Foreigners (13 page)

Payne, a sheen of sweat forming on his brow, began to shuffle forward, finding it not only difficult to keep his balance, but also somewhat painful, as the carpet grazed the skin from his knee. In place finally, and not more than a little out of breath, he hunkered slightly, so as to bring his hips onto the same plane as Kathryn's. It was then he felt the sharp snap. It did not, however, occur in the strained ligaments behind his extended knee, as he had expected.

“What's wrong?” Kathryn asked, perturbed.

“Something . . .”

“Well, what?”

“. . . in my back.” Payne groaned, as frozen in place as the far more flexible actors on the television. “Something's happened . . . in my back.”

“What already?”

“I don't know . . .”

Kathryn shifted.

“Ouch,” Payne yelped. “Please don't . . . can't move.”

Kathryn moaned and Payne could see out of the corner of his eye that she was wriggling the toes of her foot propped on his shoulder.

“Oh, Harvey,” she whined. “You're going to have to. I can't feel my leg.”

“Just give it a second,” he begged. “Something's slipped, I think. I just need a second.”

Payne tried to adjust himself to relieve the pressure on his bent knee but succeeded only in igniting a fire in his lower spine.

“Please, Harvey,” Kathryn said, an edge in her voice. “I'm getting a pain in my hip now.”

Suddenly there were other voices in the room, moaning and gasping and calling out. Payne, frightened, twisted around to see who'd walked in on them and as he did felt the cold blade of agony tear up his spine and prise apart his shoulder blades. As he fell sidelong onto the rough throw rug, which he now in a flash resolved to pitch into the garbage, Payne recalled the ancient Norse tradition of the “Bloody Eagle,” which involved the cutting open of an enemy's back so as to
expose the heart and lungs to the cold air. And as he cautiously reached around to feel the warm sponginess of his displaced organs, he heard Kathryn's laughter.

She was leaning against the sofa, massaging her tingling leg with one hand and pointing toward the television with the other. The pause button had cut out, and on the screen the two actors were performing with ease and obvious pleasure the act that now left Payne in paroxysms of Nordic anguish.

Payne, feeling the muscles in his lower back, just to the right of his spine, curling up into a hot little fist, arched his shoulders in the hope of unclenching them. He'd been expecting the discomfort at some point, what with having to sit for so long, especially in the confining seats of coach class. He'd already grown accustomed to the dull, slow-burning ache that had visited him with regularity since the fiasco with the video. If he was in his office working and it came upon him, he would lay himself down on the floor with his arms outstretched, crucifix-like, and wait out the spasm. He'd even done this once on the cold linoleum tiles of his kitchen floor when a particularly intense knurl formed as he was tending to a large pot of angel-hair pasta. But the prospect of lying supine in the aisle of economy class was unlikely. It was not simply his humility that prevented him; the remarkable narrowness of the aisle made such an act impossible.

It was the doctor in the emergency ward who suggested lying on the floor to him. The embarrassment of that visit reddened Payne's cheeks even now. The most difficult thing had been getting his clothes back on. He had to remain lying
on his side while Kathryn pulled on his underpants, gently rolling him onto his back only when it came time to slide them over his hips. The doctor hadn't been nearly so gentle when he pulled them halfway down his buttocks so that he could get a good look at the affected area.

“And you say you did this moving an armoire?” Payne remembered the doctor saying, his voice flush with doubt. “Must have twisted yourself into an extraordinarily awkward position. And what about the abrasions on your knee and cheek?”

“Fell down,” Payne replied. “When I twisted myself.”

“Yes, I see,” the doctor said, again with suspicion, casting a quick glance toward Kathryn. “Of course,” he continued, patting Payne on the belly, “if you got rid of a bit of this you wouldn't have near so much trouble. The abdomen and the back should act as counterbalances, you see. It shouldn't be a case of one supporting the other.”

Payne remembered the look on Kathryn's face as she stood there, her back brushing up against the plastic curtain of the examination carrel. The doctor explained that it wasn't anything serious, a pull of the latissimus and probably the ilio-costalis, as well—nothing that rest and heat wouldn't cure. As he said this, Payne saw slight traces of distaste reflected in Kathryn's eyes, as if she was being forced to watch something that, although organic, was also unsightly, like childbirth or death. What had been missing from her expression, though, Payne was now willing to admit, was compassion.

That was the beginning of it, Payne now realized, and thought about how it was that examining rooms figured so prominently in his declines.

He gazed up at the television monitor. The little white airplane had exceeded the apex of its arc, which passed just south of Greenland, and was dipping now toward the Irish coast.

