“Not a therapist. It was a friend . . . my . . . it was my dad, actually. He and my mom were worried about me.”
“What does your dad do for a living?” Candler asked.
“He’s an electrical contractor. My mom works for the phone company.”
“What part of yourself . . . I don’t know how to ask the question.”
“What had I compromised?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“I’ve wanted to tell you for a while now.”
“Sorry, I’ll shut up.”
“I don’t have a name for it. But it’s the central part. Like . . . like downtown, you know? The part of me that’s all me. I can change other things and still be me, but this part I can’t change. I have to stick with it.”
Neither spoke for several seconds. Candler was sleepy and grateful to her. “You love your father,” he said.
“I love the man who made me see I was hurting myself.”
“I’m sorry I don’t know him,” he said.
The night had been a lark until she saw Mick’s inert body, at which point a shudder passed through her, and she understood that this unmoving body was her life, and it might be revived or it might be extinguished.
Fortunately, Mick’s mother gave her something to do. “Get clean pajamas from his dresser, the top left-hand drawer.” She cradled her son’s head in her arms. Craig, the brother, was downstairs calling the hospital. Rhine was in the hallway, crying. Mick had wet himself, and his mother wanted clean pajamas. She knew how long the ambulance would take. There was time to change him. Maura helped. “He’s still breathing,” his mother said, and then she offered her hand. “I’m Genevieve.”
Maura pronounced her own name. She added, “I love your son.”
“I know that, hon,” Genevieve replied. “Get me a wet washcloth.”
He had taken all his medications, all those pills that had been accumulating because he wanted to be sharp. They bathed him with the washcloth and awkwardly worked the pajamas over his damp legs as the sirens approached, and it was not until the ambulance took Mick and his mother away that Maura burst into tears, which permitted Rhine to finally quit his moaning and comfort her. “Don’t cry, Maura,” he said. “Don’t cry.” He said the same thing over and over and over until she finally quit crying.
Policemen came. They drove Maura, Rhine, and Craig to the hospital, the three of them in one long bench seat behind a wire screen, as if they were criminals, and she had a wild thought that she should tell these cops about Bert and Ernie in the pickup truck, but the thought immediately embarrassed her. One of the policemen said, “It’s a beautiful night, otherwise,” but nothing else from the ride stuck with her.
Then came the waiting, just the three of them at first in a room the color of pumpkins, that same orange and a green trim like the vine. Was that how fashionable people decided what colors went together and what colors clashed? Did they rely on the natural world? Fucking farms and plants? People arrived and joined their waiting—Mick’s mother emerged from the room where they were trying to save him, and then Mick’s father and his girlfriend, who wasn’t wearing a bra, sat with them, and then Mr. John Egri showed up, in jeans, and he shook their hands and said something to Maura too low for her too hear.
“What did you say?” she asked, her voice like an explosion in the room.
John Egri smiled and repeated, “Hang in there.”
Rhine fell asleep, wearing his helmet so he wouldn’t lose it. He put his big, plastic-covered head in her lap, and she let him.
This wasn’t the first time Mick had tried to kill himself, and the Courys knew how to behave. Mrs. Coury said encouraging things to everyone. Mr. Coury and his girlfriend did a lot of praying. When a nurse summoned the parents through the swinging doors, the girlfriend flipped open her phone and called someone. Who would she be calling, Maura wondered. Did she have a friend she could ring in the middle of the night? Was she close to her parents? When Mr. and Mrs. Coury returned, accompanied by a nurse or doctor—a dark-skinned woman with bulges beneath her eyes—a moment of mayhem followed. Mr. Coury and the girlfriend dropped to their knees, holding hands and praying in loud voices. Mrs. Coury ran to her other son and took him in her arms.
“What?” Maura said.
The dark-skinned woman answered. “He’s alive. So far. Vitals better. Not out of the woods, but there’s reason for hope.” Her mouth made an uncertain gesture. “We’ve done everything we can do.”
