“It was … I guess you’d call it a one-night stand,” Sonja says. Now
she
is red and Doris isn’t.
Marcia lowers herself to her father’s chair. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
“We should have,” Doris says. “Ten years ago.”
“So, you got pregnant and that’s why you went to Vancouver,” Marcia says, more to herself. She looks around at everyone. “So, Joanie’s my niece,” she says.
“I’m sorry, Sweetie,” Doris says. Her eyes are tired and sad and affectionate. “Brother, this is some night, isn’t it?”
“I just wish you’d told me. I don’t understand why nobody told me.” By “nobody” she means especially Joan. She means before now.
Gordon sits next to Doris. “I guess our thinking was, you’d tell Joanie, you know the way you two are, and that she had enough on her plate as it was.”
“But
she
knew!”
“As it turns out,” Doris says. She shifts on the chesterfield to study Sonja.
“Me and my big mouth,” Sonja says again and covers her mouth with both hands.
“She’s not my sister,” Marcia says. Her eyes flood. “She’s my niece.”
“She’s still Joanie,” Sonja says, muffled through her fingers.
“That’s right,” Gordon says serenely. “Who she is has nothing to do with who you, or any of us for that matter, think she is.”
He is so tranquil! Has he lost his mind?
I have orgasms with queer men!
roars in his skull but as if from behind glass.
I have orgasms with queer men!
It has the ring of an odd translation. He did not say it, of course. Under no circumstances would he have put it that way. So what
did
he say that she knew about him? And why did she want everyone else to know?
“I have orgasms with queer men,” he says out loud. “I wonder how she came up with that one?” His tone of baffled innocence sounds just right to him.
Nobody seems to be listening. Doris is telling Marcia about the stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancies back in the fifties. “Your life was over,” she says. “Kaput.” Gordon looks at Doris. Does
she
love having sex with bare-naked women? Given that his declaration told the truth, he supposes that hers did, too. He looks at Marcia. She has slept with more boys than she can count. How is it that he can conclude these things without feeling appalled? Well, he can. “Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness,” he thinks, “shall be heard in the light. And what ye…” How does it go? “And that which ye have spoken in the ear in
closets
shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”
“Holy, Geez,” he thinks. “Right on the money.”
H
e drives through the downpour like an escaped convict. Skidding away from intersections, passing cars on the inside and sending flares of water up over the sidewalks.
Beside him in the front seat Doris grips the armrest and her door handle. In the back seat Sonja and Marcia smash into each other whenever he rounds a corner. Nobody speaks, except for when Marcia says, “I wish you’d asked her why,” and Doris says, “She hung up on me.”
It was Carol, the friendly nurse. “You’d better get here right away,” she said. That was maybe fifteen minutes after the tapes ended. Before she phoned, while everyone was saying that Joan was the same Joan, Marcia was aware of a fissure opening up between herself and Joan, a breathing space that hadn’t been there before. Now, in the car, it’s gone. Her bones rattle. There is a popping in her head. Her parents are homosexuals. She doesn’t doubt that the tapes were spliced. She is certain that her parents would never have said anything like that in front of Joan. They are still homosexuals, though. Even if Marcia believed Joan capable of making up such tremendous lies, it’s too late. Now she knows. She knows because she already knew, don’t ask her how. Hearing it expressed was like hearing about sex for the first time. The details suspect, the fact unassailable and yet impossible to imagine. She looks at her father’s hands squeezing the steering wheel. He is gay, she thinks and doesn’t feel a thing. He is going to keep pretending he isn’t, she thinks, and this penetrates, draws some blood.
They make it to the hospital in under twenty minutes. As
they’re going up the elevator the loudspeaker blares, “Code blue! Seven north! Room 259!”
Marcia says, “That’s Joanie!”
“What’s code blue?” Sonja says.
“We’ll soon find out,” Gordon says. When the elevator stops he shoulders through the doors before they’re open.
