Adverbs (6 page)

Lila stood up and tottered, which was a new thing lately and couldn’t be good. The bartender frowned and spread his gob of lotion between his hands. “You don’t get it,” she said. “Let me explain what is happening to the Jewish people. Girls are never never never never never never never never going to walk into this place or another place and sleep with you in pairs”—she looked at his name tag—“
Gus.
It’s over. Stop with the porn imagination and the men tackling each other outdoors. You need to call Tony every five minutes for the score? Go score with Tony. If men went out and had sex with each other every time they were angry there’d be so much less pain in the world.”

“What the hell?” the man said. “You’re crazier than our friend Headphones and you’re not even drinking. What’s eating you, anyway?”

Lila gave him the same smile she gave her husband when he bought the gun.
For hunting
, he had said.
To kill birds
, and she unbuttoned her blouse. It was a green silk thing, bad for rain and it always rained in this part of the world. There was a row of gorgeous outfits hanging in her hospital room closet, ready for the nightlife like a sick joke. Whenever I opened the doors the hangers would ping and rattle in the breeze, like Lila was dead already and her ghost was deciding what to wear. “Check it out,”
she said, unbuttoning further. She wasn’t wearing a bra and had never needed to, although of course she’d worn one for two years in junior high until I told her, in the soccer field out back as the drizzle spat into our rum, that she should just give it up. Beneath the silk was the scar from the last time, snaked between her breasts, and a spiral, wide and bearing nasty teeth, down to her pale belly, in a way that made her navel no more. For some reason they had to spiral it. For some reason this was necessary. I’d seen it a thousand times, from that day in the waiting lounge when they wouldn’t let me in, and I heard her surface from the anesthetic and cry and cry and cry until I pushed through anyway. The waiting lounge felt like a blind date on the sixth floor, with everyone staring and wondering what was wrong with one another, but Adam was gone by then, and Lila’s unmentionable husband, and so I was the only one out there for Lila and she was the only one in there for me. Every time I saw the scar I thought of what they showed on the TV in the room. Some nurse had turned it on so Lila could have company, while I magazined in the lounge because I wasn’t a relative. The TV told a science story of some people who had found a wounded bear in a faraway forest and had used science to trick it back into healthy. Now it traveled with a show and balanced objects on its head. Why don’t they leave them alone? Why don’t they ever leave them alone? I couldn’t believe my eyes, that they would show such a thing on a screen, and neither could Gus believe his eyes as he saw it. Without a rude word he left us and Lila sat down and pulled her shirt shut. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and reached into the rip in her purse.

“Do you want me to come with?” I said. Terrible things hap
pened with her in the bathroom, as you might imagine, and I had seen them all.

“Just to brush my teeth,” she said, taking her toothbrush out. “Bad taste in my mouth.”

She walked off behind the plants and I put my head down on the table and cried. When Adam moved in we bought a globe at a garage sale and would spin it together in bed. I’d stop the world with my finger and Adam, the drugs racing through his teeth, would tell me things he knew about where my finger landed. Some of them he made up but most of them he remembered from a grade school teacher of unspeakable power. Still nothing in this world prepared me. In all the world I couldn’t guess this moment or what it looked like, so I thought I’d cry about it for a minute until I heard the bottle set on the table and Lila sit down beside me.

“I’ll make you a drink, dear,” said Lila, but it wasn’t Lila. She was older, much older, and vaguely cool, wearing a shawl I might buy if my loans ever let up. Her fingers looked like trees in the park, and she clutched everything at once: vermouth and Campari and a cocktail shaker and three dainty glasses by their stems.

“You’re the woman on the way in,” I said. “We saw you.”

“I talked to your friend,” she agreed, unscrewing the cap of the vermouth. “I told her my blackjack theory.”

Drink was making this difficult. “Do you
work
here?” I asked.

She made a noise so much like a barnyard hen that I missed Lila’s mom all over again, the way she always got pesto on her
shirt but never stopped ordering it. “I wouldn’t call it working,” the woman said. “I’m wasting all my money away. It doesn’t pay much. As you well know, it’s quiet today, so I stumbled in here and saw you crying like you couldn’t go on. So I’m here to serve as an example, and I’m going to make you a drink called an Old Pal, Campari and vermouth and bourbon like you like, but served up so you look better drinking it, as you well know.”

