Meeting Rozzy Halfway

by Caroline Leavitt

  Walt didn’t call and she began to worry. At first she told herself that he was just busy, but then she started to panic, imagining him in some terrible crippling accident, losing his memory and wandering forty years in some tiny unfindable country. She kept having dreams about him. He was transformed into a giant bird with huge red flapping wings. He’d swoop down and catch her in his talons, but then he always released her, sending her helplessly floating down in an endless expanse of gray sky.

  She waited a week and then called his Detroit office, where a breezy secretary told her that Walt was no longer with them.

  “What?” said Bea.

  “Fired,” said the girl.

  “For what?”

  “Can’t tell you that,” she said. She couldn’t tell Bea much of anything, not even where Walt might be located. Bea hung up the phone and started to cry. She called his Detroit apartment, but the line was disconnected. She even called information in Akron, where he had told her his parents lived. She dialed every Adler in the whole city until she hit the right one, and by then she was tight with hysteria.

  “I don’t know where he is,” said Walt’s mother.

  “But we were going to be married!” cried Bea.

  “Married!” said Walt’s mother. She immediately began peppering Bea with questions, inviting her out to Ohio right that very week, asking her what kinds of gifts she might like, what kind of wedding. Bea couldn’t speak. She begged Walt’s mother to call her if there was word from Walt and then she clicked down the receiver.

  Bea waited out the week. She felt as if everyone around her were sleepwalking and she was the only one awake. The air was thick and sludgy around her. She couldn’t seem to breathe, couldn’t keep enough air inside of her to live. At work she hunched over the books and silently wept, keeping one hand over her face, sluicing away the tears. Mel knew something was wrong. He put his arms about her. “You want a vacation, honey? You just say when.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Bea. He looked at her curiously, fatherly, but she couldn’t tell him. Saying the words might finalize it, and she was afraid.

  Bea found a doctor who would give her Valium and she gulped them down like hard candies. She went to work in a hazy shock. She came home and wrote WALT CALL BEA in large red letters on sheets of watercolor paper, and she masking-taped them all over town, at their favorite haunts, at Frenchie’s. She called his office over and over and over again, demanding information. Why wouldn’t they tell her where he was? Why didn’t they know? She sometimes had a sickening premonition that he was there, listening on an extension, his arm thrown carelessly around a pregnant blond. She could see the two of them, laughing at her. When Bea came home, she stayed in front of the radio, listening to the voices flowing into one another. She kept the phone at her feet, and when it rang, it was like an electric current.

  She fed her fantasies. She lost weight, and then she binged on potato chips and superstitions. If I sleep four hours, she thought, Walt will call. If I eat this soup, Walt will show up in front of me. Mel finally took Bea into his office and ordered her to take a vacation or lose her job. “You’re scaring the customers away,” he told her, “and I like you better than I like them, so the only solution is for you to take a paid vacation and then come back to work when you feel good again.”

  So Bea bought a ticket for the Caribbean. She had hired an answering service for any calls she might receive, and had left her hotel address with the post office. She was airsick on the plane. She grabbed the greasy white vomit bag from the seat pocket and fled to the bathroom. She was in there for so long that the stewardess rapped on the door.

  Bea purged herself. For the first time she felt something besides the raw weaving ache Walt had left her. She felt anger. She straightened up and stared at herself in the filmy mirror. She was still beautiful. She fluffed out her hair. There was a gray strand and she violently plucked it out, letting it drift onto the floor and die. She checked her eyes for wrinkles, and then she stumbled back to her seat, a faint brown vomit stain on her lapel, marking her.

