Vivian In Red (30 page)

Under the tablecloth, Daniel seeks my hand and squeezes it. He leans in toward my hair. “Let’s take a walk or something soon.”

I nod to show that I hear him, though I’m not sure I want to know what’s coming.

Daniel and I step into the night. In my head dance the visions of knowing winks and glances exchanged when we announced we were going out for some air.

In the Short family, taking a walk with a boy was about the only way to get any sense of privacy. You could never have a boy in your room, God forbid, and in the main parts of the house, the adults would make like buzzards and circle. For me it was worse yet because I had the older cousins, too.

Daniel drapes one arm around me. Our heights are perfectly proportional for the greatest ease of his hand on my shoulder; I have thought this so many times in gratitude while we were together, with a pang of remorse when we were apart.

“I’m going to L.A.”

Of course he is. I should have known he would.

He goes on, as if he could hear my thoughts, “I’m not having much luck here lately. I didn’t get that callback, and working as an extra now and then isn’t enough to make a career. A buddy of mine is getting some commercial work out there, a couple of TV pilots. I’m not a native New Yorker like you. This was never my city in the first place, so what’s really keeping me?”

The weight of this question does not escape me. He wants me to say that I am enough to keep him here.

“Oh. Well, good luck then.”

“I’m waiting until Tom’s lease is up, though. So I’ve got three months.”

“Good.”

“You don’t have anything else to say, Ellie?”

We have turned toward the park, darkening now with the autumn’s onrushing dusk. A breeze stirs the branches and swirls the crumbling leaves. What else is there?

“I’ll miss you,” I say, folding my arms and clenching tight, like my arms can steady my voice.

“I don’t really want to go.” He pulls me in for a sideways squeeze, causing me to stumble slightly, and at this we both chuckle. The sound is mirthless, empty. “I wish I had reasons to stay. And it’s not just the work.”

Don’t ask this of me. Don’t hand your life to me, I’m not capable.

He pulls me to a stop under a streetlight. Our feet crunch into a pool of early leaves not yet swept away by the wind. I notice a couple of leaves tangled in the hem of my long skirt.

“If you told me to stay, I would.”

He did it. He put his future in my hands. I did not ask for this. It’s not fair.

“It’s your choice, not mine. It always was.”

“It’s supposed to be ours.”

“So why did you leave me in the first place, then? And why are you coming back around now? I just got used to your absence, which was no easy trick.”

“I just missed you. But I missed you when we lived together, too. Since Moira, which I apologized for up one side and down the other… But even before then. I thought one of these days you’d let me into those silences. I want to be let in, doesn’t that count for something?”

What if I don’t want to let you in?
This thought bursts into existence, surprising even me, and I find myself glad I’m not the type to blurt every thought out loud.

“Will you look at me, Ellie?”

I glance up at the squared off chin, with its leading-man cleft I always teased him about.

“My eyes, Eleanor.” He puts his finger on the underside of my chin.

In the movies, this is adorable. The shy, reticent heroine just needs this small nudge of encouragement to gaze at her beloved, and her face blooms like a flower, the string section crescendos, and they live happily ever after. It is beneath him to try this cliché with me.

My chin stays down so that his finger is pushing, and I have to resist with my neck, and I feel like a stubborn child, but so be it.

He lets go and his hands drop to his sides.

“You know I don’t like looking people straight in the eye.”

“I’m not ‘people.’ Or at least, I’m not supposed to be in the same category as the landlord, the guy at the bodega.”

“I couldn’t look at Nathan Lane full in the face, either.”

“I’m supposed to matter more than Nathan Lane, too. You do look straight at the people you love, I’ve seen you do it.”

“I’m not going to play this game.” I turn away from him and start striding back to the house. “I’m not going to perform some stupid test to determine our whole future. If you go, it’s because you want to. Stay if you want to. I don’t care.”

“You don’t care?”

At this I stop. There was pain in his voice. Not the intentional wounded-dove voice of someone inducing guilt, no, this was genuine. I feel it too, just then, the slicing sensation across the chest.

I turn to him, and look at the buttons of that birthday-gift shirt. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t. I just want to go home.”

“So we’ll go home.”

We finish the rest of the walk in silence, not touching. I have my arms folded, he’s got his hands in his pockets. It’s a thing he’s been scolded for on stage, always going for the pockets. It’s his failsafe, what he does when he doesn’t know what else to do.

“I’ll head home from here,” he says at the doorstep.

“You’re going to throw me to the wolves alone?” I rejoin, grasping for our old banter.

“Good night.”