I looked at this woman and saw also the bored nurse, and Adam and those boys who liked to run tiny cars at four in the morning. It was the usual revelation:
everyone’s crazy
. “There was another guy in here serving as an example,” I said. “He had a theory.”

“Everybody has a theory,” the woman said. She started shaking the shaker and I could hear that ice was already inside. “This other guy, what did
he
make you?”

“Nervous,” I said. Lila was taking a while—I felt the prickle of deciding whether or not to worry—but then she appeared like a miracle and tottered past the plants to our table.

“It’s a party!” the woman said, adding the Campari.

“I’m back and so are you,” Lila said, putting the toothbrush where it belonged. “This is the blackjack woman, Allison. We talked on the way in about her theory.”

“As you well know,” the woman said, “I have these birds in cages given to me by a dear young man who draws things. He’s the sort of boy you girls would like.”

“I’m done with boys,” Lila said, “except Sidney Poitier.”

“I met him once in my Hollywood days,” the woman said. “He’s not for you.” She turned to me and her eyes looked icicle
shiny, sharp and pretty and not likely to last. “You want my bird friend,” she said. “Sometimes he behaves badly, like his birds, but you would like the likes of him.”

“I was telling Allison she needed someone apocalyptic,” Lila said.

“Maybe she needs both,” the woman said. “An apocalyptic boy who draws.”

“Even with the right boy I’d wreck it,” I said. “I’d join the navy on impulse and sail off right when he needed me, or we’d have a baby and I’d accidentally put it in my purse. The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights. I know they’re the wrong boys and I just go to them.” I balanced my finger on the square of a napkin and moved it down the table like a barge. “I just go,” I said.

“It’s true,” Lila said. The talk was cheering her, I could tell. When she first got sick there was a very popular book about heaven. While she languished in the hospital I stayed up all night on espresso, taping the word
heaven
over with the word
Las Vegas,
everywhere it appeared in the book.
Sometimes when I’m alone I get a warm feeling inside me and I know my mother’s in Las Vegas thinking of me.
She was smiling like that now. “What’s your name again?” she asked the woman.

“How about Gladys?” Gladys said.

“Well, Gladys,” Lila said, and draped an arm around me. “Allison here once met a boy named Adam. He was all pepped up on drugs when he knocked on the door desperate for money. ‘I need money,’ he said, and do you know what Allison did?”

“Fed him waffles,” I said. “He kept saying ‘I need money’
and I told him if he picked up all the leaves in my yard I’d give him a dollar.”

“It wasn’t even her yard,” Lila said. “She just wanted to see him bend over.” Gladys laughed and slid the Old Pals over. They looked rosy in the indoor light. “I can’t drink,” Lila said.

“I thought you looked too sick to drink,” Gladys said gently. “Never you mind, dear. As you well know, a woman looks good with a drink in front of her whether she’s drinking or not. You keep it.” She raised her glass to start a toast. “Good times around the corner,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a long corner, Gladys. How about ‘Confusion to the Gentiles’? That was the toast we learned in sixth grade.”

“Allison was a gloomy Gus then,” Lila said. “She would wander the halls like a ghost. She had a theory that she should be wearing men’s neckties, but it wasn’t going over well at Gene Ahern Preparatory School. People would laugh at her and she would cry at them back. She was a sore thumb.”

“And what changed the tide?” Gladys asked.

I looked at Lila and saw her mother’s chin, the crease of her mother’s brow when we stayed out past curfew and snuck in the back. It was all that was left of her. For a while in college I was an experimental filmmaker, if that’s the word for it. We’d get drunk and rip up pages in the
Norton Anthology of Poetry
and read them into her dad’s video camera in funny voices. There was no point to it, but we loved those movies to tears. They were for a select audience, but then again we were the Chosen People. What would happen to us? What would hap
pen? “It was when I met you,” I said to her. “It all changed then.”

“Birds of a feather,” Lila said, and took my hand.

