She Poured Out Her Heart (24 page)

He meant, about the two of them. “I don't see how.” But dread was creeping up the back of Bonnie's neck. “What does she say?”

“We were getting ready for bed”—a brief flick of his eyes made it clear to Bonnie they had actually been in bed together. Really, the man
was a miserable liar—“and she pipes up with, ‘Do you think Bonnie would like to spend the night sometime?'”

“Whoa.”

“She meant, come over for dinner, hang out with the kids, and we'd make up the guest bed so you wouldn't have to drive home. But she had my heart going, I tell you.”

Bonnie's heart was going too, just from hearing about it. Eric said, “Every so often, she'll say something, not about you, necessarily, but something, I guess, spooky. Like she's on a different wavelength. I can't figure it.”

They were both quiet. Bonnie thought it had to be Eric's guilty conscience leading him to imagine things. She said, “It's a coincidence. Jane doesn't know anything.”

“Yeah.” Unconvinced.

“But she will if you don't get your act together. Stop looking like you murdered somebody.”

“Yeah.” He wasn't making much of an effort.

“Come on. It's not like you have all kinds of other things to feel guilty about.” Bonnie watched him look away again and make his bad news face. “God, you're kidding. Eric!”

“You asked,” he said gloomily.

“I don't believe this. How often? When?” He muttered. “No, come on. You can't tell me that and then drop it!”

“Two. I mean it was two different women. Once I was at some conference. It was practically a drive-by. The other time, well, it was actually a few times. It's over. Long over.” He gave her a feeble look.

“I changed my mind, I don't want to hear about it.” She felt indignant. On Jane's behalf? On her own? Because she had been only one of a series?

“Fine.” He shrugged.

“But maybe you could tell me,” Bonnie said, unable to stop herself, “why none of those other times were like a big crisis.”

“Because they weren't you.”

She had nothing to say to that. They were silent until he spoke again. “I know it sounds like some dirtbag excuse, and I don't want to be disloyal to Jane. Any more than I already have been. But she's not a very interested party, when it comes to sex.”

Not only was this no surprise to Bonnie, it was something she had known about Jane from almost the very first minute of their friendship. And yes, it did seem disloyal and dirtbaggy. “So maybe I could ask you, why get married? Why Jane? I mean, you knew this, right? You could have let her be. Found yourself a real hot tamale instead.”

“This is a weird conversation.”

“It's a weird situation.”

“I guess I didn't think anything was that wrong. With her. Us. I guess I thought most girls, women, they just kind of went along with things, it was normal. Look, this is embarrassing, I don't want to keep talking. Oh, and hot tamales? Anything cools off over time.”

“Why Jane?” Bonnie asked again. “Come on. Because she was impressed with you? Because she admired you?”

“Yeah, maybe. Whatever bad motive you want to assign to me.” Eric yawned and buried his mouth in his hand. “Sorry. I haven't slept much.”

“She went along with things. She had her place and you had yours. You married her because it seemed like a good
plan.
”

“That's not fair,” Eric said wearily. “Or even if you're right, that's not the whole story. She's always had that sweetness to her. That calmness. I loved that in her. All right. I guess you don't have to throw flowers at me. But I'm trying to tell you the truth.” He finished his coffee and got up from the table. “Sorry if I woke you.”

Now that he was leaving, Bonnie felt, stupidly, regret at speaking as harshly as she had. She made no sense to herself sometimes. “Look, I'm sorry too. I didn't mean to give you such a hard time. I don't feel very good about myself either.”

He nodded, as if he was done with saying things. She followed him to the door and opened it. He was already out in the hall when he turned back to her. “Would it be OK if . . .”

“If what?”

“If we talked sometimes? About normal stuff,” he hurried on. “About work. What you watched on television. Politics. Maybe not politics.”

“You want to talk.”

“Friend stuff. Like we used to.”

Bonnie hesitated, and he began to backtrack, never mind, and she said, quickly, “Sure. We can talk, once in a while.”

