Some Other Town (9 page)

Earnest sighs loudly. “Jumped,” he says. Then he walks to my balcony to show me.

He points to the ground below. “Right there,” he says. “There, where they've paved over for parking. She landed right there with her neck twisted around and they took her away in a basket.”

Earnest turns from the balcony, he looks old. I nod and return to my paste-up. The night is late, and I think Earnest has finished his story.

“But there's something else you should know,” he says. And I can hear him shambling his way back to my table. He leans in then over my shoulder and his voice drops to a raspy whisper. What he has to tell me, he says, is something for only my ears. He never knows when it might be close and it is better it doesn't hear.

“‘It,' Earnest?” I say, still burnishing.

“The ghost. That girl in the nightgown. She's still here, you know.”

I lift my head and find Earnest has taken a step back. He stands now, staring, waiting.

“There are no such things as ghosts, Earnest,” I say. Which I feel obliged to point out, although something about Earnest lurking there in the dark makes me less confident of the fact than by day. “You are now just making things up.”

“Believe what you like,” Earnest tells me, shrugs, and continues. “Me, I seen her. Little thing, drifty, long silvery hair. She stays mostly just on the fourth floor, there by that balcony where she jumped. I tell you I don't much like mopping up here alone.”

And then he pulls up a chair, sits down, and tells me more of the story.

The night that it happened, he says, they had made up her bed on the balcony. Back then, they thought air was the answer, fresh
air, so everyone, even screamers, slept out of doors. In winter with furs on their beds and their feet stuffed in boxes of straw.

Earnest continues. The nurse attending that night said the girl just wasn't right. Her fever was back, she didn't know where she was. She lay restless and writhing for hours. Then well past midnight, without any warning, she got up out of her bed like she was sleepwalking. The night nurse stood too, but before she could stop her, the girl was up on the balcony ledge, holding her arms out wide.

Just like an angel, the nurse later said, dressed as the girl was in her nightclothes. And then just like an angel, the girl lifted up to her toes and smiling, tipped out into the night. The nurse couldn't reach her in time. The girl fell face first all those four floors and landed with a sickening sound.

I wince here a little. I do not like to think of that sound. But I believe this time Earnest is finished, so “It is a sad story, all right,” I tell him. And I start to go back to my board.

Earnest holds up his hand to stop me. “But it wasn't the way the nurse told it. The girl wasn't sleepwalking that night.”

And here Earnest gives me a look. “Something else made her jump. Something out in the night was calling her.”

He stands.

“That little one in the nightie, you watch out for her,” he says. “She'll be calling to you now too.”

Earnest nods once toward the balcony. Then he picks up his mop and is gone.

But now it is noon, and Frances is in the hallway calling us out for lunch. It is something the editors and I do, we take lunch here together in the cafeteria. We most of us would go elsewhere if we could. The sanatorium's food service is resolutely uninspired and, what is worse, they insist on feeding us in the basement.

This last part is not all the food service's fault. When our building was still a sanatorium, it housed a large dining hall on the first floor, an elegant, sunlit place next to the building's little theater. But now Continuing Nursing has taken over the hall and divided it into meeting rooms. The continuing nurses are fond of assembling, they have annexed the theater for it as well. And as a result, the sanatorium's cafeteria has withdrawn to the basement floor.

It is a dark and moist space to dine. To get there from where the elevator lets off, we must walk through long halls with low ceilings and giant, exposed metal pipes. Where it is not just the visuals that affront. Although the food service tries to disguise it, the place has the smell of a laundry room, an odd mix of mildew
and bleach. I am sure it is where in the old days they washed blood from tubercular sheets.

Or blood from the gurneys they ran through the steam tunnel below. Back in the day, Earnest says, they called that tunnel the death chute. Or so Earnest says. It is another one of his stories.

Since the sanatorium was built, that tunnel has served a purpose. Steam flows through big pipes there and heats the sanatorium all winter. But the tunnel is large, a tall man can stand up in most places, five people can fit across, and soon enough the sanatorium figured out steam is not all the tunnel is good for.