Doctors and nurses are hurrying down the hall. “Oh, God,” Doris says. She starts to run. They all do. Ahead of them two nurses turn into Joan’s room. A nurse just inside the door says, “You can’t come in here!” Doris shoves past her, and Gordon, Sonja and Marcia follow. Somebody shouts, “Make way!” It’s a nurse dragging in a cart with monitors on it. They stand aside. The bed is creaking but there are so many nurses and doctors around it that they can’t see Joan. One nurse is putting up another I.V. At the foot of the bed Carol is writing in a clipboard. She turns and says with light surprise, “Oh, Doris,” as if she wasn’t the one who phoned. She hands her clipboard to the nurse beside her, then motions the family to stay back, stepping aside herself, and now they see the doctor giving Joan mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Doris grabs Carol’s arm.
“She stopped breathing,” Carol says in a low voice.
“When?” Gordon says.
“Three minutes ago. Four.”
The doctor is now thumping Joan’s chest with both his hands one hand on top of the other. The bed creaks. A sound like people making love, Marcia thinks.
“Is there a pulse?” Gordon says.
Carol shakes her head. She says that she phoned because Joan was having trouble breathing.
“Is she dead?” Marcia whispers.
No answer. The doctor resumes thumping Joan’s chest. Gordon’s bad leg buckles. Sonja catches his elbow, but she has been feeling dizzy since the elevator ride and now she swoons,
clutching his arm and dragging him down with her. When they hit the floor the whole room quakes, and Joan coughs.
“She’s back!” the doctor says.
Six hours later, in Intensive Care, Joan is sitting up and taking sips of water from a glass. Wires are clamped to her chest and run from under her blue gown to a monitor on the wall, but this is regular procedure after cardiac arrest, it doesn’t mean she’s still in danger. Obviously she’s not. She is making her animal sounds and looking alertly around the room. She has her sunglasses on. In only minutes after that cough she was imitating everybody’s gasps and weeping. She breathed “Whoosh” when the toilet flushed. When the doctors and nurses left the room and Marcia lay down on the bed and thought, “What happened,” she got a response—We were tuckered out.
“I mean, what happened
tonight?”
Marcia pursued.
We were beat.
“Why did we get sick in the first place?”
We were so exhausted. It was so exhausting.
“Why wouldn’t we help ourself? Why wouldn’t we eat?”
We were too pooped.
And so on, along those lines. But at least it was communication.
Dr. Shack, who showed up as Joan was drifting off to sleep, said, “Well, maybe it was fatigue.” She didn’t even raise her eyebrows at Marcia’s claim that Joan had spoken to her telepathically. “In all honesty,” she said after taking Joan’s blood pressure, “I have to tell you that she has me completely bamboozled.”
“Join the club,” Doris said.
In the car Marcia says that she asked Joan why she secretly taped them, and that Joan’s answer was, “You are so interesting.”
“I think, initially, she taped us for the fun of it,” Gordon says. “For no reason except to have something to listen to when she was by herself. And then she read that article on David Rayne, and that gave her the idea of taking what we had said apart, taking—“
“A word from here and a word from there and splicing them together to make us say things we never said,” Doris finishes for him. She doesn’t mean anything by it. She is exhausted, that’s all, and he has already told them this enough times.
“We were her instrument,” Gordon says quietly. This he truly believes and is in awe of.
“We were her
audience,”
Marcia says.
By the time they pull into the driveway the sun is up, a pewter light kicking out from between the houses. Straight overhead the rain is coming down hard, but who has the energy to dash from the car to the front door? Sonja, scarcely awake, shuffles behind Marcia with one hand on Marcia’s shoulder. Inside, Sonja lumbers up the stairs and shuffles along to her room, where she falls on her bed without removing her wet dress or folding back her poodle-patterned coverlet.
Doris offers to scramble some eggs. Marcia declines, says, “See you in eight hours.” She has a date with a hundred clues. In Joan’s bed she lies naked on her back, crying and letting the clues spill over her. The front of Sonja’s blouses being wet when she came back from Vancouver, and that sour-milk smell she had then. A man her father used to work with, an effeminate man named Elvis, coming up to her in a restaurant and saying too urgently, “Say hello to your father for me, will you? We were very,
very
close.” And her recoiling, knowing that she would never say hello for him. Six or seven years ago at one of her father’s book launches a man slid his hand around her father’s waist and whispered in his ear something that the two of them laughed at, secretly—flirtatiously is how she remembers it now—and then the man saw her and his hand withdrew,
smooth as a pickpocket’s. That time when she burst into the kitchen, and Angela was standing behind her mother with her arms around her mother’s waist…
At the kitchen table Gordon massages his eyes under his glasses and says, “A night for the record books.”
