Mona was not entirely correct about the llamas, I learned at her party. She was so rarely wrong that I took a secret pleasure in her small error. Madelyn, her houseguest, wasn’t breeding the llamas, at least not yet. She had two, yes, but male.
“A female is very expensive, about ten thousand dollars. If I had ten thousand dollars I wouldn’t use it to buy a llama but to go around the world,” she explained in her thin, even voice, like a novitiate instructing a sixth-grade class. Madelyn paused a lot when she spoke, as Ev used to do, but her pauses seemed deliberately spaced to set off the words in a mystifying halo. Maybe I should have tried that with Q. from the start, to be more mysterious.
Madelyn was looking serene, tanned by the Southwest sun and draped in a long dress of vaguely Indian design and autumnal colors which made her pale face rise as if from one of Rousseau’s tropical jungles. She no longer had that air of faint disapproval, as though nothing in the vicinity quite met her standards. Life, or the llamas, had mellowed her.
“So what do you use them for?” I asked.
“For backpacking.”
“You rent them out to people who go into the mountains?”
“No, I go into the mountains myself. The mountains are full of mystery. I meditate.”
What did she do with the llamas while she meditated? If they were Tibetan and hence Buddhist, perhaps they would meditate also. But since according to Mona they were Peruvian in origin, I imagined Madelyn tethering them to a tree like a cowboy securing his horse while he lolled around the campfire or poked through the sagebrush.
“Another thing is, I keep combing them out, hoping to get enough wool to make myself a sweater, but I haven’t gotten there yet. A sweater takes an awful lot of wool.”
“I thought so, about the wool. And you—” I turned to Mona—“you said I was thinking of alpacas.”
Mona frowned, barely altering her intelligent, deadpan expression.. When she permitted it, her face could be astonishingly fluid, revealing a hidden powerhouse of emotion. No wonder she kept it guarded.
I studied Mona, lanky, sleek and dark, quite splendid in one of her thrift shop finds, a 1920s dress covered in fringes, suggesting an antique lampshade. Strange that I trusted her so thoroughly, while most thin people made me suspicious. Though my trust was wavering: not only had she been mistaken about the sex of the llamas and misleading about the wool, but this was not the little reunion dinner she had promised. The room was filled with people who for the most part were standing, not sitting, the mark of a full-fledged party. It was informal enough to join groups without an introduction, yet large enough so we’d be eating on our feet, buffet-style. Mona’s husband, Dave, was already carrying in platters from the kitchen. I’d have to be careful not to drop things.
I was in no shape for a party but had done my best, coaxed my body from bed and into festive attire, adorned my face with dangling earrings and makeup to mask its tense, bewildered look. The walk down the Drive was graced with one of our magnificent smoggy New York sunsets, creamy purple, amber and pink suspended over the river like a slice of melting spumoni. The kind of sunset that engenders, albeit briefly, faith in the world, love, redemption and every other good thing. Why sunsets should inspire such feelings, who can say? It must be a genetically programmed response to enable us to face nightfall, an appalling event, when you think of it—everything gradually losing color and outline to sink in blackness. Imagine how the first humans must have felt when they saw the night coming on. Maybe what made them human to begin with was the willing acceptance of night, the dawning of faith that light would return. I would have worshipped not the sun itself but its light. The sun is monotheistic, but light appears in infinite forms, the gods and goddesses in their protean moods.
I had arrived infused by the sunset, eager to watch its finale from Mona’s high-ceilinged and benign apartment, and found this decorative crowd of theatre people. More spruced up and shiny than an ordinary crowd. Loud and expansive, with grand gestures and embraces, mannered pouts and raised eyebrows, smirks, snarls, and laughs of every sort. I’d always liked that atmosphere. It was no more artificial, really, than common social behavior, only more colorful. I might have taken on those manners had I stayed in the theatre. But just now it was daunting.
“Shit,” I’d greeted Mona, “it’s a real party.”
“Well, yes, it grew,” she said. “There were more people in town than I thought, and everyone wanted to bring their current loves, so here we are.”
I should have brought Tim—something tangible to show for the intervening years—but Tim had a meeting to attend, and not being a wife, I hadn’t dreamed of pressing him.