“Great.” He smiled a crooked smile and there was a moment when they were visibly deciding whether to hug, or shake hands, or nothing at all. Just then Fern Dumpling opened her door and stepped into the hall wearing snow boots and toting a bag of garbage. She took in Bonnie's pajamas, Eric's rumpled clothes and 36-hour beard, maybe his wedding ring as well.

“How about all this snow,” Bonnie said, cheerfully. “We sure got clobbered.”

Fern agreed that it was a lot of snow. Her expression took on a ruminative quality. Unaccountably, she went back inside, taking the garbage with her.

“Bye,” Bonnie said to Eric. He made the hand sign for shooting himself in the head and she closed the apartment door behind her. A little while later she watched his car round the corner and its heaps of new-piled snow, and speed off.

And now she had to imagine him headed home, calling Jane, probably, to tell her he was on his way. His tired face wearing no particular expression, and then, once he reached his front door, rallying, turning into husband and daddy.

Should she feel shocked, or injured, or much of anything, that he'd cheated on Jane? She wished he had not told her, if only because it was one
more bad secret. Why was she so surprised? Men screwed around, everybody knew it, Bonnie herself had done her share and more of sleazy sleeping and was not in a position to throw stones. She knew more than she wanted to about both their sexual temperaments, Jane's and Eric's. She got back into bed and willed herself to sleep, and when she woke up again it was after noon, and her head hurt from all the space that Jane and Eric had taken up in it.

Bonnie didn't hear from either of them again for a few weeks. This was not unusual, since she and Jane might go a long, busy time without talking, let alone seeing each other. Finally, hating the sense of calculation that went along with it, Bonnie called Jane to say hello and catch up and not talk about sleeping with her husband. And how was every little thing?

Jane said, “Don't ever get married.”

“OK,” Bonnie said. “Off the table. Care to say why?”

“I should have had the courage to be on my own. Live a solitary life. I think that would have suited me. Now there's always always somebody here. Never mind. It's too late now. Grace is having a princess moment. Everything is tiaras and twirly skirts. It's supposed to be the new girl power. I'm not so sure. It seems kind of retro.”

“You don't mean that, about wanting to be solitary. Single, maybe. Not solitary.”

“I meant both.”

“Like what, like a hermit or something? I'm not making fun, I'm trying to understand.”

Jane said, “I'm thinking. OK, not a hermit. There could be people walking around doing people things, going to work and running cash registers and mowing the grass. But I don't want to have to talk to them. I want them on mute. That's the fantasy.”

“Yeah, I can see how that doesn't really jibe with family life.” Not that Bonnie wanted to spend a lot of time hashing over Jane's family life.

“Eric's going to call you,” Jane said.

What? “What?”

“He has some patient who got arrested for drugs, he wants to know what's going to happen to the guy.”

“That's nice of him,” Bonnie said, trying not to hiccup into the phone. “I mean of Eric. He's a caring medical provider.”

“He's such a Boy Scout. I don't know if you can tell him anything helpful.”

“Well great,” Bonnie said. “Sure, have him call.”

“He takes things so personally,” Jane continued, as if this was a logical next thing to say.

“Don't most of us? If things happen to a person, they have a personal reaction.”

“It's limiting. It means that you're confined to all these subjective things like your own experiences and opinions.”

“But those are the only things that give us authenticity and validity.” As always when arguing with Jane, Bonnie reached a point where she lost track of the issues and was only trying to keep her end of things going.

“I'm talking about the concept of detachment. Most people don't understand it. I've come around to embrace it.”

“I'm not sure I understand it myself. Detachment?”

“It's when you can, it's hard to explain, get beyond yourself. Erase yourself, sort of. Not get hung up on your own ego. Your own little wants and needs.”

“Then what happens?”

“Other possibilities open up. Other currents. Harmonies of . . . spirit.”

“I'm sorry,” Bonnie said. “I'm not getting it. It sounds kind of moonbeamy. New Age.”

Jane sighed. “It figures. You are probably the most earthbound person I know.”

“Yup, that's me.”

“Moonbeamy. That's not even a word.”

