Forecast

by Janette Turner Hospital

  ‘I have a woman.’

  ‘What?!’ Paul laughs. ‘You mean you’re getting some?’

  ‘Our relationship,’ Nelson says with dignity, ‘is not just about sex.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Paul says. ‘You sly old fox!’ Then he frowns. ‘She doesn’t work for Wholesome by any chance?’

  ‘No,’ Nelson says. ‘She does not.’

  ‘Pardon my asking, but is this something you’re paying for? Because, you know, we could make a deal. Confidentially, between you and me, we have girls on the payroll, so to speak, if that’s what you need.’

  Nelson says coldly, ‘I’m not interested in relationships of that sort.’

  ‘You’re not paying her?’

  Nelson does not deign to answer this question.

  ‘Well, shit,’ Paul says. ‘Who’d have thought? I mean, no offence, but you Nerd Squad guys are not exactly …’

  Nelson raises his eyebrows. Not exactly what? his eyebrows ask.

  ‘Well, you know … Not exactly Brad Pitt.’ Paul laughs again, an angry bark. ‘More like an unattractive Woody Allen, no offence. Hey, that was a joke.’

  ‘Accepted as a joke,’ Nelson says.

  ‘You’re not that bad. As a matter of fact, you don’t look half as hopeless as Woody Allen.’

  ‘Apparently Woody Allen has to beat off women with a stick.’

  ‘Too-shay. OK, you got me there, though I’m damned if I know how he does it. There’s no way it’s just brains, no way. One of life’s great mysteries.’ Paul paces and touches. Nelson makes a mental note to wipe where Paul has touched. ‘I guess there’s always the mystery weapon, eh? Which is not fighting fair. Totally below the belt, so to speak.’ Paul laughs at his own joke, but stops suddenly and stares at Nelson’s crotch. ‘Come to think of it, you did show us what else you got. Big surprise, I gotta admit.’ Paul peers at the bed behind the divider. ‘You do it here or at her place?’

  ‘Can I ask you, with all due respect, to leave?’

  ‘I know she’s a plant,’ Paul says. ‘If you’re not paying her, then I know Wholesome is. What’s her fucking name then?’

  Her name is Beatrice, Nelson does not say. Instead he says: ‘She’s not for sale.’

  Nelson has become aware that Paul is visiting someone in the building where Beatrice lives. Not that he has seen Paul there. What he recognises is Paul’s car parked on the street, first on a Friday night, then on a Saturday, the first time about an hour past midnight. Usually Nelson arrives at his watching post around 10 p.m. and keeps vigil until Beatrice turns out her light, but on the Friday when he first noticed Paul’s car, he was late. He’d been answering emails overtime, placating Wholesome’s astonishingly belligerent customer-whiners, and then he’d felt so jangled and so demeaned that he’d found it necessary to work on his spider game, adding cul-de-sacs and worm holes, monitoring the number of hits, the thousands of gamesters derailed. He’d lost track of time.

  He knows that Paul is a gamester addict. He knows that Paul has signed on.

  Now he leans against his tree.

  It’s too late for Beatrice. Her room is dark, or should be dark, but there must be a small bedside lamp.

  And then he sees Paul’s car.

  He waits until the bedside lamp is turned off, but he does not see Paul leave. He decides to wait.

  Apparently he falls asleep, his back against the tree. When he opens his eyes it is morning, he is aching from head to foot, and Paul’s car is no longer there.

  Nelson has begun to think improper thoughts. His dreams have gone viral. More and more frequently he wakes in the park, drenched with dew. His dreams embarrass him. He would never, in real life, do the things that he does in his sleep. For example: one night, in the building lobby, he presses the buzzer for Apartment 3C, and when Beatrice asks, ‘Who is it?’ he answers, ‘It’s Dante.’ Another night, he says, ‘It’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I want to paint you.’

  Both times, she says the same thing: ‘Come on up. I’ve been waiting for you.’

  When she opens the door, she is wearing the loose green gown. She lets its slide from her shoulders and poses herself on the bed. Nelson paints her.

  Sometimes he paints her green, sometimes gold. Always he uses oils.