Mr. Coury spoke from his knees, addressing Maura. “A miracle has taken place, young lady. They said those drugs were powerful enough to kill a bull. I heard them. An Andalusian bull. But God, with the help of these fine people and their amazing machinery, God—”
“It’s still touch and go,” the dark-skinned woman said. “I have been very clear with you.”
“Join us,” Mr. Coury said and offered Maura his hand. “Join us in thanks.”
“Pass,” she said, and Mr. Coury seemed to see her then for the first time—her weary eyes, the skin around them darkened, bloody paths through the whites. A tear shuttled over Maura’s cheek to her lip and the hiding tongue, like a predator, slipped from its cave to trap it, savor it, make it disappear.
“There’s a reason Christ is called the savior,” Mr. Coury said to her. “Do you have a better explanation? The doctor here cannot explain it. Do you know why our son has been spared?”
Maura nodded. She slapped the sleeping boy’s helmet. “ ’Cause this freak spazzed out.”
Mr. Coury merely stared, his mouth falling open, and Maura shut her eyes, wishing she actually could pray without making it into a joke. She needed something to do. She had missed the arrival of Mr. James Candler and was surprised to see him sitting along the wall with everyone else. He wore a suit and tie, a black suit, which upset her, as it seemed like he’d come to hear that Mick was dead. Rhine’s father showed up later, and he did not stay long. Rhine’s father was tall and normal looking, and he gently woke his son. “I can carry you,” he offered but Rhine declined. He flipped up his plastic visor to talk to people. “Good-bye, Mr. James Candler,” he began. Despite his sleepiness, he said good-bye to each of Mick’s people. When he came to Maura, he started to hug her but chickened out.
Maura wrapped her arms around him. “Good night, you retard,” she said.
When she was alone again, she felt she had to be honest with herself. She could not avoid the truth. When she’d heard that Mick might be okay, she had felt enormous relief but also—she couldn’t deny it—a letdown. A shameful, niggling sense of disappointment. It bothered her so much that she went to the nurse’s station and called Patricia Barnstone.
“I’m downstairs,” Barnstone said. “They won’t tell me what floor or where to go.”
Maura took the elevator down. Barnstone was all the way across the room. She sat alone in the sad and ugly room, her back against the dark, gigantic windows. The shirt she wore was too large, a shapeless disguise, and when she shifted in the chair she seemed to be shrinking, disappearing into the fabric. Her short hair was standing on end. She looked like just anybody you might see in a hospital and not very much like the woman Maura knew. Maura ran to her anyway. Barnstone opened her arms to catch her.
“Candler called me,” she said. “He told me you were here.”
“When I saw Mick,” Maura began but she didn’t know how to explain, even to Barnstone, what she felt, how the whole world teetered over a big black nothing.
“It’s no joke, is it, being a living thing?” Barnstone’s coarse voice filled one ear. “One little pissy moment, and you can throw it all away.”
“I had no idea,” Maura said. She cried for a long time before she was able to say, “I can’t believe I did this to my parents.” And in that moment, she forgave her family everything, all their failings, real and imagined.
Candler remained in the hospital after the othe
rs were gone. Even Mick’s father had left. Candler was not sure why he stayed. He found an odd comfort in the waiting area, his hands buried in his suit pockets. He had talked with Lise on the phone for a long time, until he could tell she was nodding off. Her drowsy voice reminded him of the sounds she made during sex, interrogative exclamations that climbed a ladder as she neared climax. “Up, up, uut, uph, up,” she’d say, her voice distant, higher in pitch than normal, the tone more curious than excited, her eyes closed, and—almost like platforms along the climb—she would add a quick half-whispered sentence: “No, I knew that,” the tone of the words falling, her eyes still closed, the climb up up up beginning again, and when she reached the top, the sentence repeated, “No, I knew that. I knew that.” The first time she spoke it during intercourse, Candler thought she was addressing him, commenting on his performance, indicating an error in execution, but she wasn’t speaking to anyone.
