* * *
In Mary Ann’s car I stared down at Ray’s finger, gray now where it wasn’t splotched with grease, the nail chewed to the quick. I felt tested and proven. After the moment of panic I’d picked up the finger and even considered washing it, but then I thought I might lose some of his nerve endings down the drain. We didn’t have ice so the finger was lying on a can of Dr Pepper, cold out of the machine, in a gallon Ziploc on my thigh. The middle finger had been sucked in the fan and exploded into the radiator fins. With mixed feelings I realized that just that morning I’d seen him flip the bird right-handed for the very last time.
It wasn’t cardiac arrest but unstable angina brought on by trauma and forty years of smoking. The prognosis was good, and the doctor congratulated me on my job with the finger, which they were sewing back on. Ray would have to stay overnight for monitoring. I’d called his ex-wife in Hartford, and she was on her way.
One nurse said we could see him and another said we had to wait. I didn’t care. Time had stopped and I was getting paid to be here with Mary Ann, my sudden lover and friend. The accident was tragic but not for us, and though we cared about Ray he wasn’t family, so we weren’t sedated with grief like the other couples in the ER waiting rooms, or moping in prayer for an end to suffering like the children of very old people, or confused and miserable like the uninsured sick waiting for one of the urgent-care doctors to see them. We were temporarily stranded, unneeded, smiled at by nurses and ignored by receptionists with phones pressed to their ears.
In the cafeteria we sat among the hospital staff, who were eating from trays or sipping coffee in their light green smocks. I was still jittery with the feeling you get as you pass a gory wreck on the highway, the sense that it easily could have been you, that impulse to change your ways and be more deserving of the unknowable quality of luck.
Mary Ann and I glanced around quietly as the room filled with late lunch and early dinner patrons. At one point she was engrossed in a conversation barely audible between the cashier and a woman in teddy bear scrubs. I couldn’t guess what Mary Ann was thinking, but her expressions ran a short spectrum from despairing to hopeful, and then she looked away, turning with apprehension when people stood up, as if they all had news for her.
“I hate hospitals,” I said.
She turned, startled, though I’d been careful not to speak loudly. She said my name and for a moment seemed confused. “It’s hard to believe you’re so young.” Then she looked out at the wide, doorless exit to the bright hallway. “Can I take you somewhere?” she said. Admittedly I was unnerved, and I asked if she wanted to finish her coffee first.
“You’re very protective,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“With the customer. You helped him sit down. You asked if he wanted water. How many guys were out there—five or six? And nobody else thought to help him.”
I sat back a moment. I was receiving images and sounds from the past hour as if they’d happened to me years ago. Yes, the gearheads weren’t worth a damn. I’d brought the customer a folding chair after he’d just watched his engine disfigure Ray, but I didn’t remember asking him anything.
“The last time I was here I was in labor,” Mary Ann said. “And I was thinking just now that I couldn’t see his face. He crowned … they have a mirror on the ceiling, but he wasn’t looking up. He was facing Nick. And then Nick said he was beautiful, and I started crying, and that just tightened everything up and out he shot, the rest of him, in one push. A fastball, Dr. Field said.” She smiled and touched her cheek where it was suddenly wet. “God, am I crying?” She dabbed napkins at her face. She seemed nervous and a little embarrassed, and I tried with my own smile to ease her worry.
In the maternity ward I shuffled beside her, ready to turn back at her first hesitation, but with her arms folded tight against her ribs, turning at every sound, she pressed on. The long window was coming up, and suddenly I remembered Nick asking one of the ambulance drivers which hospital Ray was going to. I’d expected Nick to take the bag from my shaking hand and follow them, but then he asked Mary Ann to drive me. In the middle of everything—Ray had just been loaded up, the customer was crumpled over holding his pale face in his hands—Nick had taken the time to find out what hospital, when Mary Ann could have asked, or I could have. There were three hospitals in Waterbury, and now I tried to understand what possible reason he could have for letting her go to the one where only a year before she’d given birth to Joey. There were no good answers.
