I really felt like Jimmy had done one heck of a job beating me up from the inside out. He knew what he was doing, all right. He wanted to hurt me. That’s what was starting to sink in. That’s why I couldn’t shake that socked-in-the-stomach feeling. When I got to the hospital, I took the elevator up to the psych floor and headed straight for my aunt’s office. I couldn’t wait to unload the story of my crummy afternoon on her. I knocked on the door to her office and stuck my head in, but it looked like she’d gone for the day. That’s when I kicked the doorjamb. Hard.
“I broke my toes once, doing that,” I heard my aunt say.
I turned around slowly. My aunt was leaning against the counter at the nurses’ station. She was wearing a black linen suit and holding a bunched-up stethoscope in her hand.
“How long have you been standing there?” I asked.
“Long enough. You walked right past me.”
Oh.”
“I have a headache. Compliments of Jimmy Woolf.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. . . . Did you ever just have one of those days?”
“Sure,” she said, smiling. She walked over and gave me a tug on my hair. “How do you think I broke my toes? Come on inside; tell me what’s going on.”
I followed her into the office. “I need to borrow some money. Jimmy left me stranded in the city without any way to get home.”
“That doesn’t sound like Jimmy,” my aunt said. She sat down on the edge of her desk and took a pack of Tareytons out of her jacket pocket. “What happened exactly?”
“I don’t know!” I slumped down into the chair in front of her desk. “I don’t know what happened exactly! Jimmy blew his audition at the Shubert this afternoon and I was trying to . . . I just wanted to make him feel better! What’s so terrible about that?”
“He took it out on you?”
“Are you kidding? He said some stuff to me—he wanted to make me feel bad! You should have seen the look on his face!” I could feel my eyes starting to fill up again. “Shit . . .”
“Okay,” my aunt said quietly. “It’s all right. Here.” She pulled a couple of Kleenexes out of the box on her desk and handed them to me. I really felt like a jerk. “You and Jimmy will straighten things out—you always do.”
“We had a pretty good thing going, and he screwed the whole thing up.”
“Don’t you think a friendship as good as yours and Jimmy’s can withstand a little denting?”
“What I think,” I said, “is that you should haul Jimmy Woolf in here and see if maybe there’s another personality lurking around in his body, because he is definitely not himself.”
My aunt lit her cigarette. She tilted her head slightly and looked at me. Whenever she looked at me that way, I was sure she could read my mind.
“Did you walk all the way over here from the Shubert?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled. “Your mother would love that.”
I blew my nose. “She doesn’t have to know.”
“How’s your headache?”
“Compared to my day? Terrific.”
“Tell you what—why don’t you stay over with me so you don’t have to make the trip home tonight, okay? I’ll call Fay and tell her you’re spending the night.”
“That’d be nice. Thanks.”
There was a knock on the door. Mrs. Getz, who was a nurse and a friend of my aunt’s, poked her head in.
“Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a call on line two—sounds kind of important.”
Mrs. Getz looked at me. “That friend of yours, Morgan—Jimmy, isn’t it?”
“Jimmy’s on the phone?” I said. “What does he want now?”
Mrs. Getz smiled. “He wants to talk to your aunt; that’s all I know.”
My aunt put out her cigarette. “Thanks, Betty.”
Mrs. Getz left. My aunt reached for the phone.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You’re not going to talk to him, are you?”
“You want me to hang up on him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Why don’t you go out to the nurses’ station and ask Mrs. Getz to give you a couple aspirin for your headache, okay?”
“I’m staying right here. Go ahead and talk to him; I don’t care. This might be interesting.”
My aunt picked up the phone. “Jimmy? This is Dr. Hackett. . . . Yeah, I know. She came here. Uh-huh. . . . Let me put you on hold for a second, Jimmy; I’ll see what I can do.” She punched a button on the phone and looked at me. “He wants to talk to you.”
“No! Why should I?”
“He sounds upset.”
“He’s upset!”
“Do you want to talk to him or not?”
“No! I don’t know. I’m not sure. . . .”
My aunt picked up her stethoscope. “I’ll meet you downstairs. I promised the E.R. doctors I’d stop by and take a look at one of their patients before I go home.”
“Hey, what am I supposed to do about Jimmy?”
She thought a moment. “If you decide to talk to him, punch line two. Otherwise he’ll be on hold for the rest of his life.”
I sat and stared at the phone for a couple of seconds. Then I took a deep breath and picked it up. I punched line two.
“Jimmy?”
“Morgan . . . look . . . Christ, what’d you take off like that for?”
“You know why, Jimmy.”
There was a pause. I could hear him breathing. I could hear traffic, like he was calling from a pay phone.
“Well, how are you going to get home? I’m just a few minutes away; I’ll pick you up, okay?”
“I’m staying over at my aunt’s tonight.”
“Do you think she’d mind if I stopped by?”
“I’d mind, Jimmy.”
“Look, I was upset earlier! Who wouldn’t be? You know how much that audition meant to me!”
“That’s a hell of an apology, Jimmy.”
“God, what do you want from me?!”
“You try to figure it out,” I said. “And when you do . . . call me.”
I hung up quietly. I knew Jimmy had been trying to tell me in a hundred different ways how sorry he was, but I wasn’t ready to be friends again. Not yet. I guess I thought that making him feel bad would make me feel better, but all it did was make my head pound harder and leave me with an empty feeling that just wouldn’t quit.
Getting even isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.