They parted around one in the morning, as the last call went up. He kissed her cheek and a rosy blush forced her gaze downward. He could see she was smiling tenderly.
“Would you come back tomorrow night?” she said to the floor. “I’ll make sure Vicki shows up for a check-up.”
He reached two fingers under her soft chin and guided her face up to his.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
Elizabeth had no intention of bringing Vicki along. On the contrary, she bought her cousin another room, which Vicki happily accepted with a giggle and a playful push.
“Elizabeth, what has gotten into you?” she said, happy for her.
“Don’t jinx it, Vick. There are no guarantees in life, certainly not my love life.”
“My one piece of advice, Lizzie: Be careful. First-timers fall hard.”
João had not been sure he would come back. He had obviously had too much to drink last night—they both had. And what was the point? He’d be in Africa before he knew it, and she could sleep with any number of brown-skinned men to fill her vacation fantasies. This was 1970; sex was supposed to be everywhere, even in Portugal. To that point, his summer on the beach had been sadly chaste. His father wouldn’t have approved of Elizabeth Bromwell, that was sure, but he wouldn’t have approved of his son’s failure to get laid either.
He had to admit he liked her. She was vivacious, bright, an effortless conversationalist once she got going, a little needy, yes, but so was he. So he went. That evening, he put on a pair of loose-fitting linen pants, untucked his shirt, and walked to the beach by his place—so he could approach Elizabeth from the shore, trousers rolled, with the sun low and at his back. She was at the bar as promised. Vicki, of course, was not. They began to talk and drink and, without struggle, the night marched on. Soon after midnight, Elizabeth held out her hand and led him to her room. “‘In thy face, I see the map of honor, truth, and loyalty,’” she whispered, actually believing it.
“‘She’s beautiful and therefore to be woo’d. She is a woman, therefore to be won,’” he murmured in response, and to his surprise, he meant it.
I too had left my home country to escape something—maybe not an aristocratic upbringing in a gilded cage but something pretty potent. I listened to Elizabeth’s story and tried to avoid my own. My parents had dwelled now for ten long years on my sister, their eldest child. We never faulted them for it, my brother and I. We felt their pain, not as acutely maybe, but in our own way. We understood their inattention, the days, sometimes weeks, when our parents didn’t seem to notice us. We had been young—I was ten, my brother twelve—when our sister, Rebecca, was stricken, but that was old enough to learn to care for ourselves, even to appreciate a little the benign neglect that let us get into trouble without ever really getting into trouble. By the time our parents could tune back in to their sons’ lives, we didn’t feel like we much needed them. So they didn’t.
The truth was that I did need them, but without my mother’s attention, in the shadow of my dead sister’s frozen room, I expressed my need—really my longing—in other ways. I was perpetually falling madly, painfully in love with some girl or other, usually with one who could never love me back enough, certainly not the way I loved her. It was riveting in its painful, animating way, the constant string of one-sided pinings for fourteen-year-old girls who preferred the company of their girlfriends and Bonne Bell Lip Smackers and trips to the mall to the mess of poetic and slightly pathetic me. This was followed by engrossing, unrequited love affairs of slightly more maturity and imagined sexual content that at least involved talking to the object of my desire. That phase was finally capped by something that felt equal, but was fueled more by my need to be noticed than to offer love. Once I got my first girlfriend, I was never long without one. Even leaving for England meant leaving behind the latest love of my life—Lisa, a scattered college beauty with icy gray eyes, self-consciously staggering musical taste (King Crimson, Mike Oldfield at Montreux), and the same propensity for love with distant, invisible partners. That affair, again, was ultimately unrequited.
Now I was with Maggie. I had managed to escape the tug of Rebecca, the detritus of her unlived life: proms never attended, kisses never received, the Faulkner she never got to, exotic tropical fruits never tasted, European trains never missed. The black hole of loss marred my parents’ faces, so I put an entire ocean between me and them. But I was no more whole for the journey.
“Can I make you some tea before bed, Elizabeth?”
She looked at me with a rueful smile and picked up her shot glass, tinkling it a little in shaky hands.
