She’s had her effect. She sees him trying to hold his face, his authority, steady.
“Dr. Adams and I are working in tandem. You can rest assured.”
“Schoolboy, dearest, I’ve been resting here
in
sured all week long.” She’s meant to shame him with wit, but he doesn’t understand. Her embarrassment at this—even she could hear how her sentence wobbled to a halt—cretinous man! “Is it true that doctors no longer pay attention to the flesh-and-blood patient? That all your generation of medical people cares about is the bottom line? Now, Dr. Adams, would he be someone more senior? Would he perhaps provide me better treatment?”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. But, what if you run along and find him anyway? The answer to all your questions is no. All’s the same. If you are done with me for today, let’s see if you and he can’t make a switch.”
“We don’t really do consultations within—”
“What a good suggestion, dear. I would like to consult Dr. Adams. Don’t forget to tell him my name. You need a reason that doesn’t put you at fault. I know! Tell him I’m not eating.” She smiles and takes a bite from the sandwich, chews it thoughtfully, and drops the remainder in the plastic trash pail beside the bed. She turns her head away from him to signal his dismissal. In the mirror of the open closet door she sees her scowling, patchy face. She thought she’d been smiling. In the mirror, the resident takes three steps backward and turns out the door.
* * *
The woman who says, “Sorry, no English,” brings and then clears dinner. Then no one comes. The last light outside the windows fades. CeCe is full of the dread of night.
Boring
, she says, to no improvement. She can’t sleep. The floating curtains slip and suck in and out of the French doors in the black breeze. Again, Nurse Jean has forgotten and left them ajar. The lake is bleak and blurs into the black trees of the woods behind. Every so often the doors bang and startle her. The wind pushes them open, revealing a wedge of damp, black lawn. The lake murmurs and the hedge looms. She turns her head the other way, but this puts in her sight the open closet—her clothing dangling from the hangers, the monster outline of the wheelchair, lurking in the dark.
She needs to be patient. It’s hard to sleep in a place that isn’t home. Tomorrow she’ll set George straight.
* * *
Has she slept? She sits up in the bed, feeling as if a great hand is pushing her. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but it must be close to four in the morning. She is restless and feels strong enough to walk, stronger than she has in weeks. Is she imagining it? They said it would take time to accumulate in her blood. Even then, no guarantee. She is almost steady on her feet. She takes the phone in her hands and pulls it over to the chair. Iris answers. CeCe says, why no, she hadn’t realized the time. She reminds Iris that absolutely no one has come to see her since George dropped her off; what has it been, a year? She flexes her free left hand and arm and watches it move by her will and feels its blood and matter. She uses her feeblest voice, but also her buried-treasure voice, and holds the phone away from her lips to make the guilty distance seem greater and guiltier still.
“It was so kind of George to take me by train when he preferred to go by car. I want to tell him he can pick me up by car—whichever car he likes. I’m all better, I’m better than ever! I’ve changed my mind. I just needed a rest. George will explain that I’ll take the medicine at home, being so strong and well. I do hope he hasn’t dumped me here for good, dear, don’t you?”
In an eyes-shut voice Iris says, “How’s the place? Same?”
“How has the place been, you mean? I’ll tell you a story. You remember a lot of stories when you’re lying around with nothing to do. My beloved father was once given by some corporate friends a wastebasket. For his birthday, for his office. Made entirely of gold. The wire lattice around the sides, the base that sat on the rug. Weighed a ton. I think it was part of some private joke those men had; they had a lot of private jokes. It sat in his office until he died. He used it too. I could see a naughty pleasure on his face each time he tossed a crumpled sheet of paper into the thing. A golden wastebasket still holds trash, doesn’t it, dear!”
“Mmm, gold, sure, golden bag,” Iris says, then claims George isn’t waking up and she’ll have him call first thing in the morning. But Iris is not to be trusted.
