Textures of Life (6 page)

“I’ll phone the doctor now.”

He shook his head. “Fall—asleep now.”

“Don’t talk—just nod. Are you sure—?”

He nodded. How to tell her?—how well he knew the image.

“You want to stay where you are?” She brought him pillows, banked them, slipped one, with a practiced move, under his knees. “If you want a urinal, I have one. This is no time to—okay. But let me know. Or anything else.” She seated herself under the lamp. “I’ll be reading.”

On the edge of sleep, he found himself unable to drop off. She had a magazine, but wasn’t reading it. “How did you know?” he said. “The pills.”

“Shhh-h.” She took up a book. “Don’t talk.”

“How?”

“My mother had them.” She bent her head over the book.

Don’t talk, he thought, when we have, we are, in the code of people who have already had their greater conversation. The time from when he had crumpled until his return now seemed that—all before just prattle, and not on her side only. Her certainties rested better on the concrete, that was all, on the lore of copper pots, on the thousand-and-one scales that flexed a serpent she must never admit to be there; she knew how to slip a pillow under the knees of the dying. My mother had them. Had. He found himself unable to sleep without reassuring her. “I’m not going to die,” he said. “Not this time. Yes, I’m sure.” Having given her this extraordinary particular, he slept.

When he awoke, she was reading under the light of one lamp. His watch had stopped. He was able to observe her for some time before their eyes met. “What time is it?”

“One-thirty.”

He took out a pill and swallowed it, feeling almost good, in the light, convalescent suspension after shock—arisen from that nadir of accident in which one says “This is it!” to the plateau of the only moment in life safe from providence, in which one is able to say “That
was
it.”

“Water?”

“No thanks.” Afterwards, it always left him tentative, unwilling to add by one minim to his body’s economy, in the same way that people held themselves rigid after operations, waiting silently for their organs to renumber themselves, note what had been done to them and resume. Actually some movement was even good for him now—he always resisted.

“Can you—would you like to shift to the bed now?”

“Actually, if there’s any way for me to get a cab now, it’s quite safe for me to go. I know what to do from now on.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m sure you do. But you can’t think I’ll let you go back to that hotel tonight.” If he still planned to fly back late tomorrow, there was really no need for him to go back at all. She might tell him so later, not now. The cozy air of convalescence in the room, lights alert in the stillness, reminded her too well of those hours after one had nursed a child or a husband, anyone loved, safely through an illness, but still short of the point where they could get up and leave—for the safe hours to come, yours was the loving tyranny.

“I won’t sleep now, you know. You ought to.” Lassitude held him. He mulled how to explain to her—since he clearly was staying—how a man able to go back to his hotel room preferred not to move from his corner.

“I won’t either. I wouldn’t have.” She leaned forward. “You’re doing me a favor, you know. This would have been—the first night in more than twenty years that I was truly alone—and going to have to be, from then on. The day after, that wouldn’t be so bad. But tonight—tonight—I was prepared to be desolate.” She shrank back. “I shouldn’t trouble you, make you talk.” She took up her book again. “I’m just here if you want anything. Stay as you are. You’d probably rather.”

So that too was part of her lore. He stared at her bent head. “No, let’s talk,” he said. “Yes, trouble me.”

Her chin came up with dispatch. “Oh no. We won’t begin on
that
again.”

Forgetting his economy, he laughed. To call women like her humorous was not quite accurate; rather, they helped one toward stations wit or gaiety in oneself. But obviously it was up to him now, in the pause which always fell when anyone said, “Let’s talk.” “Tell me,” he said, still laughing, “do you by any chance play gin?”

Before she could answer, he had embarked on the true story of their evening as first he had visualized it—of his vice. He told her of the room clerk, the garment buyer. It took him several lively minutes—this was how he entertained at home. “So you see,” he said in conclusion, “how far I’ll go if I have to.”

She received this very seriously, in silence. Had he really gone too far? Talk, for most, meant that repartee of the personal which he had years ago discarded as too costly. He closed his eyes; let her think that it tired him now.

The light’s in your eyes, isn’t it? And you have to raise your head to talk, if I sit here.” She rose, turned out all lights except a blue night-light in an opposite corner, left the room, returned with an armful of pillows and had settled herself matter-of-factly beside him, back against the wall, feet stretched parallel with his, all before he had time to wonder what she was about. In the half-dark, he waited for some comment on what he had told her. She seemed not to be going to make any. Chin on hand, eyes possibly on him or not, she seemed to think that she had already answered him.