“The really lucrative thing about llamas, though .. ., is their manure,” Madelyn was saying. “It’s miracle manure. You can use it to grow just about anything, even in the desert. It’s like rabbit pellets, very dry and cohesive . . . only larger, of course. I’ve given some to my neighbors. They put it on their gardens and the results are astounding. Things grow miraculously, even in the dry soil we have.”
“Too bad you can’t package it and sell it,” I said.
“Oh, but that’s exactly what I’m planning to do. I hope to start packaging it next winter. After all, people love to buy Santa Fe things—Santa Fe jewelry, Santa Fe food. . . . Anything with a Santa Fe label has this incredible cachet.”
“Santa Fe shit,” said Mona, and my trust was fully restored. Never mind the size of the party or the error about the wool or her disconcerting thinness emphasized by the fringed green lampshade dress.
I hastened to click on the tape machine in my head, which fortunately could work retroactively, picking up the previous ten minutes and then running for about half an hour. This had to be transcribed for the data bank. It had the aura of usefulness, though I wasn’t sure why.
“It must be a beautiful place to live,” I said, setting her up and rolling the tape. “I remember last time I saw you, oh, four or five years ago, you were hoping to live there someday. It’s great that you’ve done it.”
“Yes, well, I wandered around for a while first. .. . I lived in Tibet for almost a year. I wanted to study a certain kind of folk music, which I did, and I lived in an ashram. You know, in Tibet . . . it’s amazing, people don’t have our notion that the individual is central, only the group. You’d never have a phenomenon like that Madonna movie, for instance. People in Tibet would be baffled at why . . . anyone should choose . . . such display of self.”
“You don’t have to be Tibetan to be baffled,” murmured Mona.
“In Tibet,” said Madelyn, “they feel themselves part of a community. Living in that atmosphere helped me get my priorities straight. At this point I feel .. . I have my life all worked out. I have the work I want to do. I live where I want to live. I get up in the morning and look out and see those wonderful mountains. I go to feed the llamas and gather their droppings and .. . I feel terrific.”
After a near-sacred hush, she added, “Mona told me about your husband. I was sorry to hear that. What a terrible experience it must have been. The city is such a violent place.”
Mona exchanged a meaningful conjugal glance with Dave, who was arranging silverware on the buffet table across the room. Here in our rotting but alluring city we were humble. We didn’t presume to work out our lives. If we get a meal nicely organized for thirty people, we feel it’s been a good day.
“Yes. Well, thank you,” I said. “It was a .. . a bad experience, as you say, but after two years you begin to—”
“Dinner!” called Mona loudly, saving me from myself and swiveling to face the guests, her fringes following along diagonally like a well-ordered regiment. As she turned back and faced me she rolled her green eyes.
Madelyn slipped away, the folds of her jungle dress disappearing behind someone’s somber slacks.
“So what did you make this time?”
“A new recipe. Llama mole,” Mona said.
I drifted off to say hello to people I hadn’t seen in years, not since the cast Halloween party where Q. assaulted the stagehand. Many of the same people were here—I wondered if they remembered it. We were in love in that savory adulterous way and Q. was going to tell Susan very soon. He came as Superman and I as Cleopatra—love makes you grandiose. So much so that not for a moment did I think of Susan at home with the flu, God forgive me. One of the stagehands showed up as a Nazi storm trooper—boots, belt, holstered gun, and a swastika on the sleeve of his uniform. As he goose-stepped around the room, people stared open-mouthed, a few trying feebly to laugh. Q. stalked over, puffing out his chest with the big red S. “That’s not funny,” he said. “In fact it’s vile.”
“Oh, come on,” the fellow answered, “where’s your sense of humor?”
“I have no sense of humor, that’s right.” The others tittered nervously; Q. was known for being funny. “I’d rather have no sense of humor than no brains.” More words. Knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch, “one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deny’st the least syllable of thy addition.” Words to that effect, more or less. We had just done Lear—Q. was Albany that time. Eventually Q. did start pummeling him as Kent did Oswald in the play, until the others tugged at his Superman cape and pulled him off. The knave got up, brushed off his uniform, and left. Q. was a hero but uncomfortable. “For my next number I’m going to fly,” he said awkwardly, and downed a glass of bourbon. I loved him so then. For the awkward remorse as much as for the attack of righteousness.
