8 ◆ Joan

JOAN SAT IN A RED LEATHER CHAIR in the lobby of the Astrid Hotel, listening to a woman playing a harp. She rested her arms on the sides of the chair, palms up, as if waiting for coins to fall from the gilded ceiling. She didn’t think her speech in the ballroom had gone all that well, but it was over. The music made her feel better. Her face cooled in the hotel evening.

Sound did not travel easily in the ballroom. All she had heard was the echo of her words; all she had seen was darkness. Sweat collected under her eyes, trickled down her neck. It was probably lucky that she had no makeup to put on beforehand. Someone had replaced her compact with a nutcracker and a dozen walnuts. Charles or Micah, she figured. Lyris had not been in the family long enough to learn about the hours of contentment to be had from playing tricks on Joan.

She had gone on with her speech, the theme being that centuries of breeding had not robbed domestic animals of their taste for freedom. She showed slides and cited the experiments of Ward and Wolper at the University of Illinois. She gave ­examples — perhaps too many examples. The conclusion was a reading from Rudyard Kipling: “Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.” Afterward, two people asked where she had done her graduate work, and she explained that all her knowledge came from years of lay observation.

She rose from the red chair and drifted down a hallway to the pay phones. No one answered at home, but the distance between Joan and her family seemed to guard them. Things could only be all right. There was a lounge next to the telephones, and she went in and ordered a Moscow Mule.

“You’re just in time,” said the bartender. “The hypnotist is about to start his act.”

Joan drank the Mule and looked around. The black tables were taken by convention-goers, listing slightly, with glazed eyes, as if they had already been hypnotized.

“Good crowd,” she said.

The bartender shrugged. “I haven’t counted.”

“What are they after?”

“Who knows? This is my third week at the Astrid. A hotel bar is different.”

“It’s because the people are only passing through.”

“Well, I think that’s right. They’re away from home for a night or two. They laugh and talk, and the ones who get hypnotized wonder what they did while they were under. People argue, they throw up their hands, they stalk out. You wouldn’t believe how many. They don’t know each other very well to begin with. The arguments tend to begin right back there in the corner. Then they spread.”

“I think they want to be changed.”

“Who?”

“Everybody.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you?”

“Hmm,” he said. He slid wet glasses into the compartments of a blue plastic crate. “You’re asking what I want or what I think they want?”

“What you want.”

“Now that’s a question. I’d have to consider it.”

“That’s what I want.”

A waitress came up with a pencil behind her ear. “Candy, what do people want?” said the bartender.

“A little loving, I suppose,” she said.

The bartender poured liquor through a red spout with sharp downward thrusts of the bottle, and the waitress took the drinks out among the tables.

“Changed into what, though?” asked the bartender.

“I guess I’ll know it when it happens,” said Joan. “But now I’m beginning to wonder if it will happen. To be made something good. And I’m not young. I’ve been waiting a long time already. And whenever I think I’ve found it, I realize later that I was wrong. Do you know that the universe is expanding?”

“Well, I’ve heard that.”

“They believe that the end of the universe, which is so far away in the first place, is getting farther away all the time. And not slowly but quickly. I mean, it’s moving. While here we sit with our small concerns. Funny, isn’t it? Sometimes I feel like whatever I’m supposed to be is tacked to the back wall of the universe and moving away from me at the speed of light.”

“You shouldn’t come in here alone,” said the bartender. “In a way it goes against my interests to say so, but if you want my advice, don’t. Otherwise you end up having thoughts like you’re having.”

“Why, because I’m a woman?”

“Men are worse.”

“I think this way all the time.”

“There’s a pool on the twelfth floor.”

“Maybe I’ll head up there.”

“Also a health club. You could ride the stationary bike if you don’t like swimming.”

The hypnotist performed on a small tiled dance floor near the jukebox. He walked back and forth before the tables, choosing volunteers. A silver lighter provided the flame by which he mesmerized them. He lifted the lighter and told his subjects to imagine that it was the moon rising. “How do you feel?” he said.

“Sleepy.”

“Under the influence.”

“Angry.”

“Hypnotized.”

