Stories of Mary Gordon

by Mary Gordon

  “What happened with the rich American?” I asked.

  “I went to America with him, but it didn't work out. So I made my way to Aspen. I'm a great skier, of course everyone in Grenoble is, and I got a fabulous job on the ski patrol. With a lot of good tips from lonely widows. That's where I met Penny. She was a waitress there and we got married for the green card. We were great friends, but the fucking was no good. I don't know why, because we really liked each other.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “A Cuban guy brought me to Miami. I learned bathroom lighting. Then I met George. I went home with him because I thought he was rich, but even when I found out he doesn't have shit, I stayed with him. I guess we're in love. Maybe that means I'm getting old. I don't feel old, but I could never support myself by my cock anymore. That's over.”

  “Well, it's too dangerous nowadays,” I said.

  “What do you think about the waiter? Would he like to go home with you or me?”

  “Probably with someone his own age,” I said.

  “Are all your books depressing?” asked Jean-Claude.

  “I think I write about life as it is.”

  “Why would you do that when what everyone wants is to forget about it? Why don't you write something funny? Something romantic. Something about the waiter who meets his long-lost father, the oil sheik, who's dying and is going to leave him ten million dollars, so he buys a house for himself and this older guy who's the love of his life.”

  “That's not the kind of story I can do.”

  “Anyone can do any kind of story if they want to,” he said.

  My brother called for the check. He and I fought over it. Jean-Claude looked at the palm trees, or the waiter, or the boys, bare-chested, roller-blading down the middle of the street.

  On our way to the car, my eye fell on a dress in a store window. Gray wool, sleeveless, a jacket trimmed in Persian lamb.

  “Remember Grandma's Persian lamb coat?” I said to my brother.

  “You must try it on,” Jean-Claude said. “It will be very elegant for you.”

  He was right. I did feel elegant, although it seemed odd to be trying on gray wool when, fifteen yards away, people were dressed in almost nothing, in neon colors, their bare arms and legs absorbing the last of the October sun.

  The dress was more than I could afford. But I'd been working hard, and no one else I knew was going to treat me to anything in the foreseeable future. I shook off the self-pity that was ready to drown my sense of well-being about how good I looked in the dress. I looked at myself carefully from all angles, partly hoping in one of them I wouldn't look good, so I wouldn't have to spend the money, or take the risk on so much pleasure, partly praying that when I turned I'd still look as good as I had a few seconds before.

  “Magnificent,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Terrific, honey,” said my brother.

  Jean-Claude came by with a black velvet-and-silk scarf, velvet flowers embossed on the silk plainness. He wound it around my neck. The dress, already a success, was transformed into something entirely other; it turned from a success into a triumph. I looked at the price. The scarf was $300.

  “That's higher than I can go,” I said, handing the scarf back to Jean-Claude, trying to keep my spirits from being dashed.

  I was happy with the dress, and Ted kept telling me I was doing the right thing, the dress was a luxury, but it was clearly worth it; the scarf might make me feel bad in the end. I know I'd be happy when I got back to New York, but at that moment all I could do was mourn the scarf.

  “You two go on ahead,” Jean-Claude said to me and my brother.

  He caught up with us in half a block.

  “So,” he said. “You're happy with your dress.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  “But you're sad about the scarf.”

  “Well, it doesn't really matter.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, and threw a small bag at me.

  I opened the bag. The scarf was wrapped in aqua-colored tissue.

  “Jean-Claude,” I said. “Don't be ridiculous. You can't afford this.”

  “Baby,” Ted said. “It's a lovely gesture, but you can't afford it. You're up to your ass in debt as it is.”

  “Of course I am, you idiot. Of course I can't afford it. Do you think I'm an idiot like you? I didn't pay for it.”

  “You stole it?”

  “What do you take me for? I've been many things, but not a thief. No, I didn't steal it. All I did was tell him that you and Ted were married but what you didn't know was that this would be the last shopping you'd do for some time because Ted was leaving you for me tomorrow. That I was terribly guilty, but we couldn't live without each other. So I told the guy who owned the store that he should give you the scarf because your life was about to be ruined, that I would buy it for you, but I had no money, the money was all Ted's, and he was a monster but I loved him and what could I do?”

  “So he gave you the scarf?”

  “Of course. For a while I was trying to decide whether to tell the story as I did or to say that you and I were running away, that you were leaving Ted for me because you loved me and what could I do. I had to figure out whether the guy was straight or not, and I had to do it quickly because the way I told the story depended on it. I have trouble telling which way these guys from the Islands go. But I liked his ass and I'm usually not into straight men. I decided he was one of us. Thank God I was right. I knew everything was riding on my telling the right story.”

  “lean-Claude,” I said. “You must bring the scarf right back.”

  “Of course I won't,” he said. “Why should I? I earned it. And everyone gets something they want. You get the scarf. The guy from the Islands gets something to think about, and a warm feeling inside, like he's the Good Samaritan. I get to give you the gift I want for you and can't afford. Only Ted didn't make out so well. But, what's the difference, he's got love and money. Life is good for him. And one day, you'll write something and Ted will be the hero of the story and you'll let everybody know how wonderful he is. Then he'll be paid back for not looking so great in my story. And one day, you'll write something about me.”