The moon came up in the window, or, at this time of night, dropped down. Yes, she was looking at him. She folded her hands in her lap. “You’re very ill, aren’t you, Nicholas.” It was not a question.

No one had ever said it to him that simply. Not even the doctors liked to. None of his roster had ever done, never, of course, David. No one had wanted to dwell for the barest moment on what would have rested him where he dwelt with it alone. Her tact was beyond measure; she took him literally. All his self-amused explanation had meant to her was that he was in dire need of being talked through the night, and fathering her pillows, she had answered him. He drew a simpler breath than he had in a long time. “Very.”

Words were awkward after that; so was silence. She chose to press his wrist at the same spot from which she had held him over the abyss, then release it.

Because the best sympathy was the kind that bred it, hers reminded him that she too had her situation. “And you?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long have you been alone?”

It took her a minute to see how he equated it. “Two years.” She sat forward, hugging her knees. “That’s—how it feels, then?”

“Oh, it’s gone on so embarrassingly long,” he said quickly. “Ten years. Actually—a lot of new medicines came in. There’s a regimen. And I couldn’t afford not to take it seriously, because of David. We had no relatives.”

“How old were you? When it began.”

“Thirty-eight.”

“I’m forty-four.” She contributed this as a child might. Indeed, the hour no longer seemed to hang in the suspension of convalescence, but, perhaps because the room was Elizabeth’s, more like one of those in her girlhood, when one sat up for the confidences that came simply because the hour was late enough.

She stared at him intently, one hand pleating the big petticoat on the bed above her. “What is the regimen?”

“Oh—it’s not—anything transferable.”

“Some of it must be. It can’t all be—‘not boiled but fried.’”

She had made him laugh again.

Tentatively he moved, stretching an arm, a leg, while he enumerated the checks and balances that had kept him going, so far as he knew.

They seemed sparse, unheroic. David’s name did not appear among the medicaments. He leaned back in the abandonment of no longer having to think of his posture. The dial of his watch surprised him—nowhere near four. “No, you’re right. That’s not quite all.” Why shouldn’t he tell her? The later the hour, the less people lied to themselves or others. Few things sounded foolish by moonlight. By dawn, any man spoke the truth. “I’ve never told anyone. Every once in a while well—I more or less put my name down for—one rash act. It’s a way of imagining myself into living like everybody else—long-term. The first time, it was accident. I decided to build the house, and it turned out to be a fairly complicated house. The doctors hadn’t given me more than a year or so. When the house was finished—I’d lived three.”

For a space they were quiet, sailing on what last had been said. At some such hour, all rooms become barques. The outer light held the room for a brilliant second, then slipped down.

“And the next one?” Her face was hidden on her knees.

“I coasted—for about a year. Then a friend of mine wanted me to do an art book with him, one of those histories based on a fixed idea, probably wrong but interesting. It meant close collaboration, text, plates and so on. I figured, if he was willing to bet on me for a couple of years—that’s about what it took.”

“And then?”

He was a long time answering. “I made David—I sent him
away
to college.”

She got up from their corner and stood at a window, pressing her face against the frame. “You gave him up.”

“Oh no. I hung on for dear life. That was how.”

The window was open at the top. She held her face to the air, to dry. No—it was not transferable.

He felt the gap at his side like a defection. She had moved so shadowily. “Whatever are you doing there?”

“Seeing where the moon went.”

“You’re such snails, here.” Indoor people, for whom looking out a window was an excursion. The Coast had a great deal of illness, but like the gypsies, kept it hidden, often in apricot tints of health like his own. “I can tell you where it’s gone. To California.”

“You’re not thinking of flying back tomorrow? Oughtn’t you to rest, even in a hospital?”

“Just rest. That hotel’s quiet enough. I’ll stay on a few days.”

She came and knelt down beside him. Why don’t you—you could stay here. You could send for your things.”

He did not reply, or move.

“Yes, why don’t you,” she said. “At least there’d be someone—we could talk in the evenings.”

His eyes, usually so quick, were as still as his face, not fathomable. She had wounded him then, by so clearly assuming—what must never be assumed. Women are conventional—he would know hers. She had wounded him by taking it for granted that he had no secrets, any more. “I just wanted to—” What could you give a man who had nothing, to whom you had just blurted that out? She stood up. “Would you—like an orange?” Let him laugh then. It would be something to have amused.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll have an orange.”

While she was gone, he put his head in his hands.

When she came back, she was carrying a short-legged bed-tray, on it a plate with two oranges and a fruit knife. He took up the knife, shaped like a scimitar for a baby Turk, and began scoring an orange. His hands were slow, deft, like a magician’s. They intended her to watch them.

