Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  2

  The day before he left for Harvard, Billy came to say goodbye. He came in the early afternoon. He couldn’t see us that night because he and Dianah were going out to a musical and having dinner afterwards. And he couldn’t see us tomorrow because he was leaving early in the morning and Dianah was escorting him to the airport. So this was the only possible time.

  He hoped that I understood.

  I was, of course, understanding itself.

  When somebody comes to say goodbye, the purpose of the visit dominates the scene and no matter what else is being said, it’s the unspoken goodbye that’s the topic.

  So it was with Billy’s visit.

  The whole thing turned out to be one endless goodbye.

  Leila and I rode the elevator down with him (in silence) and walked him out to the street.

  I was sure that he was going to get a cab, but Billy thought it silly to get a cab. It was only a fifteen-minute walk (the way he walked) to Sixty-ninth and Central Park West and he said he felt like walking. Stretching his legs a bit.

  I should have let it go at that, but I couldn’t. I had a certain kind of a farewell in mind, a neat and clean goodbye, with a taxicab taking him away while Leila and I stood and waved. Deprived of the anticipated image of our parting, I conjured up a longer version of the same scene.

  “We’ll walk with you a bit,” I told him.

  It was hot. As hot as it had been yesterday. As hot as it would be tomorrow.

  We talked about the heat. At least I did. For all I know, I was the only one doing any talking.

  I wondered how people lived before the advent of affordable air-conditioning. I advanced a thesis (not my own) that the architectural landscape of modern cities was shaped by Freon.

  Who could argue with that?

  Nobody did.

  We turned down Broadway. Past the panhandlers, the derelicts, the trashmen selling their recycled trash. Past the wild-eyed and wild-haired Jeremiahs. Past the phone freaks carrying on bogus conversations with phantoms at the other end.

  I hadn’t intended to walk this far, but it now seemed almost impossible to stop and say I’d walked far enough. The downtown current of Broadway was pulling us ever more southward. Past Harry’s Shoes. Past the Shakespeare bookstore. Past Zabar’s.

  I had no idea that I would be taking this walk when I left my apartment and so I hadn’t come prepared. I had no loose change to hand out. I had no money on me at all. It almost felt chilling (in all that heat) to find myself penniless in public.

  We were drifting.

  Past the Apthorp building. And the Apthorp Pharmacy. Past the little traffic island where I had sat in silence with that old man wearing my father’s overcoat. Where, in silence, we sat “like two chess pieces of an abandoned game.”

  I was following Billy. If something or somebody didn’t stop me soon, I knew that I was quite capable of following Billy back to Dianah’s apartment, as if all of us, Leila too, could spend the night there.

  Fortunately for me, Billy came to his senses. He stopped.

  “I think you better take Leila home, Dad,” he said with authority. “Look at her.”

  Billy and I were bathed in sweat. Leila, true to form, was bone-dry, but her face was swollen and covered, as if with bruises, with red blotches.

  “I’m fine,” she protested.

  “I’m not,” Billy said in a no-nonsense voice. “I’m going to take a cab the rest of the way. It’s too hot.”

  He hailed a cab.

  For such an extended farewell, it suddenly became very abrupt.

  He and Leila embraced and kissed and muttered some words of farewell. Eager not to make my embrace any longer or better than Leila’s, I made it short and manly. No kiss at all.

  Billy got in the cab.

  “We’ll see you in Pittsburgh,” I shouted and waved.

  And then he was gone.

  It all felt messy and wrong, parting like that, and wishing to alter the mood and hoping to elicit a smile from Leila, I turned to her and said in my most engaging manner, “Phew, I thought he’d never leave.”

  “Oh, please,” she snapped at me. “Don’t! Just don’t be clever for once. It’s too fucking hot for clever. All right?”

  I offered to get us a cab, but then I remembered that I didn’t have any money on me. Neither did she. Nor had she brought her blue hat and the sunglasses to protect her from the heat and the glare.

  We walked on uptown, past all those places and people we had walked past before.

  It was so hot. The term “nuclear winter” seemed apt but misplaced. A nuclear summer is what it felt like. The bubble of our mood, our own private little biosphere that moved with us as we moved, just added to the heat.

  Her face, gorged with blood, got redder and redder.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  THE NEXT MORNING, Leila woke up with a fever blister. I was still in bed when I heard her cry out in anguish from the bathroom. It sounded horrific, as if some long-evaded destiny had finally caught up with her.

  I rushed inside to find her face-to-face with her reflection in the mirror, examining something on the left side of her lower lip, touching it gently with her fingertips.

  “Oh, fuck! I don’t fucking believe this,” she screamed.

  I still didn’t know what the problem was and asked for an explanation.

  “Look!” she screamed, full of rage.

  I looked.

  She stuck out her chin and turned her head so that I could have an unobstructed view of the little red inflammation in the corner of her mouth.

  “It doesn’t look so bad,” I told her.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” she snapped at me. “So what if it doesn’t look bad now? Who cares how it looks now? It’s throbbing! And I know what that means.”

  She seemed ready to cry. Or to smash something. Or somebody.

  By noon, the fever blister had grown considerably larger, puffier.

