Suzanne began to feel as if all her senses had been thrown right out of whack. Her morning coffee tasted like straw. Her favorite perfume smelled so much like oven cleaner, she instantly scrubbed it off. Gary could be at his computer, but she swore she saw him in the doorway, watching her, waiting. She swore she heard him right behind her, saying something to her in a low voice that made her shiver.
Usually, she could sleep until noon, but suddenly, without even trying, she jumped out of bed at six, the same time Gary did. Coincidence, she tried to tell herself, as she rushed to dress, pulling on her prettiest dress, grabbing for her brush, and snapping it through her locks so fast she brought up small sparks of light. Just whom did she think she was brushing her hair for? Why was she slashing on lipstick, coating on mascara? What in the world was she doing?
Gary was her sister’s husband, a man so not her type it wasn’t even funny.
She was scared about Molly, the same way he was. That was all it was that was bonding them. She was lonely. Sleep-deprived. Sexdeprived. Love-deprived. Look at Patty Hearst. Women fell in love with their captors all the time. Maybe this wasn’t the same thing, but it almost was. This was a crush, and she’d just have to get over it the
same way she’d get over a cold, and that would be that. She’d have to find more things to keep her busy, to keep her mind off him. She had the house under control. She and Otis were doing fine, working on a kind of schedule. Maybe she could get clients, cut some hair. Get her mind on work instead of Gary.
Besides, Gary loved Molly. Any fool could see that. The way she sometimes caught him staring at Molly’s photo, his face so soft and sad, it was all she could do not to run over to him and throw her arms about him. Every time she walked into Molly’s hospital room, there was another gift from him. He couldn’t afford anything, but what he bought was always simple and beautiful. So perfect, it got her in the gut to see it. Butter-yellow cashmere socks. A sea-blue vial of lotion. Such kindness, such thought, made her just love Gary even more. And she wasn’t the only one.
The nurses couldn’t stop talking about him, singing his praises. “Your brother-in-law’s a jewel,” one nurse told Suzanne. “Lots of men would just leave. I’ve seen it more times than I care to comment on. The wife gets sick and the husband starts visiting less and less, and then one, two, three, you see him in town with a tootsie on his arm.” The nurse shook her head with approval. “Gary’s a good guy. A really good guy.”
“I know,” said Suzanne.
One day, Suzanne was coming out of the shower, when she realized all she had with her was her towel. She was freezing. An old blue flannel shirt was hanging on the hook by the door. Gary’s. As soon as she touched it, she smelled Gary’s pine aftershave. She grabbed the shirt. She put it on. Buttoned it tight against her.
Gary was having his own problems. He looked everywhere for work. Every morning, he spent hours on the phone, calling his friends, his business contacts, always insisting to everyone he spoke with that no job was too mundane, too beneath him or too boring, as long as he could do it at home, and on his own time. He made blind phone calls to agencies he culled from the Yellow Pages, but without much luck,
and every day, on his way to the hospital, he stopped at the gift shop and bought four different newspapers, one from New Jersey, one from Connecticut, two from New York. He sent off resumes and he even called a few headhunters. His resume was impressive enough that people called him back, but after that, he was in trouble, because as soon as anyone heard that all he was looking for was part-time, off-site work, the atmosphere turned suddenly cool. “That’s not what we’re really looking for,” people told him. “We’re looking for someone who can be part of a team. Someone more committed.”
It made Gary feel hysterical. Committed. Jesus. What was more committed than going to the hospital every day to see the woman you loved most in the world not recognize you, and not letting yourself give up hope? What was more committed than being a single father?
Gary sat in his kitchen and stared at the telephone. Don’t give up, he told himself, just as the phone suddenly rang, startling him so that he dropped his pen, rolling it across the floor.
“Gary.”
“Ada!” He scooped over, grabbing up the pen.
“Guess what? I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh, thank God, thank God. I really need the work.”
There was a clip of silence. “Gary, it’s not work.” Her voice brightened. “It’s for Molly.”
“For Molly?”
“I was in the bookstore the other day, and I picked up this absolutely amazing book. The Magic Healing Power of Mushrooms. It’s all about how the mushrooms help the body release this special chemical and how it affects immunity—”
“Ada—” Gary cut her off. He felt suddenly exhausted. “Molly can’t eat.”
“Well, I know that, but you could boil up the mushrooms and give her the liquid—”
“In her IV?” His voice tightened. “She’s comatose. She can’t eat.” Ada was quiet. “I was just trying to help.”
“I know you were.”
“Well, if I hear of anything, I’ll call you.”
Gary hung up, feeling sick.
He could hear Suzanne in the kitchen noisily washing dishes. At least she was cleaning up. He heard the mail slapping in through the slot and he crouched to leaf through it. Bills. Junk mail. Cards he never had the heart to open because they always made him feel worse. They reminded him too much. He usually just threw them away. He was almost finished with the mail when he found something addressed from the hospital, and he tore it open.
Five pages of pale blue paper with deep blue ink. Columns and explanations and a total on the very bottom. Eight hundred thousand. He stared at the pages again as if there were some mistake, an extra zero, a wrong comma or decimal, a misprint. Operations. Procedures. CAT scans and MRIs and nuclear medicine. A single blood test was two thousand alone. Gary started to laugh. Eight hundred thousand! He looked at the service dates. These were all for last month! The bill didn’t even cover the last three weeks! He was laughing so hard he was crying, snuffling his tears, hitting the table, making so much noise, Suzanne ran in, her hands still damp. He flapped the bill in the air and handed it to her.
“This is a joke?” she asked, and he shook his head. “Insurance will cover this, right?”
He leaned along the wall. “What am I going to do?”
Every day now, another bill came, and the totals were always so astronomical, they took his breath away. He didn’t recognize the names of the doctors billing them, the procedures all seemed to be in a foreign language, and after a while, he simply stopped looking at the bills altogether, but stuffed them into clean envelopes, stamped and addressed them and sent them off to insurance and tried not to think about them at all.
