The electric heater Myrian uses to warm her bedroom clicks on and the lamplight dims, regathers itself beneath the shade, and glows then as equally bright as before. Outside, blind gusts beat against the window. (Winter seems to take a perverse delight in bullying the east side of Renton.) Janus stares out at the cold, knows all too well from his work at the free clinic how inclement weather effects his neighbors: the falls that shatter elbows and hips, the bouts of croup, pneumonia and influenza, laryngitis and high fevers, frostbite, hypothermia and hyperventilation, the burns suffered by those who try warming themselves with cheap kerosine lamps and the skin that cracks and splits raw from the chill. He prescribes antibiotics for every sort of illness the winter months bring on, treats as best he can the people who come see him: the indigent and uninsured, mothers struggling on ADC, children neglected and run off, addicts and derelicts, victims of alcoholism, those with syphilis, blastomycosis, botulism, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis, trichomoniasis, typhus, and AIDS, young and old, black and white, Asian and Muslim and Latino, all pass through Janus’s clinic at one time or another, in seasons warm and cold.
“Come to bed,” he whispers as Myrian stands before her wall.
“Let me shower first,” she answers, and goes to rinse away the smearing of paint and sex. When she returns, she slips in beneath the blankets and sets herself against Janus’s hip. “Garvey Interiors called this morning. They want me to paint a mural of dinosaurs and cavemen for the lobby of Peterson’s Pancake House. The Fred and Dino look.”
“You’ll have fun with it, I’m sure.”
“Maybe so,” she gives a soft laugh, and letting the subject drop, describes her idea for a new canvas. “I’ve made a few sketches and want to start soon, but nothing I’ve drawn feels right,” Myrian switches off the light and runs her hand down the length of Janus’s leg. In the dark, the heat of his body flows through her. She stretches her toes along his damaged foot, strokes gently at his dented flesh. “Tell me,” he says in reference to her canvas, wanting to know what she has in mind, interested as always, hoping it will help her to describe the piece. Rather than say more however, Myrian asks if he’s heard anything new about the man who collapsed at the Imperial Hotel.
“Nothing really.”
“Tod’s been in a strange mood ever since it happened.”
“He’s not thrilled by what he found out.”
Myrian sighs. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? The things people do, I mean.”
Janus squeezes her fingers inside his good hand, enjoys the feel of her this way, how his palm is able to enclose a part of her so completely. He measures the narrowness of her bones against his own and staring off recalls the events of Tod’s dinner, how he was delayed at the clinic and arrived late, greeted by commotion as he and Myrian entered the hall where a man had fainted. The room was in ruins, tables and chairs overturned, and people scattered left and right. Janus examined the man’s eyes, took his pulse, and checked his arms for marks as a woman rushed out for her car and Tod phoned ahead to Renton General, alerting emergency of what to expect. In the days that followed, Janus heard the whole story as Tod came to see him at the clinic. “The things people do, yes,” he repeats what Myrian said.
“It’s a mystery.”
“Who can ever know?” and squeezing her fingers tighter, feels them wiggle warm inside his grasp.
He remains awake for a time, listening to the sound of Myrian’s breathing, her foot still pressed close to his own, and reaching then with his injured hand, runs it gently down her cheek. He thinks about Tod, whom he’s known for years, and how curious the events which pass in a lifetime. Back when he was a young doctor completing his residency at Renton General, Janus earned a fellowship in thoracic studies. The grant was a great honor and he was initially excited, though by fall he began having doubts. Disillusioned by the administrative constraints of practicing medicine in a large hospital, he wondered if there wasn’t something more he could do with his medical training and mentioned the possibility of opening a free clinic to his wife.
Sarah Fenriche was a fellow resident finishing her rotation in reconstructive surgeries. Possessed of a firm, inflexible mind—her father was a scientist, her mother an engineer—Sarah was raised with empirical restraints, her imagination subjugated to the intransigence of sound judgement; she laughed when Janus first mentioned leaving the hospital. “All this talk. You’re just overanxious. Wait until you finish your residency and you’ll see what you’re feeling now is nonsense,” she sat with her elbows propped and her nose pushed inside the Merck Manual, refusing to entertain any more of Janus’s ridiculous suggestions.
Eventually he stopped discussing the clinic with her, and when she learned from others that he’d contacted state agencies and applied for grants, had scoped out potential sites while abandoning all thoughts of becoming a thoracic surgeon, she accused him of betrayal. “You’re romanticizing everything. You’re neglecting your responsibilities. You’re out of your goddamn mind!”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“But this is absurd! You’re supposed to be a doctor. How are the patients living on the north side any less deserving of your skills than those people in east Renton?”
“I never suggested anyone was less deserving. The point is people on the east side have limited access to suitable medical attention.”
