And that's when I hear the singing.
It's soft, high, lilting. My hands drop to my sides. I let #58 fall to the floor.
I follow the singing up the stairs. It's coming from the bedroom. I open the door. Artie's bed is empty. The sheets are thrown back, as if Artie has been healed, miraculously, and has gone to the office.
But the singing isn't coming from the bedroom. It's coming from the master bathroom. The male nurse is standing by the bathroom door. He looks a little bewildered, not sure of his role here. I nod to him. He nods back.
"I'm standing by," he says, "to help him in and out of the tub."
But this doesn't explain the singing. I walk through the bedroom to the bathroom door, which is cracked just enough for me to see Artie's back. He's sitting in the tub, and it's Elspa's voice—a beautiful voice—rising up from somewhere deep inside her. She's there, kneeling beside the tub, singing softly. I don't recognize the song. She dips a sponge in the bathwater and squeezes it out over Artie's back. There's nothing the least bit sexual going on. No eroticism. Only tenderness—like a mother taking care of a child with a high fever. This takes my breath. The moment has a simplistic beauty. A purity.
My chest is tight—a sharp pain. I feel light-headed again and walk unsteadily out of the room, down the stairs, and to the liquor cabinet in the kitchen. It's too bright, too loud, too airy. The ceilings are too high. I feel tiny. My hands work quickly. The ice clinks in the glass. It's a lonesome sound.
The phone rings. I answer it. Lindsay starts talking full-tilt, so fast I can only make out the words—someone might get fired, Danbury? And there's a client who might drop us? One of the partners is freaking out? I can't make sense of any of it.
"It'll all work out," I tell her. "Just don't get involved emotionally. Just don't take things personally. I can't talk right now."
But she forges on about Danbury almost getting fired and the possibility of a small promotion and back to the partner again.
"I can't talk right now," I tell her. "Don't take this personally, Lindsay, but, here, let me show you how to disconnect." And I hang up the phone and stand there.
Elspa walks in and pulls a salad out of the fridge. The salad is news to me. I've never seen it before.
"You want some?" she asks. "I made plenty."
"No."
She grabs a small bowl and starts fixing her own. "He's so thin. I wasn't prepared for that."
I don't say anything.
"But he's got his mind. It's all there. Still Artie."
"Still Artie."
Elspa starts eating heartily. "You sure you don't want anything?"
"No, thanks."
She talks while chewing. "He was telling me this story about this one time—"
I hold up my hand. "I don't want to hear the story."
Elspa freezes, then continues to eat. "Okay."
It hits me then that I don't feel like a burglar—quite the opposite. I feel stolen from. "That was my moment up there."
"Excuse me?"
"Bathing him. That's what I'm supposed to do, and you stole it."
"I didn't mean to . . ."
"Forget it."
Elspa puts down her fork. She looks at me. Her brown eyes are gentle. "He cheated on you, right? That's why you hate him. How many?"
"He had lots of women before I met him, and I didn't know it but he kept two of them—souvenirs."
"He isn't good at good-byes."
"That's a nice way to put it," I say, taking a moment to consider how much I don't appreciate that reading of things. "And then he added a third. It was the third one I found out about and then the other two. When was the last time you were with him?" This is a fair question. I ask it boldly enough.
But she doesn't seem caught off guard, only matter-of-fact. "Before he met you. I started working in one of his restaurants when I was really young." She still seems young. "Gosh, it's been, like, six years since I smelled like Italian food all the time. Artie came in to spot-check. It wasn't that kind of relationship though. I mean, I'm not really one of his old girlfriends or anything. Artie was more like a father. He helped me through a hard time." She pauses, still pained by some memory there.
I'm not sure that I buy it. "More like a father?" I ask.
"It was a long time ago," she says. "I survived— because of Artie."
She's so earnest that it's hard not to believe her. She has a face that seems completely open—as if too naive to lie.
Her expression lightens. "He told me a lot of stories today about you, how you met, your wedding. It's all so beautiful. But I like the story about the bird on the porch the best."