For instance, the cafeteria these days uses it as a kind of back door. The tunnel leads a long way underground and at the train tracks behind our building, there's an entrance like two large cellar doors. It's where trucks stop every week with deliveries, crates of eggs, sacks of flour for our meals, which kitchen workers haul back in through the tunnel on the sanatorium's old hospital gurneys.

But then again, years ago, when people came to the sanatorium mostly just to die, “Wasn't all eggs they wheeled through that tunnel,” Earnest says. “Used to be bodies, going the other way.”

Earnest explains: The directors who ran the sanatorium then didn't much want all the dying to be known. Bad for business they said, bad for morale. They didn't want other guests feeling downbeat, what with the hearse always out in the drive. So aides laid the dead bodies on gurneys instead and rolled them out through the tunnel, loaded them onto Pullmans, and sent them all home by rail.

Earnest's stories, as I've said, run to the macabre, and as usual the editors and I ignore him. When we lunch together in the cafeteria here, we try not to think of our provenance. Rather, we make
a point of being informative. That is to say, the series editors take every opportunity they can to talk at length about themselves. Or about their latest romance. The editors all are single, they are forever coming up with new men.

“So much the better for romance,” Lola says today as we take our places at table.

Lola, who has a generous heart but the underbite of a sea bass, could not actually be called good-looking. She is instead mostly large—over six feet of strong healthy bones, great aquiline nose, tree-trunk ankles and legs. Even Lola's voice is ample, a booming West Texas drawl that stops conversations in crowds and seems to turn in particular the heads of short men. “Them li'l cowboys jes take to me,” Lola says. “Flies to manure,” she adds, throws back her head, and guffaws.

Frances studies Lola from across the table. She lights a cigarette, stares. Frances is a hard woman, we all think. Celeste says it's because she is fat, well pretty much going on obese, there is no other way to put it. It's what makes Frances generally ill-tempered, we believe, although oddly, ominously serene. When trolling our halls, she does not walk so much as she glides—well, a cross really between glide and lumber—a menacing half smile about her.

Her stillness is unsettling to us here. In meetings, for instance, she sits back from the rest, holding that cryptic smile, lights her cigarette, and waits. Then if someone on staff makes a mistake, says well, it just seemed like precipitous behavior to her, always Frances strikes. She sits forward, leans toward the speaker. “You mean precipitate, don't you now, dear? Precipitate behavior,” she will say. “Precipitous is for cliffs, don't you see?”

But now Frances considers Lola's comment on romance. About the necessity always of new men. “Agreed,” she says, and leaves it at that.

We at the table are surprised. It is not like Frances to concede. But after she stands then to go back for seconds, Lola asks us so, did we know? Lately Frances has herself been collecting men. “She has taken up tennis,” Lola says, “for the exercise, she claims, for all that runnin' around at the net.” But mostly, Lola thinks, it's because of the lawyers. “So many lawyers, you know, like their tennis,” she says. “And some none too well hitched, neither.”

Lola stops here and gives us a look. “Married lawyers in this town play singles,” she says, and nods like she's sure Frances knows one or two.

“I see,” Celeste says, looking uncomfortable.

Celeste likes to keep things positive. At forty-eight, she's our oldest by a decade and also our most pampered and frothy. Of the editors, you might say she's the pretty one. That is, if you had to choose one, it would probably be Celeste, she does at least try the hardest. She wears her hair down in long flaxen waves, she smells always of musk and patchouli, and thanks to a color consultant who said, “You, Celeste, are pre-Raphaelite,” she dresses in long flowing silks and gauze. It's as though she were wearing drapes, Frances says.

Celeste generally ignores Frances. She thinks now a moment on what she can add to this topic of finding men. And steering away from the adultery option, Celeste offers a new example. “Or then there is Sally Ann,” she says. “I happen to know Sally Ann writes long letters to men she has never met, whose names she finds through community outreach. It must be how our Sally finds her new ones.”