I can sense him searching for eye contact, so I look up, make myself look, but the intensity makes me glance away, too fast.

“Good night.”

I step into the darkness of the doorway and watch him go, disappearing in the dark and reappearing in the streetlights, until he rounds the corner, where he’ll descend into the subway and be whisked back home.

I
hate to be tucked in like a baby, but I never mind a few more moments with my granddaughter.

She’s handed me my medications and a glass of water, which she is now setting carefully on a coaster on the nightstand. She has already pulled the dusty curtains at the windows, switched on the light in the hall as a kind of nightlight. She switches on this receiver gizmo next to the bed, telling me it’s one of Eva’s old “baby monitors” and she’ll be able to hear in her room. There’s a little bell so I can ring it into the monitor if I need her. With Eleanor moving in, and the nurses having so little to do—my not speaking is nothing they can help with their sitting around—the twenty-four-hour staff is gone, leaving Eleanor’s presence plus this monitor contraption to keep watch. This is some kind of improvement—fewer strangers, anyhow—but a baby monitor?

She reaches down to pull the comforter up higher, which would be tricky for me one-handed. I use my good hand to reach out, and try to lift her chin a little, so I can see her better, but she flinches. Actually flinches! As if I was about to hurt her, as if I could ever do such a thing. I draw my hand back like it’s stung.

She notices. “I’m sorry, Grampa, I’ve had a long day and I guess I’m easily startled right now.”

I try to get in her line of sight with my “what’s wrong” face.

She looks around, over both shoulders, before she answers. She looks me in the eye and I notice then how blue the skin is under her eyes. “It’s Daniel. He wants me to … He wants something I can’t give him, and if I don’t, he’ll move three thousand miles away and I’ll never see him again.”

I can feel my sad face mirror hers. I do this a lot now, I notice, in lieu of speaking my sympathy. What is it she won’t do for him? What does he want from her?

“Do you have everything you need, Grampa?”

I nod, settling back on the pillows. A soft yellow light glows from the lamp next to me. A small table holds the water, my glasses, and a couple of books.

“It was nice tonight, wasn’t it?” she says.

She’s just making conversation. It wasn’t nice for her, I could tell the whole time, from Joel’s gooey toast to his love for Jessica and his presentation of a gaudy necklace as anniversary present to the political fights to Eva pinning her in a corner, and then whatever came after…

Not so great for me, either, considering one unwanted guest.

I won’t stay if I’m not wanted.

Ha, since when do you wait for an invitation? Haunting me all through dinner wasn’t enough for you? I hope you didn’t come back for dessert because the great-grands ate it all.

“Good night, Grampa.” Eleanor kisses my forehead and walks with a step heavier than natural for her, a young woman, out into the hall, then slowly to her room.

At dinner, Vivian had been in the chair catty-corner to me at the dining table, making her usual series of infuriating cryptic comments, when everyone was ignoring me for people who could actually have cocktail chatter. It made me wish I was a real drooling invalid who would not notice or care. One of those desiccated old upright corpses you see dragged out by family members from time to time.

That’s right, I talked to you when no one else would.
I can’t see well out in the dark outside the lamplight, but I think she’s on a low bench at the end of the bed, where Bee used to sit to put on her stockings and shoes.

Fine, talk to me. Knock yourself out.

Were you surprised when I died?

I sense a change in her position, as if she’s stood and is approaching my small circle of light next to the bed.

I wouldn’t think it would surprise you, considering. You always said I was reckless.

You were. Always dashing off alone, in a tizzy about something. Not safe for a young woman, so we always had to chase you. Is that what you liked? The chase?

You assume I calculated every move. That’s Allen’s game. Not mine.

You didn’t act for no reason. Nobody does that.

I didn’t say it was for no reason.

Nothing you ever did made sense. How many times did you lose a job in the Depression? Or almost lose it?

I was unwell, you know that. Not that anyone cared.

I cared! I covered for you in Boston. Told them a sympathetic story so you wouldn’t get canned. I helped you plenty of times.

Until you didn’t.

That’s not fair. You were asking for something I could not give you.

Could not? Or would not?

I’m not going to keep this up. What’s the point? You want your own personal Day of Atonement? Well, see if you can turn back time, then. I mean, you can come back from sixty years ago to haunt me, so why not that, too? Of course you can’t. You’re just a trick of the brain torturing me until I die, well, hurry it up already. I’m eighty-eight years old and I can’t talk, and no one pays attention to me anymore but Eleanor and I can’t help her either when I’m like this. I’m worm food in a few years regardless, so God or the devil or whatever demon you are, just kill me off right now already.