Joe had pushed me down to the Great Lawn, where several ball games were going on. It took only minutes for the tops of my knees to turn pink in the broiling sun, but I wasn’t about to complain. I knew the heat could make me sick, but I figured I was still semi-frozen from Jackson Hole and it might take me a while to defrost.
“You mentioned your mother,” he said. I braked my chair beside an empty bench as he sat down and stretched out his legs. I noticed he was wearing battered Top-Siders with no socks. I could see the vein pulsing beside his ankle. “Is your father… ?”
“Left when I was six. He lives in L.A.”
“Do you ever see him?”
I shook my head. “Not since before I was diagnosed. He’s been married three times and there’re a lot of kids. He’s always sent money, but now Ma’s got her bakery going in the neighborhood. We’re all right.”
“What about men?”
I gave him a stare.
“I told you I want to know everything,” he said. When he smiled, lines crinkled beside his eyes and an indefinable sadness evaporated. I could see that his bottom teeth were a little crooked.
“Are you married?” He wasn’t about to give up. “Do you have three children? A boyfriend? Come on.”
I suddenly felt shy. Not just a little shy, but blushingly, stammeringly shy. “This time you. You go first.”
“All right. I’ve dated a lot of women but there’s only been one relationship that’s lasted more than a few months. It hasn’t been working out. I know what you’re thinking. Can’t commit.”
“My record isn’t that hot in the commitment department either. There was an off-and-on two-year thing, but it ended after I got sick.”
Just then somebody hit a triple halfway to the West Side and a great roar went up. I watched a runner slide home and felt such a tug, a tearing sensation. It wasn’t usually that bad, but I had to blink hard. I’d never minded getting dirty in a slide. Joe was studying me carefully, so I put a hand up to my eyes as if the glare bothered me. He took the other one and held it, palm up, staring into my future.
“So there’s nobody now?” he asked. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak through the lump.
“You know what, I think I’d better get going,” I said, and withdrew my hand.
“Are you sure?”
I unlocked the chair and gave myself a push.
“I can put you in a cab,” he offered. I liked that he didn’t protest when he saw I was resolved.
“You can walk me out of the park, but I’m okay after that. It’s good for me to flex my biceps.” I did a bodybuilder’s pose with my arms, showing off what definition I had.
As we wound down along beside the Metropolitan Museum, I was trying not to think, just to be. Live in the moment. It was hard when I’d spent so many years always looking ahead to the next challenge, the next choice. But it felt good to have a man’s company, to remember what it was like to be touched, even if there was a sting to it. When we got to the street, he said, “Sure you’ll be all right?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Anna, let me have your number.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. No offense. I’m just not … I don’t think so.”
“I don’t even know where you live.”
“I’ve got the light,” I said, gave a mighty shove and sailed out across Eighty-fourth Street. “Keep taking those pictures!” I aimed a backward wave at him so I didn’t have to see his face. I ought to carry air-sick bags for when I make remarks like that.
Instead of heading home, I found myself wheeling over to York Avenue. I stopped outside the bakery for a moment to see if there were any customers. Nobody. Ma was leaning on the counter over a magazine.
People,
probably. She was vocal about what a rag it was, but I happened to know she bought one every week and read it on the sly. I was grateful she wasn’t busy. Ordinarily, she used free time to invent new recipes. She’d had some success with carrot-fig spice cookies, less with the latest effort to banish the tedium of chocolate chips, something called space-junkies. I haven’t dared ask what’s in them.
Norma’s Crust had the widest smoothest wheelchair access in town. When the bell jangled, Ma looked up and quickly slipped the magazine under the counter. Her eyebrows drew together as soon as she got a good look at my face.
“What’s the matter?” she asked me.
I opened my mouth to tell her “Nothing” and immediately burst into tears. I’m not much of a weeper, so Ma was out from behind that counter in half a second. I got the impression she vaulted over it, but of course that’s ludicrous.
“What the fuck, Anna?” She had her arms around me while I just sobbed away, drowning her apron. I took a couple of great heaving breaths and started to laugh. What a spectacle. At this point, Ma straightened up and went for the scotch. She poured me a stiff splash in a measuring cup and watched while I downed it. Then she went over to the door, hung the “Closed” sign on it and pulled up a chair. My ponytail was somewhat the worse for wear. Ma reached out and tucked some stray tendrils behind my ears. “You ready to talk about it?” she asked.
“I think I must be cracking up,” I said. “It’s only that I met this guy at the A.I.P. and we had a nice afternoon in the park.”
“Uh-huh,” Ma said. She could speak volumes in two syllables.
“Well, that’s it. You think I could have a tiny bit more?” I held out the measuring cup. She poured another half an inch, which I sipped at.
“Don’t pull your deep-dive act on me now,” Ma warned. “You know the deal.”
When I’d been diagnosed, Ma made me promise to talk to her when I was low. Otherwise, she said, she’d kick my ass out. My father had not been one to share his feelings, and Ma said fifteen years of silent seething was enough. Still, there were certain things we’d never discussed.
“I haven’t been with anybody. I mean men. Since.”
“I figure you miss that,” Ma said. “There were always a lot of guys around.”