“No, David, you go ahead. I’ll be alright.” She poured herself another drink, and, I imagined, thought too about love, about being loved, about a man’s touch. As she had said that night with Kelvin, ogling her daughter’s latest, it had been some time.
Elizabeth was giddy with joy. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the room and the world outside were beginning to glow. She released her hair from its constricting ponytail and looked into this man’s lustrous, black eyes, her left hand slinking behind his head, her fingers parting his curls. He moved toward her, lips softly parting. My God, she thought, my mother’s bizarre educational curse has yielded this gift to me, this most wonderful gift, the most wonderful gift I have ever imagined. I will never again muster an ungrateful thought toward Charlotte Bromwell in my life. That happy pledge swirled into the excitement overtaking her as she realized that she had done it, she had rid herself of her virginity, finally.
She had tried to whisper to João that it was her first time, but she wasn’t sure it had come out through her quickening breath. He had sunk into her hurriedly, with one of his hands on the small of her back, the other on the curve of her waist. His grip had been fierce. He didn’t squeeze or pull, just held her in place, and as the first shock of pain shot to her head, she remembered she gasped but didn’t flinch. With a deft, single thrust, he had staked a claim, and Elizabeth wanted nothing more than to honor it, to belong to someone, someone who wanted her this badly. He had obliterated her, and it was far, far better than she could have ever prayed for. She was gone from Hampshire, gone from Vicki, gone from tutors and aimless non-expectations. She was in someone’s grip now. Better yet, he was in hers, cradled in her thighs, held in her arms. She had arrived.
Chapter Three
It’s possible that Elizabeth’s stories had been embellished over time. How often she had told them I could only guess by the number of volunteers who had preceded me, a number I had not worked up the courage to inquire about. Of course, I may be embellishing myself, filling in some gaps, some carnal detail Elizabeth didn’t actually share. But the detritus of the Bromwell past was certainly everywhere at No. 4. It all fit together. This man she described, João, had sounded like a reluctant but effective Don Juan, and if, as I suspected, Cristina was his, he may well have been Jupiter incarnate.
It was Cristina I was hoping to see when I peeked into the kitchen the morning after Elizabeth’s most recent long night of storytelling. Instead I found Elizabeth standing by the counter in a dressing gown, intent on a textbook, her hair wild and unbrushed. It was early still, before she had prepared herself for class, and the glance we gave each other was almost intimate, a lover’s view before the morning ablutions. She smiled shyly, beneath sleepy eyes, as I hurried past, toward the sound of Hans’s buzzer.
“David, come take a letter.”
The two nurses were grabbing the last of their things as they headed out of the room, cheery in their tight little dresses. I still hadn’t learned their names, which was shameful considering how much I already owed them. Years of paralysis had left Hans’s ass pretty much gone. The flat, flabby surface that was left behind was smeared with whatever dribbled out. It festered into small infections that would grow into larger ones without constant minding. The attention to such medical issues, particularly the irrigation of the anus, was, lucky for me, mainly the responsibility of the professiona
l help, the ones paid more than eighteen pounds a week. On occasion, I did clip Hans’s nails and nostril hairs. He was remarkably fastidious about such things.
The nurses smiled at me as they swished out. “Morning, love,” they cooed. They didn’t remember my name either.
Come take a letter. What am I, a secretary? I thought, stepping in and rummaging through the polished and bowed chest of drawers next to his bed for a pen and paper. I realize this guy’s my employer, but has the guy ever heard of asking? Or saying please? He hadn’t said that word to me once since my arrival.
The chest of drawers had a twin, less used so the inlay stood out more clearly, a delicate filigreed pattern. It had been carted away on my third day by two broad-shouldered men under the watchful gaze of a little, balding antique dealer. They had wrapped it carefully in quilted blankets, secured the blankets with duct tape, and loaded it into a beat-up green van with “Haversham Fine English Antiques” painted on the side.