  Just before bedtime that night, she spotted the beginning of another one next to it.

  By next morning, the two blisters had merged, forming a sprawling multifaceted sore that essentially took over the left side of her lower lip.

  She had to keep her mouth open at all times to avoid touching the lower lip with the upper. The slightest contact resulted in wincing pain. She was also terrified that the infection, as it had done in the past, might spread to her upper lip as well. Mouth open, wearing a grimace that at times looked like a sinister grin, she spoke like a ventriloquist.

  She applied Zovirax hourly, but the prescription ointment made an already terrible-looking thing look even worse. The heat from the fever blister melted the ointment, coating the sores with a milky-white ooze and imparting to the whole thing an appearance of some strange imported fruit that had latched on to her lower lip and would not go away until it had ripened and burst.

  Driven by some need to find the sliver lining in everything, I saw even in this attack of herpes labialis a cause for consolation, if not outright celebration.

  Better, I thought, that it should happen now than at the premiere of her movie in Pittsburgh.

  When I shared this thought with Leila, she started screaming. It was much easier for her, much less taxing, to scream than to talk.

  Then, on the third day, or maybe it was the fourth, she woke up feeling sick all over. She was shivering. I turned off the air conditioner in the bedroom. But then she got too hot. So I turned it back on. I didn’t have a thermometer, so I ran out to the drugstore and bought one.

  She had a temperature of 104. Aspirin knocked it down a few degrees, but then it came right back up again.

  No, she wouldn’t hear of going to see a doctor, or of having a doctor come to the apartment to see her. She knew what this was, “and there is nothing doctors can do because I’ve been through this before and there was nothing the doctors could do then either. So please,” she half pleaded, half threatened, “just stop with the doctors or I’
ll go check into some hotel so I can have a little peace.”

  2

  Her confinement to the apartment while she recovered from whatever it was she had (a flu of some kind) led to my confinement as well. Instead of going to my office, I stayed home. I came to enjoy it while it lasted. I only went out for groceries, cigarettes, or to buy the papers.

  She lived on apple sauce, bananas, and ice cream. Things you didn’t have to chew.

  To help her pass the time, I read her stories from the newspapers, magazines, and periodicals I was now beginning to read. (The problems of the world fascinated me and my reading list of daily and weekly publications expanded to keep up with them.) I also read her poetry. When she confessed that she had never read a single play of Shakespeare’s, I took it upon myself to read some Shakespeare to her. She couldn’t bear to hear any one whole play, but she loved having me skip around and read my favorite passages. Which is what I did.

  Of all the lines I uttered from the volume of Shakespeare’s collected works, only one made her cry and it was, as far as I was concerned, an odd choice, because my reading of it was not very good.

  “Nymph,” I read Hamlet’s line to Ophelia, “in your orisons be all my sins remembered.”

  “Oh, dear,” she started blubbering, “but that’s so sad. It’s too sad.”

  I went in and out of her room over a dozen times a day, and there were times when I returned to find her asleep.

  Even in sleep, she kept her mouth open to avoid aggravating that fever blister. Her now permanently parted lips gave her face (whether asleep or awake) a strange, disturbing intensity, an expression of some arrested intent, as if any second, despite the pain it might cause her, she would put her lips together and deliver herself of some devastating utterance.

  3

  Leila recovered. Her fever blister vanished. Everything was now fine, except for Leila herself.

  She picked on and found fault with everything I did. The nicer I tried to be to her, the more unbearable she found me.

  “Just don’t!” she kept saying.

  Just don’t became her refrain.

  “Please,” she hissed, seething, “I beg you. Just don’t be so goddamn charming all the time.”

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  I made a little theatrical bow as I retreated. She blew up.

  “That’s it. That’s just it. That’s what I mean. That fucking little bow you just made. What’s that supposed to be?”

  I, of course, knew exactly what she was going through and why. She was dying to get away from New York and go back to Venice for a while. But she couldn’t just go. She had to torture herself (and me in the process) and agonize over it, as if she were in some way betraying me by leaving.

  Feeling guilty for wanting to leave, she was trying to pick some horrible fight with me so that she could justify her departure. By not obliging her, by being considerate and tolerant and kind, I was making her feel even more wretched, even more guilty.

  In the end (Saul to the rescue again!) I had to step in and clarify the crisis in which she found herself.

  “Leila,” I addressed her one evening, “listen to me, please.”

  “What now?” she snapped.

  “Please.” I gestured to a chair. “Sit down.”

  “My, my,” she said, rolling her eyes, “aren’t we polite. Is that what we’re going to do now. We’re going to be polite till bedtime. We’re going to sit here and listen to the air conditioner roaring and be polite to each other.”

  She sat down in the swivel chair and began swiveling.

  “All right,” she said, “I’m sitting. Now what?”

  “Why don’t you go to Venice for a while?” I told her. “I think you need to get away from here.”

  Not having said a single word herself about wanting to leave, she seemed shocked by my ability to penetrate into her private thoughts. She stared at me in that squinty-eyed way, as if wondering how much I knew.

  I lit a cigarette.

  “You’re telling me I should leave, is that it?” she finally said.

