Impulse

by Frederick Ramsay

  He leaned forward as if he wanted to sample her perfume.

  “Who?” he said softly.

  “Who, what?”

  “Who do you talk to, that who.”

  “Oh. Me, I talk to myself, but not really. This is confusing, but I need to tell you because our waiter thinks I’m rude and the server, the little round girl with the ponytail, thinks I’m crazy. I thought if you knew, you could sort of help.”

  “Right. I’ll just point at my temple and circle my finger and wink at them while I tilt my head your way. The woman’s nuts but not to worry.”

  “No. That’s not it at all. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Rosemary’s face reddened again, but not from blushing.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not something to joke about, is it?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you been having these chats with yourself?”

  “Not myself completely. A part of me…an alter ego, I guess. She taunts me, dares me, you know? No, you don’t. Well anyway, this other me pops up in my head and says things and before I know it I answer, lately, out loud.”

  “And sometimes the out loud part is misunderstood by waiters and servers—”

  “And sales clerks and friends and—”

  “This has been going on just lately or for a while?”

  “I think I always did. It was a way to think. You have conversations with yourself or made-up people and work it out. I expect if everyone were honest, they’d say the same thing. Then, a year after George died and all my friends stopped dancing attendance on me, unless they needed a chair filled at dinner or a fourth for bridge, I found myself with lots of time on my hands. It seemed like my entire life had become solipsistic. There’s a difference between being alone and being lonely. I guess this is the way I keep from being lonely. You probably know about that, too.”

  “I do.”

  “I just wanted you to know, so that when I say something apropos of nothing, I’m probably arguing with my other self. You should not be alarmed or confused.”

  “So when you answer a question and the answer is a little eccentric—”

  “I’m probably talking to me and then trying to make the comment fit the conversation I’m having with you, yes.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I’ve been there, done that, too. Not to myself though—talking I mean.”

  “To your wife?”

  His expression changed just for a split second, but in that second she saw the accumulated pain, fear, and anxiety—the overwhelming burdens he carried. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his.

  “Tell me about her, tell me the rest,” she said.

  Are you sure you want to know?

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  She smiled. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The first time he ever laid eyes on Saundra Halliwell, she was stark naked, hands flying about trying to cover up and at the same time pull her window shade back down. He’d taken a shortcut through the parking lot behind the women’s dorm on his way to the library. The sound of the shade slapping against its roller and her gasp caused him to look to his left and there she was, a brunette Venus. Her mouth formed a perfect O. He stood transfixed. In the seconds that passed before she managed to pull the shade back down, he fell in love. He often wondered if he would have anyway, if he hadn’t caught her at that precise moment.

  His problem after that was to find out who she was without revealing how he knew her, in a manner of speaking. It took him three weeks of hanging around outside the dormitory door and watching its inhabitants come and go before he spotted her. It was not an easy task. It is one thing to recognize a face in normal circumstances, quite another when the first impression includes a whole lot more skin than a face. He supposed that in this day and age, it wouldn’t make much difference. Nudity, frank discussions of sex, Sex in the City, had changed the world, and it didn’t include him or his generation. He guessed his parents felt the same way when they were his age.

  When he finally approached her, she almost screamed. Apparently, he’d been noticed lurking, her word, around the dorm, and the women in it had come to the conclusion he was some sort of pervert. Stalker had not entered the lexicon then. His difficulty came in convincing her he wanted to meet her and no one else, and he had to do that without telling her why. They had no classes together, ate in separate cafeterias, and had absolutely nothing in common. It would make for a good match.

  He didn’t tell her about the window shade until much later—on their honeymoon. After that, when she would see a secret smile on his face, she would say, “window shade,” and he’d nod. He still smiled that way once in a while, but now it hurt.

  ***

  “We met in college. She was an undergraduate and I was in graduate school. We were married a week after she graduated. I’d finished my graduate work the same year and we moved to Chicago. I taught a few years on the North Side, then we drifted to Omaha and finally to Phoenix.”

  “Did she work, have a career of her own?” Rosemary asked.

  “At first she worked a variety of jobs. She was a French major in college, not the best choice to establish a career path. She thought she might be a translator at the U.N. or something like that.”

  “And?”

  “And…we were happy, had two kids, nothing unusual or unique.”

  Rosemary waited. For a man who could write two dozen books, Frank Smith had very little to say.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I will never see her again. Talking about her this way does not make it any easier. It’s enough to say we loved, we had a good marriage, and now she’s gone.”

  She sat watching him, trying to read his expression. “You said two children? I know about your daughter. What about the other?”

  “My son, Francis…we aren’t speaking at the moment.”

  “What happened between the two of you?”

  “He, like Scott Academy, thinks I have money. The fact we lived modestly did not dissuade him from that notion. He just thought I was cheap. Anyway, he invented or wrote…I’m never sure which is correct…a software program that he claimed could accurately predict the stock market. He wanted me to provide the risk capital to market it.”