Elizabeth had watched impassively, leaning against the open doorway and smoking a cigarette. The little man produced a wad of one-hundred-quid notes and began counting. I couldn’t make it out, but there were quite a few of them. Elizabeth hadn’t seemed impressed, slipping the folded bills without so much as a glance into the side pocket of her denim dress. “Haversham indeed. Rubenstein more like,” she muttered as he sped away. “Who does that little Jew think he is?” Her eyes met mine briefly as she turned around to reenter the front hall before a flicker of shame averted them.
“Second drawer,” Hans said wearily. “There’s a lovely Montblanc, unless Elizabeth’s nicked it and sold it off.”
Hans was always weary to one degree or another. His condition meant he could never expend enough energy for real, sleep-inducing fatigue, but in the absence of deep sleep, he was always in need of it. From my end of the bargain, I was convinced he never slept. The stick strapped to his wrist with the rubber, studded thimble at the end could do a remarkable amount of work. It could put on Maria Callas at all hours of the night, for one. For another, it could hit the buzzer.
I hadn’t noticed the wires when I moved into the room upstairs. They were connected to an electronic buzzer, the kind you’d see on a game show, high on the wall, in a corner. Whoever put it there must have been in on the joke. No one would ever notice it until it fired—which was for me, as I’m guessing for most, on the first night of occupancy. It made a particularly heinous noise, a wrong-answer kind of noise, perfect for wrenching your eyes open out of a deep sleep.
“Oh, David,” Hans would say as I stumbled down the stairs at four a.m. “What on earth are you wearing? I’ll have to get Elizabeth to find you some decent pajamas if you’re going to insist on stumbling around in your knickers. Anyway, a little light is streaming through the drapes. Can’t get any sleep. Close them up better, that’s a lad.”
“Oh, David, nice to see you. Still in your underthings? My throat is positively parched. The pitcher of water is next to the bed.”
“Oh, David, the bedclothes have slipped off my head and I can’t seem to get them into place.”
I began to imagine all this was intentional, a way to make me miserable. He seemed to be particularly needy when Maggie was spending the night. “Fuck like bunnies for all I care,” he had said, neglecting to say how difficult he could make that.
Clearly I had to toughen up. This was what I signed up for. “You will be his awms and legs,” Nigel from Community Service Volunteers had told me. I guess it hadn’t occurred to me that this would be a twenty-four-hour-a-day task.
“I will need you to type this up later, neatly, no mistakes. But jot it down for now,” Hans said crisply. “Elizabeth can show you where the typewriter is when I’m napping.”
“‘Dear Voluntary Euthanasia Society,’” he began. “‘I have been a dues-paying member of your little association for a dozen years now, and I’m still bloody alive.’”
He stopped to consider his words. His pause was so pregnant I thought maybe he’d given up on the whole venture. I stood there dumbly waiting.
“Strike the ‘bloody.’ Sorry,” he continued again. “I’ll try to keep this a bit more formal. Make it, ‘and I still appear to be alive.’ Yes, ‘I have been a dues-paying member of your little association for a dozen years now, and I still appear to be alive.’”
I rushed to catch up. As the meaning of his words had begun to register, my handwriting had slowed.
“‘Across the Channel, in Holland, doctors are snuffing out quadriplegics like me by the dozen. Nobody seems to be complaining. Yet I cannot seem to get so much as a decent dose of painkillers from the National Health Service. I would like an update on your efforts with Parliament. Surely you can find a cranky Tory with fascist roots, keen to rid Britannia of the likes of me. Pity my father, Gordon Bromwell, has passed on, but he must have progeny in Whitehall.’”
He paused again. “I wonder if assuming knowledge of my ancestry is unreasonable. Does anyone remember Gordon Bromwell?”
“Umm,” I let slip, unsure whether he was talking to me, continuing with his dictation, or muttering to himself.
“No, no, that’s fine. Let’s carry on, David.”
“‘I am at my wit’s end,’” he said more forcefully. “‘I have also exhausted my patience with the society. Please inform me why I should maintain a membership that has gotten me nothing beyond a newsletter devoted to assisted suicide in lands I cannot hope to reach, given that I have broken my neck, and unhelpful hints at making life somewhat bearable as you dither on your assignment. Sincerely, Hans Bromwell.’”
