Saving the World (2 page)

“‘Course he's going to tell you he doesn't know me.” The woman could be laughing, could be clearing her throat. “They never know you, do they, after they get what they want.”

Alma lets out a sigh of impatience. She wants her guillotine sharp and quick. Actually, Alma is hoping to be spared. In part, she doesn't want to be distracted from her present state, from the possibility of coming through to the other side of her dark mood.
Please
, she addresses Richard retrospectively.
Don't have done anything stupid, please
. A tryst during the company's last overnight retreat? A reunion with an old girlfriend when he flew back to Indiana for the funeral of a favorite uncle? Recently, he brought home a cell phone. Richard, who dislikes the whole idea of cell phones (“I don't want to be reachable every moment of my day”), now has his own private, portable number, courtesy of Help International, in case one of his on-site people needs to get hold of him. But mostly, Richard uses it to call home so Alma can read him the grocery list he has forgotten on the kitchen counter or to tell her he is stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive on his way
home from his Boston meeting or to ask her how she is feeling, if she has made any progress in the novel he, too, thinks she is almost done writing.

Maybe Richard is also using this private line to get in touch with other women.

“I have some bad news,” the woman is saying. “I'm calling everybody.”

Alma is sure now. The woman has some communicable disease. But Alma can't really see how this applies to Richard. Her present mood notwithstanding, they have been basically happily, monogamously married for more than the requisite years you can carry these infections around with you. All those adverbs (
basically, happily, monogamously
) suddenly sound suspiciously assertive, defending themselves against the onslaught of
Are you sure
?

“Where are you calling from?” If Alma can place the woman, it might be easier to dismiss her.

“I've been so sick.” The woman goes on, ignoring the question, as if she has to get through what she has called to report. “I just found out and so I'm going through my book to warn everyone.” A
book
to go through? What does the woman run, a service? How many calls has she made already? Is Richard the first?

“What exactly is it you have?” Alma asks the woman, trying to inject concern in her voice. It's a strategy from her old hitchhiking days when some driver would suddenly turn weird or aggressive. Alma would start gabbing, asking questions, pretending to great interest as if being a nice person might keep her from being raped and murdered.

“I've got AIDS,” the woman pronounces the word importantly. Like a trophy.

Of course, Alma is thinking. What other epidemic do people worry about in this part of the world? Elsewhere, along with AIDS, there are other plagues brewing, in terrorist bunkers, in open-door clinics with dirt floors, flies buzzing over wasted faces, diseases long since banished from the richer-world neighborhoods—Tera knows all about them. Alma has been researching the subject, specifically the smallpox epidemic, Balmis and his vaccine expedition around the world
with little boys. She doesn't know why, but in her present mood, it's the one story that seems to engage her, as if through it she might discover where it is she is going.

“I'm calling all the wives,” the woman is explaining. “I just know how men are. They're not going to tell you.”

Alma has had enough. “Look here,” she tells the woman. “I don't know who you are, but I know who my husband is, and he shares everything with me, okay? Everything. And for another thing, his past relationships do not concern me. If you want to talk to him, you have our number, you can call tonight.” She is about to hang up, glad she has conquered her pettiness and mistrust, but the image lurks before her, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, the president having oral sex in the Oval Office while heads of state wait in the anteroom. Then there are Alma's cousins back in the Dominican Republic, fading beauties having their hair colored and their faces lifted, joining Bible study groups led by young, attractive Jesuit men from Spain, while their cocksure, cologne-scented husbands go off to their mistresses in designer guayaberas. Alma wavers, wanting and not wanting to know more.

“I know what you must think …” The woman's voice trembles. “But I'm not some whore. I'm just calling everyone to be sure.”

Whore? How old-fashioned the word sounds. There are no whores in the USA anymore, Alma feels like saying. Everyone has a new name now. Flight attendant, waste disposal engineer, sex worker. And what does it mean that the woman is
calling everyone to be sure
? To be sure of what?

