Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  He let my foot go. It slid to the floor with a thump.

  “You know about me and—?”

  “Mindy! I saw you and Mindy together. That first day you took Ann. By yourself, supposedly. So I could have ‘fun,’ remember? I saw you kiss her.”

  “You saw me kiss Mindy?”

  “On the cheek.”

  “I was probably just saying goodbye.”

  “And I saw the look you gave her.”

  “What look?”

  “The kind of look you used to give me.”

  Our food came, which of course even heightened the tension more. The waiter hovered around us.

  “More wine?”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Fresh pepper?”

  “Why not?”

  I kept my head down, knowing Harvey was about to burst, and listened to the twist of the grinder, the waiter's footsteps going away, then that moment of silence in between, that decent interval before you could start talking again. One, two, three …

  “There's nothing going on between Mindy and me. We're just friends. Jesus! Are you out of your mind?”

  “Is this what I ordered?” I frowned, finally looking up.

  “Yes.”

  “So you're saying it was a hallucination, when I saw you two together that night?”

  “We were running late. We were coming back from the doctor's.”

  “What do you mean, coming back from the doctor's? You are the doctors!”

  “Stop shouting.”

  “I'm not—”

  He reached out again. My hand had a fork in it. He covered it, fork and all, like when you put a tent over a canary cage. To make it go to sleep.

  “We took Ann to a pediatric oncologist because she had a growth on her finger,” he said, in a low, serious voice. “The doctor ordered an X ray. He got the results back, and they're negative. We had a follow-up visit today and she's fine.”

  He took his hand back. I stared at what he'd left me, four fingers, a thumb, a bar of metal lying across.

  “Mindy noticed something,” he went on. “At one of those checkups. A growth.”

  “Above the knuckle,” I said automatically.

  “Right. She called me, and we decided that, in your condition, with all the uncertainty about what it could be—” He stopped and started over. “It was nothing. We were both ninety-five percent sure it was nothing. But we didn't want to put you through the waiting.”

  “We?”

  “I made an appointment and took Ann there on that day off I gave you.”

  “What about her?”

  “Mindy volunteered to come. To keep me company.”

  “Just like old times, huh?”

  “We're not sleeping together, Ann. We never were. I told you, we're friends.”

  I looked up. “Ann? I'm not Ann.”

  “Eve,” he corrected. “You've been acting like such a basket case lately that I was worried this would push you over the edge. But I was wrong, all right? Clearly you've sensed that something was up. Mindy said she went over to see you the other day, and—”

  “So that's why she came.”

  “—she felt I should talk to you.”

  “So you're not sleeping with her?”

  I tried keeping the note of disappointment from my voice.

  That would be so much simpler an offense than what he seemed to be telling me, which was this deep and horrible betrayal.

  “Of course I'm not sleeping with her.”

  “Then who are you sleeping with?”

  “No one.” He thought about it a minute, and then repeated, allowing himself to sound a little aggrieved, the only time he had ever complained, “I'm not sleeping with anyone. You know that.”

  Our main courses had just been sitting there, getting cold. He took a mouthful, to avoid my glare.

  I had ordered meat, but there was no way I could chew. All my bones had dissolved. I tried acquainting myself with what felt like a new world.

  “So Ann's sick?”

  “No. She's not sick. That's what I'm trying to tell you. She had an abnormal growth on her finger, which, in very rare cases, can become a sarcoma, a kind of cancer. But with her it's just a cyst. Probably from sucking on it.”

  “A teething bump.”

  He nodded.

  “The doctor said it should go away all by itself.”

  He had called me Ann. We were both children to him, people to take care of. Patients.

  “Everything all right?” the waiter asked.

  “Very good,” Harvey mumbled.

  “Delicious,” I said.

  Delicious, but I have just decided to become a vegetarian. I lifted my wineglass instead.

  “I'm sorry, Eve. I made such an obvious mistake.” He was beating himself up, so I wouldn't. Getting in ahead of me. “It's like a medical history I remember studying in school. A woman was complaining of acute neuralgia, a pain in her side that seemed to be psychosomatic. So the doctor tried to hypnotize her. And at first it worked. The pain went away. But then she started vomiting, having headaches.”

  “I don't have—”

  “The point is: You can't just treat the symptoms.” He was lecturing, like I was the one who needed to learn the lesson. “You have to deal with the underlying causes, otherwise it manifests itself somewhere else. I thought, if I just removed things from your life that made you anxious, you would feel better. But instead you're going around imagining all sorts of crazy sexual liaisons. Not to mention stealing fabric.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman in the story. What was wrong with her to begin with?”

  “That's not the point.”

  “I know it's not the point, but—”

  “She was raped,” he said, in a reluctant, offhand way.

  I laughed.

  “Are you going to eat yours?”

  “I don't think so.”

  “You want something else?”

  “No.”

  “You want to leave?”

  We were still married. That's what was so amazing. Everything was superficially the same. He took a few bites and, in between, shot me anxious looks.

  “I'm not going to make a scene, if that's what you're worried about.”

