One day I had a visitor. I was in the TV room watching Lisa watch TV, when a nurse came in to tell me.
“You’ve got a visitor,” she said. “A man.”
It wasn’t my troublesome boyfriend. First of all, he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. How could a person who was locked up have a boyfriend? Anyhow, he couldn’t bear coming here. His mother had been in a loony bin too, it turned out, and he couldn’t bear being reminded of it.
It wasn’t my father; he was busy.
It wasn’t my high school English teacher; he’d been fired and moved to North Carolina.
I went to see who it was.
He was standing at a window in the living room, looking out: giraffe-tall, with slumpy academic shoulders, wrists sticking out of his jacket, and pale hair that shot out from his head in a corona. He turned around when he heard me come in.
It was Jim Watson. I was happy to see him, because, in the fifties, he had discovered the secret of life, and now, perhaps, he would tell it to me.
“Jim!” I said.
He drifted toward me. He drifted and wobbled and faded out while he was supposed to be talking to people, and I’d always liked him for that.
“You look fine,” he told me.
“What did you expect?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“What do they do to you in here?” He was whispering.
“Nothing,” I said. “They don’t do anything.”
“It’s terrible here,” he said.
The living room was a particularly terrible part of our ward. It was huge and jammed with huge vinyl-covered armchairs that farted when anyone sat down.
“It’s not really that bad,” I said, but I was used to it and he wasn’t.
He drifted toward the window again and looked out. After a while he beckoned me over with one of his long arms.
“Look.” He pointed at something.
“At what?”
“That.” He was pointing at a car. It was a red sports car, maybe an MG. “That’s mine,” he said. He’d won the Nobel Prize, so probably he’d bought this car with the money.
“Nice,” I said. “Very nice.”
Now he was whispering again. “We could leave,” he whispered.
“Hunh?”
“You and me, we could leave.”
“In the car, you mean?” I felt confused. Was this the secret of life? Running away was the secret of life?
“They’d come after me,” I said.
“It’s fast,” he said. “I could get you out of here.”
Suddenly I felt protective of him. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for offering. It’s sweet of you.”
“Don’t you want to go?” He leaned toward me. “We could go to England.”
“England?” What did England have to do with anything? “I can’t go to England,” I said.
“You could be a governess,” he said.
For ten seconds I imagined this other life, which began when I stepped into Jim Watson’s red car and we sped out of the hospital and on to the airport. The governess part was hazy. The whole thing, in fact, was hazy. The vinyl chairs, the security screens, the buzzing of the nursing-station door: Those things were clear.
“I’m here now, Jim,” I said. “I think I’ve got to stay here.”
“Okay.” He didn’t seem miffed. He looked around the room one last time and shook his head.
I stayed at the window. After a few minutes I saw him get into his red car and drive off, leaving little puffs of sporty exhaust behind him. Then I went back to the TV room.
“Hi, Lisa,” I said. I was glad to see she was still there.
“Rnnn,” said Lisa.
Then we settled in for some more TV.