  “Could it predict the market?”

  “No idea. I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, if it could, he wouldn’t need me to front end the financing and, more importantly, Francis didn’t know anything about the market. He was a math and computer science major in college, the two years he actually attended. He was guessing.”

  “So you turned him down cold.”

  “Not cold. I said, ‘Come back with a business plan and some other investors and I will contribute toward the project.’ He got angry. Said I never trusted him, and so on.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much. I think my wife sent him money from time to time but….”

  She waited. Clearly, Frank had nothing more to say.

  “I lost track of your family when they moved away. What—?”

  “My father bought a house in South Carolina near the coast. Not in one of the fashionable towns but very nice. Any hopes he had for a peaceful retirement went out the window when my mother developed Alzheimer’s. She died after a money-draining, soul scarring eight years. My father just gave up and died the next year. That disease takes its toll on everybody around it.”

  “On you, too?”

  “Oh yeah. You think, what if it’s genetic, what if I’m next?”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know, but I live with that fear every day. It rummages around in my subconscious pulling up reminders of my slipping mental faculties. Every time I forget a name, misplace my keys, or can’t recognize a familiar street…I think, here we go. It’s awful.”

  He told her about the backlog of books on his hard drive “Sandy would just have to pop out a book a year, let an editor f
ix it up, and there’d be money in the bank. Frank Smith may have to go to that big mystery writers conference in the sky, but Meredith Smith could live on forever.”

  “Do you still work that way?”

  “Yes, but now it’s just a habit. My kids will be responsible for sending them in, I guess. You know the worst of it? When you disassociate.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You find yourself rejoining a conversation but you have no recollection of having drifted away. Most people have had that happen—mind wanders and then you hear someone repeat a question or look at you funny and you say, ‘Sorry, just wandered away for a moment.’ But with disassociation, you don’t remember going anywhere, only coming back. You wonder, ‘How long was I gone? A nanosecond, a full second, a minute, and when will the day come when I don’t come back at all?’ It scares the hell out of you.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be awful to have something like that hanging over your head.” She’d never thought about it before, losing one’s mind and drifting, or perhaps speeding would be more accurate, into senility. “Is there some way doctors can predict if you…have it?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure. Even if they can, I don’t want to know…would you?”

  She guessed she wouldn’t. They sat in silence after that. Rosemary sipped her tea and scanned the room. Frank picked up the reports and began to read.

  An older couple sat across from them. The husband, it had to be a husband, seemed agitated. He twisted and turned in his chair, searching, it seemed, for his server. He rubbed the check between his fingers as if it was currency and he needed to be sure it wasn’t counterfeit. He wig-wagged at his waitress and held up the bill.

  “Two dollars and eighty cents for coffee?” he said, glaring at her.

  “Yes, sir, two coffees at—”

  “I’ve never paid that much for coffee.” He patted the carafe in front of him.

  “Sir, the coffee was for two cups and we leave the carafe for your convenience—”

  “It’s highway robbery,” he said, shaking his head. His wife kept her eyes fixed on the back wall, not looking at either her husband or the waitress.

  “This is highway robbery,” he repeated and glared some more. “I’m telling all my friends not to eat here.”

  “Sir, if you’d like to speak to the manager—”

  “No thanks. What can he do except make up some lame excuse? My friends will never eat here. This is outrageous.” As he rose, Rosemary thought she caught a fleeting look in his eye, the briefest hint of confusion, as if it flashed through his mind he might be wrong and was making a fool of himself. It faded just as quickly and he stomped away to the cashier’s station.

  The waitress didn’t move as she watched him pull out his wallet and start in on the cashier about the cost of coffee. The cashier comped him the coffee. He didn’t seem satisfied even then. His wife shifted around in her chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the waitress. “Sometimes he forgets.”

  “It’s okay. He probably had a bad day.”

  Rosemary suspected the wife had spent the last forty or fifty years apologizing for hundreds of small misunderstandings on his part. Her husband returned, face still red. He helped her to her feet and gently slid the walker in front of her.

  Then the truth hit Rosemary so hard she wanted to cry.

  “That couple has been married forever,” she said. “They had an arrangement that worked all those years. He did the business end of the marriage, she did the domestic. Now, she is crippled and can’t keep up her end. She can’t cook for him, so they eat out. He probably never learned to do anything more complicated than boil an egg.”

  Frank stirred but still concentrated on his papers.

  “My guess is she prays daily that she dies before he does. She has no idea where the money is, how they live…anything. She’d be completely lost without him.”

  “What?” Frank said finally, lifting his eyes from the papers.

  “Getting old is a bitch.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  They trudged up the small rise from the restaurant toward the hotel. Rosemary inhaled. The air carried the aroma of new-mown grass and deep frying. She laid her hand on his sleeve. “Are you sure about this?”

  He looked up and sniffed. “Sure about what?”

  “Doing this search, investigation, whatever it is we’re up to.”