Gladys sipped her drink. “And what happened to your boy who wanted money?” she asked me. “Did he change you, too?”

“He was a mistake,” Lila said quickly.

“He was,” I said, but this didn’t help, or the drink I finished. It’s one thing to forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then? That boy Adam had left a spiral scar as he tripped through my life, but you’d expect a clumsy passage from someone who showed up carrying his shoes. I looked at Lila, who couldn’t drink what was in front of her. I thought we wouldn’t have times like this, me drunk and her sober, until she was pregnant and a boy was gone from my life. But instead she was sick and he was gone from my life. “He’s dead,” I said.

“He’s nothing,” Lila corrected me. “He’s less than nothing.”

“You can’t be less than nothing,” I said. “Thank God. He killed himself without caring about me. He shed me like skin.” I heard the talk. You can be talking, just talk, and you wish you were conveying something at the same time, but you’re not. How could you be? “He said he felt happy whenever he looked into my eyes,” I said, “but he scarcely ever did. I said I’d hold him all night and make sure nothing happened to him, and sure enough nothing did. I thought I’d keep him because everybody should have a true love you can’t be with, but he lay in the bathtub and got gone, all guilty over something I didn’t even know about. Six years. I thought I’d be doing this with Lila when she was preg
nant, not sick. Point No Point, we always said. Point No Point or bust someday.” I stood up and rested my hand on the wrecked TV just for peace and quiet. The ceilings were mirrored, with cameras behind them probably to keep all the money safe, and still I didn’t have any. “How dare he admit there’s no point?” I said, and sat down again to drink Lila’s Old Pal. “There’s no point to drinking, either, but look—I’m doing it.”

Gladys didn’t look surprised. She finished her drink too, and gave me an otherworldly sigh. “And you’ll die too?” she said to Lila. “When is that, dear?”

Lila gave her the smile again, the gorgeous one. “You’re not supposed to ask me that,” she said. “A month maybe, unless this beeper goes off, and then there’ll be another operation and one more month. And then Allison will go to grad school without me and study poetry. She has her loans, she’s all set to go, we just have to wait me out.”

“Poetry?” Gladys said. “You’re wasting money quicker than blackjack.”

“In high school it was Wallace Stevens instead of Sidney Poitier,” Lila said. “You know that poem about the different ways to look at a bird? She knew them all by heart. How many was it, Allison?”

“Thirteen,” I said. “
O thin men of Haddam, why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird walks around the feet of the women about you?
”

Lila took my hand and squeezed the thumbnail until it showed a white blob.
A ghost,
she taught me the day we met on stairwell B.
A ghost in your fingernail
.

“Are you ladies hungry?” Gladys said.

“I can’t eat,” Lila said.

“Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” Gladys said, a song from prep school days. “If you could eat, dear, what would you, for a wish?”

“Cake,” we both said. It was her favorite forever.

“You don’t say,” she said, chuckling. She reached under her shawl and brought cake to the Point No Point Casino Lounge Number Six. It was a small piece on a paper plate, covered in clear plastic like a birthday leftover. This woman was a prophetess. “A bite won’t kill you,” she said to Lila, “no quicker, anyway.”

Lila tore the plastic off and licked a bit of icing from her finger. “What other wishes can you grant, Gladys?” she asked.

Gladys reached down to Lila’s waist and pointed to the beeper. “You won’t believe me,” she said, “but I can make this go off and extend your life if the operation works.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“I made the cake,” Gladys said. “I made you a drink, as you well know. That’s no less a miracle. You want to live longer, Lila? It won’t be fun, but it seems like you girls could use the time.”

“You’re crazy and I wish you would stop,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Gladys said. “I don’t think you’re ready for it to stop.”

Lila looked at Gladys and me and then the cake. It felt like waiting for Adam to say it back, those quiet times when all of a sudden nothing’s a joke. We’d had these moments before, usually in bars. This was like all of them. “Yes,” Lila said finally, “but can you really?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Gladys said, and stood up. “No, what am I talking about? There are lots of ways. It’s a gamble.”

“It was a gamble to come here,” Lila said. “What are the odds?”