Do it, the new voice inside her urged. You know you can do it. It doesn’t matter how he judged you. You aren’t the person he created. Don’t live in that person’s image anymore. Find out who you really are. What have you got to lose?
The audience at Live Wire was patient on Monday nights. They had paid their discount cover charge knowing that they were going to be subjected to a stream of rank amateurs or third-rate professionals with nothing better to do between paying jobs.
Amy remembered the small in-town club from the early days when Elliot was touring and would stop by Atlanta to see her after one of his weekend bookings. He and she would go to Live Wire to watch the beginners make idiots of themselves. Elliot had loved to play the magnanimous Big Name, doling out advice and hope, getting up on stage to do a few minutes of material for the surprised, cheering crowd.
She was glad that Elliot was three thousand miles away tonight.
As she angled between people at the bar her legs quivered so violently that when she looked down she could see a tremor in the skirt of her print sundress. Her shoulders itched under the thin white jacket she’d put on to make the dress look more formal. Hives. She was getting hives.
In a little office down a hall hung with autographed photos of comics mugging for posterity, she found a squirmy little man in sport clothes who climbed over his desk and grabbed her in a hug. “How ya doin? Long time no see! Lawd-dee, it’s been years since you and the Elliot-man dropped by!”
They rocked from side to side. Her nervous stomach began to rebel. “I’m fine, Irving. Irving … can you put me into the lineup for tonight? Anywhere. I’ll take the graveyard if I have to. I just want five minutes to do some material I wrote.”
“You? Writing gags for yourself? What happened to Elliot? What’s going on? You? Amy? When did this writing thing start?”
“It’s a long story. Can I get into the lineup?”
“Sure! It’s open-mike night. You can have all the time—Amy? Are you all right?”
“Fine. Excuse me. Thanks for letting me in. I’ll be back in a minute. I just have to go throw up.”
She spent the next two hours huddled in a chair in the ladies’ room, alternately clutching her stomach and going over the jokes she’d listed on a paper towel. She told herself that she’d survive, even if she bombed. Bombing was part of the business. Nobody, not even the top comics, escaped it all the time. The important thing was to prove that she could get up on stage and not make a fool of herself. Or at least not too much of a fool.
At ten-thirty Irving sent one of the waitresses to get her. “You’re on after the next guy finishes,” the girl told Amy between quick puffs on a cigarette. “Hey, does this smoke bother you?”
“Nah, I always look like Dracula on a day pass.” Amy splashed cold water on her wrists and stared at herself in the mirror. You’re good. You can do this. She walked out of the rest room on wobbly legs. An eerie sense of panic rose in her chest, and she almost headed for an exit. A comic was twisting balloons into animals, and his giraffe popped two feet from her ear.
She bolted into the short, narrow hall that led directly up on stage. Trembling, she tried to take slow breaths. A stockbroker was on stage telling stockbroker jokes. The audience wasn’t laughing. Soon they wouldn’t be laughing at her.
The stockbroker finished quickly. Amy leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. Irving squeezed her shoulder on his way to the stage. “You okay?”
“Sure!” Her voice was an octave higher than usual, with a squeak like a reedy clarinet. She couldn’t recall her first two jokes. She began to take small steps backward. With any luck, she’d be gone before Irving got the introduction out of his mouth.
But he was too fast. He bounded to the microphone. “Here’s an old friend of mine who just dropped in tonight to try out a few jokes. Please welcome Amy Miracle.”
Only the worst coward would run at that point. She thought about it, but her feet began moving forward. She climbed a short ramp. She stepped onto the stage’s varnished wooden floor. The lights surrounded her. The applause was polite.
Somehow she ended up front and center. Her throat had a knot of fear in it. She wrapped both hands around the mike’s slender metal post and simply stared at the audience, unable to speak. They stared back. After twenty or thirty seconds the waitresses stopped to stare, too.
