Bodies and Souls

by Nancy Thayer

  “I’m starving,” she said. “Aren’t you? I could eat a horse.” She nuzzled into his shirt and bit his tummy, then worked her mouth down.

  “Hey,” he said, and bent down and bit her back. He pulled her face to his and kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her neck, but Liza tossed her head away from him, laughing, and cried, “Food! I need food!”

  So he pulled her to her feet and they hurried, arms wrapped around each other, down the long carpeted hall to the kitchen. Johnny turned on the radio and found a station that played rock music. He opened two bottles of British ale, put dill and garlic pickles on a plate. Liza buttered thin rye bread, then piled slivers of rare roast beef on top, and covered it with chunks of Boursin cheese, then melted it all under the broiler. Finally they sat across from each other at the kitchen table, eating the sandwiches, licking the dripping butter and cheese from their fingers.

  “I think we should leave today,” Liza said when she had almost finished her sandwich. “I think we should go now—just throw our things in a suitcase and go.”

  “I don’t have any clothes with me,” Johnny said. “And I can’t just go home and pack up my stuff—”

  “Never mind about clothes,” Liza said. “We’ll fly to New York. We’ll buy you a whole new wardrobe. We’ll go someplace where it’s hot and you won’t need anything but shorts—”

  “Let’s go to Mexico,” Johnny said, for her enthusiasm was contagious and his second ale combined with his memories of the morning made him feel fervently young and alive, and eager to express this youth, this life, in some dramatic way. “Let’s go to Acapulco. We’ll just swim in the ocean, we won’t need any clothes at all.”

  “Yes, Mexico,” Liza said. “We’ll swim in the ocean, we’ll get lost in the crowds, no one will ever find us!”

  “If I can’t take any clothes, you can’t, either,” Johnny said.

  “All right,” Liza said. “Fine. But I will have to pack some necessities—jewelry, money, traveler’s checks, checkbooks, and, my darling, birth-control pills—it won’t take long.”

  They were childish, triumphant, like adolescents hurrying to pull off a trick and escape. They left the dishes on the table and went rapidly through the house. Liza swooped up what she needed and threw it into a canvas-and-leather traveling bag. This was the sort of thing she loved to do, this was the sort of thing she was born to do—wild, brash, extravagant acts of escape—and she glowed as she moved. Johnny followed her about, nearly ill with excitement, caught up in the momentum, needing to be caught up in the momentum so he wouldn’t stop to think. It seemed to him that if he could just move fast enough and not lose courage, he could escape the fate of Wilbur Wilson and every other human being in this town. He could run away from death. He could make certain that he would never keel over in the entry of a church or nearly die in front of an entire town.

  “Ready!” Liza called at last, and Johnny called, “Wait!” He ran back to the kitchen and grabbed a six-pack of ale and a bottle opener, thinking himself immensely clever and responsible for remembering the bottle opener. They went out the door, slamming it with gusto, and threw the canvas bag into the back of the Cadillac, and jumped in.

  “I’ll drive,” Liza said. “I know the road from here to the Hartford airport like the back of my hand—like the front of your hand!”

  Johnny laughed and opened an ale and the golden foam shot up and out of the bottle, cascading down over his slacks and her silk dress. They laughed at this, and it did seem right, as if the beer had caught their mood and was spontaneous, explosive, mischievous, like them. Johnny turned the car radio to a rock station, and sang loudly to the songs he knew. From time to time he reached across the seat of the Cadillac to press kisses onto Liza’s face, neck, arms, and breasts.

  “My hair’s a mess!” Liza yelled at one point, when they had stopped at a toll booth on the turnpike and she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. “I look insane, Johnny! Why didn’t you tell me! Here, trade places with me. You drive while I fix my hair.”

  “Oh, no,” Johnny said. “Huh-uh. You drive. Leave your hair like that. It looks great. You look like you just finished making love. You look all disheveled and—handled.”

  She smiled at him. “Keep it up,” she said, “you’ve got the potential to develop into a truly decadent person.”

