Sugar Time

by Jane Adams

  “So am I,” I smiled back.

  The valet was waiting with his car, a dark blue Saab convertible with the top down.

  “Do you mind?” he asked as I settled myself in the passenger seat. “I’ll put it up if you’d prefer.”

  “No, please don’t. I love convertibles. My first car was an MG, I was hooked.”

  “The TD?” he asked. “I had one of those, too. A dark green one.”

  “Mine was blue,” I said.

  “What happened to it?”

  “I traded it in for a station wagon.”

  He grinned. “So did I.”

  We drove down a steep hill and turned south into a neighborhood of cobblestone streets and turn of the century streetlamps atop intricate wrought-iron standards. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before the sun sets,” he told me. “I thought we’d have a drink on my deck—it has a wonderful view—and then go across the street for dinner.”

  We were in Pioneer Square, he explained. “The settlers used to skid the logs down from the top of that steep hill to the saw mill at the bottom. That’s where the expression, skid row, comes from.” He slowed to allow a horse-drawn carriage to clop past us. “A new factoid for your collection.” In one of our conversations I’d told him that my favorite book was Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. “Here’s a little present for you,” he said. “I picked it up over there at the Elliott Bay. It’s a great bookstore.” I tore off the kraft paper wrapping and picked out a brightly colored, oversized paperback. Americanisms: The Illustrated Book of Words Made in the U.S.A.

  “A man who listens when a woman talks—what a concept!” I said. “Thank you so much—I love it.”

  A few minutes later he pulled up in front of a red brick building similar to the others in the neighborhood, He clicked the remote, the garage door opened, and he drove in and parked. The garage elevator creaked its way to the top floor, where it opened directly into a brick-walled loft with wide planked floors and towering ceilings. Late afternoon light poured down from the top of an open staircase in the center hall: “The view’s upstairs,” he said. “I sleep down here but I live up there.”

  The upstairs took my breath away. From floor to ceiling windows facing north and west, the city and Sound were spread out before me. Beyond an elevated viaduct, the jagged peaks of the Olympics framed a bay busy with water traffic. At one end of it, tall orange cranes, like side chairs for giants, lifted ocean-going containers off the decks of a freighter. At the other, a passenger liner strung with gaily-colored flags tooted its horn in preparation for departure. Between them toy-like boats with billowing sails swerved and jibed: “A little early in the season, except for the really dedicated sailors. There are a couple of those on my team who’ve been putting in a lot of overtime lately, so I told them to take the afternoon off and enjoy the weather.”

  “You must be a popular boss,” I said.

  “It’s no big deal—there aren’t that many nice sunny days in Seattle this time of year. Why don’t you go out on the deck? I’ll fix us drinks and bring them out.”

  The hum of viaduct traffic was muted somewhat by the deckscaping. There were bamboo trees in terra cotta pots set among wooden planters that were thick with bushy grasses and ivy hung from the railings. A squat stone Buddha regarded me serenely from a ferny corner between two slatted wood benches. To the north the city skyline twinkled with lights from tall office buildings; the silhouette of the Space Needle, backlit by the setting sun, was like a spindly tinker toy off in the distance.

  Alex brought us each a glass of wine and we stood in companionable silence, watching the last sliver of sun sink behind the mountains, splashing the sky with streaks of purple, red and orange. A wind came up and I shivered; my blazer was silk, but beneath it my blouse was thin and sheer, and my trousers were a light gabardine.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “We’ll go in.”

  “Not quite yet.” The sky seemed to hold its breath until the sun’s reflections faded and the last streak of color disappeared. “Now,” I said. “Now we can go in.”

  I looked around. I could imagine Alex here, working at the crescent shaped rosewood desk, reading in the Eames chair with his long legs stretched out on the ottoman, or watching the flat screen TV on a wall opposite the windows from the brass-studded leather couch. From almost anywhere in the room he could watch the ship traffic in the bay, the sunset reflected in the towers of glass and steel at the water’s edge or snow-capped Olympics.

