A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  In the waiting room, she sat next to him, a paperback copy of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in her lap. “You know, I never got around to reading that,” he said.

  “This is what made me want to go into neurology,” she said. “I have to say, I’m loathing it this time. All this bogus compassion. And his bogus beard.”

  “Since when have you been so fierce?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just in a shitty mood. Let’s worry about you.”

  “Ah, that’s a young man’s game. And what are you in a shitty mood about?”

  “About half the time,” she said. “See? You’re not the only one who can be evasive.”

  —

  As instructed, he had gone without breakfast; coming up out of the anesthesia, he vomited bile. On the drive back out of town, Karen pulled into the quilted-metal diner on the bypass and helped him up the three steps. Really no need: they were dotted with ice-melting pellets, and he felt remarkably normal, considering the morning he’d had.

  Karen ate an omelette while he drank coffee and studied the map of Greece on his place mat: a country in the shape of a splatter. Islands called the Sporades? He had never heard of them. Must this not be where “sporadic” came from?

  “You sure you don’t want some rice pudding?” she said. “You wouldn’t have to chew. You should eat something.”

  He shook his head.

  “Here, at least take my jelly. You need to get your blood sugar up. We have apple or—let’s see. Grape.”

  “Ah. The Puritan or the Mediterranean. This will tell you something about me.” He peeled back the seal on the tiny oblong tub and picked up his spoon. “Out, vile jelly!” It tasted sweet, but not particularly of apple. He swallowed without letting it linger in his mouth; he still didn’t dare feel with his tongue where the teeth had been. “Martine and I were going to spend the summer in Crete.”

  “Do you know this is the first time I’ve heard you say her name?”

  He put down his spoon. “Do you know,” he said, “that you have a gift for making yourself offensive?”

  “Donald, why are you being so ugly to me?”

  “Perhaps that’s my gift,” he said.

  Back in the passenger seat, the inside of the Jeep looked familiar but reversed, like a mirror world. Karen waited for a Sleepy’s truck to pass, then pulled into traffic. “Listen, I want you to stay down at the house tonight. Gloria and I can take the guest room.” She meant Claudia’s room; Nathan’s had been redone as a study for Martine.

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  “Then I’ll bring a sleeping bag up.”

  “This is foolish. I—Watch out!”

  “I see him.” She hit the horn as a minivan seemed to be nosing into them from the left lane. “You don’t even have a phone up there.”

  “For what purpose?” he said.

  “I’ll let you think about that.” She shifted down to pass the Sleepy’s truck. “God, I want one of these,” she said. “It makes me feel like a real lezzie.”

  “Do you consider yourself not a real lesbian?”

  “Well.” She looked in the rearview mirror and swung back in front of the truck. “I’ve been with men. It’s not the same.”

  “I’ve been with men,” he said, “if it comes to that.”

  “You?”

  “Well. A man. I found it pretty much the same.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, back when I was willing to try anything.” He had told Karen only that he’d been beaten and robbed.

  “So,” she said, “this must explain why our bath salts keep running low. I was picturing you splashing around with some loose woman.”

  “That’s a distasteful picture.” What they’d done to his mouth was beginning to hurt. “Listen, I need to fill this prescription they gave me. I don’t suppose you’d go into Rite Aid for me?” Little chance that they might accuse Kaspar Hauser of impersonating Donald Blakey to fill a prescription for codeine, but nevertheless.

  “Of course.” She put on the turn signal. “So who would have thought. No wonder we get along so well. Both galloping bisexuals.”

  “Hardly that,” he said. “Unless you mean off into the sunset.”

  She pulled into the parking lot and began prowling for a space. “Now I’m supposed to tell you that you’re not old,” she said. “Aren’t we tired of this dance?” She glanced over at the Staples store. “You know, it used to be that all I had to do was see this place and I’d feel myself blushing.”

  “That’s a lovely stage,” he said.

  “Stage,” she said. “That’s a lovely word.”