Seeing the babies through the fingerprinted window, she was teary and laughing. I thought of April, how before she could speak she seemed to pulse with all she couldn’t say, as Mary Ann seemed to pulse now in her urgency.
I looked in. Some of the babies were black and some were white, but they all had the same big eyes, the slits too long on the sleeping ones. Their heads were half-deflated balloons and you couldn’t tell what final shape they’d take. They were girls and boys only by the colors of their hats, wrapped like burritos up to their necks, eight of them, most sleeping, one crying, one who seemed to have perfect vision as he watched his quivering hand.
Mary Ann pulled me close, her fisting hand untucking my shirt at the side. I remembered looking in April’s window at Mercy four years ago and making my melodramatic fourteen-year-old’s promises to stand in as April’s father. Their needs were enormous and dire. Take care of us, they said.
A large black woman in teddy bear scrubs came down the hall reading a clipboard. Mary Ann let go of me and pushed back from the window. The woman saw us over her glasses. “Girl?” she said. She opened her arms as Mary Ann stepped toward her. “I thought I told you the rules in here,” the nurse said as they hugged. “You bring that baby when you come by.”
“He’s with a sitter,” Mary Ann said, in a voice so even it shocked me.
“Well, go get him,” she said. “I can wait.”
Mary Ann laughed, or tried to, and I looked down and stared hard at the floor. “We’re visiting a friend,” she said.
“How old now?” the nurse said.
“One. He just had a birthday.”
“Nick and Mary Ann,” the nurse said, remembering their names, and then looked at me. “Oh, that Nick,” she said. “Had to be right up in her business. ‘What’s this, what’s that?’ Dr. Field said one more time and out. Lord, I never seen her threaten before.”
After the doors closed on the elevator and Mary Ann and I were being pulled up to a random number I’d pushed, she released a pent-up breath and shuddered. “God, it felt true,” she said. Then she turned and lurched and for a second time in as many weeks she cried in my arms.
On the seventh floor she held on to me, and we walked like we were just learning to walk, like the spinal cord patients in rehab, up to a wall of glass that gave us the Union Clock Tower against the hills of nowhere towns like mine, and it was there in that ginger dusky light that she looked up at me as if I were someone she could love.
* * *
When we finally got in to see him, Ray was weak and giggling. He wanted me to throw one of his nitroglycerine pills at the wall to see what would happen. His ex-wife had arrived, a thin woman with a small lined mouth that looked angry even when she smiled. She went out to “have one” as soon as we got there.
More drugs kicked in and Ray looked peaceful, like he was going to die, though the doctor had assured us that he wouldn’t. He was plugged into an oscilloscope whose screen wasn’t a whole lot different from the one we used for cars, but with only one blip instead of eight. I realized that he had never panicked, even when he was on his back on the cold concrete, the blood pooling, his heart shorting out. This was, I could determine now that the scare was over, the way a man ought to die—without fear or complaint.
“Hey, toots,” Ray said to Mary Ann. “You been crying?”
“She was worried about you,” I said.
Ray grinned and said, “Listen. You know what that Saint Peter’s telling Go
d right now?”
“Keep him alive?” I said.
“He knows I get up there, I’ll just raise hell and kick a chunk under it.”
Mary Ann smiled and rubbed my back, and Ray looked at the two of us together with a Buddha smile, as if he knew everything was going to turn out all right. “Except for this, I notice you been happier,” he said. And then he looked at me. “Kid, they got a 7-Eleven down the street. Go get me a can of Kodiak. Wallet’s in that drawer.”
“I got it,” I said.
He looked at Mary Ann. “No smoking, the fuckers,” he said. “They never heard of cold turkey making you have a heart attack? I seen it happen.”
When I got back with the snuff he was asleep. Mary Ann stood at the window, looking out at a glass building glazed with the lowering sun. Ray’s ex-wife was watching Phil Donahue and I gave her the snuff as Mary Ann got her purse. She was smiling as she walked up to me.