  Sometimes the oils are flavored and he licks them from her breasts.

  Sometimes he does other things.

  Sometimes he goes astray in his own computer game.

  Sometimes, however, he is wide awake and knows that he is. In the 7-Eleven, for instance, at the edge of the park, one Sunday morning: he is buying a quart of milk and the New York Times, chatting with the acne-peppered kid at the cash register as the boy is making change, and suddenly there she is. Nelson is paralysed. She is moving between the aisles, putting orange juice and muesli in her basket.

  Beatrice smiles, a smile that could move the planets and the stars, and she says something, but to Nelson her voice is simply thunder.

  The kid at the cash register also says something, both to Beatrice and to Nelson. Nelson cannot translate what he says. Nelson pays, or hopes he pays. He gropes his way, leaning against shelves, to the door. His heart is thumping, his sense of balance cataclysmically out of whack. On the sidewalk outside, he gulps air. All strength has left him, he can barely walk, so he staggers to the nearest subway stop and descends to the root-raddled dark. As it happens, the train that roars into the platform is the A train, terminus Brooklyn, wrong direction. Nelson gets on because what, after all, does it matter? Hell is anywhere, and so is heaven.

  She smiled at me.

  It is dark, and hours later, when he gets back to his apartment, but the woman in the painting is still smiling. The smile, like that of the Mona Lisa, is secret and knowing and warm.

  ‘Okay,’ Paul says, nudging him with a boot. ‘Now I’ve got your number, you creep.’

  Nelson wakes in the park, his clothes damp, his body aching, his shoulders against his favourite tree.

  ‘Turns out you’re a garden-variety stalker. Bit of a joke, don’t you think? Wholesome’s stalking you, I’m stalking Wholesome, and you’re chasing tail in a very unwholesome way.’

  ‘A thing of beauty,’ Nelson says, ‘cannot be dragged in the mud.’

  ‘Oh please. Spare me, you pervert.’

  Nelson receives an email from Paul, the subject heading of which reads Got your number. The message reads: We could trade, you know. As I’ve said before: Name your price.

  There are two attachments. Nelson hesitates. He shuts down his computer and sits on his bed and lets the painting of Beatrice calm him. Then he returns to his desk and goes online.

  One by one, he opens Paul’s attachments.

  The first photograph is technically sophisticated, taken at night. The viewpoint seems to be from Nelson’s tree in the park. Beatrice is at her open window, the moon reflected in the upper panes of glass. Her lips are parted but her eyes are not closed. She is reaching out for someone in the dark.

  The second attachment is an interior shot: Beatrice languid and naked on her bed.

  So, Nelson tells himself, resigned. This is the way of things. Get used to it. This is the sort of camera angle available to Paul.

  Nelson knows he should delete these attachments, but he opens them over and over again.

  At first, Nelson begins the data manipulation in his sleep. Photoshopping, rearranging, blurring memory and desire, airbrushing in and out, all this is second nature. He can do this with his eyes shut. He has won awards.

  Then he begins to do it by day for consolation and private pleasure.

  He takes Paul’s jpeg of Beatrice in her boudoir and adds himself: first as shadowy (but benevolent) watcher; then as bedside admirer holding her hand, then as lover. He sets up tripod and digital camera in his own apartment and takes multiple snapshots of himself. He experiments with fitting his face onto other bodies: Brad Pitt’s body; George Clooney’s; Hugh Jackman’s. He arranges himself on the bed beside Beatrice, one hand draped o
ver her right breast. After much thought and indecision, he emails one of these jpegs to Paul. He types in the subject heading: Name my price? We could trade? Really? In the message he writes: No trade necessary. Haven’t you noticed? It’s Woody Allen who always gets the girl, but you’ll never understand why. Explanation attached.

  This was the image forwarded – from an unidentified source – to local police.

  The death of Beatrice was extraordinarily bloody. A blunt weapon was used, forensics said; a baseball bat, or perhaps the side of an axe. There were no finger-prints, and no weapon was found, but the police had photographs in full inglorious color. These, it transpired, had been printed off at three different Kinko stores and mailed in from postal boxes on assorted street corners. The photographs showed the park, the tree, the stalker, the building opposite, the woman on the balcony. Both the stalker and the woman were clearly identifiable when the images were enlarged.