  “No, I’m telling you that you don’t need an excuse for wanting to. You want to go. I can tell. It’s not something you should feel guilty about.”

  My use of the word “guilty” caused guilt to appear instantly on her face. She could hide nothing. She tried, but she just couldn’t do it.

  I then proceeded, in an admittedly professorial manner, to analyze the situation in which she found herself at the moment.

  “This is a whole new crisis for you,” I told her, puffing away on my cigarette. “Up to now, your whole life, from what you’ve told me about it, has been a series of losses and disappointments. Something was always cut, taken away from you. From your life. From all the movies you were in. And this has happened over and over again. If something happens enough times, no matter how painful it is, it becomes normal. It ceases to be a crisis and becomes, through repetition, a way of life.

  “But now,” I went on, “all that is about to change. For once, all the scenes you shot are not only still in the movie, but you’re the star of the movie. You were thrilled when I first told you about the preview in Pittsburgh. But you’ve had time to think about it. You see, you’ve become comfortable as a victim and are now terrified at the prospect of having to abandon that role and assume a new one. The role of a woman who is loved. Whom life rewards instead of robs. It’s this crisis of fulfillment that’s making you anxious …”

  I lit another cigarette and continued.

  “I’m not blind. I know what you’ve been going through. I know you well enough to know that you haven’t been bitchy toward me just for the sport of it. That we haven’t made love in all this time just because of the heat or whatever. You are too honest to fake your emotions. To fake love and goodwill when you’re churning inside. You need to be off by yourself. To take stock of things. To mess around Venice for a while. See your told friends. Do some of the old things you used to do while you prepare yourself for the next phase of your life. You’ll see, Leila. Something glorious, but something you richly deserve, is awaiting you in Pittsburgh.”

  She couldn’t take any more. She couldn’t bear to hear another word. Sobbing, she flapped her hands at me, gesturing for me to stop.

  She threw her arms around my neck, those white, soft, seemingly fragile arms of hers that on occasion (this being one of them) could be as strong as steel cables. It almost hurt to be embraced with such force.

  She buried her face in my neck and shoulder and, although she was sobbing louder than she spoke, I heard every word she said.

  “I do love you,” she told me. “You do know that, Saul, don’t you? I really do.”

  She left the next day. But not for Venice. She changed her mind. Said she felt like visiting Charleston and seeing her mom and some of her old high school friends again before she became famous. She would go to Venice after that.

  She would not let me arrange her itinerary through my travel agent or pay for the tickets.

  And no limo either.

  We had a lovely, unhurried farewell outside my building. I stood under the canopy and waved as the cab whisked her away.

  During her absence, I resumed my former life. Going to my office. Having lunches with Guido at the Tea Room. Picking up my clothes at the cleaners and strolling down Broadway, handing out money to the panhandlers along the way.

  But whatever I did was tinged with a sense that all this was time in the interim and that real time would begin only in mid-November in Pittsburgh. In a way, I was there already, waiting for Billy and Leila and Leila’s movie to join me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  IT WAS MEANT to be my very last divorce dinner with Dianah. I was determined to stick to the business at hand and insist that either she get a lawyer, or I get a lawyer, or we both get lawyers. Whatever divorce settlement she wanted, she could have. I, for one, would contest nothing except further procrastination on the matter.

  To
underscore my businesslike mood, I wore a businesslike suit for the occasion. Dark blue suit. Rust red tie. Light blue shirt. The expression on my face was one of firm resolve offset by a touch of fairness.

  Our dinner at our French restaurant was at eight. I was early as usual.

  “Ah, Monsieur,” Claude the maitre d’ greeted me with the fullness of emotion one normally associates with Muslim pilgrims beholding Mecca. “Monsieur Karoo, so wonderful to see you. So very, very, wonderful. It has been so long since …” He went on, wanting to know how I’d been. Was Madame joining me tonight?

  He clasped my right hand with both of his and didn’t so much shake it as cherish it for a while.

  Instead of going to the bar, where I normally waited for Dianah to show up, I told Claude I would prefer to wait at our table.

  “But of course,” Claude said.

  He led. I followed.

  In my many years of dining here, I had never seen the place so deserted. It was less than half full. Either it was an off night, or our French restaurant was in decline. Those things happened. Empires, restaurants had diseases of their own and once the decline set in, it was next to impossible to reverse.

  It seemed fitting that my last divorce dinner with Dianah would take place in an atmosphere such as this.

  I had my choice of tables, but force of habit made me choose one next to a table that was occupied. Two couples in their late thirties or early forties.

  The last thing I wanted for this last divorce dinner with Dianah was privacy. An audience, even a small one, was an indispensable component of my being alone with her and her being alone with me. Our kind of privacy demanded a public.

  My waiter came and he, like Claude, expressed jubilation at seeing me again. Despite my long absence, he hinted at an ongoing intimacy between us by offering to bring me my usual drink.

  “A gin and tonic for the monsieur?” he asked with a knowing grin.

  I hated to disappoint him, I really did, but I was determined to have my last divorce dinner with Dianah without the charade of playing drunk and without the device of a drink in my hand. I was turning over a new leaf and I wanted Dianah to know it.