  Bea hated the Caribbean. She liked the cold, the indoors, and here everyone was grilling themselves up like minute steaks. But she pushed herself into a new red bathing suit and let her hair skid down her back. She had a hotel room on the beach and everyone watched her behind their sunglasses when she gingerly padded onto the white sands, dragging a black velour towel behind her. No one had black towels, and no one looked like Bea. She squinted around her. Everyone reminded her of Walt, and she made a silent vow that she would never let the next man in her life go anywhere without her, not even to the drugstore for aspirin and a newspaper. She fished around in her beachbag and gulped a Valium. That little yellow sun warmed her more than any burning orb in the sky. She supposed that -she ought to go swimming. It was quite hot, but she was afraid of the ocean. There were all sorts of animals that made it their home; crabs with pincers, jellyfish, huge prowling sharks. She had an impulse to call her answering service, but a dizzying flood of anger stopped her. She’d cancel that service. But not just yet.

  Enter Ben Nelson, my father. He was a real athlete back then, a runner. It wouldn’t be until much later that he would take on layers of fat, insulating himself. He was a Boston lawyer on vacation, running up and down the beach like a crazy person, tearing up the sand along the water’s edge and skimming his feet in the froth.

  “He surprised me,” Bea said. “He didn’t run in the morning when the beach was deserted. It would be cooler then, easier to run than in the sticky heat. He was always up by six anyway. Sometimes I’d see him in the coffee shop, making some waitress squeeze him fresh orange juice and boil him an egg. He’d read while he ate, usually some ponderous-looking law book, or philosophy. He started his running at eleven, when the heat had peaked, the beach had become carpeted with flesh, with tones of pink and white and brown. He wove in and out of the blankets, carrying himself above the ground like a ballet dancer. He never slowed his pace; he kicked up the sand and he sweated.”

  Ben had not always been in such good shape. That story was one he himself loved to tell, over and over again, savoring the outcome, proud of it. Even now, it is the only part of the past he will talk about.

  He had nearly died at fifteen, of some rare respiratory disease. His parents kept telling him he had inherited it, that there was a legacy of illness in the family line, but he never saw anyone else who had what he had. He hated the whole business. They gave him three different medicines and he had to carry them with him wherever he went. He had two bottles of green and white pills and a small inhaler that spritzed a whitish mist down his throat and into his laboring lungs. He took to wearing blazers in the summer, shirts with pockets, pants with large kangaroo pockets. But even so, his pockets bulged with the shape of the inhaler. One day he went out and bought some surgical tape and taped the inhaler to his thigh, under the baggy fabric of his pants. He worried all day that the tape would fail him, that it would unstick and his inhaler would clack down to the floor, branding him, mocking him. When his air choked itself off and he needed that inhaler, he ripped off the tape in the men’s room, in a stall. He felt as if he was defoliating a jungle. The hair ripped from his legs. The tape immediately lost its stick; he couldn’t retape the inhaler, and he ended up with the same loathsome bulge in his pockets. No one knew he was sick. His friends kidded him about wearing his pants so baggy. He wished he could carry a purse like women did. He had nightmares that one day he would be caught without his medication and he would strangle in front of enormous crowds of people, all of them gawking at him, so he went out and got triple refills of his medication, stockpiling them in his room.

  Her parents were no help. They were devout Catholics and instructed him to pray to God for a healing. At first, when he was still going to church, he did. But when he continued to be sick, he soured on religion and announced that he didn’t believe in anything. “That’s why you’re ill,” his mother said angrily.

  His parents hel
ped to smother him; he felt that they were prodding his lungs to malfunction, that they used his coughing as proof that he needed the church.

  It wasn’t until Ben was in college that he started to change. There was a tiny diner near the campus. It wasn’t very clean, but Ben liked to wander in and buy endless cups of hot tea. He’d lean into one of the blue booths and watch the old European owner make the tea. She made tea like no one else, sifting out the leaves from heavy glass jars, steeping them in a copper bowl, and he struck up a conversation with her. It was she (he still remembered her name years later—Emily Breuger) who told him about folk medicine, about herbs, about vitamins in foods. She didn’t talk to many people about her knowledge because they never believed her, they thought she was a quack. Back then, no one cared about herbs or vitamins, or brewed up teas that could whisk away a cold or cure an upset stomach. Everyone wanted wonder drugs, wanted clean hospitals and candy bars. Emily was so delighted by Ben’s interest that she let him prowl among her books; she was free with her herbs and recipes and with her advice on how he might get well. You couldn’t really get good vitamin supplements back then, but Emily made up a list of foods that Ben should eat, and she told him to run.