CeCe stands again and walks the perimeter of the room, grazing the wall with her hand. She makes an X from corner to corner to corner to corner. She slaps each piece of furniture as she goes. Could it be? The drug restoring herself to herself? She walks to the closet and closes its door. She sits in the chair, tired. When she wakes next, she is sunk back in the tangled bed, trapped inside the swirling cotton like a mite in a cottonseed pod. An odd, three-point pain radiates along the small of her back. She pushes herself up and the pain disappears, but it’s so hard to push herself up! She cries out upon discovering she’s as weak as she’s ever been. Her jewelry, lost in the sheets—the two rings and the bracelet the nurse laid out—was what caused her pain. She gathers them in her hands and puts them on and lies back down. She is exhausted and wide-awake. There’s nothing to do but wait.
At the first light of dawn, the landscaper reappears. She’s become accustomed to watching him. Today he pushes a wheelbarrow across the wet grass. He parks it by the hedge, for the first time close enough for her to notice the lettering on his T-shirt. It reads
DE ROSA’S LANDSCAPE AND TREE REMOVAL
and features a drawing of a riding mower. He looks Greek to her, Egyptian, maybe. He sets a mug carefully down in the uneven grass—from its cheerful color she suspects he has a family. He sits against the hedge, opens a newspaper. He pulls a loose cigarette from his pocket, lights it, contemplates the evenness of the topiary, returns to his reading. The smell of the smoke mingles with the smell of dewy grass and the dawn mist rising off the lake. It steals into her room. Not a cigarette but a joint. Does everyone smoke a joint at dawn? She should introduce him to Dana Barnes. Its stale pungency—first husband, Raymond Fitts, who made his job at MGM seem far more than it was, who charmed her out of sense. She’d had no parent alive to tell her charm was not enough. She can still feel their ancient life, though they were married only three years: Raymond, sitting on the floor beside her chair, everything an electric confession, the ice cubes melting in the heat. A party in a railroad apartment in the West Village, her hand on a battered cello case, lugged from so far uptown. The year they tried it his way, a rented bungalow in California, and CeCe wore an apron; Raymond, leaping up and padding off to find a record. Raymond, pushing her against the hot stove for dancing with Art Blakey. Maybe it was only they were young.
They divorced discreetly. She was twenty-one. She flew to Mexico on the Ju
á
rez Special. He agreed to be out by her return. A three-day package: a round-trip flight from New York, an appearance alone in Ju
á
rez family court on the day between planes. She stood and said her name before the judge. She kept her hat on. It was new and expensive and American and made her feel protected, with netting hanging over the eyes between her and the judge. She handed him her passport and the divorce papers the New York lawyer had drawn up. The judge stamped them and warned her not to drink the hepatital water. She slept a fitful night at the fleabag no-tell that was part of the deal.
Boarding the small plane back, the passengers nodded hello, recognizing each other from the flight over and the lobby of the courthouse where they’d stood in wait, each holding a ticket with a number. Twenty- and thirtysomething women, white, wealthy enough to divorce on the quiet so far from home, dressed right. The plane got through the clouds and turned toward New York. The divorc
é
es leaned their sleek heads together to commiserate and asked the stewardesses for stingers and mai tais, pregnant or not, drinkers or not, secret safe with the Mexicans. They kept it together until somewhere over Texas one began to cry and the rest began to smoke. They pulled tissues and photos of children out of their purses and stood to smooth their skirts. They bumped their heads against the coat shelves, clutching the crumpled tissues, holding their heads as they pitched up the aisle to the ladies’ room and back. They ordered whiskey and fanned themselves with their gloves and the emergency-discharge cards, and half were laughing and half were crying but they were all gat-gun drunk loud: locksmith, vacuum, dog, baby, loan, alone, telephone, darling, carpet, washup, cheer up—and by the time the farm fields of Ohio were under the wings a special kind of exhaustion, a special melancholy, had set in and together the women drew the blinds of the slight, white plane to listen to the stuttering whir of the prop, having decided in unspoken communion that they would not look at the line of the earth meeting the sky or the jagged silver welcome of midtown in the distance. They asked for coffee, coffee please on descent, because their mothers were picking them up, because no one was picking them up, because they were clown-faced with relief and grief and CeCe decided, alone and sober in row one, having talked to no, no thank you, no one, that she was not interested in landing and hallelujah if the maiden 707 kept gliding north right into the granite of the Appalachians because what life after this could be called life?
But then, she met Walter. Patricia was born, and George. She discovered her good work, the work of converting her inheritance (of which an almost unnoticeable portion was awarded to Raymond) to the good.