I made my way into the crowd for the hugs and shrieks. Thank goodness no one would offer condolences about the shocking death of my husband, since no one else here knew I had married him.
“What about Quinn?” asked Sonia, a broad-boned woman who was once Ophelia in Hamlet. Today she’d have been cast as Gertrude. “Are you two still in touch?”
“On and off. I had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago. He was in a movie they were shooting in Queens.”
I turned away, stumbling into a discussion about why women in concentration camps survived better than men. Because women are accustomed to mutual help and camaraderie, someone asserted. Did they survive better? I hadn’t known. The question was not unimportant; it was not even tedious, which was more than could be said for global warming and adolescent anomie, but as usual I couldn’t get interested. I kept thinking of all those newspapers Ev used to read in bed and how I had encouraged him to talk. I required conversation, and since he didn’t talk about personal matters I became very knowledgeable, even about global warming, which was just coming into its own as a topic when he was shot.
“I always felt sure you and Quinn would get together one day,” said Sonia, equally unable or unwilling, it appeared, to focus on the serious issue at hand. “I mean marry. Or something. But you never did, did you?”
“No. Not Quinn.”
“Are you married?”
“Not anymore.”
She smiled knowingly. “Me, too. I just divorced my second. It’s an epidemic. So how are you? I know you’ve done okay. I’ve seen your books in stores. My mother reads them.”
“To tell the truth, I’m feeling sick. In fact if I don’t sit down pretty soon I’m going to fall. Excuse me.”
Before I could move off she hustled me into a chair. “Sit. This minute. I knew it.” She placed a comradely hand on my shoulder even though we weren’t in a concentration camp; it wasn’t a question of outlasting the Nazis, just a pleasant little summer party. “I knew it. When you came in the door it took me a minute to recognize you, you were so changed, and it wasn’t only the years. I thought to myself, she must be sick. That is one sick girl.”
Despair. All my efforts, my frisky clothes and ornaments, to no avail. I looked hideous. A spectator at life’s banquet (not so bad were it really llama mole). An invalid tolerated at merry parties out of pity. Invalid, meaning not valid.
“I’m going to get you some food,” said Sonia. “You stay right here. You’ll feel better once you eat. You can eat, can’t you?”
“I can eat just fine. But please don’t bother. I’ll get it myself in a few minutes.”
“Uh-uh. I’ll be right back.” And she was. Like a hospital orderly, she presented the plate and bade me eat; all we lacked was the wheeled tray across the bed. Poached salmon, potato salad with leeks, that was a new one for Mona. Tunisian carrots? My, my. I raised the fork obediently.
“Now, what is the matter with you?”
Like a fool, I told her. Too demoralized to make anything up—the very same problem I had at my desk.
“Ah, so that’s it. Listen, I must bring Greg over to meet you. He had that and he’s fine now. He’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
She zipped off and I immediately rose, fortified by a few bites of excellent salmon. I’m no good at keeping distress to myself. Despite all those years with Ev, or perhaps because of them, I always rush for solace.
Dave, an ideal husband in Mona’s view, the culmination of her hectic love life, was eyeing the array of food, possibly wondering if it was time to refill the platters.
“Tell me, Dave. Do I look sick? Sonia says I do.”
He studied me as judiciously as he had studied the table. Dave was one of those comforting people who seem at ease in their lives without making any fuss over it. It wasn’t hard to see his appeal to a woman whom love had frayed. He would never have announced that he had his life all worked out, yet he seemed to have done just that. Husky, round-faced, graying, he suggested a friar in a medieval monastery. I had to remind myself that he was not a friar but an industrial engineer. He knew no more about emotional blight than anyone else.
“You look very nice, Laura. I like that purple shirt. Is it one Mona found?”
“No, it’s new. I mean, from a real store. Thanks, but that’s not what I meant. Sick. You know, fading away?”
He studied me some more. No trace of irony. Mona had enough irony for both of them. “Not at all,” he said levelly. “You look tired, not sick.”