I nodded. “I guess I just never let myself think about it. Not after Bobby. That was such a mess.” Bobby Zaklow had been my steady man for almost two years before that last great run at the reservoir. He stuck it out for another six months, but then he bailed. I couldn’t blame him, and I didn’t think I was in love anyway. I’d always thought that since I couldn’t have Marlon Brando in
Streetcar,
I would never truly surrender myself to an all-consuming passion. Still, it didn’t feel good when Bobby left, and I just shut myself off from men after that. I knew they’d all pull away from me once they found out what the future had in store.
“Tell me about this person,” Ma said.
“His name is Joseph D. Malone. He had a really good photograph in the exhibit. Maybe it was accidental. He’s kind. He’s troubled. He. He.” I could feel the tears coming again. “He swept me off my feet, Ma,” I wailed, “and I wasn’t even
on
my feet.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Ma said, wiping my face. She let me cry for a while.
“Sorry,” I gulped finally. I could see she was worried. It’s not great for me to get agitated.
“So what’re you going to do about it, babe?” Ma asked.
“Nothing.” I looked at the desk in the corner where Ma did her accounts. There was a photo of me at college, accepting an award for the ski team. I was leaning on my poles, one hip cocked, one knee slightly bent. If I tried that now, I’d wind up on my rear end in a snowbank. God, I remember what it felt like flying downhill with the snow peppering my face. I still dream about it. “Nothing,” I repeated. I made a goofy face at Ma. “You got a new cookie for me to try out? How about something with okra?”
It wasn’t as easy as I thought, forgetting about Joe Malone. It was as if there were some cosmic conspiracy to throw him up to me at every possible juncture. First there was a copy of
Crain’s
in the waiting room at my neurologist’s. I always complained to Dr. Klewanis about the paucity of reading material there, assuming that he was trying to speed up the process of his patients’ nerve-sheath damage by making us leaf through
Your Well Body
and
Scientific American.
But this time I snatched the business weekly up like it was a double issue of
Vogue.
Joe Malone’s face was staring straight out at me with that plucked-chicken look of the recent haircut. In fact, he was one of half a dozen “new faces in the boardroom.” There was a short paragraph on each executive. Joe’s item said he divided his time between New York City and upstate near North Lockville, wherever that was, and that he’d persuaded his way into the offices of the CEOs of every major airline to pick their brains about cooperative air routes in the eastern U.S. Both Air East and Blue Skies Airways had been so impressed with him that they’d tried to snap Joe up and AirMalone along with him. I struggled with myself about whether to stuff the article in my bag. Then, after I’d left it behind, I stopped at all the news concessions on the way home until I found a left-over copy.
AirMalone chose that week to launch an advertising campaign that was broadcast daily on WNYC. I was listening to the radio and hauling my eight-pound weights around when suddenly there was this voice saying,
“AirMalone, the little airline with the big future.”
Maybe it had been on before and I hadn’t noticed.
Then the Sunday
Times
struck the final blow with an article in the Business section. I was soaking in the tub when Ma came in flapping the newspaper at me like a red cape at a bull.
“Isn’t this your photographer?” She stuck the article in front of my nose, and there he was again, with longer hair this time.
UPSTATE UPSTART FLIES HIGH
. Either AirMalone had hired a fantastic publicist or I was being pursued by some sadistic god of circumstance. Pretending casual interest, I grabbed the paper and got it soaking wet. I learned a few things about Joe Malone: (a) he was thirty-one years old; (b) he graduated at the top of his class from first Cornell, then the Harvard Business School; (c) his mother was described as “formidable”; and (d) he was “romantically linked” to someone called Lola Falcon. The name brought to mind a heroine worthy of Thomas Hardy, and what does “romantically linked” mean anyway? I think of a chain-link fence.
“There’s no escaping the man,” I muttered.
“What about this Lola broad?” Ma asked.
“He basically said he’s a womanizer, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.”
“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” she said with one of her looks.
I gazed down at my legs floating like pale pink sausages on the bathwater. “He wasn’t coming on to me, Ma. Believe me. I was in my chair, remember?”
“As if that gives you absolution.” She took the soggy newspaper from me and pretended to wring it out like a dishrag. “I’d try the hair dryer. Just on the off chance you want to keep this.”
By the time September rolled around, I was in remission. Thank God, because I always hated to start the academic year in my chair. I was one of those obnoxious faculty members who was unequivocably ecstatic to get back to work. First of all, it was a lot easier to forget my own complaints when surrounded by fidgeting, awkward, stressed-out, loopy, immensely touching and hormonally challenged teen-agers. I could never predict what was going to emerge from their mouths—observations ranging in intellectual acuity from Einstein to Daffy Duck. While almost continually unnerved, I was never bored. The third week of school, I took one of my classes on a field trip to the Pierpont Morgan Library to examine the illuminated manuscripts. We were crowded around some Blake when I looked up and saw Joe Malone’s face glowing like a saint’s, suspended over a display case on the other side of the dimly lit room. At that moment, he raised his eyes and spotted me. It was delicious to watch his face register the eloquent combination of confusion and shock. Last he knew, I had wheels instead of feet, and here I stood in all my five-foot-seven-inch glory. I could read his thoughts:
She been to Lourdes or what?