Bonnie told her good-bye and got off the phone. She couldn't help feeling there had been some shift or off-balance tilt in Jane since the Christmas crisis, or no doubt before then. The kind of thing that Eric called spooky. Or maybe it was only what Jane had said, detachment. Hearing the music of the spheres. Whatever.

She was nervous about Eric's phone call, but she didn't have to wait long for it. He called the next day, he might have only been waiting for Bonnie to get things rolling. “What's this about a patient?”

“It's not really for a patient.”

“Yeah, I wondered.” She hated that he'd come up with some lame, overcautious cover story just to make a phone call. “So what's this really about?”

“You talked to her, right? You see how things are.”

Bonnie kept silent. There wasn't any point in passing on Jane's comments about the married state.

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Does she want me to go away? Right now she tolerates me. I tell you, there's not much worse than being tolerated. What about the kids?”

“I'm sorry,” Bonnie kept saying, and she was, because they both sounded miserable, in different ways, but what was expected of her? How was she meant to make anything better instead of worse, how would she not be implicated?

“Could we have lunch or something?” Eric asked. “I'm right downtown. Up to you.”

Bonnie didn't like that it was up to her. Why should she have to be the gatekeeper, the traffic cop, the one who said yes when what was really needed was no? But Eric was freaking out about Jane freaking out, and trying to get this portion of his life under something resembling control, and if nothing else Bonnie was worried about him and so she said that yes, they could meet. Not lunch, though. Lunch always sounded like an
excuse, another infinitely expandable cover story. She said they could go for a drink. Meaning one.

So at the end of her day, Bonnie took a bus down to the medical campus and walked along the narrow streets between the hospital buildings and parking garages. The skyscraper that housed, among other things, cardiology, was all sleek architecture and expansive space, the lobby so grand, all glass and tile, so much clever light, indirect or blazing or pooling underfoot, the effect so precisely and solidly rendered as to make the human body seem entirely breakable and inefficient by comparison.

She found the elevators and went up to the waiting area where she would meet Eric.

Here was a long wall of couches and chairs arranged in groupings that might either facilitate conversation or allow you to avoid it, whichever your purpose. It wasn't crowded and Bonnie chose a seat off by herself. Of course Eric was not there yet. Many and urgent were the demands on his time. Who was she, or anyone, to compete with the hemorrhaging or convulsing patient, the heart struggling to manage a few more flabby beats? She thought she understood how Jane might have gotten used to the regular disappointment of his absences, might come in time to prefer it that way.

She didn't like hospitals. She didn't even like television shows set in hospitals. They were places where you got bad news, worse and worst news, where such news became routine and was routinely and briskly dealt with, when of course what you wanted, when you were in crisis, was for the entire place to stop in its tracks and indignant announcements made over the P.A. system. Here were machines that were far superior to the fallible subjects they were meant to serve, machines that made such precise and deft intrusions, which sipped blood and sorted through cells and turned everything into measurements, tests to be passed or failed. As everyone failed, sooner or later.

Bonnie told herself she was being gloomy and melodramatic. Besides, wasn't the newest catchphrase in health care “wellness,” the idea that
medicine was meant to coax and encourage you to make informed and positive choices? Stay fit and healthy until you die!

Eric was late, and then later. Bored with sitting, Bonnie got up and went to the bank of windows at the far end of the room. The city sky was darkening to chilly twilight. April, and still no real warmth. Across the street, looking almost close enough to reach out to, was another medical building, the dimly lit windows opposite appearing to be some sort of lab, with workbenches and a great many untidy, bulky binders and files on the shelves above them. Although she watched for some time, no one came into the room. It struck her as melancholy, a kind of abandonment.

Bonnie considered giving up on Eric and going home. His problems weren't going anywhere. They'd keep until next time. A heart doctor, such a joke! What good did it do him, rewiring everyone's cardiac circuits, unplugging their arteries, if Jane's heart had closed itself off to him? Why was anyone's happiness so hard to come by? Why not disdain the body, as Jane did, since its pleasures never lasted?