  ‘But I’ve never been in the building,’ Nelson protested at the time of his arrest. ‘I’ve never even known her real name.’

  ‘Is that so?’ the prosecutor asked, months later, displaying on a screen for the jury both the email and the attachment that Nelson had sent to Paul.

  Paul – and others – testified to a history of aberrant behaviour on Nelson’s part.

  Defense counsel promised: ‘We will appeal,’ but added, sotto voce, to the client: ‘This doesn’t look good, Nelson. This doesn’t look good. What is any sane person to think when you manipulate images like that?’

  And Nelson knows, despite the fact that he has never been inside the apartment of Beata Beatrix, that he is guilty and should be punished.

  Forecast: Turbulence

  ‘Hey!’ Stacey yells, iPhone to one ear and an index finger pressed hard against the other. ‘Can you guys turn that down?’

  ‘How can you stand it?’ her mother asks. ‘That’s not music, it’s unbearable noise.’

  ‘Can you hang on a minute, Mom?’

  Stacey signals to the friends in her room who have been passing a joint around. ‘It’s my mom,’ she says, pressing her phone into a pillow. She screws up her face and rolls her eyes to indicate long-suffering ennui of the affectionate familial kind. ‘Gotta deal with this.’

  Everyone groans sympathetically, gathering up laptops, iPods, and books. No problem, they signal.

  Kelly, with her soulful eyes, says: ‘I do hope it’s not bad news about your dad.’

  And from Liz: ‘I don’t know how you can bear to watch the news. I’d be a wreck.’

  ‘Mom?’ Stacey says. ‘Can I call you back in five minutes?’ And to her friends she says: ‘Cross your fingers for me.’

  ‘I know this is going to sound sick,’ Elise says – she is a Media Arts major who already has an internship with local TV – ‘but I have to say I hope it doesn’t end completely before I get assigned to Kabul. I want to be embedded for ABC.’

  Everyone is shocked. That is sick sick sick, they tell Elise. More troops have to die just so you can reach for your brass ring?

  ‘But I want to be Martha Raddatz,’ Elise protests.

  With your eye makeup? they say scornfully. Who are you kidding? You want to be Diane Sawyer or Christiane Amanpour.

  ‘They are all my role models,’ Elise insists, aggrieved. ‘Freedom of the press is one of the things we’re fighting for.’

  Enough already, they say. So if an IED gets Stacey’s dad, we can thank you for having such pure goals.

  ‘Oh shit, Stace,’ Elise says. ‘I wasn’t thinking … I guess that was a dumb thing to say.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Stacey says. ‘Listen, can you all scram? I gotta talk to my mom in case she’s had a call from Army HQ.’

  See you, they say.

  Kelly comes back with the half-smoked hand-rolled toke. ‘You probably need this.’

  ‘At the moment, yeah. Thanks.’

  ‘End’s in sight, remember. The President’s bringing them home.’

  ‘Right,’ Stacey says.

  ‘Only combat troops for now, I know that, not backup. But your dad’s in combat, right?

  ‘Yeah. He’s in combat. Front lines.’

  It’s not a lie. You could say that, Stacey thinks. She accepts a reassuring hug and waves Kelly out. She inhales some weed deeply and slowly before she lifts her iPhone and hits redial. ‘Sorry, Mom. Had a bunch of friends in my room and couldn’t get rid of them. What’s up?’

  ‘Are you sitting down?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m on my bed. Is this bad?’

  ‘I think you’ll need to be sitting down.’

  Stacey’s heart misses a beat and then kicks into an erratic stumble-run. ‘Uh oh,’ she says.

  ‘Your father has made contact.’

  Stacey takes a long suck at the joint. Her father has made no contact for five years, not since his military discharge, not since he became someone else. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Okay, I guess, considering. He’s had the last of his surgeries, he says. He still has to take heaps of medication.’

  ‘I’ve been saying he’s still in Afghanistan. Saves explaining too much, you know?’

  There is a long silence. ‘Well,’ her mother sighs, ‘we’ve always been just a phone call away. We never put ourselves out of reach.’