  The shelves surrounding the TV held artifacts as well as books that tended toward history, biography and science. There were some African masks, a cluster of framed photographs, a football trophy and a cowboy hat. Terry Gross’s familiar voice issued from Bang and Olaffson speakers on one of the shelves; he pressed a button, silencing it.

  A compact but functional-looking kitchen, all black glass and stainless steel, was divided from the living room by a granite-topped counter where Alex had set out a dish of olives. It was definitely a man’s room, but there were some whimsical touches, too, like a pair of steel bar stools with their backs bent into profiles of two jut-jawed faces, and a Peter Max triptych that reminded me of a Grateful Dead poster. But what made me laugh out loud was the coffee table. Its base was a Dalmatian, lying on its back with its pink Nike-shod paws holding up a glass rectangle. I bent down to examine it more closely: its eyelashes were made of curly black telephone cord, and its pink satin tongue flopped contentedly out of its mouth. The lettering on the small sign sewn to its belly said The Bitch in the House. I looked up at Alex, who smiled and said, “Doesn’t every house need one?”

  When we left the loft we walked across the street, through a wrought iron gate into a narrow courtyard surrounded by brick buildings. We went into one of them to a ground-floor restaurant and were greeted by a dapper man in his sixties with a rose boutonnière in the lapel of his suit.

  “Good evening, Mr. Carroll,” he said.

  “Hi, Carmine, nice to see you. This is my friend, Ms. Kane.”

  “Good evening, Ms. Kane. Welcome to Il Terrazo. Your table will be ready in a few moments—meanwhile, may I offer you an aperitif in the bar?”

  The barman looked up as we came in. “Campari and soda?” he asked, and after a look at me for approval, Alex nodded. We took our seats at the bar and I looked around. It was busy but not crowded with well-dressed people sitting near us or at the leather banquettes against the wall. Relaxed, end of the day laughter and the quiet hum of conversation surrounded us. “What is it they call their neighborhood pubs in England?” asked Alex. “Their locals? Well, this is my local. It also happens to be one of the best restaurants in town.”

  “Convenient, I’d say. Does Carmine deliver?”

  “Only for very good customers,” he said. “He’s owned this place for years. You can’t tell it’s here from the First Avenue side of the building—you have to know what you’re looking for.”

  “And you do.”

  “Usually,” he replied. “But sometimes I don’t know what that is till I find it.”

  The salmon was so fresh it must have swum up from the waterfront and climbed onto the stove and the rest of the meal was equally good. I kept Alex laughing through dinner with stories about La La land and a few about myself. He was a good audience until Frances got inside my head again—“Men say they want a woman with a sense of humor, but that only means they want you to laugh at their jokes”—and I stopped talking.

  “Your turn,” I told him. “What’s the project you’ve been working so hard on?”

  “It’s so complicated I don’t totally understand it myself,” he said. “We’re looking at a new way to combine data from molecular genetics, treatment protocols, that sort of thing. They cure diseases in labs all over the world hundreds of times a day, but unless they know why, they can’t do it a second time. That’s where data mining comes in. We collect a lot of information, but we don’t always know how to use it.”

  “Like the government
. The FBI still hasn’t sifted everything they knew about 9-ll even before the attacks. Or about terrorist activities since then.”

  “Like that,” he agreed.

  The waiter proffered a dessert tray, but I shook my head. “I think we’ll take a check, Giorgio,” said Alex, and then, to me, “How about I walk you back to the hotel? It’s only eight or nine blocks from here—are you up for it?”

  I felt a pang of disappointment. So I wasn’t going to explore the lower floor of the loft—not tonight, anyway. “Sure,” I agreed. “Why not?”

  He took my hand as we crossed the street, and held it all the way back to the W. Ignoring my aching toes, I managed to keep up with his long stride until he realized it; he slowed down, and we made our way out of the Square, past antique shops and taverns and coffee bars and bookshops, onto a walking path between the waterfront and the viaduct. Eventually we turned east, onto a broad avenue lined with office buildings, stores, and a striking modern building that zig-zagged up a steep hill in glass-encased boxes that seemed to float in air. “The new library,” he explained. “It’s by Rem Koolhaas. People either love it or hate it.”