  “You have every right to be mad, but don't let that get in the way of the fact that there's genuine good news here. Ann's OK.”

  “I never knew she wasn't.”

  “You must have sensed it.”

  “No. I didn't. I don't have feminine intuition or maternal instinct or any of that crap. I thought maybe you two were fooling around. And then when she told me to talk to you, I was sure of it.”

  “But if we'd told you straight out—”

  “I'm good in emergencies, Harvey. It's the boredom I'm having trouble taking. You stole something from me. You stole something from us. It would have been an ordeal in our life we could have gone through together. It would have brought us closer.”

  He hung his head. I could see his bald spot. So many years ago, when he was a newborn, there had been that soft, skulless way in to who he was. And now, was there nothing left but a shut door?

  “I knew, almost immediately, it was the wrong thing to do,” he sighed. “But I didn't know how to get out of it. The worst part was not being able to talk. I've missed you so much. Missed you when you were right in front of me. When you've been in my arms.”

  I never realized how, in the past few months, I had come to depend on Harvey as this judge-on-high of right and wrong. He was my moral compass. He was busy being good, so I didn't have to. And of course you can't sleep with someone like that. You can only admire him. If he'd started to treat me more and more as a child since Ann was born, until he couldn't even tell us apart in terms of helplessness, I had done the same, turned him into just as much of an object, a statue of strength and wisdom.

  “What do you know about the bathrooms here?” I asked slowly.

  �
�Why? Are you going to be sick? You shouldn't drink so much if you're not going to eat.”

  “No, it's just that usually restaurants like this have really fancy bathrooms, whole rooms. For one person at a time.”

  “Go ahead. I'll tell them you weren't feeling well. We can take all this home, if you want.”

  “With doors,” I went on, “that lock.”

  I put my foot inside his pant leg this time, as far as it would go. For the smartest person I knew, Harvey could be incredibly slow. It was like trying to pry a boulder loose and push it down a hill. Of course, once you got him rolling …

  “Eve,” he said, “I don't think we can—”

  “Why don't we make it a new anniversary? Or whatever comes before the anniversary. The thing you were happy about in the first place. Let's go back to that, the actual event, instead of just remembering.”

  “That doesn't really work. It's still our anniversary, no matter what. You can't change history. I mean, it's still the date we got married on.”

  “I want to do it in the bathroom, Harvey.”

  “Yes, I figured that out. But I don't see how. We can't both get up at the same time and—”

  “I'll go first, then you wait a minute. Just knock. Remember, it's the Ladies' Room, not the Men's Room. That's very important.”

  I could see he was intensely uncomfortable.

  “This isn't really my thing.”

  “I know. That's why we're going to do it.”

  “What if a waiter comes?”

  “If a waiter comes he'll refold our napkins. I've been watching him do it on the other tables.”

  “All those other people aren't off having sex in the bathroom.”

  “Maybe they are. Who knows? Who cares about other people?”

  We were staring at each other.

  He ran his hand through his hair, nervous. “If I go along with this, does it get me just a little bit out from under what I did?”

  “Just a little.”

  “How much?”

  “That depends.”

  I took my foot away. We were magnetized. I could feel the pull, that clean metal-to-metal attraction. I was angry at him, so angry the emotion was a pure force that could be used for anything, put to any purpose, so angry that, if I wasn't careful, we were going to end up making a furious genius.

  “Dr. Gabriel?”

  A waiter was coming over.

  “Could you tell me where the Ladies' Room is?” I asked sweetly.

  “Certainly, madame. Just past those flowers, on your right.” He turned back to Harvey. “There's a phone call for you, doctor.”

  We frowned.

  “Are you on call?”

  “No. And even if it was an emergency, I have my beeper.”

  “Well, tell whoever it is you can't talk to them right now because you're about to go off and get—”

  “I'll be right there,” he told the waiter.

  I watched while he went over to the little podium at the front of the restaurant. I still couldn't believe what he'd done, that he'd kept something like that from me. I wondered just how helpless and neurotic I must have been acting for him to do it. A basket case, he'd called me. Had I been that bad? We needed to get back together again, on the most basic level. If he would just get off the stupid phone. Who could be calling? Who even had this number? Nobody but the babysitter.

  I looked over and saw his expression. Something was wrong. Immediately I thought of Ann. He was pale, speaking very quickly. It wasn't paranoia anymore. I was through with paranoia. This was the real tragedy all the paranoia, all the false anxiety, had been in preparation for. A cold breeze blew through me. My knees shook. Quick, think of something else. “Madame.” The waiter had called me Madame. That was better than Ma'am, certainly, or Mother, or Mrs. Or Ms. Or Miss. It had a kind of warrior sound to it. Madame. But it still wasn't me. I stared down at the grease forming on my lamb chop until I couldn't take it anymore. I stood up to join him. He was just hanging up when I got there.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Did something happen?”

  His face had a look of concentration, like he was trying to solve a math problem.

  “Harvey, that was the babysitter, wasn't it? Is Ann OK?”