  “lean-Claude,” I said. “No one would believe me.”

  “Of course they will, if you do your job.”

  When we got home, Ted put my bags and laptop into the spare room, the one that looked out on the golf course. I said I needed not to be disturbed. I put the scarf around my neck, sat at the desk, and wrote all night. I didn't move until the sun came up, a garish red over the flat, prosperous green where soon real humans would appear, to my astonishment, alive beyond the rim of my invention.

  Sick in London

  Paul collapsed.

  She had heard of people collapsing but she had never seen it, and never before had a picture formed in her mind. Collapsed: like an umbrella or a beach chair. The end of uprightness. The end of use.

  They had been walking in Hyde Park. It was late summer; August twenty-third. A perfect day. “It's a perfect day, isn't it?” everyone had said: the desk clerk in the hotel, the waiter who had served their breakfast. The blueness of the sky had delighted them. It wasn't like an American blue sky. Clarity was not everything; there was a hint of white underpainting, nothing metallic, a softness, and a sense of water. Wasn't sky vapor, really, she had thought, and wasn't vapor really water? That was the sort of thing she would say to Paul, and mostly he was amused but sometimes she suspected he was secretly appalled by the depths of her scientific ignorance.

  In place of knowledge of the physical world she had language. He couldn't string a sentence together in anything but English. In college she had minored in Spanish and still had what could pass for fluency, and she could make her way in French and Italian. She'd never been to Portugal but she imagined that if they traveled there, she'd be able to get them through. But this trip was to England. A trip to look at famous gardens. A trip to a landscape that did not make heroic demands on her imaginati
on.

  They'd landed in London on a Thursday night, and moved into a small, pleasant hotel that had been recommended by a colleague of Andrea's. She had used their frequent-flier miles to upgrade to business class. She wanted to pamper Paul; he'd been working too hard, he had been told. Possibly a beach vacation was what he would have preferred, but he seemed pleased with the idea of touring English gardens. Two weeks, starting in Yorkshire, then proceeding to the Lake District and after that Dorset and then Kent.

  Paul was thirty-four and Andrea was thirty-one. He was a chemical engineer; she worked in the human services department of the same company that employed him. She liked her job, or as she would have said, she liked it well enough, and she was good at it: fitting people to jobs, putting out small brushfires of interoffice conflict. She particularly liked the people she worked with: Jeff Mortimer, the head of the department, though he was sometimes disorganized and often promised things he could never hope to deliver on. And Anne, Anne Webster, ten years older than Andrea, her immediate supervisor. They worked together wonderfully. Hand in glove, Jeff said, and sometimes when they'd worked overtime filing a complicated report they'd go out together for a drink, high-five each other, and after they'd clinked glasses Anne would say, “Are we a fabulous team or are we a fabulous team?” And Andrea would answer: “We are a fabulous team.”

  There was no word for it, she reckoned, thinking of Jeff and Anne, this thing between good colleagues, people who worked well together. Was it wrong to call it love? If it was love, it wasn't like any of the other feelings she had thought of as love. She had loved her parents and her sisters; she had loved the friends she had kept since girlhood. Certainly she had loved Paul, whom she had met in sophomore year in college: not her first lover, but, she told herself, her only real one. What she felt for Anne and Jeff was not like any of that. And yet she found that when she was away from them, on weekends, or on vacation as she was now, she thought of them often and happily. And although she was happy, on weekends, on vacations, to sleep late, not to feel so rushed or pressed to accomplish things— both ordinary domestic tasks and more difficult professional ones— she always looked forward to opening the door of the office on Monday morning, knowing they would be there every time. When she and Paul talked about having a family, they agreed that Andrea wouldn't work while the children were small. And although she couldn't honestly say she was very attached to her work as work, she knew she would miss working beside Jeff and Anne. And she wondered: wasn't that a kind of love?

  She and Paul planned to begin trying to get pregnant after they came home from vacation. Then they changed their mind: they'd begin on their holiday. It would be fun to say their baby had been conceived in England, on the holiday that they had spent looking at gardens. She wondered if they'd be able to pinpoint what garden they'd come from seeing, or been about to see, when the baby was conceived. Paul had told her it would be impossible to pinpoint the moment so precisely. “Not if we're having the kind of good time I plan,” he'd said.

  And then he had collapsed.

  It had been a lovely morning, the proper beginning of their holiday. They had made love for the first time ever without protection. Thinking of it, the word seemed odd: protection. Protection from what? From life? But it was true, sometimes it wasn't life you wanted, sometimes you wanted life kept back. Or maybe it wasn't that there was just one kind of life, that it was a mistake to use the same word for the child they hoped to bring into the world and a bacterium that could wipe out a population.

  She was unused to the feeling of Paul's semen inside her. She was afraid of washing, in case she might wash it out. She wanted it to work; next year at this time, she wanted to be a mother.