He presented her with the oranges, each rosetted in the center of its neatly laid-back skin.

“My grandfather used to do that!” she said.

“My father. Europeans.”

The orange skins remained—acrid mignonette.

“What will the children say?” he said.

So it was settled, then. Her fingers were sticky. She spread them. “After all—they match, don’t they?”

He considered. One to have. One to hold. Would that be David? Never sure which. But tender tidbits, both of them. “Oh, they match.”

“After all—they don’t want
us
to sit up with
them
.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

Once an ambulance went by, trailing its sleigh-bell terror, then a homing plane, or so one thought of it, traveling steadily—fraternal signals from the never-quite-safe.

“What will the next one be?” she said.

“Next?”

“Your—rash act.”

He had survived the plane East—of course, pressurized these days. Plus three cups of coffee. “I’d half meant—just to slide. Is that one?”

“But there is something else? That you could do?”

Down there,
it
moved, moving him with it. This, he could say, moving his hand an inch—this. He held on fast, to his economy.

“It’s not up to me. I can’t say.”

So there was a woman, and at half-past three, their first awkwardness. She was remanded back to their subject.

After a while, she spoke. “We really have been—sitting up with them. Haven’t we. Just for tonight, it can’t be helped. It’s barbarous, even the guests were. Following them in their minds, I mean. But it can’t be helped, can it.”

“Not tonight.”

“I used to try and think that if she—that when she—went with a boy—that was her business. As long as I didn’t know. But at weddings, I always found myself watching the bride’s mother, wondering what she was thinking. Knowing. Because then—just for that once—it isn’t only their business. Not then.”

“Not the fathers,” he said. “We watch the son.”

“Do you think—?” If she faltered, it wasn’t because of any awkwardness with him. “It is their business now, of course. But I’ve thought for some time—do you think that they already—”

After some moments, he put his hand on hers and held it. “Think back,” he said. “Think back.”

When he looked at his watch again, it was four, and it was she who was asleep. He drew the coverlet from the bed over her. It was years since he had done such a thing even for David—all the gestures of solicitude had been pointed toward him, separating him. He got up, tiptoed to the bathroom, and came back. It was years too, since he had slept in anything but a chair. The one she had been sitting in pouted at him, its boudoir shape padded like a high, nubile bosom. He chose a straight one, from the desk. Wrapping himself in a thin blanket from the bed, he sat facing her, letting their conversation resume. The hard chair held him capably; it stood on terra firma. Even if she was awake, he did not have to say it to her. He did not have to. Saying it to himself, he fell into a sleep still vigil, where he said it to her. Prepare. Prepare, for a little while, not to be desolate.

F
OR THE YOUNG PAGANIS
, the three and a half months they spent on Spring Street were a saga they knew themselves to be living. A dozen times a day, some small domestic act set a precedent, or would if not watched. Some they noted pridefully; more often they were too careless to watch. From home, Elizabeth had brought the wicker sewing chest given her by the grandmother who at the same time had put an embroidery hoop in her four-year-old hand and taught her the archaic lore of the French knot, the feather-stitch and how to hem invisibly, by picking up, with a needle so thin that it bent in the middle, a single thread of the cloth. Her grandmother’s approval, usually so grudged to children—“See, Margot, better than you ever!”—had been the first hearkening of that praise she had always later on been able to win for herself by some skill of the hand. Inside the sewing chest, on plumply quilted lining the color of Christmas glow, a row of tin-gilt thimbles hung in assorted sizes of which she had used perhaps the two first, above buttons of all sorts—marcasite, bone, pearl—from the family button box, spools of the old mercerized colors, and a small tape measure of yellow cotton, inked in black, that at a touch still rewound itself on its reel. Opening the box to find a shirt button for David, the old spools, faded but lucent, had given her back the same unfocused eye that had taken in the
Blue Fairy Tale Book
and the
Green
; the buttons, staring from that last rainy playtime on which they had been shut away, were a collection of physiognomies too knowing to be deserted. David had been charmed, both by her cherishing of such an unlikely object and her ability to sew—was that why, deviously pushed from the lair of herself, she had brought it? Before shutting it away, she fingered the tape measure. Their life-to-be here resembled it, all linear and good, back of the first black-marked inch a firm, satisfying nothing. She ought to toss the whole box away, had a strong desire to do so. Finally, giving in to an opposite urge that seemed much weaker, negligible, she put it out of sight in a dark corner. After all, it served a purpose.