  He trusted her. He could run only a tenth of a mile at first before his lungs protested. It took him months, but he got better, stronger, he needed less and less of Emily’s herbs. He stopped going home. As soon as he stepped into that house, his mother would ask how his health was, and his lungs, obligingly, would fold up on him. He hated her a little, the way she twitched toward him whenever he coughed, the way she rubbed his chest. “You see?” she’d say. “You’re hardly better. You come and live here with us again, and we’ll soon set you right.” He couldn’t stand it. He began harboring a theory that she was responsible, that she hadn’t eaten correctly when she was carrying him. When he accused her, she took to her room, weeping; and in disgust, he decided to cut himself off from his parents, to start a new generation of Nelsons.

  The doctors he saw were not as amazed by his progress as he would have liked them to be. One even told him that it was fairly common for a childhood illness to be outgrown, and that Ben might as well have swallowed sugar pills as herbs. It was then he lost all his respect for doctors. He continued his herb and exercise regime, and three months later he was cured. He never cared that people called him a health nut, a fool, that he was the only one running on the Boston streets on his way to work, the only one on that hot tropical beach who really moved.

  It amused Bea to watch him. She told me she could tell he had noticed her. Every morning he ran around her, dipping down to catch the title of whatever book she was reading. The jackets attracted him like bright bits of metal. Eventually, he stopped running dead in front of her. She was reading Proust, and she glanced up at him, shielding her eyes from the sun with the flat of her hand.

  “You read a lot of books,” he said.

  She smiled. “It comes from working in a bookstore.”

  He sat down beside her. It became a habit. At first they didn’t really talk much. She didn’t like being interrupted when she read, and he was content to be beside her and tan. She opened up to him very slowly, speaking in that husky voice of hers, blinding him with her wit, her intelligence. They began going out to lunch together, stretching that into dinner. And he persuaded her to run.

  Bea always thought he would get bored with running, that with her there, he’d be willing to sit more and run less. But one day he presented her with a gift, all wrapped up in silver paper and silver ribbons, and she ripped it gracelessly apart. She lifted out a pair of screaming yellow running shoes and started to weep. “What’s the matter?” he said, baffled. “Is it the color?”

  “Oh,” she said, wiping away the tears with the side of her hand. “It’s nothing.”

  She never got used to running, to having to use her body, but she liked the companionship, the way Ben was always a few steady beats ahead of her. He decided she should learn tennis. “He was a foul teacher,” she told me. “He’d try to be patient, but he kept pursing up his mouth just like a dried fruit. I couldn’t handle that look so I began waking up an hour early to take lessons from the local pro. Ben never found out.”

  They were there for over a month. For Bea, it was a totally different kind of life than the one she had shared so blissfully with Walt. There were no evenings in, certainly no dreamy long afternoons. Instead Ben made her attempt waterskiing, and had her riding horses. Riding was the worst. He was always prying her hands off the saddle horn. “You’ll never learn to ride that way,” he told her crossly. She meekly held the reins, but as soon as he cantered ahead, she grabbed for that leathery knob as if it were a lifeline. She was leary of her horse, a small dappled mare. It looked as if it might like to bite her.

  Ben was different from Walt. He remembered everything, even what someone had said to someone else years ago, things that she didn’t think mattered. There was a preciseness about him. He was clean of Walt’s giddy recklessness. At dinner one night she carried on with a man sitting across the way. She smiled and blushed and tipped her drink at him, all the time glancing at Ben, gauging his reaction. Ben got up, and something twisted within her. She stopped flirting and looked down into her drink. But when Ben reappeared a few moments later, he handed her one perfect red-black rose. She dipped her nose into the petals and smiled.

