Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  Nina took off her shoes and lay down on the bed, leaving her clothes on. She pulled the eiderdown over her body, but didn’t get between the sheets. They were nice sheets, silk with a pattern of tulips and bluebells, but Nina didn’t want them around her. She switched off the bedside light and closed her eyes. On the inside of her eyelids waited a Jackson Pollock in black and white: the state of her mind. It was too confusing to sort out. Clinging to one fact, Mrs. Standish’s promise to help, Nina tried to sleep.

  She tried for a long time, lying in the soft bed in the enormous house, listening to the little world of her own breathing and the big world of the storm, firing snow pellets at the windows. Then she stopped trying. That didn’t work either. Nina got up.

  She stared out one of the windows facing the road. She couldn’t see it. All she could see was the storm. Then the glass misted under her breath, blurring even that. It was due to the mist that Nina wasn’t sure whether she saw a sudden yellow glow coming from the direction of the road. By the time she rubbed the mist away, the glow, if it had existed at all, was gone.

  Nina stood by the window for a while, waiting for the glow to reappear. Then she gave up. She lay down on the bed again, pulled up the eiderdown. This time she couldn’t even keep her eyes closed. She got up, looked out the window, saw nothing but the storm; then peered through the curtains covering the other windows, those facing the closed-off wing.

  And Nina saw green light shining through a window on the ground floor. Not bright, but steady: she closed her eyes, looked again, and it was still there.

  Nina watched the green light. Minutes passed. Nina knew what she had to do long before she did it.

  Nina opened the door of her room. She walked down the hall. The lights had been switched off, but the faint luminosity of night, even such a starless and moonless one, came through the windows and lit her way. She reached the stairs and started down, silent in her stocking feet. Nina descended two flights and entered the long corridor. It had no windows; she walked on in total darkness, feeling her way with her hands. Many rooms opened off the corridor, great spaces full of shadows that seemed to move under her gaze, although she knew they were only pieces of furniture. She came to the dining room. Embers glowed in the fireplace, bright enough to reveal Zulu, asleep on the rug. Nina froze. Zulu shuddered, but he didn’t wake up. Perhaps he thought her smell was only part of a bad dream. Nina tiptoed by.

  At the end of the hall there were more windows. By their light, Nina saw a closed door. She turned the knob; the door swung open without a squeak: Mrs. Standish was too rich to have squeaky doors. Ahead Nina saw a flight of stairs leading up into darkness, and a corridor beside it. She was in the south wing.

  Nina walked along the corridor. Her feet felt thick carpet; would there still be rugs in the closed-off wing of a house? She didn’t know. She had never been in a house with wings before, except as a tourist. Ahead she saw a faint green glow.

  It escaped through the crack under a door on her right, not far away. Nina stopped before it, listening. She heard nothing. She put her hand on the knob. Slowly, she turned it, slowly pushed open the door.

  On the other side was a room. Nina could see clearly: a wall monitor lit everything green. A green line moved across the monitor, rose to a peak, fell, moved, rose, fell, moved to the end of the screen, reappeared at the beginning, rose, fell. In the center of the room stood a bed. Wires ran to the bed from the monitor, and from other machinery as well. On the bed lay a fair-haired man, with an eiderdown, much like the one in her room, pulled up to his chin. An IV feeding bag hung over him and he had a breathing tube in his nose. The eyes of the fair-haired man were open. They gazed at the ceiling. It was a white ceiling, separated from the white walls by a gilded molding. A spider web clung to the underside of the molding. A fat spider, green in the light of the monitor, stood motionless on the wall.

  Nina stepped into the room, moved toward the bed. She made no effort to be quiet now, but the fair-haired man continued to gaze at the ceiling. Nina stood beside the bed and looked down at him. His face was very thin, but it was a fine face, with blue eyes as beautiful as Mrs. Standish’s, but softer.

  “Happy?”

  The blue eyes gazed at the ceiling.

  37

  Dying was just like living, full of surprises. When he thought he finally had dying down to a system, a functioning arrangement made up of the in-crowd—components one, two and three—and the outsiders, the walking talkers—Mother, Fritz, Dr. Robert—who should appear but a stranger in the night, saying: “Happy?”