Oh, Lord, this was hopeless. The Catatonic Comic. Someone in the dark, intimate room began to snicker. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, but at least it broke the monotony. Go for the sympathy element, Amy thought desperately. Just tell the truth.
She leaned toward the mike and croaked. “Y’all terrify the hell out of me.”
To her shock, they laughed. She found a bored face and scrutinized it. The man watched her with his head tilted to one side in a quizzical way, as if someone had just goosed him. Well, go on, go on. Make me laugh.
“Suburban people are real scary,” she continued, her voice cracking. The man chuckled. Why? She hadn’t said anything funny. What was this—some kind of Twilight Zone episode? She stepped closer to the microphone and peered over it warily. “Suburban people have their own gangs. Oh, I know—you think I’m just paranoid. But I’ve seen ’em. Those women in jogging suits, walking in packs, with their little headphones. Are they really just listening to ‘Thin Thighs in Three Hundred Years?’ Or are they casing your station wagon? Do you want to go out some morning and find your hubcaps missing and a Barry Manilow tape on the front seat?”
This time the laughter was no fluke. The bored man was sitting on the edge of his seat, grinning. She couldn’t think about it too much or she’d freeze again. She had to keep careening ahead, jabbering about whatever came into her mind. “I’m also scared of furniture salespeople. They hang out in gangs, too. You know how frightenin’ they can be. You walk in and there they are, trying to look nonchalant, leaning against the furniture, with measuring tapes hanging out of their pockets. You try to ignore them—you get real nervous, but you’re trying to be cool and just walk on by. But they won’t let you. It’s ‘Hey, mama, want to see some sofas?’ or ‘Check out this credenza, baby.’ Oh, you can try to detour around them—take the long way through the dining-room sets—but they’ll only laugh. They know nobody can find their way out of all those fake rooms alone.”
People applauded. The man with the bored face was nodding to the woman beside him. They were both chuckling.
Amy took a deep, disbelieving breath. She knew she’d be frightened the next time she got up on stage, and the time after that, and probably the thousandth time. But obviously fear could be funny. “You know what else I’m afraid of? Big words that sound embarrassing. Like ‘mastication.’ What is that—having oral sex with yourself?”
The man with the bored face nearly fell out of his chair laughing. She stared at him with adoration. Pick the toughest person in the room and concentrate on him, Elliot often told new comics. When you own him, you own the room.
She owned the room. She owned her future. She could deal with the rest.
“You want a what?” Elliot bellowed at the top of his lungs. Then he went to the soft-drink machine in one corner of his office and kicked a dent in the diet cola.
Amy had expected his reaction. Her newfound confidence didn’t desert her. “I want the writing job you offered me a couple of months ago.”
“Why?”
“Because I just put my father in a nursing home and I need the money.”
“So you think you can crawl back—”
“I’m not crawling. Either you give me a job or you don’t. I’m a damned good writer, and you know it.”
“You want a favor? Go rub a lamp.”
“I want a job. And actually, I want to be your friend again. I remember when we liked each other a lot. You don’t have many friends left, and I’m willing to try to help you—but on my terms.”
“You greedy, arrogant—”
“Here are my terms. I won’t sleep with you, I won’t act as y
our gopher, and I won’t play Nurse Ratched when you’re determined to get stoned, because that hardly ever worked anyway. But I will be your best writer and your best friend, and I’ll stand by you while you get professional counseling.”
“Fuck the counseling. When you’re ready to live with me again, then we’ll talk about the rest.”
“Too bad. Bye.” She pivoted and headed for the door.
“Wait!” He kicked the soft-drink machine again. His anger crumpled. “All right. You’re hired.”
“Good. One more thing. I don’t mind working overtime at all, but I won’t work nights.”
“Why?”
“I have other fish to fry.” She had decided to keep her stand-up routine a secret. He wasn’t capable of dealing with more of the new Amy yet. She planned to work at the little clubs outside L.A., where people who knew her would be less likely to go. She had a lot to learn, and she wanted the relative anonymity of the smaller clubs in which to do it.