  They began to tell each other everything. She knew he was an only child, that he didn’t like to talk about his parents, that he was as intelligent as he was impatient. He thought he knew everything about her, even about Walt, but she didn’t tell him that she was still trapped by memory, that she still wondered and worried over her answering service back in Detroit. Ben told her he loved her. It was a relief to listen to him making rules, talking about relationships as if they had edges and boundaries to bounce against. When he asked her to marry him, she bit back on a hasty answer. They hadn’t known each other that long, and besides that, Walt was still coursing through her blood, she couldn’t forget him.

  She panicked. She saw the long lonely weeks spreading out ahead of her, the silent apartment, the routine of her job. She liked Ben, but she wasn’t sure. He had told her there had been other women in his life, that women really liked him, but that no one had captured him as Bea had. If she said no, he could easily find someone to say yes.

  She didn’t want to have to make the decision at all. She called her mother long distance. Bea’s mother was practical. “Is he kind? Is he generous? Forget all that romantic garbage, that stuff bleeds right out of a marriage fast enough. If he’s those things, then marry him.”

  So Bea said yes. The hotel told them where to get blood tests and the license, and even produced a local official who could marry them. They were married in the hotel dining room, right away, the two of them standing in that big room, listening to the ceremony in broken English. Bea couldn’t help thinking that if she were meant to be with Walt, then he would somehow find her in the next few minutes. She would know. She told me she imagined him calling her service and getting her number; she saw him distraught, trying to phone her and then abruptly, impetuously, hopping a small plane. The plane bobbed and weaved in her mind while she tottered on satiny white pumps. She had on a new short white linen suit with cap sleeves and she was clutching a rose. She heard the engine in the plane failing, and she held out her hand for Ben to claim, holding her breath until his flesh touched hers and dragged her back into reality. She thought of Walt for another second, and then she relinquished everything to become Ben’s wife, to blot out her past with a new name, a new identity.

  They stopped in Detroit for two days so Bea could pack up what few things she owned. She took him to meet her parents, who ignored Ben’s stiff politeness and told Bea they thought he was wonderful. She had to prod him into phoning his parents, into letting her speak to them. When they kept asking her if she would convert to Catholicism, she looked helplessly at Ben, who grinned.

  Bea didn’t bother conta
cting her answering service, but mailed them a check, with no forwarding address. The last night in Detroit, she walked around with Ben, linking arms, holding her head very high. She took him with her to say good-bye to Mel, and she even brought him into Frenchie’s for a red cream soda. She laughed when he complained that the carbonation would ruin their stomachs. And when they left for Boston, riding high up in a plane, she didn’t look out of the tiny window down at the city she was leaving, and she kept her hand clasped firmly in Ben’s.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bea loved being married. Everywhere she went, she held out her hand so her diamond could catch at the light and hold it, could warm her with its flaming beauty. She liked to call the local store and mention things her husband might want, mention her name. And she found more and more to love in Ben because he was her husband. She ran with him mornings before he went to work, still loathing the jumpy pace, but loving the image of husband and wife doing something together. She imagined the neighbors sneaking furtive peeks at them from behind the lace curtains, envious of the bond she and Ben had.

  She began to cook again. Every Thursday she took the subway to the North End to Haymarket Square and picked out fresh fruits and vegetables, screaming at the merchants when they tried to pack up some of the bruised produce for her, hiding it with their large beefy hands. Let them leave that spoked stuff for the beggars who were always scrounging around the bins after everyone else had left, bagging up the brown bananas, greedily lunging for the blackening broccoli. She bought only what she needed and began cooking at three. She surprised Ben. It took her a while to figure out what he would eat and what he wouldn’t. He hated tomatoes. She used imported oils and real butter and she grew her own spices in the windowbox of their apartment. Every morning they both drank special herb tea. She packed him lunches with imported cheese and Bing cherries, with bread she baked herself and juice drinks she made in her blender.