Nice, but not nice enough. I wanted enthusiastic conviction. Something a woman might give. I wanted one of the theatrical types to fall all over me with reassurances.
“Oh, Sonia’s just a bitch,” he said in his placid way.
“Is that your considered opinion?”
“Yes, she—”
I touched his arm in warning, for Sonia was closing in, pushing before her a youngish man. Her hand on his black shirt sleeve, fingers slightly bent to keep a grip, suggested property recently acquired. Chiseled face, blond, muscular. Vanity surging through his veins. Too much hard upper-body strength, the Tai Chi teacher would say; he’d snap like a stiff branch. The picture of health, though, which boded well. Sonia presented him as a fellow actor.
“Laura, you must talk to Gregory. He’ll tell you how to get better.”
Smiling, she moved off with Dave. Was I expected to congratulate her later, the way you tell new mothers how stunning their babies are?
He didn’t seem eager to impart his knowledge. “What are your symptoms?”
I had a flicker of anxiety, as when reciting symptoms to doctors, who always looked skeptical at my performance. Gregory might make a suitable doctor if the acting didn’t work out. When I finished he kept staring.
“Well, how did you recover?” I asked. “You look fine.”
“There is a way to cope with this disease if you’re willing to try it. I myself went to a homeopath, an Austrian down in Chelsea. You do know what a homeopath is?”
The mental Rolodex turned up homosexuals and psychopaths, the mind of a writer being nine-tenths ear. “Sure.” They were an alternative to doctors, at any rate. They fought fire with fire, in small doses.
“Have you ever been to one?” Gregory asked tauntingly.
“No.”
“Well, if you’ve never seen a homeopath, you have a surprise in store.” He waited, with a slight smirk, but I vowed to wait him out, enjoying the certainty that I could send him reeling across the room if I chose. Into the silence came Sonia’s throaty laugh a few feet off, and Dave’s answering grunt. At last Gregory yielded. “He’ll make all sorts of tests and ask you lots of odd questions, then depending on your answers, give you the appropriate herbs. You have to take these herbs at weird and very specific hours. . . . What do you do, anyway?”
“I’m a writer.”
“That’s good. If you worked a regular schedule you might have trouble following the instructions. For instance if you worked sixty hours a week in an investment brokerage firm. But with your lifestyle you can do it. Aside from the herbs, the other part of the cure is massive intravenous injections of Vitamin C. Not everyone can do this. It all depends on whether you want to go down to Chelsea twice a week and lie on this guy’s cot for an hour in a darkened room with a tube in your arm. Some people can deal with this and others can’t.”
Clearly, we both suspected which camp I fell into. I ate morsels of the dinner to provide ballast for the Scotch I was planning to drink as soon as Gregory finished describing his course of treatment.
“But it’s the way to recover, for sure,” he said.
“How long did it take you to get better?”
“Six months or so.”
“Six months, eh?” I didn’t puncture his smugness by saying the obvious. I was once smug, too. He wasn’t much older than I’d been then. Smug about Q.’s wife Susan, first off. He loved me more, ergo, he would have to leave her. Gregory would be unsmugged soon enough. I almost felt sorry for him: what a long way to fall until he reached the porous soil of humility. For most of us the drop was not that great, so we didn’t sink as deep.
“Well, I’m glad you’re better. Thanks for telling me about this.” Thank you for sharing, as they say in the support groups which had also been suggested to me, where you sit around and talk about your symptoms as my grandmother and her friends used to do over mah-jongg. At least they had the sense to play a game along with it.
“I can give you his name and number if you like.”
“Why don’t I think it over and then maybe call Sonia to get in touch with you, okay?”
“No problem. Good luck.” He was off.
I finished what was on my plate, poured a Scotch and sat down on the couch near the window. It was fine, sitting alone in Mona’s living room, slowly sipping Scotch. Very comfortable. Maybe Scotch was the cure, though not, to be sure, intravenously. I envisioned lying on a cot in a dim room while a tube pumped orange juice into my veins. What would Q. say?