“AIDS is just the last stage,” the woman goes on. She sounds tired, worn out with trying to reconstruct all that some health professional has told her. “I've probably been HIV for some time. But I don't have no health insurance. So I didn't know myself till I got real sick.”

It's only now that Alma notices the woman's bad grammar. Oddly, it makes her feel safer. Richard wouldn't risk their happiness for someone who can't talk right, would he? Like a lot of former farm boys, Richard can be a snob about certain things. Then, too, the woman
might not be smart enough to have gotten the details right. Maybe she had sex with Richard years ago. HIV doesn't lie dormant that long. Or does it? Alma knows so little about it—a pamphlet she read while waiting for her flu shot at the hospital. She actually knows more about Balmis and smallpox than about her own millennium's epidemic.

But this is irrelevant: Richard has told her about everyone he has slept with, and among the modest handful there are no quick affairs, ladies who might later call up with bad news. Alma recalls their first days as lovers (she was thirty-nine; Richard, forty-seven), the thrilling sense that even as middle-agers they could still be the principals in a love story: the long, housebound days on weekends the boys were with their mother, the rumpled sheets, the life stories they shared, the lights of the little town beyond the window, snow beginning to fall. “Okay,” Alma says finally, as if granting the woman some point. “Just tell me, when did you and Richard get together?”

“Please don't get mad at me, Mrs. Huebner.”

“My name is not Mrs. Huebner,” Alma says, her voice rising again. “I'm Fulana de Tal.” Her professional name, necessary camouflage upon family request. “It sounds too much like a title,” Lavinia had objected, finally relenting when Alma explained that
fulana de tal
actually meant a nobody, a so-and-so.

“What?”

“Fulana de Tal,” Alma repeats. She doesn't try to Americanize the pronunciation. This woman will probably assume that Richard found her during one of his third-world consultancy trips and brought her back to be the good wife it is now difficult to find in this country.

“You don't give a shit, do you? As long as you're safe.” The woman's voice has turned nasty. “I hope you get exactly what you deserve! Go to hell!”

“Wait! Please!” Alma is the one pleading now. She wants the woman to take back her curse. But the woman has hung up her end.

Alma is still at her post at the window. She looks out as if she might spot the woman racing across the back pasture toward Helen's house. She thinks of the stranger she saw earlier. It's as if in her gloominess
she has mistakenly wandered into some twilight zone, among the bruised and broken with no way to defend herself from their intrusion or ill will. This woman's curse is an infection she won't be able to shake off.

Only, Richard—loving him, being loved by him, if he hasn't already betrayed her—might save her.

S
HE WANTS TO CALL
Richard and hear him deny everything. But it's Thursday afternoon, when HI holds its weekly company meeting, reports from the different project managers: What's happening with the water-system project in the West Bank? Is the financing application for the Haitian reforest-a-mountain proposal finished? Did we get back the estimates and feasibility studies from the microloan coffee cooperative in Bolivia?

Whenever Richard talks about these meetings, Alma imagines all the men in the company standing over a large table map, dividing up the world. Always it's the men she imagines—though a few women do work as coordinators and project managers. And though Alma knows that Help International represents the good guys, many of them former Peace Corps volunteers, corporate Robin Hoods funneling funds from the rich and powerful in the first world to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor, their talk at these gatherings, at least as reported by Richard, sounds to her like four-star generals plotting in the back rooms of the Pentagon. Sometimes Alma wonders how much difference—besides content—there is between these types of men.

“A world of difference,” Tera would say. Bossy and big-hearted, Alma's best friend is a force of nature. Just who Alma needs to talk to right now. Any number of times in the past, Tera has been the emotional equivalent of God reaching down toward Adam's lifted fore finger on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Tera has breathed grit into Alma.

The phone rings and rings. Unlike everyone else Alma knows, Tera refuses to get an answering machine and buy into the impersonality of the first world. Dear Tera, everything is a political struggle. But Alma
has learned to get beyond this first string of her friend's defense. She has come to realize that this is Tera's way of girding her loins, so to speak, making her poverty mean something. Tera actually survives on less than twenty grand a year and no health insurance, teaching as an adjunct at the local state college. She also conducts weekend journalwriting workshops in which a half-dozen or so women participants uncover horrible pasts and buried terrors. One time, as the guest writer, Alma sat through three hours of a sharing session. It was awful.