As usual, Sally Ann has not joined us, Celeste is speaking for
her in her absence. Sally Ann does not often come down to lunch and it happens we sometimes forget her. She is a small, slight young woman with one lazy eye and olive, acne-prone skin. She is also achingly, clinically shy. She keeps all day to her hospital suite, or, when it is absolutely necessary, scurries the halls, head down.

Sally Ann, like me, is not one of us, and when we are honest, we admit it's a relief she does not come down to lunch. Although we hasten to add it is not only because of her appearance. Sally Ann has one habit particularly distracting, unnerving even to those who know her. That is, in the last year now going on two, Sally Ann has taken up with a puppet. She calls him Bones or Mr. T. Bones, and it's as though they are going steady. Never mind that Bones is just an old sock with two cereal bowls sewn in for a mouth.

“Sally Ann,” Celeste says, still on the topic of men, “primarily writes to convicts. She has been pen pals with prisoners for years.” No doubt, she says, Sally Ann by now has won whole cell blocks of dark convict hearts.

Lola looks thoughtful and agrees that yes, it seems to work out for Sally Ann. And then, considering, she grins and says someday she may just try it herself. Lola has tried many things in her life, she is willing to try almost anything. She has for instance just signed up with a group called Match International, Inc. They put you in touch with immigrants, she tells us, all doctors and lawyers, professional men. Match Inc. is very particular.

In fact now, Lola says, she's seeing a Zairian statesman. An elegant man but shorter even than her others, he stands only up to her sternum. But then alluding to new possibilities there, “Lordy, lordy,” she says laughing and slaps her thigh. “Ain't nothin' like a brand spankin' new lover.”

Celeste looks at Lola, eyes big. She pretends to be taken aback. “Lola, how can you say such a thing?” As though she herself does not know about romance. How it necessitates always new lovers. But then giving it thought, “Or rather, I mean, Lola, how could you resort to a service?” Celeste herself has her standards.

And when we most of us look down at the table then and begin fooling with what's left of our lunches, Celeste turns and addresses us all. “So very well then—tell. How really do you find your new loves?” Truly, Celeste wants to know.

His students wait in the studio at their worktables. It is their first day, they are excited, unsure. They look young to him, they grow younger each year. He counts. Only twelve. Good.

He has come to teach them painting. He is a teacher of painting, still life, life drawing. We are all artists here, he tells them. We are all, all of us, beginners. He looks into their faces. He knows they do not understand him.

He is visiting, on loan from a Western state. He is part of a university there too, Drawing and Painting, School of Art. He is faculty, tenured, he teaches. It is not enough. It has never been enough, he knows.

He has come for a year to teach color and line. To show students about light, about seeing. To help them work valiantly, honestly. To help them want to work more. And then he must leave end of spring.

He hasn't much time. He starts class.

He sets his students before easels. Explains about canvas, how to mix paint, the correct way to hold their brush.

The students look at him, ready to begin.

No, he tells them. Not yet.

He asks them to wait. Be still, he says. Now watch for it.

What? they ask. Watch for what? They do not understand.

He cannot tell them. He says only they must learn first to look, truly see. They must know before they begin.

How do we find our new loves? I look down at the table with the others. I will not offer well here's how it was with Ben. Because, as I've said, he and I have an understanding, we have our oath of silence. Besides which, considering that Ben is gone, there's no point now in bringing him up, let alone explaining how I found him.

Still, head down as I am, I give it some thought, that night Ben and I first met. And then I am back to my daydreams.

I look up at him. “Coffee,” I say, “how about coffee?”

He looks surprised. I myself am surprised, I do not know why I offer that, “Coffee.” I do not actually feel like coffee. Nor should I be proposing it to this new man. Someone after all I have only just met and who could be, for all anyone knows, some well-mannered hatchet murderer drawn in by the lights and free food.

“Good,” he says. “Coffee.” Then “Ben Adams,” he adds, and extends me his hand.