The hypnotist asked the angry man what the problem was and, after much back-and-forth, got him to explain his suspicion that his ex-wife was sending blank postcards to his house. Not one or two, but many. The hypnotist tried to convince the man that his ex-wife was in the audience and willing to listen, but this illusion failed to take hold. Then he directed the man to make his body completely rigid so that he could be laid like a plank across two chairs. This worked, and the audience applauded politely but seemed disappointed not to be able to hear the man have it out with the phantom of his ex-wife. Joan left the bar feeling more hypnotized than the man whose fate it was to be bombarded with blank postcards.

She walked through the lobby. It seemed that hours had passed since she had relaxed in the chair by the harp. The concierge waved her over to his desk and said that a doctor had been looking for her. He gave her a vial of pills that the doctor had left and bid her goodnight. She went up to her room and put on her swimsuit and a robe. Maybe the doctor had come to the city on business of his own, attending another conference in another hotel. Maybe he had a patient who had taken sick in the city. There were a hundred reasons for him to be here, no doubt. She rode up to the health club in the elevator.

The swimming pool was deserted except for a young woman reading a chemistry book, who handed Joan a towel. It was a beautiful place at night. Yellow light played on the water, and willowy plants pressed against windows looking out on the tall darkened buildings of the city. The chlorine smelled strong enough to make the pool seem clean but not so strong as to be unpleasant. Joan went down a ladder into the warm water, which dissolved the events of the night. The echo of her words, the drops of her sweat, the hypnotist, the postcards — nothing could penetrate the plane of the water or follow the stroke of her swimming. She lay on her back, kicking her legs intermittently as her hands gently turned, pulling her forward. Her submerged ears heard a sound like breathing. Whether it was the sound of the hotel or of the city or of the universe flying apart she could not say. A mosaic of blue mirrors covered the vaulted ceiling, so that she could watch the broken progress of her body far below. She saw her swimming self as if through the unbiased eyes of a bird. At the deep end, she folded into the water and kicked toward the white lights near the bottom.

The day of the tornado, Joan and Micah were returning from the grocery store in Charles’s van. Like the van he had now, it was full of tools and pipes and metal boxes. The tornado appeared on the other side of town, and seeing it, Joan drove into the driveway of an abandoned farm. Carrying Micah, she ran to the house. The front door swung open. It had been kicked in earlier by Dr. Palomino, whom they found sitting in a wing chair in the living room, watching the funnel cloud through the windows. The tail yawed, churning up dirt and lumber, and every now and then a fierce light flashed within the flexing cloud. If they spoke — and they must have ­spoken — they perhaps noted how chance would dictate that the tornado would not come their way. There were so many other ways it might go. The funnel swelled as it moved across a bean field, ripping up plants and clods and spinning them out as silver powder. Joan and the doctor could not find any basement stairs, and so they lay down in a central hallway with Micah between them. A gateleg table supported by an intricate platform of spindles could be seen in the next room. Joan got up and tried to shove the table aside so it would not come crashing into them. The legs caught on the floorboards, and Joan seized the table between the drop leaves and flipped it over. When she returned to the hallway, Micah said, “The ratlike creature slithers to and fro.” The strangeness of the remark did not sink in until later. The wind became very loud, and the house scraped off its foundation. Glass fell from the windows. When the timbers settled, Joan picked up Micah and carried him out to the van, followed by the doctor. The doctor started the engine and cranked the wheel, but the tornado came down the trough of a grove and shoveled the van toward the barn with such force that his steering became meaningless. Joan sat with her arms wrapped around Micah, and the doctor abandoned the driver’s seat, stationing himself between the boy and the dashboard, shielding him from whatever lay ahead. The van skidded along, nose in the ground. Lost in the whirlwind, they could see nothing. The corner of the barn materialized only when they hit it. The van twisted like an awl held in the grip of an unsteady carpenter. Tools and groceries flew against the metal walls. It occurred to Joan, as it must have to the doctor, that a van full of plumbing equipment might rank among the worst places to be during a tornado. Then the wall of the barn gave way, and the van moved through its broken boards and through another wall and into the round and slatted space of an empty wooden silo. The doctor said that if the silo went they would be completely fucked, and they got out of the van and left the silo through its door. The sky was pale blue and blurred by a rain of dirt and water. A rainbow wrapped around the grove. Joan held Micah and whispered in his ear, reciting God’s promise in Genesis 9: “And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature . . . and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

The doctor stood at the pool’s edge, offering a towel, and Joan climbed the steps and dried her hair. With the towel covering her eyes, she shed the tears that she might have cried during the tornado if she had not been so busy trying to keep Micah alive. But this did not really get at why she was crying. It had something to do with the rainbow they had seen afterward. Maybe she no longer believed in covenants, that one or any other. What if the rules and verses she had lived by, or tried to, didn’t mean what she thought they did?