He paused for effect, then ordered, “You’ll find the address of the society in my black binder, top drawer.”
“Hans, you don’t really want me to send this.”
“Well, why the hell not?” he said, turning his head away in disgust. I shuffled silently back to the newly twinless chest of drawers to find the binder and an envelope. I could tell this wasn’t the first letter of its kind.
After breaking his neck, Elizabeth told me, Hans was brought to the spinal center at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, just northwest of London, “the best in the UK.” It cost a fortune, but those debts would become clear only after their father died. Houndsheath was sold to the National Trust to pay off the private practitioners—the doctors, nurses, and physical therapists brought in to supplement the National Health Service—and the estate taxes that Sir Gordon’s hopeless legislative efforts never succeeded in killing. Stoke Mandeville may as well have been a hospice on the beach, and those high-priced specialists might as well have been buxom, twenty-one-year-old candy stripers, for all of Hans’s efforts. He implored the staff to let him drink himself to death, but they did not consent. And since he couldn’t lift so much as a dram to his lips, he was shit out of luck.
For a high spinal injury, physical therapy is not supposed to be optional. It is not just for would-be Paralympians. With even a modicum of effort, someone like Hans could have at least maintained bladder control and spared himself life with a piss catheter.
“‘With the help of a surgeon, he might yet recover, and prove an ass,’” Elizabeth muttered in exasperation.
But Hans had had none of it.
He loved to share the disdain he felt for the physiologist who had broached the future of his sex life. He would get spontaneous erections, he was told by the well-meaning imbecile, but they were not the product of sexual response, just some mysterious nerve firings that could not be counted on with a lady friend. Of course, the physiologist chimed in cheerfully, Hans’s tongue, mouth, and facial muscles would be fully functioning. “You might be surprised at the wonders you can provide with a flick and a twitch.”
The withering contempt with which Hans told this story, to lady and men friends alike, surely could not match the look he must have flashed the physiologist, who slithered away without so much as dropping off the booklet on sex and quadriplegia. That was the end of Hans Bromwell’s post-accident sex education, the end of sex,
period, or as he would say, full stop. The movement he could muster with his right arm, well conditioned and exercised, could have been put to good use. He certainly could have operated an electric wheelchair. But when the National Health Service sent him one—an expensive one at that, at least a thousand pounds—he ordered his nurse at the time to toss it into the street.
“If I’m going to be a quadriplegic, someone can bloody well push me. I’ve earned that at least,” he growled.
No one would be earning an Oscar playing Hans Bromwell as he struggled nobly back to honest citizenship.
Maggie and I were lying on her futon, pondering over the impenetrable sounds of the Cocteau Twins’ “Head over Heels.” She was insisting that yes, those were lyrics. I had my mind elsewhere.
“I have to tell you something, Maggie,” I said, turning on my side and propping my head up with the palm of my hand. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take. He doesn’t even like me. I don’t sleep. I don’t have anything to talk to him about. Maybe I should just leave now.” It was late November; the wet, cold grayness was already getting oppressive outside, and I was thinking about Thanksgiving at home, which had always seemed modest when I lived there but the memories of which now filled me with awe. It would still be warm there, the leaves colorful and unfallen. I had been with Hans and Elizabeth nearly two months and was feeling bereft. I nestled beside Maggie’s soft, pale body, as she listened, or pretended to anyway.
“Leave for the States?” she asked mildly.
“Hmm,” I answered without much commitment.
Maggie didn’t have much more to say. She had told me from the beginning Hans would not like me. But she didn’t think that would be of much consequence to me personally. She figured she would be enough to keep me glad I stayed in dreary old Brighton. I was not so sure. Her second year of studies was considerably more difficult and intense than her first. Comprehensive exams were still more than a year away, but she was now able to size up the competition, to know what it would take to graduate with a “First,” top of the class, to make something of her degree. And she had all the ambition of a working-class girl whose dreams had been mocked by the schoolmates she had left behind. I was now sharing her with Derrida and Giddens and mountains of books and Socratic professors I would never meet. And since I didn’t have any such pursuits, I felt half-abandoned.
No. 4 Imperial Lane Page 6
