in chairs. It has brought them here, to a world-famous clinic with a brain surgeon who says he will try to get it out of Louise’s brain so that no one will ever have to worry about it bleeding again.