As soon as he mailed a bill off, another one arrived, and with them began to come the insurance denials. A twenty-thousand-dollar procedure was above what insurance usually paid and so insurance would only pay fifteen thousand of it. His insurance wouldn’t cover Molly’s
hospital stay because they said that it was beyond the normal stay after a C-section, which was only three days. Astounded, Gary called the insurance company. “What can you mean talking to me about normal stay? How can you do this? This isn’t a normal C-section! Surely, if you look at her file, you’ll see the blood work, the tests, the diagnosis—”
“Hold on,” the voice on the other end said. “My computer just went down.”
He had to call back five minutes later, waiting through the tinny Muzak rendition of the Beatles’ “Got to Get You Into My Life” before a real person got on the line, and even then it was a new person, and he had to tell his story all over again. “Reapply then,” the woman told him. “Contest. Tell the doctors to send supporting information.”
“What if I don’t know exactly who the doctor is or what sort of supporting information you might need?”
“Well, if you don’t know, sir, then we certainly don’t.”
Gary leafed through another bill, denied because Molly had not gotten precertification. “Precertification! What do you mean asking about precertification? My wife was comatose!” Gary shouted into the phone. “How could she precertify anything? Was I supposed to stop the doctors, to say, ‘Wait, don’t try to save my wife yet, let me call insurance first, make sure it’s all right for you to do whatever the hell you’re going to do’?”
“I know you’re upset, but you don’t have to shout at me.”
“No? Who do I shout at then?”
“Sir, I don’t have to take this call.”
“No! Don’t hang up. You’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry.” But what was he supposed to do? The people he spoke to on the phone were just clerks. They weren’t responsible, they didn’t know him, they needed to look up the information and his wife’s file was so large, it might take them a while. “Can you call back?” the clerks kept asking. He called back three times in half an hour and each time he got a different person, and none of them knew what exactly was the problem, why the bill hadn’t been paid to the hospital by insurance. “Send it in again,” they kept telling him.
Gary tried. He kept track of the bills as best he could, but nothing
seemed to make sense. He bought two big file envelopes and stuffed the bills into them. He called the doctors, desperate.
The doctors, thank God, were sympathetic. Dr. Price waved his hand in annoyance. “Insurance companies practicing medicine. What a world. As if you don’t have enough to think about. I’ll have my office call them.”
Dr. Kane, the surgeon, told Gary he’d put a note in his file that payment might be delayed. “Pay when you can,” he said. “We’ll work it out.”
And to his astonishment, Karen told him not to pay at all.
“Let’s just say that if, when, and whatever insurance pays me is enough,” Karen said. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t ever have to worry about it.”
Gary blinked at her and she slowly smiled. He was so grateful he could have wept.
But the bills kept coming. From more and more doctors he didn’t know. From the hospital and the labs, who weren’t so understanding as the individual doctors, so willing to be a little flexible and wait for him to fight with the insurance company. Collection agencies began to call. “Wouldn’t you like to pay and get this taken care of?” a smooth voice always asked him. “Why don’t we just do it over the phone by credit card?”
“Which tapped-out credit card would you like?” Gary said wearily.
“Sir,” the voice said, cooling, “you don’t want to let this go too far.”
Gary stepped up his search for work, clipping ads from the paper about nighttime proofing, calling, and to his dismay, everyone he called asked about his last job, and then they didn’t want to see him. Next time, he told himself, he’d lie.
He had the want ads spread on the floor when Suzanne came into the room. She was wearing a green dress, her arms and legs bare. She was watching him as if she expected him to say something. “You look nice,” he said.
She smiled and then sat down, watching him again. “No luck?” she said, and he shrugged.
“You know, I could work. I wouldn’t even have to leave the house.”
“You work already. You take care of Otis.”
She waved her hand. “The baby runs like a little clock. I could do hair right in a corner of the kitchen. It wouldn’t be any trouble. I’ll schedule people when he sleeps. Or he can sit in the playpen and watch. Learn a little something.”
“I don’t know—”
“I need to work,” she blurted. “I need something to take my mind off—things.”
She looked away from him.
Who was Gary not to understand something like that? “Sure. Go ahead,” he said. “The money will come in handy.”
A CUT ABOVE.
SUZANNE GOLDMAN: LICENSED BEAUTICIAN.
COLOR, CUTS, STYLINGS. IN THE COMFORT OF MY HOME. THE LOOKS YOU WANT AT PRICES YOU’LL LOVE!
With the baby in the stroller, Wood You, the unpainted furniture store, was Suzanne’s last stop of the day. The store was cool and smelled like cedar, filled with soft pine shelves and tables and chairs, some of them stained and stenciled so you could see how beautiful they could become with just a little loving care. Wood You had a big community bulletin board by the front. The store was crowded with people, running their hands over the furniture, peering at the shelves of stains. A good sign. Every one of these people could be a potential haircut.
She had already set up a little work corner for herself in the kitchen. She took the mirror from the hallway and hung it on the wall. She moved a swivel chair from Gary’s office in front of it, and put a smock on a hook by the basement door. She set up a small shelf full of supplies, the special shampoos and conditioners she made herself, some vials of color, and small gleaming bowls with scented candles. To give the place atmosphere.
She lifted a flier out from the bottom of the stroller and tried to find a good place on the board to tack it.
“Here, let me help you.”
Suzanne turned around. A man in a flannel shirt, a leather apron about his jeans, leaned up and helped position Suzanne’s sign on the bulletin board. “Nice-looking sign.”
Suzanne looked at him to see if he were making fun of her. He was about her age, with a face like a soup dumpling. Receding brown hair, belly folding over his belt. But his smile was friendly enough.
“Anyone comes in here with raggedy hair, you point them to my sign,” she said.