“What happens to you when we make love?” he asked her.
“The nerve endings in my clitoris are stimulated,” she replied.
Lolly also spoke during sex. She was an energetic and uninhibited lover, and the first night Candler went to her London flat, he discovered that she owned an array of citrus-scented oils and colorful candles, several drawers of lacy undergarments, and recordings of instrumental music from remote parts of the world. Those first nights in her tiny bedroom had been exhausting. There was an unreal quality about them, the choreography switching by the minute from National Geographic forays to Satyricon outtakes, and he thought perhaps she was too artistic for him, but the next day at the publishing house he would find her in those black-rimmed glasses and business tweeds negotiating a contract with an agent or amortizing authors’ advances, and a weight would sink into his balls and he would want to take her on the desk. After three nights in her bedroom, he insisted on going to a hotel. Free of the papaya incense and thrumming sitars, dressed still in a three-piece suit, the skirt almost reaching her ankles, Lolly seemed unsure what was expected of her. “Just be yourself,” Candler said, and they watched The Graduate on television and made love in the semi dark of the old room, the sound of traffic and the vague odor of mold their only accompaniment.
“You want it plain?” she asked him.
“Scout’s honor,” he replied.
“You’re an odd duck,” she said.
In that hotel room, Lolly said things like, “Yes. Yes. Do it to me.
Fuck me, big boy. Harder.” It was a routine, but he did not mind it, perhaps got a kick out of it. But one day in Violet’s flat, on the narrow bed where Candler was supposed to be sleeping, Lolly lost herself in the act, and what she said then was “That’s good,” muttered softly, almost to herself, “That’s it. That’s the ticket. On the money. That’s money.”
What complicated organisms were women, with their complex systems of desires and needs. Men wanted to love and loved to fuck. They wanted bright houses and big soft beds. Women had to have worlds within worlds, and that was part of their attraction, he understood, the desire to attach one’s self to something larger.
He did not yet know that he would never make love to Lolly or Lise again, and yet the tone of nostalgia in his sleepy considerations was unmistakable. The waiting room was empty, only Candler in his suit, thinking about sex to keep from thinking about his mistakes. If I’m on my knees, I must be praying. He had made a mess of things. No, I knew that. He had gone too fast, and Mick Coury might die. That’s money. You win. He could not go on like this. This is not your fault. He had to—
“He’s still unconscious.” It was Mrs. Coury, her kind, lovely face just inches from his. “It’s nice of you to have waited, but you should go home to your wife.”
“My lover,” he said. Then he made a stuttering correction. “I’m not, we’re not—”
She seated herself on the couch beside him, taking his arm in an intimate way. “Did you talk to my husband?” she asked.
Candler said that he had. Tom Coury had thanked Candler for coming, for providing your professional care for my dear boy. Tom and Genevieve Coury behaved genially together, an air of exhaustion and camaraderie about them that suggested the connections they shared were more permanent than the divorce.
“And his girlfriend?” she asked. “Did you talk to her?”
“Not much,” Candler said. “Just a handshake.”
Tom Coury and the girlfriend had knelt on the carpet in the middle of the hallway, nurses sidestepping them, and held hands to pray for Mick’s recovery, loudly at first, and then softer, a mumbled entreaty, audible to Candler in terms of syntax, that deep dyspeptic motor that funneled human sound. Thinking about it, he felt a new wave of sleepiness wash over him.
“Do you know how many times our son has tried to kill himself?” Candler made an uncertain gesture with his head. “Several times.”
“This is the ninth,” she said. “The ninth that we know of. The first two times, Tom never left my side. By the third, well. It’s hard to describe, but you learn to hold something back, to wait and see.”
“Mick does so well most of the time,” Candler said apologetically.
She patted the arm she was holding and laid her head against his shoulder. “He loses perspective,” she said. “He can’t remember the people who love him. All he can see is the immediate problem, and it seems to him that his death would solve it.”