The man out the window stubs his joint. He hasn’t seen her. Her divorce from Walter, though, she hadn’t been able to keep private. It was her public embarrassment, and her last. She aims to keep it that way. She won’t allow her illness, the spider, to have witness. Spider—what the shaking has done to her handwriting, and how the black spots between the white branches of her dying nerves look on the scan. After that divorce, she’d restored her and the children’s surname to Somner. Walter’s consent cost her a pretty penny, but why go on as Minches? She’d applied Nan’s rule for clutter: an item must be beautiful or useful to retain its place. Minch. A name without beauty, a name without use.
The man out the window deserves as much privacy as she. She will not report his misconduct. She looks into his face, thinking, Look at me, I am here! He balances the dead joint on the lid of his mug and picks up the metal wings of his shears. Left unnoticed, to notice herself alone, she finds she’s cold and hungry. What an insult it is to wait. To wait like an addict for a handful of pills, to await the return of one’s son.
After an unbearable morning of grant evaluation, George escapes the office and walks east and north, clacking his umbrella on the splattered pavement. Thunderclouds rag behind Grand Central Station’s pediment clock. Eleven-thirty. He’s in a foul, acid, debilitating spirit. The weather conforming to his mood. Warm, pounding rain. Rain, again! Though at the moment there’s a break in the clouds. At least the temperature isn’t ninety-nine, like yesterday and the day before. The last few years, the end of July in New York City has become as bad as the end of August: rotten and ratty and fetid. He turns onto Lexington Avenue, hurrying to keep pace with the crowd so the crowd will not bump him—the lunch deliverymen in baseball caps and aprons, the couriers, the polyblend administrators, the slouching media kids, the sallow men in suits, jackets off in the heat. All, in their various capacities, no doubt more successful than he. All with somewhere to go. So many women who look like Audrey—an army of Audreys on Lexington! New York, the city of assistants with long, dark hair. The bike messengers, tubes on their backs and chains around their waists, tattooed and bloodshot and pop-veined, rocketing the narrow passages between the moving cars. Midtown makes everyone ugly.
“Cranked,” Audrey had said to him once after they shared an elevator with a bike messenger who spent the ride arguing a private injustice to the lit panel of buttons, jutting his chin side to side. “Those guys are cranked.”
“No doubt,” George agreed as they exited onto the thirty-eighth floor, wondering how much he didn’t know about life, about her life. Cranked, which one was that? How could she know particulars about the world he didn’t and still remain the nonentity sitting outside his office day after day? Considering these two Audreys’ simultaneous existence unnerved his sense of superiority, and so in time he came to misremember Audrey’s observation as his own. It was
he
who divined this vice of bike messengers, detective of the human condition that he is. Now, whenever a bike man with a chain and a tube hurtles past, George thinks,
Cranked,
and the breeze the bike makes is the very incarnation of George’s world wisdom. Today, however, he’s reminded only that the world is dingy and mysterious and hasn’t any use for him.
He walks without a destination until he remembers the racket club—there might be an early squash single for a pickup. Maybe he’ll find a novice to kill on the court, maybe a sweat will help—wait, he does have some place to go. To the watch repairman, only a few blocks back. He retraces his steps. He finds the awning that reads
KEEPING TIME, WATCH AND CLOCK.
The generation of business that’s all but extinct in Manhattan—a shop instead of a store. One day, he’ll turn the corner and see a mobile-phone kiosk or a juice bar in its place. No, even the jingle of the bell on the door and the hunch of the man on the stool behind the counter do not cheer George. He takes off his cracked watch, hands it over, fills out the ticket. Upon exiting, he discovers the sun’s come out. The racket club forgotten, he turns toward Le Petit Daudet. A light lunch, why not, though it won’t dent his misery. The ma
î
tre d’ claps him on the back and sweeps him down the
all
é
e
to a table in the main dining room.
“—And never accept a table along the
all
é
e
, where everyone will pass you by,” his mother had taught him. “Some ladies prefer it as it’s where they’re most likely to be photographed. Pushed up along the wall as if they’re waiting to audition. For whom? For
Women’s Wear Daily
? For the waiter?”