He laughed, and then she felt embarrassed because just look at his hair, flying off in every direction. But he didn’t seem to take offense. “Bob Tillman,” he said. He waggled his fingers at the baby and then squinted up at the sign again. “Suzanne Goldman. Wait a minute here. You’re not related to Molly Goldman, are you?”
“You know Molly?”
“I know of her. A few of my customers were talking about her.” He shook his head. “Terrible thing.”
Suzanne stiffened a little. “She’s my sister. I’m staying with my brother-in-law helping out. Taking care of the baby.”
“I’m so very sorry.” He gave her a considering look and then, abruptly, he took down her sign.
Suzanne’s hand flew up to stop him. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out some tape, and then he took Suzanne’s sign and taped it to the front window. Then he turned back to her, smiling. “That’s better.”
Suzanne smiled back at him. God, she thought. This guy was nice with a capital N. Why didn’t guys like that ever look like anything?
“Come back. I’ll give you a good deal on some furniture. I’ll show you how you can make an unpainted chair look like an expensive antique.”
“You got any pickled stains?” A woman tapped Bob Tillman on the arm.
“Come back,” Bob Tillman repeated to Suzanne and turned his attention to the pickle stain lady.
Suzanne wheeled Otis out into the sunny street. She felt a little better seeing her sign posted in front like that. She took a moment to admire it.
“He looks just like you. The very image.”
Suzanne looked startled. A woman was standing beside her. She looked like Bob Tillman?
“He does. Look at those eyes. That mouth. That coloring. Is he your first?”
Suzanne followed the woman’s eyes down to the baby. “Yes,” Suzanne said.
“Lucky you.” The other woman fretted her hands through her hair. She leaned forward and drew out a pen and began copying the number on Suzanne’s sign.
Two breadwinners without bread, Gary thought. No one had called for Suzanne. No one had called for him. Gary tried to stay optimistic, but he felt worn down. He stopped dressing in a shirt and tie and wore only his jeans, his battered leather jacket. He stopped carrying his briefcase, his portfolio. He told himself he was saving wear and tear on his good things, that if he got an interview, he’d shave, he’d have Suzanne trim his hair. He’d spruce up and make his step have spring. He’d make himself look like he knew what hope was.
That evening, when he was coming home from the hospital, he saw Bill sitting on his front porch. It was an odd sight, since it was neighborhood policy not to sit on the stoops until it was good and hot outside, until you could parade out plastic chairs and refreshments and one of those small portable radios. Bill waved one hand in greeting, which surprised Gary even more. He stopped, hesitating.
“How’s Molly?”
Gary shrugged. “The same.”
Bill took out a cigarette and lighted it. “And how are you managing?”
“You know. As good as can be expected.”
Bill drew on his cigarette. He tapped the ashes onto his porch. “I see you around the house a lot more.”
Gary nodded. He looked at Bill, who was looking quietly down at the ground. Giving him room. “I got fired,” Gary said.
Bill nodded, shaking his head. It was a little disconcerting to Gary that Bill didn’t seem the least surprised. If anything, he looked as if he had known already. “What kind of bastard fires someone when his wife is ill?” Bill said finally.
“A bastard who wants you there nine to five, I suppose.”
“I know that kind.” Bill flung his cigarette away and dug for another in his shirt pocket. He lit it and then looked back at the street, considering. “You know, my cousin Larry runs a warehouse over in Newark. Plumbing supplies. He never trusted those automated security systems. He needs a night watchman. Midnight to six.” He looked past Gary, at the cars. “You interested? All you have to do is be there. You can sleep, read magazines, do nothing. It’s peace of mind for Larry. I mean, who’s really going to break into a plumbing supply place?” Bill stubbed out his cigarette. For the first time, he looked straight at Gary. His face was even, breathing, his eyes a deep, bright blue. “It’s money under the table. One hundred a night.”
Gary felt a strange light shining from the sky. His mouth was dry. “When can I start?”
Larry’s Plumbing Supply Warehouse was on a dark side street in Newark. Larry was a lean, horse-faced man in his fifties with a shelf of sandy hair and straight white teeth and an odd resemblance to Bill. He pumped Gary’s hand. “Bill told me all about you,” he said. “Good people, Bill and Emma.”
“They sure are.”
Larry gave Gary a quick tour, down the gray hallways, into the storage rooms, and back to the front desk where Gary would sit. “Every few hours just walk the halls,” Larry told him. “Phone’s right here. Any trouble, just call the cops. That’s your defense.” He patted Gary on the back. “You’re welcome to bring in a radio, if you want. The last watchman had a portable TV. And you’re not totally alone here. We’ve got a cleaning man who comes here nights, too. A college kid.
Son of a friend of mine, so you’ll have a little company, if you want it. At six sharp, the day security man comes in. You punch in and out. And every Friday, I’ll come here and pay you.”
Even though Gary wouldn’t be seeing anyone, he still had to wear a uniform. “Makes it more official,” Larry said. The uniform was a longsleeved shirt and pants, both in stiff, dull brown, with a gold insignia that said TOP SECURITY. “I made up the name,” Larry confided with a grin. There was a cap, too, with a plastic brim, that Larry popped onto Gary’s head.
The first time Gary put on the uniform, he stared at himself in the mirror. He looked ridiculous. An image flashed into his mind: another kind of uniform, the scrubs he had put on to watch his son being born, the exuberant way he had tied on the mask, the gown, how he had loved the whole green starchy smell. He remembered, too, Molly’s face, shining in pleasure at the sight of him. He saw her. He felt her joy. And then he saw Molly, swollen, gray, and sick, a johnny gown tied on. Molly not seeing him at all. He shut his eyes and opened them. He adjusted the hat. It nicked at the back of his ears. The shirt collar itched. It was money. It was one hundred tax-free dollars a night, and taking such a job required no more thought than that.
He walked past Suzanne, who was feeding Otis. Her face changed. “Don’t you dare laugh,” Gary said.
“I think you look great,” she said.
The day security man, tall and thin and pale, met Gary at the door. “Nothing going on tonight,” he said, and tipped his hat, walking past Gary. “It’s all yours.”