“What’d he say?”
“Good things about you,” she said.
17.
We picked up Chinese but forgot to get my car, not because we were talking but because we were thinking, at least I assume she was, both of us smoking quietly in her Malibu as a low sun melted between buildings. At a vague point in the afternoon, or at several vague points, I’d gone from feeling shocked by her affection to feeling entitled to it. Now I was conflicted when a guy across from us at a stoplight, who at first looked to be admiring her car, tapped his horn and blew her a kiss.
“God, grow up,” she said, and as I was clenching from the disrespect it showed me—I was her husband for all he knew—Mary Ann reached over the shifter and took my hand.
“You okay?” I said.
She nodded but took a moment to speak. “Right after he was born, he was so fragile. I used to think sometimes, ‘What if?’ It’s hard to trust their little bodies to keep running. If it happened, I knew I’d never, ever get over it. And then it was like that, but after I don’t know, a month, two months, you start being the same as you were before. Eating the same food, laughing at the same things.” She turned into the driveway and parked behind Nick’s El Camino. “It seems like it didn’t happen. You’re the same and you don’t know why.”
“It makes sense.”
“But Nick isn’t the same,” she said. She smoothed two fingers over her bottom lip as she stared up at the house.
* * *
In the kitchen Nick sat across from me at the tan Formica table, his head framed by the doorway to the room in which, on the braided rug, I had given Mary Ann the first orgasm I had ever given anyone other than myself, a moment I never fully stopped thinking about. Though I should have been starving I could only stab at water chestnuts with my rubber-banded chopsticks. It was a warm evening and the windows were open, the night breeze thinning out the house smells, which were mainly the wheat smell of hardwood floor and the faint, foreign perfume of Mary Ann’s aroma oils.
“He was all right until the ambulance left,” Nick said, telling about the Mustang’s owner as he turned lo mein noodles on a fork like spaghetti. “I don’t know what happened. Soon as it got quiet he sort of collapsed. I almost called nine-one-one again.”
“He didn’t expect to see that,” Mary Ann said.
“On top of a refund I gave him fifty for the pants.”
Mary Ann let go of her fork and laughed bitterly. “Who cares about pants? Who would give a fuck about pants?”
“Another reason I don’t like them out in the bays.”
“What happened after that? After he fell?”
“We got him up,” he said. “Bobby sat with him until he could drive.”
“Bobby.”
Nick sighed and looked at the tabletop. “I was busy.”
As Mary Ann stared at him, I felt myself dissolve from their awareness until I was afraid of what I might bear witness to. “I want to know something,” she said.
Nick sat back from the table, away from her.
“Tell me exactly what you felt today,” she said. He said nothing, and after a moment she leaned forward with such urgency I thought she was getting up. “Tell me. Just say it. Pity? Compassion? What? Annoyance? Don’t think. Just say what you felt.”
“You weren’t there,” Nick said. “Maybe if you were, everything would’ve been different, but you weren’t.” His voice remained steady and without heat. It was the indifferent tone my father used when my mother tried to guilt-trip him. Nick’s marriage was over, I saw that now, and through no fault of my own. But I was all for letting it die quietly. I hoped that Mary Ann wouldn’t say anything else.
Nick pushed his bowl away and got his cigarettes and a saucer from the middle of the table.
“It’s like there’s something missing in you,” she said. “Compassion? Is that it?”
By now I was holding my breath, hoping the evening would mark the end of their time and the beginning of ours—mine and Mary Ann’s. But I wanted it to come gradually, predictably. That seemed within reach, and the words I said to Mary Ann in my mind were these: Lay off a little. You don’t have to fix him anymore.
“You never talk about it, Nick,” she said. “Is that supposed to be macho? Because I think you’re just scared. It hurts and you’re afraid to say it. That’s really sad. It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.” And out of nowhere she was the outraged woman I was afraid she’d become looking at all those healthy babies behind the glass.