  ‘No,’ Stacey says. ‘We didn’t.’ It was, in fact, the other way around. After his discharge, her father had written from a military hospital in Germany. He said that he wanted a divorce, that he was leaving his wife and daughter, that he had been wanting to do so for years, that for the time being, he did not want to see them again. There was a woman, another woman, who’d been haunting him. For years, she had been vivid in his imagination. She’d taken up residence there, permanent residence. He could no longer dislodge her.

  ‘This isn’t your fault, Mom.’

  ‘It’s like putting together a puzzle,’ her mother says in a bewildered way. ‘Little things come back … Little things that didn’t quite add up.’

  ‘No one could have seen this coming, Mom.’

  ‘It must be the war. It’s messed with his head.’

  Stacey has nothing to say to this.

  ‘But then sometimes,’ her mother says, ‘it frightens me that I must have been living in total denial for years. And it frightens me that I, you know, still miss him, that I still—’

  ‘I don’t,’ Stacey says. ‘I’m too angry with him.’

  ‘He’s been in hell, Stacey.’

  ‘So have we.’

  ‘Not his kind of hell. We have to make allowances, Stace.’

  ‘I’ve tried,’ Stacey says.

  ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘He says it’s a condition of continuing to pay your tuition.’

  ‘Shit,’ Stacey says.

  ‘Please don’t use that kind of language, Stacey. It distresses me.’

  ‘Sorry, Mom. But I can’t see him. I can’t handle it.’

  ‘Then he says he’ll come calling on you.’

  ‘What?!’ Stacey feels nothing but panic. ‘Tell him, not here, okay? Not on campus. Is he still in New York? Tell him I’ll come up and meet him there.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘Oh shit, what?’

  ‘Stacey, please …’

  ‘Sorry. What does he want?’

  ‘The thing is, he’s here in town, staying at the Wayside Inn. Apparently he checked in last night. I was still drinking my coffee this morning when the doorbell rang and there he was, on the front porch, with his car in the drive. He gave me no kind of warning whatsoever.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Mom!’

  ‘Stacey, please.’

  ‘Was he—? Was it, like … I mean how did he look? Like before or like after?’

  ‘Like after.’

  ‘Oh, Mom!’ Stacey focuses on the posters taped to her wall but they seem to move. They will not stay in their fixed places. They seem to be changing
shape. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘It was weird. And then it was just sad, Stacey. Unbelievably sad. I don’t know what else to say.’

  ‘Did anyone see him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I kind of pulled him inside.’

  ‘What about at the Inn? Did they recognise him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What name did he register under?’

  ‘Ours. He says he has no reason to be ashamed. It’s his name, after all. And he says he wants to take you out to dinner.’

  Stacey’s breathing turns rapid and choppy. She has trouble getting air into her lungs. ‘When?’ she gasps. She begins to cough and can’t stop. ‘You can’t let him come here. Mom, promise me you won’t let him come here. I’ll drive home. Tell him to stay where he is. I’ll meet him at the Wayside Inn.’ Stacey feels as though her brain is on amphetamines. She has a test in two days. She’ll have to make a two-hour drive upstate, skip classes, stay overnight, drive back. This is not the best way to prepare for a critical test – she needs an A – but the alternative … well, the alternative is unthinkable.

  ‘I haven’t given you the bad news yet,’ her mother says.

  Stacey holds her breath.

  ‘Stacey? Are you still there?’

  Stacey grunts, the only sound she can manage.

  ‘He told me he dropped in to see the Wilkinsons, and they’re throwing a “Welcome Back” cocktail party for him this Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Fuck! I’m sorry, Mom, but there’s no other word for it. How dare they?’

  ‘I got an email from Sally Wilkinson this afternoon. An invitation. I’m going to read it to you. We think this is such a brave thing to do and we want to celebrate. We do hope you’ll come. We’re assuming Stacey will be home for the weekend and we hope she’ll come too.’

  ‘Those slimy vicious hypocritical self-righteous Republicans! I can just picture them gloating over their martinis.’

  ‘Well, that’s not quite fair, Stacey. They’re good people, generous people. They were very kind to me when, you know …’