ALWAYS AND EVER, what would Q. say? He does it, too, invokes me in his mind, he’s told me. In this case it gets me nowhere. He’d say what I say. Orange juice through a needle?
Forget Q. I’ll ask Tony, my stepson. Ex-stepson, I suppose. He may resent me but he’ll give a trustworthy opinion. And civilly, too, for Ev’s sake. He’s a thoroughgoing doctor now, as Jilly recently pointed out when I referred to him as a medical student. “He’s doing his residency. He goes around the hospital on his own and decides how to treat people. That’s a doctor,” she said with pride. How confidently she rested in his boyish arms as he carried her off the train those many years, coming to spend weekends with Ev and me. She was the brave one, on the lookout for adventure. Adventurers can afford to take risks because they’re rooted in safety: Tony was her root and stem, she the flower sprouting from the firm branches of his arms.
Yes, I’ll call him. The chill in his voice won’t hurt all that much. And I’m entitled to a question. I’ve earned it, like the disciples of Taoist monks: haul the firewood and buckets of water for twenty years and you can ask one question. Years of weekends. Picked glass out of his foot when he dropped the crystal decanter arthritic Aunt Bess gave us as a wedding present, then took him to the emergency room to get out the rest. Let myself be tackled time and again in football on the beach with far more force than was needed, but I never protested, it was only sand. Stripped the guest-room bed of sheets bearing his wet-dream stains. Corrected essays on Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations, and A Farewell to Arms, even typed a few, when he complained his visits made him late with homework. I could go on and on. (Twenty more years and the monk’s disciple is entitled to a second question, an option often passed up. If the first twenty years of carrying buckets is ample time to formulate a proper question, the next twenty can cure you of the desire or need to ask another.)
There’s still time after the party. It’s early evening in San Francisco. Saintly Dave insists on walking me to my door, for this is not the sweet seaside hamlet of my imagination, where violent crimes never happen. . ..
“Don’t worry, you look fine, Laura,” he says as he turns to go. “Get a good night’s sleep.”
Right, but after I speak to Tony. Interrupt his sunset. Can it be as fine as the one that accompanied me along the river hours ago? Why on earth not? No limit to the splendor and democratic distribution of sunsets: custom-made, fashioned to locale.
I mustn’t forget he’s married now. Sara, Sandra, Phyllis? Sophie. Also a medical student. Doctor, sorry. I could get a second opinion for the same quarter. Not that I’ve had the pleasure of making her acquaintance. I wasn’t invited to their wedding, held about a year ago in Boston. A very small wedding, Jilly assured me, blushing with vicarious shame. Well, never mind all that.
The voice—its familiar pitch and diffidence—gives me a phantom shiver of pleasure. The next instant I see the gash in Ev’s neck running from just below the left ear across the throat to the collarbone. I got there so fast when the police called, they hadn’t yet fixed him up. Fixed his appearance, that is, since they couldn’t fix him. Not fast enough to speak to him, only fast enough to see the damage. I never told the kids how he looked. I accept it. I don’t ask to have it excised, only I would like, someday, that it not be the first image I see when I think of him.
“Tony.” I announce myself. “I hope I’m not interrupting. ...”
I’m touched, disarmed, when he says, “Not at all. Is everything okay?” until I realize it’s Jilly he must be thinking of.
Doctors hate being asked advice after hours, don’t they? I plod ahead with my mission.
“Are you sure it’s not just depression? I mean, even a long time after a trauma. . . . There’s a chance it might be psychosoma—”
“Tony, please. I know how you feel about me but don’t give me that shit, okay? At least not for openers. Do you think if it were ‘just’ depression I would call you of all people in the middle of the night, at least here it’s the middle of the night—”
“Laura, calm down, will you? I only meant it was a possibility. I know you’ve been through a lot and ...”
“Listen, Tony,” I say carefully, “all I really want is to ask you a very specific question. I heard—”
“Wait, Laura. Before you, uh. . . . What you said before, that you know how I feel about you. Maybe we should ...” He’s shaping phrases with the diligence of a toddler jaggedly piling up blocks, knowing they will very likely fall but not knowing why, unable to align them properly. “Maybe we should talk about this.”
Go ahead and talk, kiddo. I’m not your mother, I don’t have to help.