Nick had one hand opened on the tabletop as the other flicked ash onto the saucer. He sat crooked and tapped the cigarette filter like a machine on a slow cog.
“Tell him what you would have done,” Mary Ann said.
I looked up. How long had she been watching me? How long had I been commiserating with Nick?
“Me?”
“After you got him a chair. After you showed him that amount of pity. If you stayed instead of Nick—tell him.”
Nick wouldn’t look at either of us, and I tried to force any words that would come. But after a moment, Mary Ann knew I had nothing to wait around for. She stood from her chair and walked out of the kitchen to rooms at the back of the house.
I poked at a tiny corn on the cob with the chopsticks, and after a few minutes Nick mashed out his cigarette. “They give him any kind of prognosis?”
“He’ll be okay,” I said. “He doesn’t think he wants to come back to work.”
“I was scooping meat out of a radiator,” he said, “is why I didn’t go sit with the guy. I wasn’t going to make Bobby do it.”
* * *
Earlier I’d planned on Mary Ann taking me back to my car, but she never came out of the bedroom, and so it was Nick who drove me in his El Camino. “You think anybody’s at Wickersham’s?” he said as he pulled in behind my Nova.
It was summer, and the chances were someone would be out even when it wasn’t Saturday, but I told him probably not. He nodded gravely and stared off, but he perked up when I reached for the door handle. “You feel like going for a drive?” he said.
“I’m pretty wiped out.” I wanted to be in my room, where I could turn off the light and think about what had happened in the past four hours, just play it all from the beginning.
“I didn’t know if you wanted to talk,” he said. “I talk better when I’m driving.” He leaned forward and closed his eyes. “There’s that skip,” he said. “You feel it?”
“I don’t want to talk about cars.”
Nick settled back into his seat, staring at the gauges. After a time he said, “I wish I knew what to say to her. I don’t ever know what she’s thinking.”
“Why did you ask her to go to the hospital?”
“You weren’t in any shape to drive,” he said. “Bobby and I had the car to clean up. I figured, as long as it wasn’t where they took Joey. The one with the morgue.”
I was stunned for a moment. This hadn’t crossed my mind, and it redeemed him at least from the worst thoughts I’d had—that he was motivated for some reason to hurt her. “They can be pr
etty hard to talk to,” I offered. “Women.”
“You know, I never had steady girlfriends,” he said. “All through high school. I couldn’t ever figure out what to say. Nobody taught me. My old man used to polish valves at the dinner table. Carburetors, shit everywhere. I got on the school bus smelling like gas. Nick-oline, they called me. I knew car talk, but there’s a lot better talk.”
“So start now,” I said, meaning talk to Mary Ann, but then meaning—no, find someone else. Start over.
“Yeah,” he said, far away. “Yeah.”
I reached for the second window crank El Caminos have, the one that opened the triangle vent. “Mary Ann saw the babies,” I said, watching the little window open. “In the maternity. That’s part of why she’s upset.”
When Nick turned to me, I wasn’t ready to see such a look of concern, and after a long indecipherable moment he opened his door and got out.
He had the hood up by the time I came around the front. Using the fender as a pillow, he reached over the engine—only a 327 (Bobby had likened it to Hendrix playing acoustic) but a perfectly tuned four-bolt 327. The fan pushed back his hair, and closing his eyes he turned the mixture screw until the idle imbalance, so minuscule you didn’t notice it until he fixed it, had smoothed. Afterward, he clung on to the air cleaner as if it was giving him something necessary to his life and he couldn’t unplug himself from it yet.
I was so used to seeing him in this exact pose, listening for the soft personal voice of an engine, that it surprised me when he opened his eyes and turned, not looking at my face but looking to see that I was there. And if he was going to kill himself he would do it by lunging into a radiator fan, throwing himself into the very machine that called to him. It was like Russian roulette, his face so close to the fan blades—I went around and shut the engine off.
The Spark and the Drive Page 11