During the week that he was laid up, Kathryn came to him with heating pads and hot packs of various shapes, sizes and consistencies. Of the electric heating pads Payne was wary, afraid that if he happened to spill the orange juice he kept on his bedside table he might inadvertently electrocute himself. He was much more confident with the Presto-Relief Hot-Cold Compresses: small plastic pouches filled with a gelatinous blue slime that could be put in the freezer to cool or popped in the microwave to warm up. He liked the way they moulded themselves to his back and his neck, which had begun to stiffen with the extended bed rest.

Payne found that he enjoyed convalescing, looked forward each day to Kathryn's coming around to check on him. He took pleasure in watching the way she moved about the bedroom, picking up his knocked-over juice cups and clearing away plates of dried sandwich crusts and toast ends and plastic soda-biscuit wrappers. And to have her climb into bed beside him and rub minty-smelling analgesic on his back took him to new heights of arousal, so much so that when Kathryn tried to roll him over, he would feign agony and urge her to apply more ointment.

Payne was glad, too, to be shed of his lecturing and tutorial obligations for a few weeks, passing the latter off to an eager TA. He used his time to reacquaint himself with poor
neglected Noel Gaynor, sifting through his collection of Xeroxed miscellany, rereading his doctoral thesis and the pared-down academic article he'd had such trouble getting published—all of which he coerced Kathryn into carting home from his office.

With a vigour he had not demonstrated since gaining tenure, Payne rededicated himself to his dream of transforming “Lost in the Bush” from treatment to book-length treatise. He threw himself into his work; at first he lay on the bed, with his notes spread out across the duvet, and then, after his back started to come around, he hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling in old-fashioned marble-covered writing tablets. He filled page after page with musings on Gaynor's life in England, extrapolating from fact. He pestered the chief librarian at the college into sending a courier with precious archival material. He began to annotate both volumes of fiction, convincing himself of the possibility that he could publish them as a collected edition along with the letters, with himself as editor, of course. From there it would be a short step to getting it and his companion book on Gaynor's life and work onto the course list at Severn, and from Severn like wildfire to institutions all across the country. It was as if, huddled in his kitchen with a warm Presto-Relief Hot-Cold Compress tucked under the waistband of his boxers, Payne could finally see the light of redemption glowing just off in the distance, just as Gaynor must have when he looked out toward the blackness of the Algonquin bush.

So immersed had Payne become that he took little notice of the change in Kathryn. On into his second week of recuperation she still came every day, but arrived later in the
afternoon and left earlier in the evening. She did not share Payne's enthusiasm for his subject, and would sit quietly by while he conjectured about Gaynor's life with Penelope, about how stifling the monotony of their marriage must have been to drive him to seek contentment in a wild and untamed world. And when, in the middle of one of his flights, she rose from the sofa and took up her backpack and car keys, he broke off and asked where she was off to so early.

“It's Professor Foden. He's got us doing papers.”

“Really?” Payne said, distracted. “What on?”

“Oh, you know,” Kathryn smiled, rummaging through her bag. “The Greeks. Aristophanes.”

When she called the next afternoon to say that she wouldn't be able to come by, Payne thought nothing of it. He was deep into Catharine Parr Traill's
The Female Emigrant's Guide,
marking passages he felt both infantile and arrogant and preparing a counter-argument with material taken directly from one of Gaynor's unsent letters. But the following evening, when he looked up from the table and saw that it was past eleven and he hadn't heard from her, he became worried.

The answering service picked up on her cellphone, but he didn't leave a message. Instead, he hung up and the dialled her apartment. He could feel an immense knot forming in his lower back as he listened to the faraway ringing, and he reached around and did his best to knead it away. Payne was just about to hang up when she answered.

“Hello?”

“Kathryn?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right? You sound out of breath.”

“No, I'm fine.”

“Then why are you panting?”

“I . . . I'm working out.”

Payne could hear her trying to steady her breathing.

“. . . I just finished doing some sit-ups . . . I'm a little winded.”

“Oh?”

There was silence on the line.

“Is everything okay?” Payne asked.

“Yes. Why wouldn't it be?”

“Well, I thought that you'd be coming by. Or maybe call.”

“Sorry about that, Harvey. I got caught up.”

“With exercise?”

“What?”

“You got caught up with exercise?”

“Yes. No. I mean, the paper. I got caught up with the paper for . . . for Professor Foden.”

“Oh, the Aristophanes?”

“Sorry?”

“The Aristophanes. The Greeks.”

There was another long silence.

“Uh-huh,” Kathryn said. “That's right. The Greeks.”

It now felt to Payne as if he was the only person left awake on the airplane. Even the flight attendants had disappeared into the curtained galley, no doubt to get some rest before it came time to hand out breakfast to the passengers.

He leaned his head back and questioned whether or not it all wasn't a mistake, if he wouldn't have been better off
just sending his regrets to Professor Hefflin. Thanks, but no thanks. But then, what difference would it have made? The options open to him were decidedly limited: alone in a hotel room in Hoogeveen or alone in his house in Severn. Either way he was still alone.