Gary’s first night, he sat at the desk, a magazine in front of him. He leafed through the pages so roughly, he tore a few. He couldn’t see the bright gleam of photos, he couldn’t read a line of copy. He couldn’t focus. He looked up at the clock. Only a half hour had passed. The night swung out before him.
Larry was right. With this job, he didn’t have to concentrate on anything, but in a way, that was part of the problem. Freed, his mind
flooded with Molly. It replayed his days at the hospital, the way her face looked. He kept thinking about the moment she had gotten pregnant, if there had been something about her he had missed, something that might have warded this off, something he could have done, and it all made him so crazy, he got up and stormed down the halls, just to have something to do. He checked doors to make sure they were locked. He checked windows and shone the flashlight they gave him into every dark corner. He felt an odd satisfaction, a kind of dull joy in making the building secure.
He was making a circle back to his desk when he heard the hum of a vacuum. He turned a corner. There was a young man, his black hair in a ponytail, in jeans and a white T-shirt, running the machine over the floor. He grinned when he saw Gary and clicked off the vacuum. “Well hot dog! Company!” he called. He wiped his hand on the back of his jeans and thrust it out at Gary.
The man’s name was Marty. Marty was twenty-two and in college at Rutgers, paying his way by a variety of jobs. He wanted to be a movie director and he had all these ideas. “Night job,” Marty said, making his hands into a frame. “That’s the title of my movie. It’s about a janitor at night and how he begins to suspect the building he’s in is somehow alive and haunted and out to get him and what he does about it. It’s sort of like that great Danish film about the hospital, The Kingdom, you ever see that?”
“I haven’t seen any hospital movies lately.”
“Well,” Marty said, considering, “you should.”
Marty went off to finish his vacuuming and Gary wound his way back to his desk. The building had a kind of music, a low, steady hum, a vibration maybe. He had read once where everything had a soul, even machines, even concrete and steel. He tried to keep himself still, to listen deeper to the building, to try to feel what its soul might be like. Benevolent, he decided.
The time passed and then Gary punched out and came home. The morning light seemed unnaturally bright, the air too still. He went inside the house, which was quiet, and the first thing he did, before
he got out of his uniform and into his jeans, was look in on Otis, who was sleeping.
He should sleep, too, but he wasn’t tired. He didn’t want to risk sleeping through a minute he might share with his son, so he kept awake.
He stayed awake so he could check with Suzanne about what kind of a night Otis had had. He stayed awake until Otis cried and then he dressed his son and strolled him to the park and back. He stayed awake on the drive to the hospital and beside Molly’s bed. “I’m here.” He would have gotten up on the bed with her, if there weren’t so many tubes, if his jostling might not harm her. He looked at her and felt himself coming undone. He would have taken her illness into himself. You live, I live. It was as simple as that. He took her hand. Her skin was warm. Her pulse beat up against his. You die, I die. His lids floated shut. He slept, deep and dreamless, his mind closed tight as a building.
At the end of his first week of work, Larry showed up. He slapped Gary on the back. “You’re doing real good,” he said seriously, though for the life of him, Gary couldn’t figure out how someone did badly at a job like this. He could walk the halls or not walk the halls, he could fall asleep the whole night at his desk and no one would notice, except for maybe Marty, and he was too absorbed in his own future to notice anyone else’s. Larry handed Gary an envelope, thick with bills. “I put something extra in there for you,” he said, lowering his voice. “Bill told me how things are for you.” Larry patted Gary’s shoulder.
Suzanne tried to gauge her sister’s progress by the way the nurses acted. If they stopped to talk to Suzanne, it was a good sign. If they breezed by, it meant Molly was getting worse. She could tell, too, how her sister was doing by the number of times Gary called the hospital to check on Molly’s status. By the number of photos he left on her table. But
she didn’t begin to be really terrified until Gary stopped calling the hospital altogether, until one Saturday morning she woke up at five and found him sitting in the living room, staring at the window, not moving.
She was afraid to call out to him, to ask what was wrong. She was suddenly terrified Molly might not make it. She turned around and went back to her bed. She bundled herself up in the sheets and stared into the darkness.
She began to be more and more afraid in Molly’s house. At night, when Gary was at his night manager’s job, she couldn’t sleep. She didn’t know what she was afraid of. Gary had installed new locks, even on the windows. He had an alarm system.
Now she took a shower with the door wide open, and halfway through, she stepped out of the tub, dripping wet, and locked the door, and even then, she felt uneasy. She knew money was tight, but still, she switched on lights as she moved from room to room. She turned on the television and the radio and the baby’s monitor so it buzzed. She sat in the living room half hoping Otis would wake just so she would have company.
She went to the phone and called the hospital. “Molly Goldman,” she said and waited.
“Critical. The same,” the voice said, and Suzanne hung up. Critical was still alive, she reminded herself. So why then did she see razoredged dominoes, falling, all pointed toward her?
One day, Suzanne was putting the baby to bed when the bell rang. She raced down and there was a woman standing there, a kerchief about her hair. Suzanne opened the door. “Theresa. From next door,” the woman said. She waited and then sighed as if Suzanne were being rude. “Carl’s wife.”
“Oh, yes,” Suzanne said doubtfully. “Theresa.” She tried to think why Theresa was here, what had happened, but she felt blank.
“Is everything all right?” she asked and Theresa drew off her kerchief.
“You take walk-ins?” she said.
She gave Theresa a smock. Theresa fingered the material and put it on. “Tea? Coffee?”
Theresa considered. “I like Sanka.”
Suzanne sat Theresa in the plastic chair she used and touched Theresa’s hair. It didn’t feel real. Stiff with spray, dry from bad coloring, and the wrong kind of perm.
“It’s still keeping its shape, but I thought a touch-up, a trim, couldn’t hurt,” Theresa said.
Suzanne lifted her hands from Theresa’s hair and nodded.