“You’re mistaken about how I feel about you, Laura.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. I—well...” Some throat-clearing, then a swallow. Coffee? Beer? “It’s true I used to resent you but . . . but not as much as you think. I mean ...”
“Oh.” Happily, one faculty my virus has not diminished is my sense of the ludicrous. That seems to have been enhanced. I also hear something dimly familiar, not just in the words but in the tone. In the earnest groping for a certain unobjectionable diction. Is it marriage? Has Sandra, I mean Sophie, had a feminine, tenderizing effect? They must talk over childhood wounds in bed. Well, that’s sweet. What’s her secret? Ev would listen but never contribute, and it doesn’t work as a one-sided game. No, beyond Sophie, it’s .. . ah, yes. Therapy. The unmistakable accents of working things through. He must have gone when Ev was killed, sure, that sort of blow could send even the most taciturn. He has been urged to examine his feelings and settle unfinished business, preferably out in the open.
“Do you want to define exactly how much you resented me, then? Is that the point?”
“That came out all wrong. You know what I mean. I mean, I know I gave you a hard time but I had my reasons.”
“People always do.”
“I blamed you for my parents’ breakup.”
“I know. You’ve told me that before. When you were twelve, the first time. How could I forget? I was trying to make a soufflé.”
“But I see now ...”
I have to admire his doggedness. Perhaps it’s good for him to encounter resistance. His feeling of closure will be all the more thorough. His therapist will be proud of him when he reports this conversation.
“I see now that you weren’t really all that responsible.”
“I told you that several times. When I met your father your parents had been separated for months.”
“I suppose I wasn’t ready to hear it. I always thought he would have come back if .. . if not for you. Because when he left he told me it was only temporary. Like a—a trial. I thought it was sort of like one of his trips, so then I was really blown away when—”
“Oh. Well, that’s something I didn’t know. That he told you it was temporary. I thought you understood.”
“He said he might be back. I’m almost positive he said that. But then you came along.”
“He wouldn’t have been back, regardless of me.”
“Are you sure?”
I hope he’s not going to cry. Poor Tony. A grown-up doctor but suddenly reduced to a boy of eleven. I really should help him out. I might reap some benefit. He might drop by next time he comes East, and truth to tell, I’d very much like to sit in a room with him—tall, lean, austere—hearing his voice at close range, feeling a wisp of Ev drifting my way.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure, Tony. Do you know it was your mother who asked him to leave?”
“I don’t know that. No. She never really explained. All she—Well, she did sit me down and explain that they couldn’t get along or live together but it wasn’t my fault or Jilly’s. Like, straight out of the book.”
“Oh. He was difficult to live with, it’s true.”
“Difficult how?”
How indeed? How to explain that absent presence, that silent wrestling with a shadow? “This is enough for one night. I’ll tell you some other time. Nothing outrageous or gory, don’t worry.”
“But you see . . . I’m married now—” an embarrassed pause for the wedding I didn’t attend—“and . . . and I don’t want to be difficult in the same way, whatever it was.”
“No, I don’t think you will be.” You’re too dull, for one thing. You’re like him in many ways, but he wasn’t dull. I would have had an easier time if he were. “How is Sophie, by the way?”
“She’s fine. She’s doing her residency in pediatrics.”
“And you?”
“Internal medicine.”
“Good. Well, that reminds me of why I called. I just met someone who suggested that I have massive doses of vitamin C pumped into me intravenously. It sounded strange but you never know. What do you think? Would there be any bad side effects? I mean, would my blood turn to acid or anything like that?”
“I’ve heard about good results in some cases.” He eases into the professional tone. “But I myself. . . well, I wouldn’t advise it. There’s not much data on the long-term effects. I don’t know enough to say definitely, but the point is, no one really does. This is a very conservative opinion, I should tell you. You could find doctors who’d say go right ahead. But I’d hang on unless you’ve exhausted everything else or you’re unable to function. How bad is it?”
“I get around a little. But mostly I lie down, or I want to be lying down. I’ve heard of worse cases.”