  —

  Neither Nathan nor Claudia had come to his wedding; he’d thought they’d perhaps have been tempted by an August weekend on the Vineyard. At Martine’s insistence, he invited them for Thanksgiving that year; it was Claudia’s first semester at Bryn Mawr and Nathan’s junior year at UC Santa Cruz. Martine had reserved a fresh-killed turkey and made the dressing with truffles that had just come in at the market on University Avenue. The wine was a Riesling she had discovered at Vin Ordinaire and was now having a vogue among the faculty.

  He and Nathan had spent the morning in the woods. Nathan felled five trees with the chainsaw, and they took turns cutting them up and splitting the logs with the maul. As the weak sun rose higher, Nathan took off his denim jacket, then his plaid shirt. He was broad across the chest and shoulders, narrow at the waist and hips; as he raised the maul high and brought it down again and again, sweat darkened his black T-shirt in an inverted triangle between his shoulder blades. It had been clear since Nathan was in seventh grade that he would never go to medical school. Now, as he looked at his son’s strong body, this seemed perfectly right.

  Late in the afternoon, the kids came downstairs flushed and redeyed. Nathan, he saw, had not changed out of his blue jeans and sweaty T-shirt; you could smell his rank odor through the scent of roasting turkey. Claudia slouched next to him at the far end of the sofa. Martine opened a second bottle of wine—they’d killed the first before the kids made their appearance—and brought out a tray of roasted chestnuts. She held it out to Claudia, who shook her head. Nathan took a handful and asked if they could see what was on TV. Martine gave him a look that would have quelled one of her students but handed him the clicker and went to take the bird out of the oven. He started going at the shell of a chestnut with his teeth, staring between his knees at a football game. Claudia had got hold of the scalpel they’d used as a letter opener when they were kids and sat slicing parallel cuts into the flesh of a green olive.

  Martine came back in with a third bottle of wine. She broke the cork, tried again and finally had to force it down into the bottle with one leg of the nutcracker. “Ten minutes, boys and girls. Claudia? Would you care for more wine?”

  “Would I care for it? I mean, what does that even mean?”

  “Somebody’s losing her shit,” Nathan said. “Listen, can me and Claud carve the turkey?”

  “I suppose,” Martine said. “I’m a little impaired myself. I’ll show you where we keep the knives.”

  “Same place as always, right?” Nathan stood up. “In the knife thing? Come on, Claud. Bring your scalpel. You can give it a hysterectomy.”

  They went into the kitchen. Martine said, “I wish I had some.”

  “Some what?” he said.

  “Couldn’t you smell it on them? Maybe they’d share a little.”

  “They’re probably just ill at ease,” he said. “I suspect Nathan has experimented some, as all—”

  He heard a putt-putting noise out in the kitchen, guessed what it was and burst through the door to see Nathan wielding the chainsaw and Claudia, index fingers pressed into her ears, laughing. Nathan revved the saw to a deafening snarl, white smoke belched into the room, then the giant turkey twisted on the platter and flew apart, splattering meat and stuffing onto the wall Martine had redone in blue milk paint.

  Now the saw was idling ag
ain, and Martine was standing in the doorway. She walked over to the counter, set her wineglass down and said, “You know, you’re absolutely fucking right. We should just make this a performance piece.” She picked up a severed drumstick and hurled it at the window, breaking a pane of the original glass whose waves and bubbles Angela had particularly admired. Nathan stared at her, then shut the saw down. “Wait a second, wait a second,” she said. “I’ve still got its dick.” She reached into the garbage and came up with the turkey’s neck, which she’d boiled along with the giblets to make the gravy, squeezed it in her fist and jammed it against the front of her black velveteen slacks. “Get down and suck it,” she said to her husband.

  Claudia said, “I’m afraid.” She began to weep. “Daddy?”