“Hey!” Tera sounds breathless. She needs to lose some of that extra weight. How to approach the topic again and not have it turn into the evil forces of anorexia attacking the organic, expansive shape of the female body. “I was outside,” she explains. Tera is an incredible gardener—a passion she shares with Richard, although usually it takes the form of competition: who is still harvesting kale in November, who has the first tomatoes. “They're predicting a big frost tonight. Paul, don't bring that in here!” Tera's companion, Paul Vendler, is a tall, docile Quaker, whom Tera has been living with for way longer than anyone they know has been married. Needless to say, Tera does not believe in marriage. “Just set it in the mudroom for now.”

It always annoys Alma: Tera's stereo conversations with her and Paul. Today especially, Alma wants her friend's undivided attention. “Tera, I just had this upsetting phone call,” Alma blurts out.

“What happened? Hold on,” she adds before Alma can even begin. “Shut the door, Paul. I can't hear a damn thing.” It's Tera's own fault. She refuses to update the vintage rotary bolted to the wall of the kitchen, the receiver cord so short there is no way to migrate away from noise. Alma once tried to pass on her old portable (marriage with Richard doubled, and in some cases tripled, their cache of certain items: four alarm clocks; five assorted wine bottle openers; six phones, including two portables). But Tera refused the gift. “Ours works fine. But I'll take it for the battered women's shelter.” Alma has not told Tera about the cell phone—afraid Richard and she will be consigned to that corrupt circle of consumer hell Tera reserves for people who replace things that aren't broken.

“Tera? Are you still there?” There is an absent sound on the other end. Tera must have given up on Paul and gone off to shut the door herself.

“Sorry,” Tera says coming back. “Go on.”

Alma has already decided she won't bring up her dark mood. She doesn't want a reminder about how lucky they all are. Right now, what Alma wants is Band-Aid reassurance, someone reminding her that her fears and doubts are unfounded.

“Have you talked to Richard?” Tera asks when Alma finishes her account.

“He's at a meeting. And I just couldn't concentrate on anything. I had to talk to someone.”
Someone
doesn't sound like an adequate category for her best friend. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“I wish you weren't so far away.” Tera sighs. When they lived in the same town, they met almost every day for a walk and talk. Presence is important to Tera. It's one of her articles of faith: being there. Maybe that's why she has let herself get so large. More of her bearing witness, marching on a picket line, being there.

“Here's what I would do,” Tera says in a voice so strong and sure, Alma feels as if her friend's capacious arms are pouring out of the receiver and wrapping themselves around her. Although they are the same age, Alma often thinks of Tera as older, wiser. “First, you absolutely need to talk to Richard before you get worked up. It sounds to me like this poor, lonely woman got diagnosed with this horrible disease and got piss-poor medical information and counseling and went home and took out her old address book and started calling everyone she even shook hands with or lusted after in high school. Seriously, the health care in this country is just the pits—”

“Like you say, it's probably nothing,” Alma puts in, nipping Tera's rant in the bud. If Tera gets started on the Big Issues of the World, Alma's petty problems won't stand a chance. “It's just, oh, you know how down I've been, Tera. And this call just reminds me how everything can come tumbling down.”

“You said it,” Tera agrees. But instead of pursuing any number of corroborating horrors, Tera stays with Alma. Perhaps she senses the des
peration in Alma's voice. “Hang in there. It'll pass, really. And you got me, babe, like the song says. Are you taking your Saint-John's-wort?”

Just the name makes Alma cringe. Unlike Tera, Alma doesn't believe in all those expensive, alternative tins and jars at the co-op. But it's more than that. She doesn't want to take Saint-John's-wort; she doesn't want to be on antidepressants; she has stopped going to Dr. Payne. There has to be a place left in modern life for a crisis of the soul, a dark night that doesn't have a chemical solution.