by Brian Morton
“What’s the trouble?” Janine said. “Cat got your tongue?”
She dropped a few more coins on the counter. Why the hell was she doing that? It was as if she were tipping him, for years of service. Fifty-two cents.
When he went to the shelf for some garlic, he took a good long look at Janine, for the first time since she’d walked in the door.
She looked radiant. She looked aglow.
He was hoping that she’d learned over the course of the weekend that whatever she’d thought was missing from their marriage wasn’t missing at all. But this wasn’t a happy-to-be-back radiance; it was a still-in-the-glow-of-the-weekend radiance.
He wasn’t sure how he could tell, but he was sure he could tell.
“That sauce smells good,” Janine said.
Why the hell is she talking to me? he thought. Why is she bothering? Why doesn’t she just collect her things and go?
“You don’t have to wait here. I’ll bring it to you when I’m done.”
“Why would you bring it to me when you’re done?”
“Because it’s dinner.”
“Where am I supposed to go? Why shouldn’t I wait here?”
“I don’t know. You just got home. Don’t you need to freshen up or something?”
“What if I want to wait here? What if I feel fresh enough already?”
“Suit yourself.”
He cut up the onions, the carrots, the mushrooms, the red peppers, the green peppers. She got herself a glass of wine.
“You want hot peppers?” he said.
“You know I don’t like hot peppers.”
“I thought your tastes might have changed.”
He knew he was acting strangely. If he’d acted like this on any other day—any day before this past Friday—she would have asked him what was going on. He knew that she wouldn’t ask him now, though.
Why not just tell her? Why not just tell her he knew?
If he told her, what would he say?
I saw you holding hands with a boy down at the ice cream parlor.
What would he say after that?
Are you going to the sock hop with him?
He continued to prepare the dinner. Janine drank her wine and looked through the mail. He was thinking of attacking her with the spatula.
He started making some bruschetta for Emily. Janine didn’t like bruschetta, but fuck her.
Emily showed up in the kitchen.
“Why are you being so quiet now?”
“I’m not,” Janine said.
“Yes you are. I’ve been right outside. It’s like you caught his disease.”
“We’ve been talking a mile a minute,” Daniel said.
“You people haven’t seen each other in days. I expect you to be exchanging nuggets of information. I expect repartee.”
Emily sounded, to his ear, a little desperate. Her lips were peeled, as if she’d been chewing them. A habit she’d had since childhood but only when she was stressed.
He’d decided that she probably didn’t know that her mother was having an affair. But it was clear that she sensed that something was wrong.
He would have liked to say something reassuring to her, but he had nothing reassuring to say. He finished making the bruschetta and held the plate out to her, and she took a piece.
“So how was your conference?” Emily said.
“Well, it was a mixed bag.”
He couldn’t get it up? Daniel wanted to say. He disappointed you in some way? He weirded you out? He wanted you to spank him and tell him he was a bad boy?
“Why?” Emily said.
“There’s a lot of exciting work going on in the field. But the more I look at it, the less I feel I fit in. They’re interested in doing quantitative studies. I just like listening to people talk.”
He was trying to figure out if this was a coded way of saying that her affair had been a dud.
“On the other hand, they’re asking the questions I’ve been asking for years, and they’re asking it in a systematic way. So . . . I don’t know.”
“Sounds like you should stay here for a while past December,” Daniel said. “Give yourself time to figure it out.”
“What?” Emily said. “She can’t stay here.”
“What’s it to you?” Daniel said. “It’s not like you’ll be at home.”
“That doesn’t matter. I need both of you to be where I expect you to be.”
73
Over the next few days, Daniel found ways not to say anything more consequential to his wife than “Could you pass the milk?” He wasn’t sure why he was being like this. It wasn’t as if he were afraid to talk to her. It wasn’t even as if he were afraid she was going to leave him. He’d already put himself into a state in which, if she told him she was moving out, he would be able to respond stoically.
He wasn’t sure why he was being like this, and then he figured out that he was just being himself. He was waiting for her to make a move. When he used to box, he’d been a counterpuncher; when he used to play chess he’d always been more comfortable playing black. He was in counterpuncher mode now.
But he couldn’t stay in counterpuncher mode forever.
Can I live with it? If she wants to be with him and be with me at the same time, can I live with it?
No.
And could I live without her?
Yes. Of course.
When he first knew her, back when he still had a lot of poetry in his head, he’d once told her that he loved the “pilgrim soul” in her. He still loved her pilgrim soul—and in the distant seat of the mind that looks upon all things with a serene detachment, he respected her even now for being so responsive to life as to allow herself to feel new things for a new person. But that didn’t mean he could live with it. If she insisted on following the promptings of her soul wherever they led her, then she’d pilgrimmed herself out of his life.
74
Janine found her homecoming eerie. It was almost as if Daniel knew. But how could he know? He couldn’t know.
