THE NEXT MORNING, Leila woke up with a fever blister. I was still in bed when I heard her cry out in anguish from the bathroom. It sounded horrific, as if some long-evaded destiny had finally caught up with her.
I rushed inside to find her face-to-face with her reflection in the mirror, examining something on the left side of her lower lip, touching it gently with her fingertips.
“Oh, fuck! I don’t fucking believe this,” she screamed.
I still didn’t know what the problem was and asked for an explanation.
“Look!” she screamed, full of rage.
I looked.
She stuck out her chin and turned her head so that I could have an unobstructed view of the little red inflammation in the corner of her mouth.
“It doesn’t look so bad,” I told her.
“What’s that got to do with it?” she snapped at me. “So what if it doesn’t look bad now? Who cares how it looks now? It’s throbbing! And I know what that means.”
She seemed ready to cry. Or to smash something. Or somebody.
By noon, the fever blister had grown considerably larger, puffier.
Just before bedtime that night, she spotted the beginning of another one next to it.
By next morning, the two blisters had merged, forming a sprawling multifaceted sore that essentially took over the left side of her lower lip.
She had to keep her mouth open at all times to avoid touching the lower lip with the upper. The slightest contact resulted in wincing pain. She was also terrified that the infection, as it had done in the past, might spread to her upper lip as well. Mouth open, wearing a grimace that at times looked like a sinister grin, she spoke like a ventriloquist.
She applied Zovirax hourly, but the prescription ointment made an already terrible-looking thing look even worse. The heat from the fever blister melted the ointment, coating the sores with a milky-white ooze and imparting to the whole thing an appearance of some strange imported fruit that had latched on to her lower lip and would not go away until it had ripened and burst.
Driven by some need to find the sliver lining in everything, I saw even in this attack of herpes labialis a cause for consolation, if not outright celebration.
Better, I thought, that it should happen now than at the premiere of her movie in Pittsburgh.
When I shared this thought with Leila, she started screaming. It was much easier for her, much less taxing, to scream than to talk.
Then, on the third day, or maybe it was the fourth, she woke up feeling sick all over. She was shivering. I turned off the air conditioner in the bedroom. But then she got too hot. So I turned it back on. I didn’t have a thermometer, so I ran out to the drugstore and bought one.
She had a temperature of 104. Aspirin knocked it down a few degrees, but then it came right back up again.
No, she wouldn’t hear of going to see a doctor, or of having a doctor come to the apartment to see her. She knew what this was, “and there is nothing doctors can do because I’ve been through this before and there was nothing the doctors could do then either. So please,” she half pleaded, half threatened, “just stop with the doctors or I’ll go check into some hotel so I can have a little peace.”
Her confinement to the apartment while she recovered from whatever it was she had (a flu of some kind) led to my confinement as well. Instead of going to my office, I stayed home. I came to enjoy it while it lasted. I only went out for groceries, cigarettes, or to buy the papers.
She lived on apple sauce, bananas, and ice cream. Things you didn’t have to chew.
To help her pass the time, I read her stories from the newspapers, magazines, and periodicals I was now beginning to read. (The problems of the world fascinated me and my reading list of daily and weekly publications expanded to keep up with them.) I also read her poetry. When she confessed that she had never read a single play of Shakespeare’s, I took it upon myself to read some Shakespeare to her. She couldn’t bear to hear any one whole play, but she loved having me skip around and read my favorite passages. Which is what I did.
Of all the lines I uttered from the volume of Shakespeare’s collected works, only one made her cry and it was, as far as I was concerned, an odd choice, because my reading of it was not very good.
“Nymph,” I read Hamlet’s line to Ophelia, “in your orisons be all my sins remembered.”
“Oh, dear,” she started blubbering, “but that’s so sad. It’s too sad.”
I went in and out of her room over a dozen times a day, and there were times when I returned to find her asleep.
Even in sleep, she kept her mouth open to avoid aggravating that fever blister. Her now permanently parted lips gave her face (whether asleep or awake) a strange, disturbing intensity, an expression of some arrested intent, as if any second, despite the pain it might cause her, she would put her lips together and deliver herself of some devastating utterance.
Leila recovered. Her fever blister vanished. Everything was now fine, except for Leila herself.
She picked on and found fault with everything I did. The nicer I tried to be to her, the more unbearable she found me.
“Just don’t!” she kept saying.
Just don’t became her refrain.
“Please,” she hissed, seething, “I beg you. Just don’t be so goddamn charming all the time.”