  “Good,” Johnny said. “That’s exactly what I want to be.” As he spoke, he realized that what he said was absolutely true. He felt he had discovered a genius within himself for a vocation his parents had never told him existed. He had never been trained for this new life—and yet, he was sure, it would suit him very well.

  Liza had turned the heater on against the October chill, and the car filled with warm air that circulated the aroma of their two bodies and the perfume of those bodies and the smell of spilled ale through the car. They abandoned the Cadillac in the airport’s long-term parking lot, and within two hours of making love in the library, within two and a half hours of Wilbur Wilson’s heart attack, they were seated on a plane to New York.

  At that moment, Peter Taylor was standing outside his own house, and his eyes were lifted upward. He was studying the gutters. He had just returned from the hospital, and had changed into his favorite old khaki pants, a plaid flannel shirt, and a pair of blue-and-white and slightly decomposing sneakers. This side of the house was sheltered by an enormous old catalpa tree which Peter threatened repeatedly to have cut down. It had beautiful fragrant flowers in the spring, white petals streaked with pink and fluted lacily around the edges. When the children were little, they put a flower on each finger and paraded around pretending they were little old ladies wearing gloves. Once a year, for about two weeks, the tree was spectacular with these flowers, but at almost every other moment of the year, it was a trial. After the trumpet-shaped blossoms bloomed, they shriveled and fell, clogging the gutters along this side of the house. Then the tree sprouted long skinny pods, like wooden string beans, which also fell, with a dry clattery sound, into the gutters. Now it was fall and the giant heart-shaped leaves were falling—catalpas seemed to be the last trees to bloom and the first to lose their leaves. They were clogging the gutter again. If Peter didn’t get the gutter cleaned out soon, the first strong rain that came would cause the gutters to overflow, making brown streaks down the house, and worse, causing all the water to back up and flood down just where the back door opened, so the Taylor family would have to forge through a giant puddle just to get out of the house.

  Probably the gutters weren’t crucially full yet, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  Besides, Peter was anxious and worried and full of a sense of dread. He had that all-wired-up feeling. He needed right now to be outside in the fresh air, working physically, on a concrete, manageable problem. Not for the first time he wished he had a woodlot so that he could go cut fireplace wood with a bow saw until he panted and sweated with exhaustion and his mind was worked clean of all images but those of the splintering wood.

  He had been dissatisfied this morning in church. Then there had been the crisis with Wilbur. Now, just a few short hours later, he wished he’d had the sensitivity to interpret the atmosphere of his church more accurately. He felt very much now as he had often felt as a parent who considered his child spoiled and bad-tempered only to discover that the child was in fact exhibiting the early signs of an illness. He felt guilty, as if he’d been dense. But then, he told himself, what good would it have done if he had been anxious? It would have changed nothing.

  Will came out of the house and toward his father.

  “Michael’s not in his room,” he said. “I don’t know where he is. He split right after church. Want me to help with the ladder?”

  Peter looked at his younger son. Will at thirteen was short and actually a little puny for his age, but for just that reason it wouldn’t do to refuse his offer of help with the ladder. He would have preferred it, though, if his older son, who was so large and strong and graceful with this sort
of thing, had had the thoughtfulness to stick around. Peter had told the family at breakfast this morning what he hoped to accomplish in the afternoon. The only ladder they had was an old-fashioned wooden one, cumbersome and heavy. He and Will would manage to carry it from the garage and get it propped up against the house, but Peter wasn’t thrilled about climbing up to the top of the second floor—where the roof rose in a peak it was a good forty feet from the ground—with only his ninety-five-pound son bracing the ladder. Where was Michael? Well, Peter would climb the ladder with a superstitious sense of security: so much else had gone wrong today that he couldn’t believe the ladder would slip and he would fall, too.

  “Yeah, Will, let’s get the ladder,” he said. He followed his son into the garage and for a few moments was totally occupied, trying to disengage the old relic of a ladder from the garden hoses and bikes and ski poles and garden tools in the garage. Why was their garage so untidy? Just why on earth had anyone seen fit to keep three broken hockey sticks? “How did this place get to be such a mess?” he said.

  Will shrugged. “I don’t know, Dad. It’s always been like this.”