But it felt as if he knew.
One evening a few days after she got back, Emily looked up from her laptop and said, “Van Morrison is at the Beacon next week. You guys should get tickets.”
Janine loved Van Morrison, but she wasn’t sure she felt like going to a concert.
“Can we wait on it a little?” she said to Daniel. “Is that okay?”
“Sure . . .” he said. Then he paused. He held the pause. He held the pause. Then he said, “But it would be good if you figured out what you wanted to do.” And then he left the room.
He was angry with her. That much was obvious. But maybe he was angry at her for some other reason. That would be wonderful—if he thought she’d done something terrible, but he knew nothing about what she’d really done.
She tried to think of what it might be, but came up with nothing. And obviously she couldn’t ask him. “Excuse me, are you angry at me for some bad thing I’ve done, on a scale of seriousness up to but not including having an affair?”
Lev was traveling. He was visiting his mother in Arizona, and then he was going to see his oldest daughter at the spiritual community in California where she’d been living for the past ten years. Janine hadn’t heard from him since Pittsburgh, except for a skimpy text message or two.
Daniel had the television on. He was watching Doctor Who. A woman was being strangled by a mannequin. Daniel was nodding—nodding with approval, she thought.
75
One morning, just after dawn, she went for a run that took her up above Grant’s Tomb and back down to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. It was still early; she didn’t feel like going home and showering yet; so she walked through the park, slowly following its mazy paths to the water.
North of her was the George Washington Bridge, long and unadorned, beautiful in its strength and its simplicity.
On one of their first dates, back in college—did they think in terms of “dates” bac
k then? It was hard for her to remember—she and Daniel had gone to a jazz brunch at the West End, and then they’d taken a long walk in the park and ended up near the river, close to the spot where she was now standing.
It had been a chilly afternoon at the end of the fall. They were wearing gloves, but that didn’t diminish the intimacy she felt holding hands with him.
They sat on a bench near the river.
She remembered turning to face him and drawing her scarf off slowly.
“Nobody’s ever paid attention to my throat before,” she said. “You could be the first.”
He smiled at her, a quizzical smile, and brought his lips to a point where her throat met her jawline.
She remembered that it felt as if the city were disappearing—the skyscrapers receding, the bridge floating off like smoke.
76
Florence received a call from her doctor’s office. His secretary said that he’d be on in a moment, and then she put Florence on hold. Florence promptly hung up.
When the phone rang again a few minutes later, it was Noah himself.
“We must have gotten cut off there.”
“I cut us off. I hung up.”
“Why? You’ve got a thing about telephones?”
“Phones are fine. I’ve got a thing about power trips. If you want to call me, you can call me yourself.”
“Pardon me. I forgot it was you. I forgot who I was power-tripping.”
“You forgot who you were trying to power-trip.”
“Exactly. Anyway, I’ve looked over your tests, and there’s not much of interest. I mean, everything about you is of interest, Florence, but it’s all perfectly normal. How was the nerve conduction, by the way?”
One of the tests had been a nerve-conduction study, in which she’d received bursts of electricity from many tiny needles.
“One part science, one part acupuncture, one part voodoo. It was divine.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and ordered a few more tests.”
“So we aren’t any closer to knowing what’s going on?”
“Well, we’ve ruled out a few things. But we’ve still got a way to go.”
“So are you saying that we need to start thinking about zebras?”
“That depends on how we define zebras,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“I’m just kidding. A little medical humor. It’s not zebra time yet. This could still be something extremely ordinary, extremely trivial. In fact it’s more likely to be something trivial than not. It could be stress. It could be arthritis. It could still be any one of those horses. And even if it is a zebra, not all zebras are bad. A zebra is just something unusual. Not all zebras are trouble. I just think we should get ahead of this thing, in case it’s anything we need to get ahead of.”
“So what are the tests?” she said.
“Well, first I’d like us to get that MRI, which somehow seems to have slipped off your to-do list. What’s so funny?”
“Us? Are you going to be there? Planning to climb in?”
“I’d like to, but I’ll only be able to climb in with you in spirit.”
“That’ll be quite enough, thanks. But why an MRI? You want them to do an MRI of my hand or something?”
“Well, not so much. I think we’ve seen just about everything there is to be seen in your hands and feet. So now it’s time to look at other parts of you.”
He made this sound very reasonable. She felt like a distinguished piece of statuary. Parts of her had been thoroughly studied by the scholars, but other parts had been neglected so far.
She wondered whether she should be nervous, but she didn’t feel nervous. She went back to her work.
77
Saturday was evidently a good day for them to peer into your brain. Florence went up to Columbia Presbyterian that afternoon for her MRI.
At the medical center, after she filled out a form confirming that she contained no metal—no pacemakers, no artificial hips or knees, no shrapnel, no ball bearings, no bullets—a very tall young man led her to a tiny locker room where she was to store her valuables and change into a gown.