  I loved it—if it had been open I’d have insisted on going in. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m in meetings most of the morning, but my driver will pick you up and take you around until I meet you for lunch.”

  “That’s not really necessary,” I protested. “I can find my way around. I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “You’re not, and you probably can. But he’ll take you to the airport in time to make your plane.” As we approached the hotel, his Blackberry beeped—he stopped, read the text on its screen and frowned. “I’m sorry I can’t deliver you to your door,” he said. “I have to get back to the office—something’s come up, a glitch I’ve got to deal with. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” I replied, a little disappointed—I was still hoping to end the evening in a more romantic manner.

  As it turned out, I did. In front of the hotel he pulled me into his arms for a long, satisfying kiss—a real one this time, not a buss on the cheek. I inhaled the faint fragrance of Issey for Men, one of my favorite scents, and his arms tightened around me. “I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better—a whole lot better,” he said when we came up for air.

  “So am I.”

  “You can’t stay over till Sunday?”

  “No—I ought to be up there now, the crew’s been shooting background for a couple of days already. Besides, you’re going to Hong Kong tomorrow night.”

  “I could put it off.”

  “But I couldn’t.”

  “Can’t blame a guy for asking.”

  “Ask me again.”

  “Count on it,” he said, and in spite of all the men who’ve said things like that over the years and forgotten them the next day or week or month, I believed him.

  If you happen to be having a heart attack, Seattle is the best place to do it. Five minutes after the clerk at the Elliott Bay called 911, the EMT’s had me in their ambulance with an oxygen mask over my face and a pressure cuff on my arm. My cell phone kept ringing until one of the guys took it out of my jacket pocket. “Hello? Never mind who this is, who are you?” He bent over me. “Do you have a son named Paul?” I tried to nod but the motion made my head hurt even worse than my chest.

  I’d checked out of the hotel around eleven, leaving my bags with the concierge, and was killing time at that bookstore near Alex’s apartment until I met him for lunch. I picked up enough paperbacks to get through the next three weeks—mystery novels are better than sleeping pills, and even though eventually they rot your brain, you’re not hung over in the morning. I was on the last stair down to the basement café when I suddenly felt so lightheaded I had to grab the railing to steady myself. My chest hurt and I couldn’t breathe, so I decided not to. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, and a woman whose long hair tickled my nose was exhaling hot little whiffs of eau de vanilla latte in my mouth. When she started thumping on my chest as if she was trying to push it into the floor, counting “one one hundred, two one hundred,” I muttered, “Stop that!” even though it hurt even more to talk. She lifted herself off me and raised a triumphant fist in the air, Rocky-style—people around her clapped their hands, and then someone threw a coat over me, and someone else bent down and told me not to worry, help was on the way.

  I could give you all the medical details, but stuff like that is very boring unless it’s about you. Suffice it to say that the punch line to what turned out to be a very unfunny bit of cosmic comedy was that while I’d had every symptom of a heart attack, I hadn’t actually had one. What I’d had was a return visit from the octopus, except that this time it really was an octopus.

  “Takotsubo,” said the doctor two days later, when my heart was pumping again and they’d gotten my blood pressure back up. “From tako, meaning octopus, and tsubo, which means bottle. See this?” He held up an X-ray of my heart and pointed to a funny shape on one side, sort of like a vase with a round bottom and a narrow neck. “It’s Japanese—it’s a trap they use to catch octopus. What happens is the muscle cells of the heart go into paralysis—here, close to the aorta. Only the upper part of the heart contracts, which means it can’t pump out enough to give you the oxygen you need. It’s not very common, except in elderly Japanese women. I don’t think we’ve ever seen it in someone like you.”