  “You’re having doubts?”

  “Maybe. Some, I think.”

  He sighed. “Do you think they’re right?”

  “Who?”

  “The youth of America, or in this case, the sleek young people who snookered us into doing this. Are they right to discount us? I’m not sure how much of my willingness to pursue this is professional curiosity and how much is annoyance at a generation that assumes we’re all dotty.”

  “It doesn’t do any good to rail about being discounted as old and marginalized, Frank. As far as the general population is concerned, that’s what we are. It doesn’t matter that many of us stay in reasonably good shape, vote intelligently, and take care of our health…you name it. We are routinely patronized by the culture that sees us as fragile, quirky, and foolish. Wrinklies, they call us. We are the butt of jokes on late-night television and the target of every scam artist in the country.”

  “But why?”

  “Because for every one of us who is normal and stylish, if you will, there are a half dozen who, God love them, wear black knee socks with their plaid shorts, striped shirts, and too white sneakers with Velcro closers.”

  “And dorky sunglasses. Don’t forget them, the ones that fit over your regular glasses.”

  “And talk too much about the old days, make right turns from the left turn lane, and complain about the noise in the neighborhood after nine o’clock at night. The truth is, Frank, there are two kinds of old folks, those like you and me, who resent the stereotype, and the rest who are the stereotype. And here’s the bad news, you and I are about ten years away from joining the latter. A walker with yellow tennis balls on the back legs beckons even now.”

  “This has got to be the most depressing conversation we’ve ever had.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Do you want to know something else?” he said. “Those sunglasses really work. I don’t care how silly they look. Back where I come from, where the sun can be unremitting, they are the only thing I ever found that really protects my eyes. They block the UV rays front and side.”

  “And there are days when I would die for a pair of Velcro closure shoes,” she said. “You see how it is? At some point we surrender to comfort and what works and toss style and what other people think about us out the window. On that day, we become the very thing for which senior citizens are ridiculed.”

  “Yeah, but the good news is, we will soon outnumber all the other age groups and will be the trendsetters. Soon teenyboppers…are they still called that? Soon they will wear clunky sunglasses and ridiculous shoes and shirts that don’t match, shorts that don’t fit and…wait a minute…they already do! It’s only their parents that don’t fit in.”

  “Why don’t I feel reassured?”

  ***

  They tried reading in the lobby. Frank thought she might be reluctant to go to the room. It might have worked, but just then a convention of noisy medical technologists arrived and filled the area with happy chatter. Frank sent Rosemary up to the room while he had one more try at the Internet. Nothing in the papers caught his eye. He retrieved his home phone messages. Nothing new there either. He called his daughter; got her answering machine. He didn’t leave a message. He joined Rosemary in the room. Rosemary sat calm and composed at the desk. Whatever old-fashioned misgivings he might have had about being alone with her in a hotel room seemed not to be shared.

  Lunch caught up with Frank an hour after they began to read. His eyelids gained five pounds. Tryptophan, he thought. I shouldn’t have had the turkey club. He put the r
eport down and stretched. Rosemary had the yearbook open in her lap.

  “I need some fresh air, or coffee,” he said, “or a nap.”

  “Well, there’s a bed handy,” she said. “As long as you don’t snore, it’s okay by me.”

  “I’m going to settle for coffee.” He fixed the coffee maker next to the sink and turned it on. The room had one chair at the small desk, and another in the corner. Since there didn’t seem to be any light for that one, they had to settle for Rosemary at the desk and Frank on one of the beds next to the nightstand.

  The room filled with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. He loved it but it masked her perfume, a loss, he reckoned. He had not enjoyed a woman’s perfume for four years. His daughter rarely used it.

  “Coffee smells wonderful,” she said. “Your notes say that one of the people still on campus is a Marvin Parker. There’s no separate picture of him, but in the library spread, there’s a Luella Mae Parker. Were they related?”

  He poured two cups and gave her one. “Ms. Roulx said they were married but she left that year, divorce or something. Anyway, we can talk to him tomorrow. What kind of name is Luella Mae, anyway?”

  “Southren, honeychile. You won’t find any Luella Maes north of the Mason-Dixon line. She’s from South Carolina, Alabama, someplace like that. She was quite a looker.”

  Frank looked over her shoulder at the woman on the page. Even in black and white, she was a knockout.

  “Wow. I bet the library did a booming business. Can you imagine what adolescent testosterone and this woman could create?”

  Leaning close to her this way, he could smell her perfume again. Scents and colors were not his forte. Sandy used to kid him about both. She said she could douse herself in apple cider and wear a trash bag for a dress and he wouldn’t know the difference. He would have. He might not be able to identify the scent but he knew what he liked, and he liked whatever Rosemary wore.

  Rosemary looked at the picture again. “Assuming the worst about this woman, and we have no reason to do so, she could cause a heap of trouble, especially when you throw in one of those southern accents dripping magnolias.”