Suicides tended to believe their death would affect no one who knew them, except perhaps to improve the quality of those lives. And couldn’t that be true? Wasn’t it necessarily true that some people were nothing but a burden on the world? Had that applied to his brother? Candler could see how Pook might have thought himself nothing but a burden—except that Pook’s consciousness did not work in a fashion that would ever produce such a thought. No, Pook had seen the cumulative result of his art, and he could not go on. It wasn’t even that the art mattered to him, which meant it had to be what the art revealed. What had he seen in all those images of himself staring back? What would any man see if he could, by his own lights, create a mirror that genuinely reflected who he was? Could any of us endure it?
Mrs. Coury was silent, clutching his arm, her body warm against his shoulder, and Candler felt himself ease back into the dense yet softened regions of consciousness where memory and fantasy resided. He slipped into a dream of his life, of this moment in the hospital, and in the dream the woman holding his arm was speaking. She told him that her husband had met his girlfriend during something they called Prayer Circle, and Candler immediately heard the man praying . . . my son, struck down by madness . . . I beg of you please to release my boy’s chains.
Candler opened his eyes to the orange indent in the hospital hallway that everyone called the waiting room, but it was not a separate room, and the woman beside him was again speaking, softly speaking, the light from the ceiling an unnatural white like bleached teeth, and what was she saying now, this sad and lovely woman in a Neil Young T-shirt, her hair smelling of apples, and who had already forgiven him, what was she saying? He listened and slept, his drowsiness and his attentiveness holding hands as the praying couple had done from their knees.
Genevieve Coury was resigned not to the death of her son but to the frequency with which he would approach it. If he actually died, she would be as shocked and devastated as any parent losing a child, but she had learned that the agony of apprehension was not an obligation she had to keep. She and Tom sold their home in Yuma, abandoned their friends and jobs, moved away from family, and then her marriage, too, was sacrificed to the wrathful god of schizophrenia. She would not surrender her second son to redeem the first, but except for this, she held nothing back and had no regrets. She missed her husband, but the man she loved no longer seemed to exist. He had to glorify their sacrifices by bringing god into the picture, and she could not entirely forgive him for that. Candler heard her and did not hear her, unsure what was real and what was dream, and it did not yet
end.
It was Genevieve, he understood, who had thought to grab Craig’s Game Boy and take it to the hospital. It was she who offered her bedroom to her ex-husband and his girlfriend for the night, reminding them that Craig had school in the morning and to set an alarm. It would be she who slept for what was left of this night in the chair beside Mick’s bed. It would be she who wrote letters to Rhine and Maura, thanking them for saving—or trying to save—her boy’s fragile life. And it would be she, standing beside her son’s grave at some point in the future, who would have a clean conscience, who would know she had done everything she could to save him. And it would be she who’d be nonetheless inconsolable. Candler heard her and slept, nodding at the right moments, touching the hand that clutched his arm at the elbow. He wanted to thank her for the way she had greeted him on the phone, but he had been stripped of language and could only listen to the dream of this woman’s life.
When she rattled the arm she held, he saw his brother standing over them, his brother’s big closed face, his brother’s strong grip, and behind him were those paintings lining the walls as they had in the New York gallery. When he opened his eyes, the woman next to him was speaking. “Mick used to make amazing buildings out of his plastic bricks,” she was saying. She lifted her head from Candler’s shoulder, slipping to the edge of the upholstered couch. “He was the most wonderful child and obsessed with those plastic bricks.” She released Candler’s arm and stood. “He’d say, Mom, I’ve built you a castle.”
Candler nodded. “I understand,” he said. “I understand what you’re telling me. I’ll leave you two alone.”
Her smile was beatific, and he believed he could love her. He could give up Lolly and Lise and love this woman, adopt her tragic son, and this became part of the waking dream, and by the time a clattering cart pushed by an orderly brought him fully awake, Genevieve Coury was gone, the dream was gone, and Candler was alone.
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