Elliot thrust his hands into his hair. “You’ve got a boyfriend!”
“No, I just want to have my nights free.”
“All right, all right! Anything else? You know, of course, that you really crave my body and it’s just a matter of time before we do an Ozzie and Harriet again?”
She smiled, putting sunshine on steel. “Don’t hold your breath.”
Marie entered her seventh month—longer than she’d ever carried a baby before—and the waiting became torture. Sebastien went to her room every night and sat for a minute with his hand on her stomach, hardly believing the movement he felt inside her. They discussed the change of luck in cautious terms, always more polite than intimate, but Sebastien allowed himself a surge of hope.
Throughout the pregnancy Marie had forbidden her doctors to perform any but the most routine medical examinations; she had decided that all the testing on past pregnancies had contributed to her miscarriages. “I no longer violate the purity of my womb,” she explained to Sebastien. He humored her beliefs, caring only that this pregnancy had survived.
After the child was born they would finally have a mutual interest; something worth sharing in their lives. His work had begun to seem like a treadmill on which he performed with automatic efficiency, losing track of his emotions to the point where he would sometimes resort to cafés to observe people laughing and talking in casual conversations. He rarely saw such things at the hospital or at home, and a hunger for them was growing inside him.
Marie’s eighth month came, without complications. Late one night Sebastien returned home to find that she had unlocked the door to the nursery. Now she sat in a lotus position in the middle of the floor, eyes shut, lips moving in a silent chant, radiating her earnest vibrations to the empty, stale-smelling suite that had not been entered in years.
Sebastien couldn’t resist imagining the suite filled with toys and baby furniture, with the tall, stern windows open to let sunlight into a pleasant world filled with his child’s laughter. It all seemed amazingly possible.
The ninth month was as charmed as the rest. Sebastien’s one firm request was that Marie not have the baby at home, which was what she wanted to do. In her peaceful, confident mood she agreed without protest. Nothing could go wrong now.
And nothing did. Sebastien was performing his rounds one evening when the call came from the hospital’s maternity ward. Marie’s water had broken during her Thursday-evening yoga class, and she’d gone straight to the hospital. Sebastien ignored the hospital’s lazy elevators and ran down several flights of stairs to see her. She was sitting up in the bed of her private room, placidly stroking a crystal.
He raised both the crystal and her hands and kissed them. “I’ll rearrange some duties upstairs so that I can be with you during delivery.”
“No, please. You’re a dear for offering, but you’d distract me. I have to focus all my thoughts.” She gave him a pleading look. “Try to understand. I only agreed to come to the hospital to make you happy. Now please, let me manage the birth as nearly to my liking as possible.”
“As you wish.” His excitement over the impending birth drove away any frustration. After the baby was born he would no longer tolerate her aloof and possessive attitude. Before he left the room he placed his hand on her belly. Her hospital gown made a soft cover for the turgid muscle underneath. “Welcome to the world,” he said gruffly.
It was near dawn when Marie’s doctor came into the waiting room. Sebastien pivoted from a window and stiffened the moment he saw the woman’s shuttered expression. A thousand shards of fear cut through him, and his only salvation was to feign anger. “If something is wrong, Doctor, I want to know why you’ve waited until now to inform me.”
If there had been sympathy under the obstetrician’s severely plucked brows, it vanished. “It was impossible to inform you of something I didn’t know until ten minutes ago. Your wife delivered the baby without extraordinary problems. Your wife is doing well, physically. She’s heavily sedated.”
“The point, Doctor, the point.”
The woman’s chin snapped up. “You have a baby daughter,” she retorted. “But she’s having breathing difficulties. We’ve already put her on a respirator. Her condition is marginal—low pulse, poor reflexes, poor skin color. I’ve scheduled an EEG. I hate to say this, but I suspect that she’s anencephalic.”