  “Well, it’s terrible!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Will said, hefting his end of the ladder and giving it a tug. “I think it’s pretty normal—for a garage. All the other garages I’ve seen look pretty much like ours.”

  “What makes you such an authority on garages?” Peter asked, amused and touched by his son’s good nature. And the boy was surprisingly strong; he was certainly carrying his end of the ladder well.

  “You’d be surprised,” Will said. “I must spend as much time in garages as in living rooms. More. You know, Sam’s building a go-cart, his brother’s helping him. It’s neat. Chet Elliott gave them a used lawn mower engine. And we found three great old wheels out at the dump and—”

  “You go out to the dump much?” Peter asked.

  “Yeah, it’s really neat there. You’d be surprised at the things you can find. People throw out the best stuff!”

  They carried the ladder to the side of the house, Will talking all the way. Lord, Peter thought, if he could somehow just siphon off an ounce of this son’s enthusiasm for life and inject it into Michael, what a help that would be! They managed to get the ladder propped up against the house.

  “Now you stand there like this,” Peter said, “and brace the ladder.”

  “Sure, Dad,” Will said.

  Peter climbed up the ladder, and Will kept on talking about Sam’s go-cart, yelling so his father could hear. Thank God, Peter thought, as he reached the top and peered into his leaf-packed gutters. Thank God for the reality of these hard white clapboards and his son’s chattering optimism. Peter reached into the gutter and grabbed up a handful of crackly brown leaves. They crumbled in his fist and he tossed them to the ground.

  “Want me to get a trash bag, Dad?” Will called up.

  “Not yet,” Peter said. “You stay down there and hold the ladder.”

  Actually the ladder would probably do fine without Will; it was Peter who needed the bracing presence of his son. He scooped up leaves, tossed them into the air, scooped again. The world looked fine from up here, clear, clean, organized. From this vantage point, as he half stood, half lay against the ladder, he could look down into his daughter’s bedroom. She had placed her white desk under the window and arranged in perfect symmetry her pens and pencils, school notebooks and pink-and-gold diary, cat statues and a little shellacked wooden box holding—what?—paper clips, rubber bands? Lucy was such a tidy child. The window frame enclosed the scene so that it looked like a picture: Child’s Desk, by Lucy Taylor.

  Seen this way, from the outside, through glass, framed by wood, her desk took on the features of an oil painting, a real still life, captured as if for eternity. What elegance the objects of ordinary life had when isolated and bordered in this way, Peter thought, and he hoped that as Wilbur Wilson lay in the hospital, drifting helplessly through unknown countries of pain and strangeness, scenes like this from his own life would pass by him, Alice-in-Wonderland-like, for him to see, remember, take comfort from.

  By the time Peter had taken off his vestments and arranged plans with Patricia and gotten to the hospital, Wilbur was already in the coronary care ward, being cared for by Southmark’s best cardiac specialist. Peter joined Norma and Ron Bennett and the six or seven others who had come to help Norma in her vigil in the waiting room on the fourth floor. The doctors were working on him, people told Peter. It would be five or six hours before they would know for sure what his condition would be. But one thing was certain: he was alive, and in much better shape than he would have been if Liza Howard had not come to his aid so quickly. “Imagine that woman knowing a thing like CPR,” everyone kept repeating, “just imagine.” Peter sat with Norma, talking with her, holding her hand. Then he led them all in a prayer for Wilbur’s quick return to health.

  Norma seemed fine, even self-possessed, although of course almost an hour had gone by since the attack, and what Norma was feeling was probably tempered by exhaustion and relief.

  “I’ve asked Bertha to bring me my knitting,” she told Peter. “I’ll be okay if I can just get my hands on my knitting. I never was very good at just sitting still and waiting.”

  “Yes,” Peter said, “I think this kind of waiting is the hardest kind of work we can do.” But then he thought of Wilbur, lying near death on his hospital bed, and knew that Wilbur’s work was even harder: he had to fight to live. “Norma,” he said, “I’ll stay here with you as long as you want me.”