Usually when Suzanne worked, she filled up the silences with patter, making jokes, asking her clients questions, but there was something about Theresa that made her keep her mouth shut. Every time Suzanne looked in the mirror she saw Theresa watching her, like she was about to have her appendix taken out without anesthesia. When Suzanne touched Theresa’s hair, Theresa winced, and all Suzanne could think was: She’s afraid of me.
She washed Theresa’s hair with the good shampoo. “Smells nice,” Theresa said. “What’s that green stuff floating in it?”
“Fresh mint. It gives the smell.”
“Fresh mint. Who’d have thought?” said Theresa doubtfully.
Suzanne combed color through Theresa’s hair and set it the way she knew Theresa would like it, a stiff brassy muffin about her head, and popped her under a dryer. It killed her to ruin hair like that, but she was desperate, she needed the money, Gary needed the money, and she wanted to be working, even if it was working badly. Theresa could have told her she wanted hair like a topiary, and Suzanne would have done it.
She let Theresa’s hair fry under the dryer, and then took her out, carefully removing the hard pink curlers one by one. Theresa blinked and as Suzanne worked, Theresa’s face began to change. Her mouth loosened up. You could see her lips now. Her eyes widened. By the time Suzanne was spraying her hair, making it hard and shiny as a beetle shell, Theresa was smiling. “You did a great job,” she said.
“You’re surprised, right?” Suzanne didn’t tell her that she knew
exactly how to do hair like this from her days at Beauty Culture School, when the only people fool enough to let her work on them were all the little old ladies coming in for the five-dollar student cuts.
Theresa beamed and touched her bright helmet of hair. “You know, I decided to do this for Gary. It was the only way I could think that he might accept money from me.” She swiveled in the chair, studying the back of her hair. “Isn’t it funny, it turns out I did this for me.” She smiled at Suzanne. “I have many friends,” she said.
Suzanne began to get more and more clients. Many were from her signs, but a lot were from Theresa, too. She was nerved up about how it was going to work with the baby, but to her surprise he put on his best behavior. Not only was he quiet, but he began to look especially cute, even to her. And just seeing him seemed to relax her clients. “Oh, a baby!” they said, as if it were the biggest surprise in the world.
It was strange, but Otis relaxed her, too. It made her feel good to see him. Sometimes she swore he was courting her. She walked into his room mornings and his whole face lit up. “It’s just me, Otis,” she said, but he couldn’t stop wriggling, and she couldn’t help feeling pleased. He made cooing sounds when she picked him up, making her laugh, and as soon as she did, he cooed some more.
It killed her the way his eyes followed her around the room now, the way he’d get all nervous if she so much as stepped away for a minute. Some nights, when he was asleep, when she didn’t have clients, she told herself she was just checking on him while he slept. She stood by his crib watching him, and some nights it was almost impossible to tear herself away from him. Every night, before she went to sleep, she read two whole chapters of Molly’s baby book. She kept a notebook handy. She jotted down things that seemed useful.
She started buying Otis things, too. A pacifier shaped like a pair of big red lips. A terry-cloth lamb. And when she noticed him scrunching his face when she smoked, she suddenly made a decision. She stubbed
out the cigarette. She threw out the pack. “Cold turkey,” she told Otis.
Her favorite times were sometimes the quietest ones. Midday. She sat in Angela’s rocker and rocked Otis, listening to the quiet of the house, the calm. She thought about what she might cook for dinner. She thought about Gary coming home soon. She sighed. Sometimes she couldn’t help imagining that this was her life.
Gary left work and stopped at the all-night supermarket to pick up milk and bread and wipes with protective aloe and diapers size two. Seven in the morning. Too early for the Muzak, a syrupy rendition of a Frank Sinatra song he used to like before he heard this version. “The Summer Wind.” There were only two cashiers, young women with too much makeup, their eyelids frosted blue, their scratchy hair pulled back into ponytails, yawning, propping themselves up against the registers to lazily gossip back and forth, punctuating the air with their long lacquered nails. There were a few stock boys in bright red aprons swinging metal pricers. He glanced around. Who else beside him would shop this early? A ragged-looking woman in a blue dress shuffled down an aisle. Two teenaged kids giggled by the ice cream, holding up frosty pints and pressing them against each other’s heated skin. Losers and outlaws, all of us, Gary thought. The disenfranchised. He scratched at his arms through his uniform. He still had his hat on, out of habit. He was wheeling the cart, staring sleepily at the fresh fruits, when someone said, “Gary?” He looked up. Brian was standing there, staring at Gary’s uniform, at his cap, in pure astonishment. Gary felt hot with new shame, defiant with rage.
“Hi, Brian.”
Brian leaned on his cart. Canned puddings, doughnuts, instant coffee, and paper cups. Work food. Single man food. “How’s Molly?”
“The same.”
“So. You got a job, I see.” Brian’s gaze slid up and down Gary, stopping at the cap. His mouth moved and he suddenly snorted. “Sorry
to laugh, but that cap—that insignia! You gotta admit it’s kind of funny.”
“It’s not funny, Brian. It’s a job.”
Brian nodded again. He waited for Gary to say something, but Gary was resolutely silent. “Well, that’s good,” Brian said lamely. “I guess.” He looked at Gary’s uniform again and shook his head, grinning.
Gary wanted to shove Brian, he wanted to scream at him that everyone knew his girlfriend Candy was made-up, that she probably was a man masquerading to get some free things that only a complete idiot would give her, that no one liked Brian, least of all his made-up girlfriend, but instead, Gary said nothing. He turned, wheeling his cart so roughly into the next aisle, he toppled a display of diaper wipes, clattering them onto the floor.