I gave him a perky little wave. Michelle Cross, well turned out in Calvin Klein, sniffed drama in the air and peered at Joe as he crossed the room. He took both my hands and kissed me on the cheek.
“Anna,” Joe said. The kids backed off as his gaze made the trip from my head to my toes. “What happened?”
“I’m better,” I answered. I thought Michelle’s Clinique-enhanced eyeballs were going to pop out of their sockets. “These are my students. We’re getting illuminated.”
Joe smiled at them. Michelle’s best friend Sukey was mouth-breathing audibly. “I’m going to borrow your teacher for a minute,” Joe announced. Of course, I had nothing to say about it.
I almost growled at Michelle. “Read the transliteration in this display. Take detailed notes because we’re going to discuss it when we get back to school.”
They made a big show of gathering around the case but they kept watching us. Except for good old oblivious Rudy Steinberger who was already scribbling in his notebook.
“Why didn’t you call me back?”
“What?”
“I phoned the school a few times and left messages.”
That reptile Chubb, I thought. Always grabbing for the departmental phone to see if he could get the edge on a colleague. Last semester he neglected to tell me the headmaster had been trying to reach me for two days.
“But it’s not that I’m really surprised to see you,” Joe went on. He still had hold of my arm. “It’s the lack of wheels.”
“It just wasn’t a great summer, that’s all. When I met you, I mean. Not that it wasn’t great to meet you.” Oh, shit. Well, I do curse sometimes, but only when it really counts for something, and mostly in my head.
“I’ve been running into you all over the place,” Joe said. I did like those smile crinkles, such gleeful punctuation.
“Where was that?”
“Well, let’s see. I had a solicitation from the MS Society in the mail. I rented two videos that featured Cameron Diaz. Then I was trying to find my ski poles in the back of the closet and my brother’s bowling ball rolled off the top shelf and almost gave me a concussion.” He touched the spot. I had forgotten about his long expressive fingers.
“Oh. Bolles,” I said. I wasn’t about to mention the little shrine cached in my bureau drawer—the photos from
Crain’s
and the
Times.
“Ski poles in October?”
“Next month there should be plenty of cross-country in the Adirondacks. I want you to come with me. Can you? I mean …” He gestured in the direction of my knees. I was annoyed I’d worn slacks. My legs are still good.
“I don’t know.” I didn’t remember telling him about the ski team. Anyway, it wasn’t the skiing that worried me. It was more the sensation that there was an earthquake underfoot, somewhere around 7.5 on the Richter scale. I glanced at my students, who were fooling around, whispering and shoving. “I’ve got to get back to them.”
“Your home number’s unlisted,” he said. So he’d gotten that far. He had my arm and was clearly in no hurry to let go.
“I’ll make sure you can get through at Cameron. Ask for the English department.” I figured that if he did try to get in touch, I could dodge his calls more easily at work until I figured out what to do. He read the reluctance, or was it terror, on my face.
“Look, Anna, you don’t have to commit to a weekend trip in the north country. We could have dinner.”
“Great,” I said. He let go and I backed off. “It was nice to run into you. I have to…” I made another feeble little wave in the general direction of the adolescents.
That was it. I picked up a paper airplane from the floor and rejoined the restive tribe, and none too soon. I didn’t imagine that the ghost of Pierpont Morgan would have appreciated the decibel level. The next time I looked, Joe was gone.
“Is that your boyfriend, Miss Bolles?” Michelle asked. She’d applied fresh lipstick, the color of cappuccino.
“God, Michelle, you’re so inappropriate!” Sukey piped up. The two had a difficult relationship, symbiotic and fraught with conflict.
“So is he?” This from Will Simmons who was a knock-off of Johnny Depp. I would have done almost anything he asked of me except give him a passing grade which he truly did not deserve.
“No, he’s not my boyfriend.”
“Well, he wants to be,” Will said.
“Oh, and you’re such an expert!” Michelle was justifiably miffed that I’d chosen to answer Will.
Rudy Steinberger looked up from the display case. “Do you think they retouched these drawings? They look like somebody just did them this morning.”
A-plus, Rudy, I thought.
There was a message on the English department voice-mail at the end of the day. I erased it without writing down his number. I figured I wouldn’t have to mention it to Ma, but he’d phoned the bakery, too. I didn’t remember telling him the name.
“No, I’m not going to see him,” I told her over dinner. It was salad night at the Bolles household, and we were picking our way through a Brazilian rain forest assortment of leafy greens.
“Why not?” Just a trifle belligerent, I thought.
“Oh, do you have a point of view here?” I asked her.
“I liked his voice. As a matter of fact, we had a little chat.”
It’s an odd expression:
my heart sank.
But it felt that way, as if something inside my chest slid a couple of notches lower, into a dark place. “Didn’t you swear you would never again interfere in my social life?”
“I was being polite.”
“What did he say? Tell me exactly.”
“That he wanted to see you and that he thought you were trying to blow him off.”
I set down my fork. “He didn’t.”
“I swear.”
“And you said?”