  They both had a full English breakfast— eggs, sausage, what they called bacon but what seemed to her a greasy limp unsatisfying slice. Then they walked to Hyde Park, a five-minute walk from their hotel.

  Soon after they'd gone through the gates, they passed fountains with statues of mythological figures whose identities she could not place. Nor did she know the name for the stone beasts pressed into the pavement, on top of which were raised letters proclaiming that this walk was a memorial to the dead princess Diana. She thought of all the things she didn't know the names for. She thought of Princess Di, who was considered not very bright. Andrea had had no interest in her while she was alive, but when she died, Andrea felt her loneliness; the little girl deserted by her mother, the young wife who thought her beauty would keep her safe. She wondered if Princess Diana's most frequent emotion had been disappointment. And she thought of what a common thing it was to be disappointed. It was a rare thing to reach middle age not disappointed. She was still young, thirty-one, and she could say, certainly, she had not been disappointed. Looking at Paul as they walked in the mild August air, she hoped that she would never be.

  It was just as she was having these thoughts that Paul had collapsed.

  He was carrying a tray with two cups of coffee on it and a packet of cookies called Bronte biscuits, which she'd asked him to buy because the name pleased her. And then, wordlessly, he was on the ground. The first thing she noticed was that the coffee had soaked into his trousers just above his knee; she was worried he would be burnt; she was worried that his trousers would be spoilt. And then, as if it were a gesture she'd been carrying around with her in a bag she'd forgotten she had, she put her hands to her face. “Somebody help me,” she cried. Then people gathered. And then, in her memory, everything was a series of whirling intersecting circles.

  Someone rolled up a sweater and put it under Paul's head, and then there was a siren and the police asking her questions and then the ambulance, which she wasn't allowed to ride in. He'd opened his eyes as he was being put in the ambulance and said, “Well, Andy, I've made a mess.” She was most frightened then because he had never called her Andy.

  The police drove her to the hospital in their car. She didn't even ask the name of the hospital and later, when she was with him in the emergency room, she tried to find signs on the wall that would let her know the name of the place where she was. But there was nothing and she was ashamed to ask the nurses, “Excuse me, could you tell me where I am?” Because the answer to that question, the answer she needed was so complicated, so extensive, that she had no faith that anyone could give her the answer she needed. “I don't know where I am,” she kept hearing herself say.

  When the doctor came, and she saw on his ID badge the words UNIVERSITY COLLEGE HOSPITAL, she could have wept with relief. She could call his parents without sounding like a fool, without having to answer the ordinary question “Where are you?” with the ridiculous answer, “I don't know.”

  But the relief was temporary. Quite soon a new sentence was drumming through her brain: “I don't know what to do.”

  She knew that what she was experiencing must be called fear. She had experienced something like it, of course, a dimmer, milder version of it, when she had prepared for an exam or slammed the brakes on when a car veered toward her. But when she looked at Paul, his face so pale, his breathing so labored, when the nurse asked her to step outside the curtain and she came in later to see him attached to tubes, she knew that nothing she had felt before could properly be called fear. Her husband was near to death. What did that mean and what was he near to? She knew he was near to something that he had not been near to just that morning. I am very tired, she said to herself. Her fatigue was making her brain do strange things with language. Metaphors seemed literal to her now; when she said, “His breath is labored,” she saw him carrying huge stones up a steep hill.

  The doctor was young and handsome and Indian. He introduced himself by his first name: “I'm Sanji,” he said, “I'm the attending physician. Your husband's had a mild heart attack. We'll have to keep him with us a few days. But I'm afraid we're rather short of beds at the moment, so he'll have to go to the geriatric ward until things open up.”

  They were in no position to argue. They'd been in the emergency ward seven hou
rs; she was relieved to see him permanently placed.

  “Why don't you go home now, Mrs. lamison,” Dr. Sanji said. “You've been through a lot and you'll be fresher in the morning. Your husband will be fine. He's a strong young man, he'll soon be back to normal, and he's in good hands.”

  “Do as he says, sweetheart,” Paul said, his eyes half closed. “I'm fine.”

  But I don't want to leave you, she wanted to shout. I don't want to be alone in this strange city, in this foreign country. But Paul's eyes were closed and Dr. Sanji's did not seem as if they ever would be sympathetic to what he might think of as a hysterical display.

  She took a cab back to the hotel. In the morning, she would have to make arrangements to stay on; they were meant to go to Yorkshire. But right then, she wanted to speak to no one. She ran a bath and fell, to her surprise, immediately to sleep.

  At four a.m. she woke hungry. She remembered she'd had nothing to eat all day. She missed Paul terribly. She went to the bottom of the closet where Paul had put his soiled laundry the night before. She took his dirty T-shirt and spread it out on the pillow beside her. She woke many times in the early morning hours. Every time she woke, she sniffed his shirt and she said to herself, “No one who made this shirt smell this way could die.” This relieved her; it allowed her to fall back to sleep.