He was so furious, he drove for a while. By the time he got home, it was nearly nine. He came into the house to hear music playing, an opera aria. The house was clean, and not too warm, and fragrant with mint. Then he heard a woman laughing and he followed the sound into the kitchen. Suzanne was washing a strange woman’s hair in his sink. Suzanne wore red rubbery gloves. Suzanne had on a short black smock, the same one the woman was wearing, her legs were long and pale, her feet bare. She smiled at him and kept talking to the woman. The air was tangy with lemon. In a rocker on the floor was Otis, happily batting a plastic toy. Suzanne beamed at Gary. “Two more coming today,” she mouthed. She flushed and watching her, for a moment, he felt suddenly stricken. She looked glowing, content. Her hands, long and delicate, moved like pale, exotic flowers. He felt a pull in his stomach, a yearning. The woman getting her hair washed waved. “Hi there,” she said.
Gary changed and left the house to go to the hospital. Suzanne was noisily blowing the woman’s hair dry, so intent, she didn’t see him leave.
At the hospital, Molly lay motionless, her face turned from him. He lifted up her hand. The skin was starting to bruise. He gently put it down again and stroked her fingers. “Come back,” he said.
Someone came to take blood twice. A nurse came and bathed Molly. Two orderlies lifted her up into a rubber stretcher to weigh her and lowered her again. He stroked her hands and sang her two songs. The entire time Molly didn’t move.
He didn’t know what to do. Sometimes he thought he wanted to talk, but he didn’t know whom to talk to. He couldn’t afford a shrink. Everyone at the hospital was too busy. His friends just tried to make him feel better, to give him hope, or they got so upset, he ended up comforting them. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.
He read the newspaper by Molly’s bed, scanning the ads, leafing through the pages. FREE HELP LINE, he saw. He looked back at Molly. Her lids fluttered and didn’t open. She didn’t move. It was ridiculous, but he found himself getting up, walking over to the bank of pay phones, and dialing.
“Help line.” It was a woman’s voice, soft and soothing and very young.
Gary cleared his throat. He couldn’t speak.
“Help line. Take your time. I’m here for you.”
Here for you. Gary felt his throat expanding. “Three days after my wife gave birth, she went into a coma.”
The woman was silent.
“They don’t know if she’s going to make it.”
“That must be so hard for you,” the woman whispered.
“I feel like I can’t do this.”
“That’s understandable.”
Gary suddenly felt a buzz of frustration. “You can’t help me, can you?” Gary said sadly. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about.”
“Of course I can help you. I can listen.”
“Have you been in anything like this yourself? Do you know how it feels?”
“Don’t you think I can know how something might feel without feeling it myself?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s just not true. I—”
“Can you make my wife well?” he interrupted.
“I can be here for you. I can listen.”
Gary hung up.
Stay calm, he told himself. Believe things will turn out all right. But how could he believe in anything? How could he not worry? It suddenly seemed to him that phobics were the true seers, that even the craziest phobia might be a perfectly rational response to a terrifyingly irrational world. And when everything was so upside down, there was nothing left to do but look for miracles.
He bought a fake fur rabbit’s foot and kept it in his coat pocket. Once, when he was looking through the want ads for jobs, he saw a Saint Jude’s prayer. Say the prayer nine times in nine days and then thank Saint Jude publicly and whatever you want to happen will. He did it, he learned it. He asked for Molly to be instantly healed, and when it didn’t work, he told himself, well, maybe it would work later, maybe something still might happen.
He couldn’t afford to hire a psychic healer, but he began to buy books. He remembered the crazy mushroom title Ada had suggested; he vaguely remembered other titles she had suggesteded; when he couldn’t find any of her books, he found others. The Mind Can Heal the Body. Heavenly Healing. Mysticism and Health. He was vaguely embarrassed buying the books, but as soon as the cashier looked up at him, he turned defiant. He slammed his money down onto the counter.
It was the weekend, he didn’t have to work, and that night, he sat up poring through the books, underlining passages. Suzanne came back from the hospital and, passing by him, stared at the titles. “Look—” he started to say, but Suzanne suddenly sat down and picked up the other book, leafing through it. “There’s something on this page about charging the atmosphere with energy,” she said quietly.
He looked up at her to see if she was laughing at him. She still had her coat on. Her face was grave. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying, her body posture was as exhausted as his own, and he felt suddenly moved. “You think this is stupid?” he asked finally.
Her eyes met his. “I’d like to look at that book when you’re done.”
He was desperate. He could believe in anything. That fairies lived in the woods. That ghosts haunted houses. That people could travel in time. There were lots of things that people had thought were insane at one time that had turned out to be true. At one time no one had believed in germs. No one had believed in other planets. Who knew what was possible? Who knew what could and couldn’t be done? The thing was, you had to risk everything, you had to try.
He and Suzanne studied the books. They memorized the testimonials, which were his favorite part. A woman with inoperable cancer had been healed by the faith of her friends. A man with a rare and disfiguring skin disease had healed himself overnight by imagining his own private healer, which in his case, turned out to be a great white rabbit singing Jefferson Airplane songs. Gary and Suzanne learned a few healing exercises, how you could rub your hands together and charge them with energy and lay them over a person and cure them. How you could think of a silver cord connecting you to the earth, a power line you could tap into to boost your healing capacities. At night, he bolted awake. He calmed himself by practicing, by telling himself that, yes, he did feel his hands heating with healing energy, that, yes, he did think he might have seen a wisp of energy right there in the air. Yes, he could do this. Yes.
The next day, he walked into Molly’s room just as the doctors were leaving. Good, he thought, good. You had to be grounded, the books had said. You had to feel strong. He sat by Molly’s bed. He tried to imagine, to see and feel and hear the silver cord, vibrating and sparkling, and instead, he felt himself tense because all he could concentrate on was the noise of Molly’s machine. He rubbed his hands together, trying to imagine sparks of energy the way the books had said. And then he held his hands up over Molly as if he were doing a massage. He moved them in slow circles, in swoops and dips. The movements were almost hypnotic. He felt himself relaxing. Put your
belief in your hands, the books said. Make them heat like an oven. I believe, he thought. I believe, I believe. He felt something shifting inside of him, giving way. His hands, he told himself, were getting hot. His energy was setting off sparks. “You’re getting well,” he told Molly.