  The stranger was in his sights. A green stranger, but he knew that that was because of the night. Nights were green when you were dying. Just another surprise.

  The stranger had beautiful dark eyes. There was something familiar about those eyes, full of powerful, painful emotions, barely under control. Or was he reading too much in them? Probably. He had never been a good judge of things like that, and why would he be any better now, under the control of Dr. Robert and his drugs?

  Lobsters? Did the green woman have something to do with lobsters? There was a scandal. PCBs. Had she poisoned the ocean with PCBs? He didn’t think so. The woman was still looking down at him.

  Say something.

  “I’m Nina.” The woman spoke, almost on cue. She had a lovely voice. “Can you hear me? Your mother says you can.”

  And then he remembered—not the lobster story, but the kidnapping story: I want my baby back very much. How sharp his memory was! But why not? Memory was the sole task of component number three.

  The dark eyes watched him. They were so different from the eyes of Mother, Fritz, Dr. Robert: they hid nothing. Or if they hid something, they did it so cleverly he didn’t know, which was just as good. Or was it? Damn. His mind was wandering now, spinning uselessly like a motor when the gears were stripped. Don’t spin. Look at the woman. A special woman, that was obvious. And one who had spoken to him at the very moment he was hoping she would. A suitable woman, Mother? That would depend on her background. He gazed into her dark eyes but could tell nothing about the woman’s background.

  Talk to me.

  But now the woman didn’t speak. She looked down on him for a few more moments: they were gazing into each other’s eyes, weren’t they, like lovers or something? And then she backed away, out of the circle of his sight, beyond his horizon. He heard her footsteps moving away, but he didn’t hear the door opening or closing. Instead he heard paper rustling.

  Nina crossed Happy Standish’s room. She examined three framed photographs hanging over a desk. They were all of Happy Standish, so much healthier that he scarcely resembled the man on the bed. Photograph One: a young long-haired Happy Standish in a Dartmouth sweater, kneeling in the front row of a soccer team picture. Photograph Two: a slightly older Happy Standish, with slightly shorter hair, serving a tennis ball, the racquet in his left hand. Photograph Three: a still-older Happy Standish in evening dress, smiling at the camera, his hands on a piano keyboard.

  Nina opened a closet. It was full of clothes: winter suits, summer suits, tweed jackets, shirts, ties. And shoes: tennis, jogging, hiking, climbing, boating, wingtips, penny loafers, tassel loafers, shoes still in their boxes. Nina picked up a box of Rockport walking shoes. Happy was an 11B.

  On a shelf above the clothing lay a file folder. Nina looked inside. It contained clippings from newspapers and magazines—Billboard, Melody Maker, The Boston Phoenix, Toronto Life, The Atlanta Constitution, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Vancouver Sun, The Independent—all under the byline Hiram Standish, Jr. The last, a one-column report on a festival of North African music, had appeared in The Village Voice, datelined Aix-en-Provence, July 12 of the previous year, almost eighteen months before.

  Happy had written about Sonny Rollins, Joe King Carrasco, Doc Watson, Etta James, Jay McShann, Dwight Yoakum, Linda Ronstadt, Lou Reed, Red Rodney, the McGarrigle Sisters, the Everly Brothers. There were about two dozen clippings in the folder. Nina wondered if
that was Happy’s entire output. She replaced the folder, closed the closet door, glanced at the monitor. The green line rose to a peak, fell, rose, fell, ran off the edge, reappeared on the other side. Nina returned to the bedside.

  The dark-eyed woman came back inside his world. Nina. She glanced at the respirator machine, the IV bag, him.

  Talk to me.

  The woman spoke, but quietly, more to herself than to him. “I like Etta James too,” she said. She was facing him but her eyes were on something far away, something that made her anxious.

  Go on.

  The woman focused her eyes on him. This time she raised her voice to normal conversational level. “I saw your clippings in the closet.”

  She had understood at once that his eyes couldn’t follow her around the room! It had taken Mother weeks; sometimes she still forgot.

  The woman bit her lip. It was a soft, finely shaped lip. Luscious. “I guess I shouldn’t have opened it. It’s your closet.” She sighed. “God, I wish you could talk.” She closed her eyes. “What a thing to say. But …” The faraway look returned to her eyes.