  Martine let the turkey neck drop and put an arm around her shoulder. The greasy hand left a mark on Claudia’s silk blouse. “Sweetie, we’re all afraid,” she said. “Can we just agree that I’m shit and make this a good day for your father?”

  After they’d all pitched in to clean up the mess, they called Domino’s and played Scrabble: Martine and Nathan against him and Claudia. He put on Sketches of Spain, and the others sat on the sofa and smoked some of Nathan’s marijuana. He sat in his leather armchair and put his hand up when the cigarette came around to him, then watched the three of them get quiet. At one point he thought he saw Martine put a hand on Nathan’s thigh, but by then he’d been sipping Cognac for hours.

  The next day, he and Martine drove them to the train. They all decided that they must do this again over Christmas. Martine hugged Claudia, whose hands hesitated and then rested on the back of Martine’s coat. But something must have been said on the way to New York. Or perhaps visiting their mother had restored their sense of perspective. At any rate, he next saw Nathan and Claudia only at their college graduations and their weddings, from all of which Martine absented herself.

  At Claudia’s wedding, in the cloisters at Bryn Mawr, he saw that Angela had cut her hair and dyed the ends—there was a term for this. She’d gotten a desk job with UNICEF after burning out at Calvary Hospital. They sat with Nathan between them, and he noticed that she wasn’t wearing a ring; Claudia had told him that the marriage to the real-estate broker was in trouble.

  He watched Claudia and Giancarlo perform their waltz; the groom was the better dancer, as Fred Astaire was said to be better than Ginger Rogers, though wasn’t there now a revisionist view? He instructed himself to curb his mistrust; it came of having watched all those old movies in which American girls were pestered by European hand-kissers. This Giancarlo seemed solid enough: a visiting professor of economics at Wharton. What he’d wanted with an American college girl, however serious-minded—of course her dress put that on display for all the men to see.

  The band struck up “I Won’t Dance,” which argued some wit, he thought. The floor filled up. He held out his hand to Angela and she came to him, a kindness he did not deserve.

  “Do you think they’ll be happy?” he said.

  “They’re going to live in Rome,” she said. “What’s not to be happy?”

  “And how are you?” He put his right hand on her waist (he could feel a stiff undergarment) and fox-trotted her toward the middle of the floor, the tips of her breasts brushing his jacket front.

  “Truth to tell”—she showed teeth in what must have been meant as a smile—“I’m much better alone.”

  —

  It had been dark for hours when he heard the bell ring down the path. Damn that woman. He was sipping Talisker, for the taste, really, and reading A Dance to the Music of Time. He got up and opened the door: not Karen but Gloria, wearing a backpack and carrying a sausagelike nylon bag. “No,” he said.

  “Karen said you’d give me an argument. She got called in to the hospital.”

  “That’s never good,” he said. “You’re welcome to come in for a drink.”

  “Except you’re blocking the door. It’s cold out here.”

  “Forgive me.” He stepped aside. “I just didn’t want there to be a misunderstanding.”

  She set the sleeping bag down, wriggled out of her backpack and unzipped her down vest.

  He fetched another glass.

  “Here, I can get that.” She took it from his hand and poured herself a couple of fingers, then added a dribble of water from the jug. “My husband used to drink Macallan.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d been married. Have my chair.”

  “I’m okay.” She sat on the floor, her back against his bed. “Yeah, five years. Amazing, huh? My wedding dress was a size six.”

  He poured himself another finger and sat back down in the Morris chair. He couldn’t decide whether he liked her throaty voice.

  “So how’s the mouth?” she said. “Karen tells me they went in with earthmovers.”

  “I don’t think there’s going to be a problem.”

  “Meaning there is a problem?”

  The pain was still there, but at such a distance that it didn’t seem to apply to him. “I mean that it’s fine,” he said.

  “So are we going to fight about this?”

  “About?”

  “Me staying.”

  “I don’t believe I have the energy,” he said. “If you do stay, could I ask that you simply keep quiet? Without offense. I just don’t feel up to carrying on a conversation.”