The door swung open. A nurse came in, and Gary turned to her, trying to act ordinary. His hands hung in the air. He didn’t want anyone telling him not to do this. He put his hands by his sides.
The nurse bent and touched Molly and whipped back up. “Oh, my God.”
“What’s happened?” Gary felt a flash of hope. He could tell the nurse what he was doing. He could come in and do this twice a day, three times. Suzanne could do it, too. “She’s better, isn’t she?”
“She’s burning up, spiking another fever,” she said. “We’ll have to pack her in ice.”
Molly shivered uncontrollably. Her mouth flew open. The ice melted against the sheets and then her fever broke and two other nurses came in and changed the bed, rolling her carefully from one side to another, tucking her back in, and all the while Gary leaned against the wall watching in terror. “She’s fine now,” the nurse said, giving the sheet an extra pat.
After the nurses left, he sat by her bed. He took her hand, which was cool and dry. He told himself one mistake didn’t mean anything, that he’d try again. He didn’t care how crazy anything was, he’d find the thing to make her well, to protect her.
At work sometimes, he began to help Marty with the cleaning. “It passes the time.” Marty shrugged and leaned along the wall, smoking a joint, a goofy grin spreading across his face. “Jesus. Be my guest. Whatever floats your boat.”
Gary found he liked mopping the floors, liked seeing the water
sliding across the dark linoleum. He liked the sound of the vacuum, the backdrop of Marty’s voice rambling on about plot points in his horror movie, about actors he hoped to get. “Jack Nicholson,” Marty insisted. “If I can just get to him, I know he’d want to do it. It’s his kind of showcase role.” Marty was so lost in his reverie, Gary never even had to respond. Gary liked, too, seeing the building shining and clean and perfect. He stepped back sometimes, sweating, his muscles stretched. He felt himself and the building almost purified.
To Gary’s astonishment, Suzanne began to get more clients. The phone would ring and he would brace himself, expecting the clipped tone of a doctor, the worried voice of Karen, and instead there would be a female voice, wanting Suzanne, asking for an appointment. He’d come into the house and a strange woman would be sitting in his kitchen, a blonde or a redhead or a brunette, there would be hair dusted along the floor, and Otis, sunny and happy in his seat.
Suzanne got a bankbook and a checkbook. Having a bit more money made things easier, and it did something to Suzanne. He watched her cutting a woman’s hair. She had told him customers didn’t like to be watched, that hair was a private thing, so he leaned along the hall. She changed while she worked. He almost didn’t know her. The skittishness went out of her, she became calm and sure, as if light were glinting off her.
One day, he heard a woman weeping. He quietly walked by the kitchen. Suzanne had her arms about a woman’s shoulder, she was speaking in a low voice. “Forget him,” Suzanne said. “You’re too good for that. You don’t need him.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, trust me. What you need are highlights.”
The woman came out with reddish glints. She stopped short when she saw Gary. She gave him a doubtful look. “You look beautiful,” he said, and the woman suddenly relaxed. Her whole body seemed to beam. Suzanne, behind the woman, grinned triumphantly and gave
Gary the thumbs-up. “Now, just because a guy likes it, doesn’t mean that’s everything,” Suzanne said. “Remember, I told you it was gorgeous, too.”
The woman straightened. “That’s right,” she said. “Damn right. And you know what else, I like it now, too.”
“That’s the spirit,” Suzanne said. “Come on. I’ll show you out.”
When she came back into the room, she sat opposite him. She didn’t ask him anymore how his day at the hospital was, but he knew that she didn’t have to. He felt her studying him, gauging his mood. She was as silent as he was, and for the first time, he realized he didn’t feel like he had to fill in the silences with her, that he had to say anything. They were in the same place.
“Now you,” Suzanne said.
“Oh, no—”
“Yes. Come on. You’re a bad advertisement for my work. Clients take one look at you and they get nervous.” She laughed. Her smile was friendly.
He ran his fingers self-consciously through his hair. Then he laughed and sat in the chair. “Lean back,” Suzanne said. His neck arched and then he felt warm soapy water over his head, around his neck. He felt her fingers massaging his scalp, a shock of feeling. The shampoo was lemon and pine. “What is that?”
“I make it myself. Commercial brands are too harsh.” She bent over him, her hair a satiny brush against his arms. “People don’t give beauticians the credit they deserve. There’s a whole science to it. I can look at hair and tell things.”
“What things?”
“I can tell if a person’s sad or in love just by the shape of their hair. If it’s dry on the ends or at the top. If it feels rough. I can tell if they’re drinking enough water, eating enough protein.”
“What can you tell about me?” he said.
She was quiet for a moment. Her fingers stilled against his scalp. “I can tell that you’re exhausted. That you aren’t eating right. That—”
“That what?”
Her fingers began moving again. And then he felt a sudden pour
of cool water. He smelled wintergreen. “That you need a rinse,” she said.
She bundled him in a towel; she faced him toward the mirror she had hung up. She stared at his face in the mirror, frowning, and then she picked up the scissors.
“Oh, no you don’t—”
“Oh, yes I do. You have great long hair, but it has no personality to it. Just a trim. Trust me.”
She worked around him, bending, her long hair brushing against him. She smelled of cinnamon, and every time she leaned closer, the scent grew stronger. “Done.” She put both hands on his shoulders and lifted them off, light as paper wings, and he looked over at her, meeting her eyes.
Gary began to find that Suzanne now made it easier for him. He came home and found her singing to Otis the way he did. He found her dancing with his son, her face a map of delight. She worried about Otis the way he did. She bolted up when the baby so much as sighed. She stood over his crib watching him. It was Suzanne who came home with the side sleeper. “It prevents SIDS,” she told him.
The house smelled different with her in it. Like cinnamon. Like lemon soap. It used to bother him before, finding bits of her all over the house, but now he somehow liked it.