"I remember that, vaguely."
"You saved the bird."
"It was beating around the shutters of a friend's guesthouse, not long after we met. Artie's a coward in many ways. He was afraid of birds indoors. He hates to fly, too, on planes. I opened the right window, that's all." But now I see it in my mind and everything seemed so right then, so perfect. Artie walked up behind me, wrapped his arms around me, and the bird flitted off into the trees.
"Sometimes that's all it takes, opening the right window," Elspa says.
And I like her, just then, just like that. I need someone like this—someone not afraid to enlarge the moment.
"When he was telling that story," she says, "he was so alive I forgot he was dying."
I wonder how, exactly, Artie saved her life. I imagine her in her waitress uniform, the red shirt and nametag, the checkered apron, holding her tray of drinks. I wonder why she's really come here and why she loves him so much. I walk over to the large salad bowl, pick up a cherry tomato, and eat it. It's tart and sweet in my mouth. She would think that Artie deserves to see his son before he dies, wouldn't she? She's right. Because even if Artie has done a lot of things all wrong in his life, he deserves to know his son. Isn't that an inalienable right of parenthood? And, more important, John Bessom—that mess of a young man—deserves to know his father.
"I want you to do me a favor," I say.
She looks up at me, expectantly. "You do?"
Chapter Ten
Love Is as Love Does—but Sometimes It's Abstract, Blue, and Obscene
While Elspa finishes eating, I call my mother on the phone in the guest bedroom. I feel like I need to run this by someone. But as I explain my plan—which I do thoroughly, I might add—she's still confused. I start over again. "The problems are clear. I want Artie to meet his son. I want his son to meet Artie. But I want Artie to be the one to tell him that he's his father and that he's dying. That's his job, not mine. So, I was thinking, how do we get the two to meet? And I came up with this perfect plan."
"They meet through a mattress?" my mother asks weakly.
"For the hundredth time, yes! A mattress!"
"Now let me see if I get this: You don't want to be the one to talk John Bessom into anything. Why's that again?"
"Never mind that. It isn't important." I don't want to have to explain that if he hit on me anymore and then found out that I was his stepmother, that would be, well, uncomfortable.
"Okay. Never mind that," my mother says. "But you're going to get this girl who just showed up, who loves Artie because he saved her life, to talk John Bessom into delivering a mattress to the house himself?"
"Exactly."
"Well, I don't get all of the ins and outs, but it does seem like a plan. And I'm glad you're doing something. I think it's healthy for you to be in motion. I'll stop by in a bit and make sure everything's okay with Artie while you're gone."
"Thanks."
Shortly thereafter, on the way to Bessom's Bedding Boutique, I tell Elspa what to say. I give her a script that will play on John's need to sell things more important than mattresses. She nods along. "Got it. Right. Okay."
And then the conversation dies, and it's just the two of us in a car. She leans forward to fiddle with the radio.
"What do you do, Elspa?"
"I'm an artist."
"Ah, Artie likes artists." He liked the photographs I used to do. He'd always encouraged me to find time to stick with it. "What kind of art?"
"Sculpture."
"What do you sculpt?"
"Men, mostly. Parts of them. I let them choose."
"And Artie? Don't tell me what part he chose. Is it the part I'm thinking of?"
"He had a good sense of humor. He insisted. But it was all from my imagination. I made it abstract. And blue."
"Abstract and blue. Huh." I suddenly see a sculpture of Artie's penis, blue and misshapen. Abstract how, I wonder. All from her imagination? "I'd love to see it sometime," I tell her. It doesn't matter if it's from her imagination or not. It's intimate, and even though she's told me that she and Artie were together before Artie and I even met, and that they didn't have a sexual relationship, it still stings. The jealousy is always just below the surface now. I couldn't have sung to Artie while giving him a bath. I'm too angry for that. My anger is as deep in me right now as Elspa's song is deep in her.
"Really?" Elspa asks.
"Of course," I say.