  Someone not Japanese or someone not elderly? Although it was an interesting factoid, medically and etymologically—I knew a writer on House who’d be fascinated—I didn’t really care. I was just glad to get a straight answer from somebody, especially this Dr. Kaplan, who had a much nicer bedside manner than O’ Neill. I was relieved that he was not only Jewish (okay, I’m stereotyping here, but forgive me, I just had an attack of the killer calamari) but the head of cardiology, too. “What happens in takotsubo is that the left ventricle goes into akinesis—that’s a temporary paralysis—and balloons into this shape,” said Kaplan. “It looked like an MI—you had all the signs. So we did an emergency cardiac catheterization. Your coronary arteries looked pretty good—not great, but okay, and you should talk to your regular cardiologist about that—but the ventriculogram was the tip-off. Lucky the attending recognized it.”

  I wasn’t clear about when it first hit me that I might be dying. It must have been in the ambulance; if I am, I remember thinking, someone ought to know. And then the reassurance that of course Paul would calmed me down like Valium. Or maybe it was Valium.

  He’d caught a plane as soon as he talked to the ambulance guys, and when I came to some time that night and saw him, he looked different. Not like the Paul I picture when I think about him—then he’s a kid, not even twenty, a college dropout who hasn’t figured out who he is yet. But there in the room, half-asleep with his head slumped over his chest in a chair next to my bed—that couldn’t be a bald spot on his crown, could it?—he looked like a man.

  They kept me stoned enough for the next 24 hours that by the time I was fully conscious it was of how bizarre my circumstances were—being a patient in a strange hospital in an unfamiliar city, called Charlotte by people who don’t know that’s not who I am even if it is my name—and how relieved I was not to be there alone.

  “So what you’re saying is that she didn’t really have a heart attack, it was something else?” Paul asked the doctor.

  “It wasn’t a myocardial infarct, which is what people usually mean by that. Unlike most MI’s, it’s completely reversible and doesn’t leave any permanent damage, although technically, it’s still cardiomyopathy,” he replied.

  “I had a kind of heart thing a few months ago, in New York,” I began when Paul interrupted me with a muttered “Dammit, I knew it!” but I ignored him. “Could this be related to that?”

  “That’s hard to say. I got your hospital records from your insurance company and talked to a Dr. O’Neill this morning. He thought takotsubo was a very interesting diagnosis.”

 
“Meaning, he should have thought of it?”

  “It’s easy to mistake for the real thing,” he said diplomatically. I could imagine what my ex-husband, the King of Torts, would do with that in front of a jury if he knew—which he wasn’t going to. “Paul, you didn’t call your father, did you?” I asked.

  “Of course not, why would I do that?” he said. “I called Jessie—Ma, don’t look at me like that, she’s your daughter, she has a right to know.”

  “But you told her I was okay, right? That it was just a mistake, I’m fine, I’ll call her when I get to Vancouver?”

  He and Kaplan exchanged one of those looks that men use instead of words when they’re patronizing us. “Maybe before then,” said Paul.

  While it helped to have a name for what was wrong with me, just like in TV or analysis, what’s really important is what happens next. “How do you get the octopus out of the bottle and the bottle out of my heart?” I asked the doctor. “And when can I get out of here?”

  He frowned. “While this is a temporary condition, your heart is still in a state of dysfunction. We have to normalize the ventricular wall motion—in effect, treat the paralysis—before you go anywhere. We’ve got you on medication to increase your blood pressure, but you’re still not getting enough oxygen. You’re going to need to be monitored carefully for a while.”

  “What’s a while?”

  “Anywhere from a week to a month, depending,” he said.

  “What?” I was horrified. “I can’t stay here that long!”

  “You’re doing exceptionally well. There’s been a marked improvement in the last 24 hours.”

  “So it might be less than a week?” If I had to, I could spin some kind of story to account for a couple of days.

  “That’s very doubtful. You need to be treated in a hospital.”

  “Well, for a few days, maybe. But then can’t you just send me home with whatever drugs I need? I thought hospitals couldn’t wait to get you out the door these days. I’ll take it very easy; I’ll get plenty of rest, I promise,” I said while Paul snorted in disbelief.