  “Ann's fine,” he said.

  “Oh, thank God. I was sure that—”

  “It's my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She had a heart attack. The neighbor found her.”

  “Is she all right?”

  There was a big snifter of matchbooks by the phone, each with the name of the restaurant on the cover. He picked one up, then opened it, to look at the matches on the inside. I could see him shrinking, going away, inside his skin.

  • • •

  We took a cab home. I thought about the story Mindy told me, the old woman crossing the street in front of them. I wanted to hear his version, but it didn't seem the right time to ask. We held hands for a while. Then the cab went over a pothole and they bounced apart.

  “I have to talk to my Attending.”

  “About getting time off?”

  He nodded. “There's the body to claim and the room to clean out.”

  “Isn't there anyone else who can help?”

  “It was just us.”

  I hadn't really known Arlene. There seemed to be plenty of time for that. She missed our wedding, it was on such short notice. We talked, on the phone. She was like Harvey, that's how I instantly saw her, that same reserve. I could tell we weren't going to be bosom buddies, sharing confidences or anything like that. But she trusted his judgment and she wasn't mean to me, which, considering I was knocked up when we got married, she certainly could have been. She accepted me, for his sake. I racked my brain to think of one moment we might have had. When Ann was born I called her, and she was pleased, but it was just an interlude before she asked to speak to Harvey. Then she had come up to visit. They clearly had something intense. I didn't want to meddle, get between them. His father had died a while back, but even before then it was obvious they had spent all this formative time together. There were no sisters or brothers. Once, I'd said to him, “So we're both only children,” and for a minute it looked like he was about to object. He wasn't alone like me, I could tell he wanted to say. He had her.

  And now she was gone. It was crazy. Maybe I did have feminine intuition. Hadn't I been sensing this whole time that something bad was going to happen? I just didn't know what.

  “There's probably some special kid seat that we have to request, when we make the reservations. The kind you use in a car. Or maybe we just have to buy one, I don't know.”

  He blinked, drawn up, like a well bucket, from some deep place.

  “We?”

  “Ann and me.”

  “You're not coming.”

  “To Florida? Of course we are.”

  He turned away. We were stuck at a light, waiting to get onto the bridge.

  “That isn't necessary.”

  “You don't want us to come?”

  “You'd be …”

  “More trouble than we're worth?”

  “No. It just doesn't make sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense to me.”

  “I do these things better alone.”

  “What, feel?”

  The night was crawling over his face. Poor sad—but then I went on, I couldn't help it—stupid man. Turning down what was clearly so right for him. What the sensible part of his brain knew he needed. We weren't as different as we pretended, really, both recognizing, in the other, salvation, but also determined, as soon as we stopped concentrating, to screw it up.

  “I'm coming with you,” I said.

  “You'd be bored. And having her there, without all our equipment—”

  “I'm coming with you.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He yawned and put his arm around me. I sank into his side.

  But the next morning, morning starting officially at 1 A.M., Ann got sick. It wa
s a bad joke, considering how much time he had spent, at dinner, convincing me she was healthy. He found a flashlight and played it over the side of her red, screaming face. Then he burrowed in deeper.

  “It's nothing. She has an ear infection.”

  “Nothing! Then what's all this white vomit about?”

  “It's partially digested milk.”

  “And that's supposed to make me feel better? Now that you've lied to me once, what's to prevent you from lying to me about her all the time? How do I know she doesn't have a brain tumor?”

  “She does not have a brain tumor. Vomiting is often the result of intense pain.”

  “So she's in intense pain? And I'm supposed to just sit here?”

  “The Tylenol should take care of that. Then, tomorrow, or this morning, whatever this is, you have to take her in to Mindy and—”

  I stopped him with a look.

  “All right. No Mindy. Never mind. I'll write you a prescription for antibiotics.”

  “But we can still go with you, right?”

  He shook his head.

  “She can't fly.”

  “Why not?”

  “The cabin pressure could rupture her eardrum.”

  “Then we'll leave her here. We'll rent a cow. And put a pile of hay between the crib and the wall, so when it goes to eat, its udders will be directly over her. That way, all she has to do is—”

  “Eve.”

  He knelt down, holding my shoulders, framing me in his gaze.

  “I'm so sorry,” I said, and started crying.

  We hugged. I wondered, as sobs convulsed me, if he was crying too but somehow knew he wasn't. It was my job to cry for both of us. Still, my grief was genuine, even if I didn't know exactly what it was for. Was it for Arlene, whom I'd met exactly once? (“Take care of yourself,” she'd said, and, “It was nice to finally meet you.”) Was it for Harvey, because he couldn't cry himself? Was it for both of us, sensing this might be the beginning of an even harder time than what we'd been through already? Or maybe the opposite. Maybe it marked the end of something.

  The rest of the morning, I clung to him harder than I'd ever clung to any other human being. When it was time to go, he practically had to peel me away.

  “Get out a lot,” he instructed. “Don't just stay inside. Sun on your face is important.”

  “What's so great about the sun?”