There's a pause. I'm not sure if she knows how to read my tone. I'm not sure if I know how it should be read.
"It's raining." Elspa gestures toward the water-smeared windshield, beads crawling toward the roof. I don't say anything. I twist on the wipers. They squeak and bump across the glass. I'll need to get new ones.
We pull up to Bessom's just as John is locking up the front door. He's talking to a man in a dark suit, who doesn't look like he's buying a mattress. The man has an umbrella, and he looks indifferent, cool, almost British. John's got a newspaper propped over his head. It obviously isn't a pleasant conversation. John holds up his hand as if to say, Let's put this on hold. We're gentlemen here.
I crack open my window three inches.
The man in the dark suit says, "We need to get on this, Mr. Bessom."
"I know," John says.
The man walks off in one direction, and John starts to head off in the other. The rain has slowed a little. He shakes his newspaper. I nudge Elspa and she steps out of the passenger door of the car. I watch her cross in front.
"I need a mattress," she says.
"I've closed up already."
"It's an emergency."
"An emergency mattress? Look, my delivery truck has broken down two towns over and—"
"This mattress is for a father," Elspa says, just as I've told her. "A dying father. His son is going to come and see him before he dies and the mattress should be nice." I'm proud of her. Her high school drama teacher would be proud of her.
"Well, I'm closed up, see."
"I don't really want you to sell me a mattress. I want you to sell a dying man's peace. I want you to sell me a deathbed scene. I want you to sell me a father and son who make amends before the father dies."
John smiles at Elspa, then he looks behind her into the car at me. He recognizes me from earlier, and I can tell from his eyes that he knows I've told this young woman what kind of lines he might fall for. He waves. I fiddle with the ashtray.
"A father and son? I'm a sucker for a good deathbed scene, I guess. You'll need a pretty nice mattress for that. Top dollar."
*
Mercifully, the rain lets up. John has lashed the plastic-wrapped mattress to the roof, and he and Elspa hold on to it through the windows on either side of the car. The mattress is flapping.
"So, do you just sleep in your shop all day?" I ask.
"I wasn't sleeping. I was modeling."
"It looked like sleeping to me."
"I'm a very good model."
"Does the modeling sell a lot of mattresses?" Elspa asks.
"He doesn't sell mattresses. He sells sleep and dreams and sex," I add.
"Does it sell a lot of sleep and dreams and sex?" she asks.
"Not too much. This is just one of my businesses, though. I'm an entrepreneur with a wide variety of current projects."
"Current projects?" I ask.
He doesn't follow up. Instead he looks out the window, checks the challenged mattress, that real estate of sleep and dreams and sex. We continue through a tollbooth and get a skeptical look from the operator, like she's seen a few mattresses fly off car roofs. She's a little territorial, too, a look that says: You're bringing that onto my highway? I can ignore it though. My plan seems to be working.
We pull into the neighborhood and start the suburban wind through the dimly lit streets.
"If you don't mind me asking, who's dying?"
Before I have a chance to make something up—which is my instinct, for some reason—Elspa says, "Her husband."
"I'm sorry," John says. "I'm very sorry to hear that."
There's a catch in his voice that seems to reveal he's been through some loss of his own. We all have our losses.
I turn the corner onto my street. I see the house lit up like Christmas, every light on, and an ambulance parked out front, the red lights circling. A spiked shiver runs through me. The front door is open. Light spills onto the lawn and across my mother's back where she's standing, arms crossed, staring down the driveway.
"It's too soon," I say in an urgent whisper. "Not yet. We aren't finished!"
"What is it?" John asks.
Elspa is saying, "No, no, no, no."
Just before we reach the driveway, I stop the car and jump out. The car rolls forward, bumps the curb. I knock my head ducking back inside to throw it into park. I drop the keys in the driveway and search my mother's face. She just shakes her head. "I don't know what happened! I called 911!"
I begin to breathe heavily like I'm about to hyperventilate. I stagger toward the house and stop on the porch. Elspa passes me on the run.