Joan pressed the towel against the tears she did not want the doctor to see. Then she continued to massage her hair for a long time.

She dried her arms and legs. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“I consult with a doctor in the city from time to time,” he said. “And there is a patient, not my patient, but she wanted me to look at the charts. So, since I was going to be here anyway —”

“I don’t believe it,” she said. She handed him the towel and he folded it. That he was fully clothed and she wore only a swimsuit might have put her at a disadvantage, but she didn’t feel that way at all, for the one in street clothes is always odd man out at poolside.

“It’s true, though,” said the doctor. “An intriguing case in which the patient is having difficulty swallowing food. There is an esophageal stricture which is fairly common — you may know it as Schatzki’s ring — but this would seem not to be Schatzki’s, because of certain other symptoms that we need not delve into.”

“You came to see me,” said Joan.

“The pool is closing,” said the young woman with the textbook.

The doctor and Joan went down to Joan’s room in the ele­vator. Wearing the hotel robe, she took little bottles of vodka and tonic from a refrigerator in the bathroom, and she made drinks, and they sat by the windows in the dark.

“Joan, I’ve got a love in me that isn’t going anywhere,” the doctor said, holding his vodka in both hands, with his elbows set on his knees. “Ever since the tornado, I’ve just been idling, like an automobile engine. And all because of you. I’ve even taken to looking at pornographic films.”

“I had no idea,” she said.

“It’s not me,” he said. “It just isn’t me at all.”

“No, I had some idea,” she admitted.

“When I saw you swimming, I said to myself, ‘If I had three lifetimes, I would give two of them up for her.’”

Joan cracked walnuts, pushing the shells carefully aside with the edge of her hand. “But you only have one.”

“And this is where it is,” said the doctor.

“Can you make me better?”

“You’re gold inside. Don’t you know that?”

She thought of the hypnotized man’s story of his broken marriage and how the worst part must have been the blankness of the postcards. If the woman who’d left him had written something, no matter how bleak, then at least he would have some measure of what he had done. But the emptiness would bother anyone. What did she want? What had she become? Why so many cards? Considering these questions, Joan felt her own identity evaporating. She analyzed her actions as she would those of someone she did not know. If she were going to send the doctor away, she would not have invited him in. If she were going to send him away, she would not have dried herself with a towel from his hands.

“No one ever said I was gold inside,” said Joan.

A moth landed on the glass while they sat eating walnuts and drinking. The room was on the seventh floor, high for a moth to fly. It was not drawn to the light, because the light was off. It was a large moth with feathery antennae. The papery brown wings closed and opened in the slow rhythm of respiration. It would be too much to say that they would not have gone ahead without this reminder of indifferent nature. People looking for a sign will find one soon. But once the moth had landed, they began to kiss, and then to undress. Joan untied the white cord of her robe, pulled it slowly from its loops, wrapped it loosely around a fist, dropped the terry coil on the table. She wondered what day it was. They moved to the bed. Their clothes were on the carpet, in city light. She wondered why it should all seem so inevitable, as if they were inside the funnel again, spinning down. His hands touched her skin and she let go of the memory. It was always this way, and always would be.

An hour passed, an hour and ten minutes. The night passed. Joan and the doctor dressed and went down to the lobby. If they felt shame, no one could have known. Joan showed the doctor the harp and strummed its strings, although she could play only the piano. They crossed a red and gray carpet with their heads held high and went out the revolving doors. The doctor offered his arm, and Joan took it. A panel truck came down the street; a bundle of newspapers landed on the sidewalk. When the truck had passed, the doctor raised the fibrous blue band that held the bundle together while Joan knelt to pull a newspaper free. They walked on, looking at dazed mannequins in the windows of a store, and when they reached the end of the block they turned the corner.