  “Don’t worry about me, I have thick skin. Thick everything.” She put a hand to her belly and made the flesh shake.

  He looked away. “Make yourself comfortable, if that’s possible. There are books here.”

  “I brought mine.” She reached for her backpack. “Just tell me when it’s lights-out.”

  After a while, he felt the room begin to cool, and as if she felt it too—well, she did, of course—she got up and fed the stove. He clicked on Deal to start another game. The drugs he’d taken at six thirty were wearing off, and he took another codeine for the pain, another Dilaudid—because he was addicted, he supposed, though this was hardly the desperate condition they wanted you to believe—and an Ambien to get to sleep. If he wasn’t careful, one of these mornings he would fail to wake up. (If he continued to be careful, then it would be some other morning.) He lost, clicked on Deal again, studied the array, then moved a red two onto a black three and dragged the king into the empty space.

  —

  He seemed to think someone had hold of his upper arm, guiding him toward what must be the bed. At one point someone had said, “Are you all right?” There had been a noise, some sort of disturbance. There was a connection among these things, or if not a connection, at least a sequence. But such considerations existed far outside him.

  —

  He opened his eyes and it was daylight, and wide Gloria had been replaced by narrow Karen, fitting a paper filter into the coffeemaker. His mouth was hurting; his back too, as if he’d thrown it out again. Could time possibly have gone backward, to that episode with the boy? But there was a rule against that. The cabin stank of whiskey. He closed his eyes and the negative afterimage of the window appeared, complete with the tree branches outside. He followed it, now here, now here, now here, until it faded, then opened his eyes and burned it in again.

  He woke up the next time to the smell of coffee. He ran his tongue along his lower lip: it smarted, felt fat, and he tasted blood.

  He woke up again and Karen was sitting on the bed.

  “Say again?” she said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten thirty. So how much of this have you been taking?” She rattled the vial of Dilaudid in his face. “You scared the living shit out of Gloria.”

  “Where is Gloria?”

  “Where she always is. Berating some stock boy.” She got up and set the pills on the table. “Could you drink a little coffee?”

  He turned on his side—what in God’s name had he done to his back?—to fold the pillow double against the headboard and watched her fill a cup and pour in milk.

  “Thank yo
u.” She had put sugar in, though somehow he hadn’t seen her do it. “So. Am I being called to account for my sins?”

  “I’m not the Puritan,” she said. “You have a medical problem.”

  “Granting it’s a problem. That’s your assumption.”

  “I think Kaspar Hauser could validate my assumption. If we could reach him in the Black Forest.”

  “Ah, at least someone appreciates my little jokes.”

  “I’m surprised you haven’t been busted,” she said. “How stupid do you think people are?” She sat down on the bed again. “Apparently you passed out and fell into your keyboard. And I guess you smacked the floor pretty hard. Let me see you.” She rested a finger on his lower lip and pulled it down gently. He hissed in. “Not terrible,” she said. “I made some oatmeal. In the microwave.” Point of information, evidently. “You haven’t been eating.”

  “I need to take something,” he said. “I hurt everywhere.”

  She shook her head. “Not on my watch. I don’t doubt that you hurt. We’re going to get you to someone who treats these things.”

  He worked his elbows to get himself sitting up. “Oh? By whose authority? I’ve had about enough of you, I can tell you that.”

  “You’ll feel better,” she said.

  “You’re damn right I will. I want you out of my house. The both of you. You and your fat lesbian whatever-she-is.”

  She looked at him and got up off the bed. “Good,” she said. “A little honesty.” She took her leather jacket off the peg. “I have to say, you were a wonderful teacher. Beyond that—I don’t know, I guess I’m glad to know there wasn’t anything beyond that.” She wound the scarf around her neck and put the vials of pills into her jacket pocket. “You have an appointment for one forty-five. I’ll give you some privacy to get yourself cleaned up.”