  Go on.

  The woman shook her head—she had thick dark hair, rich and healthy—as though trying to dislodge some troubling thought, and her eyes cleared. “But … if Percival didn’t deal with the institute and your mother didn’t either, then it must have been you. You’re the third member of the board. Right?”

  The board? Oh yes, I sign things, from time to time. But what was she talking about?

  “Christ, listen to me—‘Right.’ I’m losing it.” Tears rose in the woman’s eyes.

  Don’t cry.

  But she did cry. Tears spilled over her lower eyelids and ran down her face. He noticed for the first time a bandage on her cheek, and a bruise around it.

  “But I need those records.” The woman’s voice broke. She dabbed at her face with the back of her sleeve. “I need to know who the donor was. It’s all I can think of, don’t you see? What other possibility is there?” She looked down on him with her wet dark eyes, as though waiting for an answer, treating him like an undamaged human being. She waited, waited for an answer.

  And the answer came to Happy, all at once and awful. God. God. He wanted to scream. He needed to scream. He tried with all his might to scream. He commanded himself to raise an arm, to sit up, to speak, to scream. Scream. Scream. But he could do nothing. He was in a frenzy, more out of control than he had ever been in his life. But it didn’t show.

  The woman smiled a weak smile. “This isn’t very fair to you,” she said.

  Don’t go. Keep talking. She understood him. Happy had the wild thought that they were meant for each other, that everything was somehow right.

  The woman, Nina, took a deep breath and let it out. Her gaze moved away from him, to the wall behind his head. He could just make out the spider, testing the air with one raised leg. Then she, Nina, did something that astonished him: she went to the head of the bed, stood on the edge of the frame, raised her hand high and smacked the spider. Just like that. And she, Nina, stepped down and wiped off the remains on her pants. It was that easy: a quick smack and the spider was gone, after so long.

  “I don’t like those fat ones,” she said. “They bite.” She leaned over him. “Well,” she said, and brushed the hair off his forehead and laid her hand there for a moment, a soft warm hand: “goodbye.” And then the soft warm hand was gone, and so was she.

  Nina. He wished he could say it out loud.

  Nina walked back to the pretty guest room in the north wing of Mrs. Standish’s house and lay on the bed. But she didn’t sleep. At first light she rose, put on her shoes and went downstairs to the kitchen. A man with a black bag was sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading the comics.

  “Hi,” he said. “Are you the guest?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Dr. Robert. Mrs. Standish has gone for the day, but she said to help yourself to breakfast.” He turned the page. There were more comics on the other side.

  “Are you Happy’s doctor?” Nina asked.

  “One of many,” said Dr. Robert.

  “What happened to him?”

  Dr. Robert looked up. “Don’t you know?”

  “No.”

  “A scuba diving accident. Negligence, really, on the part of the resort. Down in the Bahamas. They gave him bad air. Caused an embolism in the brain stem.”

  “Is there any hope?”

  “Hope?”

  “Of improvement?”

  “What sort of improvement?”

  “That he’ll be able to walk. Talk. Feed himself.”

  “Oh no,” said Dr. Robert. “Nothing like that. We’re just trying to keep him alive right now. He’s got pneumonia.” Dr. Robert sipped his coffee.

  Nina put on her coat and went outside. The sky was blue, the air still and cold. Deep snow covered everything except the driveway, which had been plowed down to the pavement. In the distance she saw a tall white-haired man wrapping plastic around a fruit tree. Perhaps the servants had returned.

  Nina followed the driveway to the gate. It was open. She went through and found her car still parked by the side of the lane. The lane had been plowed too, and someone had dug her out of the snowbank.

  She got inside and drove back to New York. The roads were clear. Nina’s mind had nothing to do but recall the feel of Happy Standish’s fine, soft hair, and his unblinking gaze, blue and serious.

  Nina parked close to Suze’s loft. She let herself in, called, “Suze,” but no one was home, sat on Suze’s bed. She phoned Delgado, who wasn’t in. Nina left a message: “Tell her the Human Fertility Institute was owned by the Standish Foundation. Maybe she should find out who owned the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center.” Then she lay down.