“You can try large doses of vitamins. Orally, I mean. Some people say magnesium. The few specialists each have some magic solution that works for a handful of people. The problem is, the immune system is off, and nobody understands enough about it to start it up again. There’re theories going around about hormone imbalance, brain inflammation, you name it.”
“What about modern life?”
“Listen, no kidding, that’s got to be part of it. The environment’s messed up, the air, the food . . . there are people who claim it’s a variant of the AIDS virus—not to scare you or anything—but just so you know it’s taken seriously.”
Thank you, thank you. I don’t really need Tony to make that clear. It’s quite clear. I can feel it in the general systemic refusal.
“Stress, too,” he goes on. “Frankly, the best thing is to get yourself a book by somebody who’s had a lot of experience with it. Diet is important. Stuff like that.”
“That’s exactly what your sister said. And she didn’t even go to medical school.”
“I’m sorry you’re sick, Laura. But it’ll probably pass in a few months. And I’m sorry. . . I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time, all those years.”
“Do you think you ever would have called me to say so?”
“Sooner or later, yes. Or knowing me, I might have written you a letter.” He gives a short laugh. The crisis is over. All those years of bad behavior wiped out by confession. Clean slate. “By the way, if you want to talk to someone . . . Sophie’s mother, Hortense is her name, had the same thing a few years ago. She was treated by an herbalist out here. In California, you know, that holistic stuff is taken much more seriously. You could call her and see if she has anything to suggest.”
“I’m not sure. Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
“Oh, but she came out of it just fine. She had some surgery recently but that was completely unrelated. Let me give you her number. You never know, it might be helpful.”
He sounds quite lighthearted now, relieved of his burden. The young are resilient—well, they need to be. I, on the other hand, feel too weighed down to budge, and may just go to sleep in my party clothes. Better yet, toss them in the direction of the nearest chair. I miss, but there’s no one to mind the clutter. Now, since the phone’s right here, why not try this Hortense in crepuscular San Francisco while the inquisitive mood is on me? How to introduce myself? Oh, words will come. They always do.
She has a weary, mildly aggrieved voice—What now?, her hello suggests—but at the same time sounds well-meaning and capable, a woman resigned to being asked questions, even proud of the role. I invent her from the one word: a mother of many children who keep in close touch, with their increasingly complex demands. The sort of mother who could always be relied on for lifts in the car, last-minute houseguests, hurry up and iron a dress for the interview, homemade birthday cakes, mediation with teachers or Dad, and God knows what all else. They are still relying, not having noticed her weariness. She’s a pretty woman, stout, a bit unkempt, always running late. Over the years she’s cultivated a few minor indulgences. She goes to the manicurist once a week and prizes her well-groomed nails. She buys lottery tickets often, at different places, when the urge comes over her. In bookstores, she leafs through soft-core porn but never buys any, just recalls key scenes when she needs them. The grievance in her voice is not aimed at her children or even at unknown supplicants like me, but at something far more general and diffuse. How long, O Lord, she whispers at night, into the dark.
“Well,” she sighs, “to tell the truth that’s far from my mind now because I just had a mastectomy six weeks ago.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you. I had no idea. Tony mentioned some surgery but he didn’t say . . . why don’t I call at a better time, in a few weeks, maybe?”
Shit! That Tony has a lot to learn. How much more therapy would it take before he’d warn me? Some surgery!
“No, we might as well talk now because we’re leaving for Hawaii tomorrow and I’ll be away three weeks, so . . .”
“How are you doing? I mean after the mastectomy?”
“Okay. As well as can be expected. In between the chemo, that is. The chemo is a killer but it’s only one week a month. We had to time our trip. I’ll tell you, this really wreaks havoc with a relationship.”
Wreaks havoc with. How long since I’ve heard anyone say that? It dates her. To be Sophie’s mother she might be fifty or so, but what if Sophie is the youngest of the demanding brood? It also establishes Hortense as fairly literate, otherwise she’d say “wrecks havoc,” as autodidacts tend to do. An odd word, “havoc,” to apply to a “relationship,” by which I assume Hortense means a marriage, though you can’t be sure of anything these days. “Havoc” evokes a jumble of things thrown up as if by a tornado, while a “relationship” has only two components. She’s referring, of course, to all the physical and emotional facets of a “relationship,” an abstract entity like a corporation. “Wreaks” I’ll have to look up—it’s an incentive to get out of bed. Sounds like Middle English, possibly Anglo-Saxon? I ought to know this stuff. Drum me out of the writers’ union if they could hear me.