“We should have told Marcia about Joanie,” Doris says. She cracks eggs into a bowl, one after another in a ruthless delirium. “I can’t figure out why we didn’t. Why didn’t we?”
“It was easier not to.”
“Oh,
easier,”
she says sarcastically. She pours milk into the bowl. “Oh, all right, then. Well aren’t
we
swell parents.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“Sure, why not? With her male harem to comfort her.” She opens and slams drawers, searching for the wire whisk. “More boyfriends than she can count is how many? A hundred? Four hundred? Well, it’s her business, that’s what
she’d
say.” She settles for a fork. “Anyways,
Joanie’s
going to be fine, that’s all I’m thinking about right now.”
“It was a close call. Another minute—“
She winces. “Don’t say it.”
“Well, we were lucky.”
“Luckier than we deserve. A pair of lucky so-and-so’s. A pair of lucky homo—“ She starts laughing. “Lucky homosexual—“ She can’t get it out but it’s so funny. “Old-timers who love to …” The fork slips from her hand, clatters to the floor. She grips the counter as the hysteria retches from her belly.
Gordon gets up and stands behind her and holds her shoulders. Not too tight, even though she just blurted out what he has been doing somersaults for the past eight hours trying to disclaim, and as she settles down she wonders at his composure. Still shuddering and gulping laughs, she turns to look up at him and sees from his patient, instructive expression that he is going to give her that lecture again about Joan splicing the tapes.
She pulls away from him. “Stop it!” she says. “No more! Not with me.” He glances worriedly toward the bedrooms and she lowers her voice. “Sweetie, I
know!”
She thumps her breast. “I’ve known for a long time! So let’s both stop this song and dance!”
He blinks at her.
“The girls, fine,” she says. “We can go on pretending to them, if you want to, I don’t know. But between you and me, for the love of Mike …” She drops into a chair.
He stares at her but he is attending to himself. Everything knotted inside him has suddenly been yanked into straight lines. He hears his long breaths. He reaches up to prod the ceiling tiles. “How did you know?” he says. His heart beats loosely, unclenched.
“We could start with no sex.”
“That had nothing to do with you,” he says, balancing a tile on the tips of his fingers.
“Listen, I didn’t really know anything until it was spelled out for me.” A short laugh. “And, brother, did she spell it out or what? How
she
knew is the question. How she knew about
either
of us.”
He sits across from her but does not look at her. “We must have been indiscreet,” he says.
“I guess that’s it. But who knew she had supersonic hearing?”
“Let me ask you this.” He presses his fingers together at his lips. “Was it because we didn’t have sex that you … that you …”
She helps him out. “Turned into a lesbian?”
The sparest of nods.
“I think I’d have kept it under wraps,” she says, “you know, in fantasy land, and let me tell you there were a lot of dry years there before I took the plunge. But who knows what I’d have done if we’d had a normal sex life? I’m no saint, I found that
out.” She is remembering her seedy courtship of Cloris Carter, which eventually came to nothing.
Gordon nods.
“Can you believe we’re even
having
this conversation?”
Mama may have
are the lyrics in her head.
And Papa may have …
“All civilized at the breakfast table. Oh, the eggs!”
“Not for me.”
“How about coffee?”
“No.”
“All right, let me ask
you
this. Because I’ve been wondering all these years. Do you find me disgusting?”
He is surprised. “No. Never.” He looks straight at her. “Not disgusting.”
“Just not sexually exciting.”
He keeps his mouth shut.
“See, I never didn’t find you sexy. So I must be what they call bisexual.” She pats her hair. It’s still damp. She is feeling more friendly toward him than she has felt in years. She’d like to sit in his lap, but as soon as this urge hits her so does a natural conclusion, and she straightens and says carelessly, “Do you want a divorce?”
She sees that she has jolted him, and says quickly, “I’m not saying I do. I thought you might, though, now that the cat’s out of the bag.”