I turn to look at John Bessom, who stands next to the car and the mattress. He doesn't undo the straps. I feel sorry for him. He doesn't know what he's in the midst of, what he's come too late for. I'm stalled here on the porch, breathing in sharp gulps.
"And so you must be the son. I'm so sorry," my mother says to John.
I take a woozy step toward them, just another step that comes too late, but then I realize this is the way it's got to unfold. My mother looks calm now. She'll do this well. She takes his hand, puts her arm around him, maternally. John looks like a kid all of a sudden.
"They're trying to save your father," she says. "But I don't know . . ."
John is confused. He stares up at the lit bedroom window. "My father?" he asks. "Arthur Shoreman?"
"Yes," my mother says, "Artie."
Artie isn't dead yet. They're trying to save him. I run through the front door and up the stairs. Arthur Shoreman, I hear my mind repeat. Arthur Shoreman. I hate the formality of it. The way it sounds like a name on a form, a death certificate. Not yet, I tell myself. Not yet.
I turn into the bedroom. Artie is lying on the bed, an EMT on either side speaking in code, as they do. There's machinery. Are they running an EKG in here? I can't see Artie's face.
The male nurse stands back, looking on.
Elspa is shouting, "Why don't you fucking do something?" Panic-stricken, she falls on top of the bedside table, swiping everything on it to the ground.
"Get her out of here," one of the EMTs yells.
I grab her arms, then pull her to me and out into the hallway. I hold her and rock her. She calms down and grasps onto me, weeping.
"If he dies, I'll die!" she says.
"No, you won't," I tell her.
"I won't be able to make it through this," she says.
I can't begin to comprehend that Artie might be dying already, that it may only be his body lying on the bed. I have no idea how long I hold Elspa like this, but I realize this is the first time I've really been there for someone else for a very long time.
And then I hear Artie's voice. "Hey, back off!" he shouts.
And then one of the EMTs says, "That's good to hear!"
Elspa hugs me tighter.
"He's back," I whisper.
Chapter Eleven
Sometimes It's Hard to Figure Out What Happens When Your Eyes Are Wide Open
All that follows is a little surreal.
The EMTs are still bustling around Artie, joking some now. I picture Artie's son still out on the lawn, the mattress, I assume, still strapped to the roof of the car. Elspa can't stop crying even though Artie is miraculously alive. I lean through the bedroom doorway, one arm still around her. "He's really back?" I ask the EMTs. "He's all right?"
"He was never gone, ma'am," says the one with the boxy back. "False alarm. Tension. Indigestion. His heart problems are serious, as you know, but he's doing just fine."
"Hear that?" I repeat for Elspa's sake. "False alarm. Tension. Indigestion."
Artie rolls his head toward me. His eyes are moist and he smiles nervously. "Is she gone?" he asks.
"What?" I ask. "Who?" I wonder if he's talking about Elspa. This strikes me as an odd thing to say. I wonder if he's still out of it. And then he flinches and shuts his eyes.
"False alarm?" a woman asks, in a strangely familiar voice. She's suddenly standing at my shoulder—a tall, elegant woman, in her early fifties, wearing a pale blue fitted dress and smoking a cigarette. She's pretty in a shrewd-looking way—arched eyebrows, high cheekbones. Her shoulder-length brown hair is pulled back in a silver clip at the base of her neck.
"Who are you?" I ask.
"I'm Eleanor," she says, as if this clarifies everything.
I simply stare at her, shaking my head. My ears are buzzing. Artie almost died, but now he's alive.
"You invited me," the woman explains patiently. "I thought I just wanted Artie to rot in hell, but then I decided that I wanted to see him before he does." She brushes something from her skirt. Ah, yes, I remember the voice now—the woman I called late that drunken night who had the oh-so-sweet message for Artie. Here she is. Another one of Artie's sweethearts—a lovely entrance. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if Artie were able to make peace with his past—all of it—before he died?" she adds.
My Husband's Sweethearts Page 6