One day, after Gary had gotten paid, he decided to thank Suzanne by taking her out to dinner someplace fancy.
“You don’t have to do that—” Suzanne started to say, but Gary held up his hand.
“I want to.”
He waited for her to change, busying himself with Otis. He was tickling Otis’s belly when Suzanne came into the room. She was in a soft, pale blue dress, barely grazing her body. Her hair gleamed around her. Something moved deep inside of him, startling him. He felt as if he were waking from a dream. “You’re staring.” She looked pleased and shy.
He lifted Otis up. He turned from her. “Let’s get going.”
They went to Patsy’s, a new place fifteen minutes away. It was a small, bright place, with yellow chintz curtains and tablecloths and a menu scrawled on a big blue blackboard. “They’re supposed to have the best desserts in town,” Gary said.
He set Otis in his carrier down on the floor beside him and plucked up a menu. Suzanne took off her coat.
“You look nice,” Gary said.
Otis slept in the carrier beside them while they ate pasta and chocolate pie and cheesecake, and halfway through the dessert, Suzanne turned to him and speared a strawberry from his plate. “I couldn’t resist,” she said.
Gary felt a sudden restless knocking in his head. He glanced around the restaurant, at the other customers noisily talking, gesturing, shaping the air with sound. There was a pale, balding man sitting by himself in a corner, staring at Suzanne. There was a buzzing in Gary’s ear. Gary looked from the brown-haired man to Suzanne, who was busy taking another strawberry from Gary’s plate. Her hand brushed his. She looked up at him. Her eyes were clear and full of light. He felt out of breath. He felt something tingling along his skin, something wrong. “What?” she said.
“That guy over there is looking at you.” Gary nodded to the man who lifted his glass of wine in a toast to Suzanne. Suzanne looked from the brown-haired man to Gary. “Oh, the guy from the unpainted furniture store,” she said calmly.
The man stood up and came over to the table. “Hello Suzanne,” he said. He nodded at Gary. “Bob Tillman,” he said, holding out his hand to Gary. “I own Wood You. The unpainted furniture store?”
“Oh, yes, I know that store,” Gary said, shaking Bob’s hand. Bob looked from Suzanne to Gary and back again. “Half the numbers from your sign are gone. I keep repositioning the sign, making sure it’s getting noticed.”
“That’s so nice,” Suzanne said.
Bob waited, and then his smile deepened. “Well, it was nice to see you again, Suzanne. And it was nice to meet you—?”
“Gary,” Gary said.
“Gary.”
Bob went back to his table. Gary felt his smile hardening. He felt a prickling of jealousy and he turned back to his cheesecake. “Nice guy,” he forced himself to say. “He seems really interested in you.”
Suzanne shrugged. “He’s so not my type.” She stared down at her plate and then she looked up, draining her glass of water. “Let’s order more dessert,” she said.
Gary told himself it was crazy, what he was feeling. It was just loneliness. Just pure human need. And maybe, too, it was just having someone know what he was feeling, someone going through it with him.
“You should call that guy from the furniture store,” he told her.
“That dodo?”
Gary felt a flicker of relief. Cut it out, he told himself. “He seems interested in you. You should call him. He seemed nice enough.”
“Yeah. Right,” she said.
He tried to keep more and more to himself, going up to his office as soon as he got home, taking Otis out alone in the morning instead of inviting Suzanne to go with him. It’s fine, it’s under control. He told himself that a million times a day, and then he went in to take a shower, and there, in a silky puddle of the floor, was Suzanne’s peach-colored slip and it hurt him so much just to look at it that he strode out of the room again.
He had a dream. He was walking through a field with Suzanne, holding hands because the grass was so high and rough. “This way,” she said, pointing her free hand to the back of a field. “See? There she is.” Suzanne pointed out Molly, all that red hair, burnished in the sun.
“Molly!” Gary called. He felt exuberant. Molly was alive and romping through the high grass toward him. His heart was skipping. And then he turned and saw how happy Suzanne was, and he turned and kissed her full and hungry on the mouth and Molly disappeared.
He bolted awake. He was sweating, horrified. He grabbed for the phone to check on Molly. “Critical,” the woman said, and then he stumbled down to the kitchen. He leaned against the sink. He grabbed for a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass. He had to calm down. He had to sleep. It’s a dream, he told himself. A dream.
He was on his third glass, drunk, woozy, terrified. He had done this to Molly, this was his punishment. He hadn’t been vigilant enough, hadn’t been a good enough husband. Thinking about Suzanne had been the easy way out, that’s all it was. He was disgusted to have ever imagined kissing her, to have thought about what her skin might feel like.
He was sitting on a chair in the living room when Suzanne came into the room. She had a short blue dress, her hair spilling down. Her beauty was so intense and real, it felt like a wound. He stood up. He hadn’t really slept in days. He was always afraid. And here she was.
She walked toward him, stumbling, so that he had to catch her, and then he wasn’t thinking at all anymore. He was kissing her, sliding one hand up under her dress. And she was kissing him back.
She grabbed him closer and he kissed her again. Longer. Harder. He bit her lips. He put his hand into her hair, against the back of her neck. He wanted to put his whole self up inside of her. He moved one hand up against her breasts. She moaned, and then abruptly he saw Molly, the way she liked to tilt her neck back for him to kiss, and he wrenched himself free. He shoved Suzanne roughly away from him. Panting, he stepped back. “No.”
For a minute, she didn’t move. He heard her ragged breath. And then she stepped toward him. He had never hated anyone more in his life than he hated himself. He had never wanted anyone more than her.
The phone rang. He could hardly breathe. He couldn’t see. But he made his way to the phone and yanked it up. “Yes.” His voice was cracked. He listened and then he hung up the phone.
He couldn’t bear to look at Suzanne. She grabbed at his arm, and he recoiled, as if she had burnt him.
“It’s Molly,” he said. “She woke up.”