“I didn’t know I was.”
I made a little theatrical bow as I retreated. She blew up.
“That’s it. That’s just it. That’s what I mean. That fucking little bow you just made. What’s that supposed to be?”
I, of course, knew exactly what she was going through and why. She was dying to get away from New York and go back to Venice for a while. But she couldn’t just go. She had to torture herself (and me in the process) and agonize over it, as if she were in some way betraying me by leaving.
Feeling guilty for wanting to leave, she was trying to pick some horrible fight with me so that she could justify her departure. By not obliging her, by being considerate and tolerant and kind, I was making her feel even more wretched, even more guilty.
In the end (Saul to the rescue again!) I had to step in and clarify the crisis in which she found herself.
“Leila,” I addressed her one evening, “listen to me, please.”
“What now?” she snapped.
“Please.” I gestured to a chair. “Sit down.”
“My, my,” she said, rolling her eyes, “aren’t we polite. Is that what we’re going to do now. We’re going to be polite till bedtime. We’re going to sit here and listen to the air conditioner roaring and be polite to each other.”
She sat down in the swivel chair and began swiveling.
“All right,” she said, “I’m sitting. Now what?”
“Why don’t you go to Venice for a while?” I told her. “I think you need to get away from here.”
Not having said a single word herself about wanting to leave, she seemed shocked by my ability to penetrate into her private thoughts. She stared at me in that squinty-eyed way, as if wondering how much I knew.
I lit a cigarette.
“You’re telling me I should leave, is that it?” she finally said.
“No, I’m telling you that you don’t need an excuse for wanting to. You want to go. I can tell. It’s not something you should feel guilty about.”
My use of the word “guilty” caused guilt to appear instantly on her face. She could hide nothing. She tried, but she just couldn’t do it.
I then proceeded, in an admittedly professorial manner, to analyze the situation in which she found herself at the moment.
“This is a whole new crisis for you,” I told her, puffing away on my cigarette. “Up to now, your whole life, from what you’ve told me about it, has been a series of losses and disappointments. Something was always cut, taken away from you. From your life. From all the movies you were in. And this has happened over and over again. If something happens enough times, no matter how painful it is, it becomes normal. It ceases to be a crisis and becomes, through repetition, a way of life.
“But now,” I went on, “all that is about to change. For once, all the scenes you shot are not only still in the movie, but you’re the star of the movie. You were thrilled when I first told you about the preview in Pittsburgh. But you’ve had time to think about it. You see, you’ve become comfortable as a victim and are now terrified at the prospect of having to abandon that role and assume a new one. The role of a woman who is loved. Whom life rewards instead of robs. It’s this crisis of fulfillment that’s making you anxious …”
I lit another cigarette and continued.
“I’m not blind. I know what you’ve been going through. I know you well enough to know that you haven’t been bitchy toward me just for the sport of it. That we haven’t made love in all this time just because of the heat or whatever. You are too honest to fake your emotions. To fake love and goodwill when you’re churning inside. You need to be off by yourself. To take stock of things. To mess around Venice for a while. See your told friends. Do some of the old things you used to do while you prepare yourself for the next phase of your life. You’ll see, Leila. Something glorious, but something you richly deserve, is awaiting you in Pittsburgh.”
She couldn’t take any more. She couldn’t bear to hear another word. Sobbing, she flapped her hands at me, gesturing for me to stop.
She threw her arms around my neck, those white, soft, seemingly fragile arms of hers that on occasion (this being one of them) could be as strong as steel cables. It almost hurt to be embraced with such force.
She buried her face in my neck and shoulder and, although she was sobbing louder than she spoke, I heard every word she said.
“I do love you,” she told me. “You do know that, Saul, don’t you? I really do.”
She left the next day. But not for Venice. She changed her mind. Said she felt like visiting Charleston and seeing her mom and some of her old high school friends again before she became famous. She would go to Venice after that.
She would not let me arrange her itinerary through my travel agent or pay for the tickets.
And no limo either.
We had a lovely, unhurried farewell outside my building. I stood under the canopy and waved as the cab whisked her away.
During her absence, I resumed my former life. Going to my office. Having lunches with Guido at the Tea Room. Picking up my clothes at the cleaners and strolling down Broadway, handing out money to the panhandlers along the way.
But whatever I did was tinged with a sense that all this was time in the interim and that real time would begin only in mid-November in Pittsburgh. In a way, I was there already, waiting for Billy and Leila and Leila’s movie to join me.