He died inside. The horror was almost palpable. After all the years of waiting.… She suffers. Dear God, I brought my daughter into a world filled with nothing but the most terrible misery.
The perfect machine, trained from childhood to turn grief inward, asked brusquely, “If the baby is anencephalic, how much time does it have?”
“It? Your child?” the doctor asked in an acid voice. “No more than a week, at most. Maybe a day or two. These babies … it’s tragic—”
“Yes, well, it’s doubtful that it knows much of what’s happening.” He strode from the room, snapping his fingers for the pediatrician to follow. “I want every detail. Extensive blood work—”
“Just a moment!” She grabbed the sleeve of the hospital scrubs he still wore from his own work, upstairs. “We’re discussing your daughter! Your own flesh and blood! What do you think you’re going to do?”
He halted and very calmly pried her fingers from their grip. Her furious, disbelieving gaze clung to him. She loathed him, not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered except rescuing his daughter from this nightmare. He held the doctor’s attention without blinking. He hardly knew that she was there. “I’m going to check with other hospitals,” he told her, “to see if they have any babies waiting for heart transplants.”
The nursery for intensive-care infants was home to only one tiny patient, a dark-haired thing with an undersized head and a small mask of a face, his daughter. He looked down at her in her prison of electrodes and tubes, watching her breathe with the aid of a machine. She was blind. There was nothing behind her eyes. She was one of the cruelest contortions of nature, born with only a brain stem, the most primitive neurological center, and it was already failing its task.
He slipped his hand down into the jungle of technology and touched her gently, amazed at how beautiful she was. Her delicate hands curled and she blinked long, dark lashes, but he knew that both reactions were meaningless. She was no more aware of him than she was of herself. His legs failed him, and he sat down quickly on a stool he pulled close to the incubator.
Shaking, he leaned over her and whispered, “Je t’aime, ma petite, je t’aime.” It was no sentimental lie. He loved her so fiercely that he wanted to be absorbed in the hopeless body and die with her.
But he couldn’t indulge self-centered grief, not when she was in such torment. He cupped her head in his hand as she had a mild seizure, crooning soft sounds to her while he stroked the silky forehead with the pad of his thumb. It won’t be much longer, little one. I promise. Your father promises.
“Doctor de Savin? I came as soon as I got your message.” The transplant coordinator waite
d a few feet away, his clothes rumpled, his owlish eyes revealing the early hour and the tension of this unusual situation. “I’ve finished checking. We have a match with a baby at Jenane Saint Alz.”
“The baby? Tell me—”
“Two weeks old. A congenital heart defect. Very critical at this point. We may be too late for him.”
“Why?”
“He may not last until, uhmmm—” the coordinator shifted awkwardly, “until we can provide the donor.”
Sebastien straightened. His daughter lay quiet again, her head still resting in his hand. There would be more seizures, much worse than this one. He wouldn’t let her be tormented. There was no alternative, no guilt, nothing but the sacrifice they would make for each other.
“We won’t wait,” he told the coordinator. “She is no more alive than a brain-dead accident victim. I’m going to take her off the respirator. I don’t think she can breathe on her own.”
“But if there are impulses from the brain stem—”
“A CAT scan of an empty skull is fascinating in its perversity. I suggest that you refresh your memory.”
“I know it’s terrible, Doctor, but—”
“The impulses from the brain stem are meaningless.”
“But what if she continues to breathe when you remove life support? That would be considered …” His voice faded and he shifted from foot to foot.
Alive, that’s considered alive, Sebastien finished for him silently. But only in the most pitiful way. He fixed a hard gaze on the man, daring him to finish the statement. “I’m willing to take that chance.”
The coordinator coughed and looked away. “Hmmm, Doctor de Savin, shouldn’t we contact Dr. d’Albret? He’s scheduled to return tomorrow from the administrator’s conference in Nice, but I’m sure, considering the birth of his grandchild—”
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