The gown had two sets of laces, at the waist and at the neck, but they were hard to tie. None of the laces was long enough to comfortably reach its mate.
Why were hospital gowns always like this? Why did they never fit? They seemed to have been designed for a different species. Maybe they were made this way because if they were too nice, people would steal them. Or maybe they were made this way to leave you feeling vulnerable and humiliated, thus making it easier for doctors and nurses and technicians to order you around.
The young man returned. She supposed he was a technician, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe he was a nurse. Whatever he was, he seemed unusual. He was kindly, gentle, apple-cheeked, but in his eyes there was something shrewd and ironic. He had the look of someone who was taking mental notes.
Outside the MRI room was a sign: POWERFUL MAGNETS! DO NOT REMAIN IN ROOM WHILE IMAGING IS IN PROGRESS!
She tried to imagine a magnet powerful enough to call for exclamation points.
You were told that they posed a danger to you only if you were partly made of metal—so why was there a need for this general warning?
She decided that if you thought about it, it made sense. Each drop of hemoglobin contains a core of iron. Wouldn’t this mean that when the magnets go on, they reorganize your internal architecture, sucking the iron to the periphery of each cell?
The magnets, in her case, would be trained on the brain. Maybe when she came out of this thing she’d be a neoconservative.
Finally the gentle technician—his name tag said HUDSON—showed her into the room, directed her to lie down on a sort of table covered by the usual paper sheet, and asked her what she’d like to listen to. “Classical? Light jazz? Elton John?”
“Do you have any hip-hop?” she said, just to mess with him, and when he hesitated, she said, “Classical will be fine.”
He left the room and, shortly afterward, her table went sliding into the narrow tube of the MRI machine. She felt like a corpse on a TV show, lying on a shelf in a morgue. They slide you out, because the detectives have some hunch they want to check, and then they slide you back in again.
She was inside the drawer. It was a very tight space.
She could see that this would be distressing if you were claustrophobic, but she wasn’t.
A tremendous banging started up, as if insane people with hammers had taken over the hospital. Florence began to see that if you had even a slight touch of claustrophobia, this could be very uncomfortable.
The banging kept up mercilessly, and after a while she started to get used to it, and then it stopped, and then another noise took its place, even louder and more noxious—it sounded like the grinding noise of an airplane that was about to crash.
She thought of an old friend of hers, Joanna, who hated elevators. If Joanna ever had to have an MRI, how would she get through it?
She could see how this could get to you if you even knew someone who was claustrophobic.
She was confined so tightly in this small space that, rather than a corpse, she began to think of herself as a mummy.
That’s probably a bad idea. Don’t think of yourself as a mummy, tightly bound—
Several of her friends had become serious meditators over the years, and had become proselytizers for the practice, claiming that it could cure high blood pressure, insomnia, problems of concentration, and more or less everything else. Florence’s attitude toward it had always been a mix of curiosity and scorn, but now she wished that she had taken it up.
How on earth had they figured out they could use jumbo-size magnets to peer into your brain? Magnets that enabled doctors to see what was going on inside your head—it didn’t even make sense. On the other hand, how had they figured anything out? How had they invented the telephone? How had they invented the camera?
Finally
the banging stopped, and the table moved out again. Hudson took her arm and helped her off the pad, and she felt a childish wish for approval. She wanted him to say something like, “We monitor your vital signs in there, and I’ve never seen anybody remain so calm.” She was a seventy-five-year-old woman, and she wanted a word of approval from this child.
But one of the fine things about life is the difference between what goes on inside you and what you show to the world. After he took her arm, she withdrew it, putting on an air of irritation that she didn’t actually feel. She valued his kindness, but she was damned if she was going to let anybody treat her like an invalid.
She went to the locker room and put her clothes back on. Young Hudson was waiting for her in the hall. He reached out to take her arm again and then stopped himself, which made her like him all the more.
“That thing can shake a person up.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Do you have anybody with you?”
“No. Just me.”
“Anybody you can call? Anybody who can take you home?”
She thought about it. Any one of a number of her old friends would have been happy to pick her up.
There was Vanessa, of course—but no. Vanessa was too tuned in to Florence’s feelings. Vanessa would feel all of Florence’s anxieties, but without Florence’s ability to suppress them, and Florence didn’t want to put her friend through that. There was Cassie—but Cassie had written two books about the American health-care system, and she’d want to know the details of what Florence was going through, and Florence didn’t want to talk about the details now. There was Ruby, but Ruby had been throwing herself into solidarity work with women in Egypt, and although Florence admired the headlong way in which Ruby had pursued her political passions, she didn’t want to listen to news about Egypt this afternoon.
The problem with Florence’s friends was that they were all as intense as she was, and she couldn’t deal with that kind of intensity right now. She needed someone who would just let her be.