  It was dark outside when Nina woke. She lay motionless on Suze’s bed. Then she remembered her six o’clock appointment with Bernie Muller, the Australian TV producer. She glanced at her watch. 5:15. Nina got up, showered, dressed, went outside to her rental car and drove uptown.

  Grand Central Station.

  38

  Brock McGillivray was a head taller than anyone else on Fifth Avenue. Following him was easy. He strode along briskly, keeping to the edge of the sidewalk, sometimes stepping into the street, his dramatic coattails flapping behind him. He never looked back.

  Matthias followed.

  It was cold and getting colder. Matthias zipped his windbreaker up to the top and stuck his hands in the pockets. Night had fallen, but it hadn’t brought darkness. The sky glowed in dusty greens, yellows, oranges, pinks, like a colossal chemistry experiment gone wrong. Everyone—the shoppers with their Christmas parcels, the workers with their briefcases, the tourists with their cameras, the homeless with their cardboard domiciles—looked grim and ghastly. A ragged man with a bottle muttered, “Merry fucking Christmas,” as Matthias went by.

  “You said it,” Matthias muttered right back.

  The man was unused to this response, or perhaps to any. “I said it,” he shouted after Matthias in fury. “I said it. And that makes you a thief and a robber.”

  Brock crossed Fifth Avenue and headed east on Forty-second Street. Matthias kept him in sight, but that didn’t occupy his mind. His mind dealt with what he was seeing. There were homeless people in the Bahamas. Nottage, he supposed, was homeless. Somehow it wasn’t the same. Then it occurred to him that he too would soon be homeless. The thought awoke something murderous inside him. He walked faster, closing the distance between himself and Brock. Brock strode on, never looking back.

  Brock entered Grand Central Station, still moving quickly. Unseeing, he went through the dirty waiting room packed with ragged, defeated people. The sight of them huddled in such an imperial structure reminded Matthias of a guest in the bar at Zombie Bay saying that New York was now a Dickensian place. It didn’t seem Dickensian to Matthias: Dickens, in his recollection, always opted for happy endings, or at least bittersweet, and how could that be a believa
ble expectation here?

  Brock crossed the main concourse and went down a broad staircase. There were few people on the stairs; Matthias hung back. He reached the bottom in time to see Brock avoid two medics who were trying to lift a bleeding man onto a stretcher, and enter the Oyster Bar. Matthias had been there once with Marilyn. She had sent back her oysters Rockefeller. He was trying to remember why when he saw that Brock had stopped inside the entrance and was turning around. Matthias stepped behind the ambulance men.

  “Don’ fuck with me,” the bleeding man was saying.

  “We’re not fucking with you, pal,” said one of the medics. “We’re just trying to get you to the hospital.”

  “Don’ want no fuckin’ hospital,” the man said. “I’m sick.” Then he saw Matthias crouching by the wall. The sight displeased him. “What’s your problem, chief?”

  “Oysters Rockefeller,” said Matthias.

  “Oysters Rockefeller?” said the bleeding man with interest.

  “Just get on the stretcher,” said the other medic. “It’s six o’clock. I want to go home.”

  The medics tried to lift the bleeding man. He resisted. Through a screen of arms and legs, Matthias saw Brock standing inside the entrance of the Oyster Bar, looking back down the hall. Brock checked his watch and frowned. He made a fist and smacked it lightly against his open palm. He checked his watch. He made another fist and smacked it a little harder. The medics shoved the bleeding man on the stretcher and hoisted him up. He rolled over, fell face down on the floor, lay still.

  “God Almighty,” said the medic who wanted to go home.

  Then a woman came around the corner from the stairs, hesitated for a moment, and walked past the ambulance workers, the bleeding man and Matthias. Matthias didn’t know her, had no reason to look at her twice, but he did. She had dark hair and dark eyes and something on her mind. Matthias glimpsed all of that, but it didn’t take on significance until he looked at Brock and saw the frown vanishing from his face. Brock replaced it with a big, friendly smile, bigger and friendlier than any smile Matthias had seen him give before. He came forward, holding out his hand. “Nina?” he said.