  Norma patted his hand, as if she were comforting him, and smiled. “Peter, that’s very kind of you. But go on home. They told me he was conscious for a few moments. He’s doing fine. And I’ve got plenty of other people here to keep me company. I just feel certain I won’t be needing you in any official capacity today. But I am grateful you came. Thank you.”

  It was true that Norma didn’t need Peter for company. As he rose to go, several other friends crowded into the little room. There weren’t enough chairs to go around.

  “Oh, Norma,” one woman said, and bent to embrace her. “I’m so sorry.”

  But Norma pulled back. “Don’t cry yet,” she said. “Don’t be so sorry just yet. He’s alive. Is Bertha here yet? Did she bring my knitting?”

  Peter drove home, thinking of Wilbur and what a loss it would be to everyone if he died. Wilbur provided a strong, solid streak of color in the pattern of Londonton’s people, and if he died, that particular part of the daily design of their lives would fade, would cause a rough and obvious absence. But maybe he would not die. Norma was a tough old soul, and he admired her for her staunch refusal to grieve a moment too soon. Peter had spent many hours in similar situations, trying to comfort a person whose loved one lay ill. He had thought, as a young minister, that it would get easier as he grew older and more experienced, that he would learn the right things to say and do. Well, he hoped he had improved, was less clumsy, more sensitive, more articulate. He was by now fairly good at comforting. But it never got any easier for him in the privacy of his own heart and soul. Remembrances of former griefs did not lessen the pain of new ones. Fear and pain were always the same: intolerable. And beside the hulking shadow of death, everything else paled.

  So the cold metal of the gutter and the obdurate wood of his house were as satisfying to Peter’s touch as light and a cold hard floor to a man who has awakened from a nightmare. Peter climbed down the ladder and moved it along the house, then ascended once more, tossed down more crackling catalpa leaves.

  “Dad,” Will called up after a while, finally bored with his passive job, “you know I’ve got a soccer game at three-thirty.”

  “It’s not even three yet,” Peter called down. “You’ve got plenty of time.” Then, relenting: “Actually, Will, if you’ve got other things you want to do, go ahead. I’m just about done with this gutter, and I think the ladder’s okay by itself. I’ll get your mother to help me carry it back if you
’re not around.”

  “Great!” Will whooped, and raced off to the garage. He came out a second later, pedaling his ten-speed bike. “I’ll be at Sam’s for a while!” he yelled, and sped off around the corner.

  “Be careful! Slow down! Watch where you’re going!” Peter called; it was an old habit, hard to break. If Will didn’t know how to handle himself on a bike by now, he never would. Still, Peter felt that old anxiety begin to throb in his breast, a pulse by now as natural and familiar as that which carried his blood, a pulse which began the minute the children left the house on their own and didn’t stop until they were all safe in bed, tucked in, asleep. Why couldn’t children stay home? Why had anyone been crazy enough to invent cars? Why couldn’t everyone just walk?

  “Peter? Reynolds Houston wants you on the phone,” Patricia said, walking around the corner of the house just in time to be showered with a fall of crumbled leaves.

  “Sorry,” Peter called. “I didn’t see you coming. Tell him I’ll call him back. I just want to finish this gutter.”

  Patricia shook her head, trying to shake the leaves from her hair. She was wearing jeans and a bright red sweater. He loved her for that red sweater, that bright announcement of life.

  “Well, he sounded worried. He said it was important.”

  “Oh, great,” Peter grumbled, and began to climb down the ladder.

  “I’ll finish for you,” Patricia offered. “I don’t mind.”

  Peter jumped off the ladder and landed right in front of Patricia as she touched the wooden sides.

  “Look, don’t,” he said. “Okay? Don’t climb this damned ladder today, okay? I’ll finish it after I talk to Reynolds. Just go on in the house and cook or something. I’ve got my hands full without your falling off a ladder.”

  Patricia gave Peter her old squinty-eyed summing-up look. “You grouch,” she said. “You haven’t had lunch. You got out on this ladder right after going to the hospital. I’ll fix you a sandwich. Come in the kitchen and eat before you come back out. Do it for me; I hate it when you’re grumpy.”