This takes no time at all. With scarcely a beat lost, “I’m sorry to hear it,” I reply. “I hope things are better soon.”
Hortense, no sympathy hound, moves right on to business. “Yes, well, I had what you have. I was sick for three years and they were the worst years of my life, bar none.”
Bar none. That’s intriguing, too, but my professional interest in diction has abruptly lapsed. All I want to do now is get off the phone. My heart is pounding like mad. The fear is a heavy sack pressing on my chest.
“The very worst,” she drones. “I forgot what it was like to feel well. My body was a stranger. I felt I aged twenty years. I moved like an old lady. The slightest thing was a major ordeal. I thought it would never go away, and I didn’t know how I’d get through the rest of my life. I was so depressed, I mean as a result of the illness, not a cause. Don’t let them tell you it’s depression. Believe me, before that I wasn’t any more depressed than the next person. If you’re simply depressed, you don’t lie in bed planning all the things you’ll do as soon as you get up, and then have to lie right down again. If you’re simply depressed you just lie there wanting to die.”
I move the phone two inches from my ear.
“It was as if my life had been taken from me.” I hear her fine even at a distance; she has a firm, clear voice from all those years of domestic administration. “I felt hopeless. I think maybe the most frightening symptom was the memory loss and the loss of motor coordination. Do you have that?”
“No. Not yet. At least I haven’t noticed. Maybe a little.”
“Things would slip my mind, I mean more than they normally do. And my fingers didn’t work right. I’ve always made all my own clothes, and I began to lose control. I couldn’t fit pieces of fabric together or thread the needle. And then, for example, making phone calls, I’d press the wrong numbers. It was terrifying. But it passed, little by little.”
She mentions a number of things I might do. Not do, to be precise. No caffeine, sugar, or alcohol. “Alcohol is the worst.”
Too bad. But all right. There are magic herbs that help, she says, but no, I can’t get them by mail. I should see an herbalist in New York.
“Drink ginseng tea, but it’s very important not to brew it in a metal pot.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Just don’t. And no salad.”
“What could be bad about salad?”
“I don’t know, but for some reason it’s not good for you.”
Toenail of frog. Eye of newt. As soon as decently possible I thank her and wish her a complete and speedy recovery from her mastectomy.
Is this—tonight’s research—what’s called taking control of your life? I can’t say I find it especially exhilarating. Or empowering, as they say. Quite the contrary. My heart is still racing, the sack of fear growing heavier.
At the window, I stare into the dark until the river grows distinct from the sky and trees. There’s a wind; the water’s rippling. And there’s the squirrel. I’d almost forgotten about him, approaching his death in slow motion. I wouldn’t have thought he could get any sicker without dying, but he’s dying like Zeno’s arrow, moving through an infinity of intermediate positions. His bed is fully restored. He probably feels as enamored of the little nest of twigs, leaves and lint as I do of my bed, and bitterly resents finding it cleared away every few days. Well, I doubt if I’ll be doing that much longer. Soon the arrow will reach its target and then, for the last time: brush, pan, gloves, bag (heavier with his weight), elevator. I tap lightly on the window, not really hoping or expecting to dislodge him, more as an acknowledgment, even a greeting. Of course there’s no response. He seems to be in some kind of coma, breathing evenly, a slow rise and fall of the curved back.
I ATE NO SALAD FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS, but nothing changed and I missed it sorely. So I went and strolled down the sweet-smelling, bounteous aisles of the outdoor market, our urban farm, and carried home a bag full of earth’s harvest, including watercress. I even went to put some lettuce out for the squirrel, but he wasn’t home and I was afraid to leave it in case the old rat returned to feast. I laid out my riches on the dining room table as a still life, from which I plucked a few tidbits each day. I love especially the bitter greens, perhaps the way the Tai Chi teacher loves the ache in his legs, the ache he calls tasting bitter.