“So? Can’t they drive? Can’t they take a bus? You can’t save everyone, Janus,” she shook her head, her limbs pendulous, her trunk weighted through the hips in such a way that her every step seemed to celebrate the existence of gravity. Resentful of his position, bristling against his pious views, she shouted at him whenever he tried to explain. “How are we to live?” she proceeded then to the root of her complaint. “How much does charity pay? You’re not thinking clearly.” She rejected his answers, demanded he reconsider, accused him of misleading her from the start. (“If I had known!” she cried.) Despite all this, Janus went ahead and opened his clinic. Sarah distanced herself at once from the process, and during the next sixteen months, as the grant money trickled in and Janus labored to keep his clinic afloat, she remained busy with her own work. Week to week, their marriage lost momentum, veered off the road, and eventually crashed. They divorced in the winter and Sarah moved to Brentwood where she became a successful plastic surgeon, shaving wrinkles from the cheeks of wealthy patients, tucking double chins, and carving crow’s feet from the corners of otherwise senescent eyes.
Janus also moved. He found a one-bedroom flat two blocks from his clinic on the lower east side, worked long hours, and was twice awarded a plaque for his commitment to the community. Still the city saw fit to routinely cut his funding, claiming it couldn’t manage the money under each new year’s budget. Confronted by mounting costs, limited federal aid, and inconsistent private donations, he worried about being forced to close his doors, drained off what remained of his savings, sold his furniture, his framed lithograph, a gold pocket-watch, two lamps, four pairs of pants, and three wool sweaters. His effort was but a finger in the dike however, the fiscal demands of operating a free clinic ominous and unrelenting, and strapped for cash, he stayed up late, night after night, wondering, “What to do?”
At last, fate intervened. (If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation remains her bastard child.) In the course of an otherwise slightly drunk meditation, exhausted and fearful and with no other immediate way to keep his clinic open, Janus suffered an act of providential good fortune, resulting in his right foot being crushed beneath the weight of a 300-pound metal chest. (“How could such a thing have happened?” sympathetic neighbors were curious to know.) Rendered permanently disabled, Janus collected $40,000 from the Great Mercantile Insurance Company, which he coolly sank at once into the coffers of his clinic.
CHAPTER 14
The afternoon of my release from Renton General, some fifteen pounds lighter, and with the emaciated look of a shipwreck survivor, I took a cab across town to my new apartment. The solitu
de of my liberation provided another cruel dose of reality as I bore the process of reentering the land of the living with just my cab driver as guide. A dark-skinned Malaysian man with a large purple birthmark on the left side of his neck and a wiry crop of hair, he cursed in his native tongue when I gave him the address of my new flat. “What you want to go there for? You pay me first if that’s where you want to go.”
I sat with my forehead resting against the side window as the car moved along, pale inside my old winter coat—sent over by Gee at the request of one of my nurses—a white shirt and thin pair of pants that hung on my hips with the constant threat of slipping lower. Earlier that morning, I entrusted one of my orderlies to cash a thousand-dollar check for me and I paid the cabby for his troubles. Despite my dismissal from Porter and Evans, money was not an immediate problem. I arranged through my attorney to put nearly all of my holdings in Gee’s name—she made no such demands though I was eager to do so—and also deposited cash and stocks in a special account to pay off Tod’s debt. I received a fair—if not generous—severance package from P and E, and of the assets I held onto—a few securities, one cash account, and interest in three minor businesses—my liquidity was sufficient to support me for the immediate future.
The streets along the east side were filled with tumbledown buildings and cheap motels, newspapers and the plastic lids to Styrofoam cups blowing in the breeze as if part of some tremendous shaking. I arrived at my new lodgings at a quarter to one and went inside to find the building manager. (Alphonzo Pearl was an old man in brown baggy pants, a frayed yellow shirt, and weathered black Eagle shoes, grizzled and dignified in speech and manner.) “I’ve been the super here going on twenty-nine years,” he announced proudly, and set the pages of the lease out in triplicate atop his stained linoleum breakfast table. My apartment was on the third floor, the building five stories in total, fifty-two units in all, responsible management having kept the property in good repair. The lobby was freshly mopped and smelled of ammonia and pine, the tiles inexpensive sheets of a beige and blue mosaic cut into the corners and around the radiator, the red carpeting on the stairs worn flat in the center, transformed over the years into a shade of light clay. I pulled off my jacket and rolled back my sleeves, the muscles in my legs weak; when I walked there was a weariness in my stride that let me get only as far as the first floor landing—there was no elevator—before the exertion proved too much and I had to stop and rest.
When I at last opened the door to my new apartment, I was greeted by a musty smell. The walls were a pale yellow-white, cracked and replastered and cracked again. A small kitchen was set to the right, the bedroom and toilet a few paces back, the distance from the hall to the rear window less than fifteen feet. I went to the window and opened it, then stared down at the alley below. The knots in my legs made it hard to stand for long and I soon drifted back and collapsed on the couch. My furniture—two chairs, a brown sofa, a bed, and desk—were each delivered along with three suitcases of clothes, a few assorted pots and plates, and four crates of books, shortly before I left the hospital; the entire enterprise entrusted to Alphonzo Pearl’s supervision as Gee refused to help. (I phoned to ask, hoping my decision to move downtown would alarm her and that she’d realize how far I was willing to go to make amends, but she said only, “Whatever you want packed, you contact the movers and they can call me for a convenient time to come by,” and once more hung up the phone.) I sighed deeply and sank further into the couch, the chill from outside reaching me, and after a period of some delay I managed to get up and close the window tight.
Now what? I gazed at the far wall and the few boxes containing my collective possessions, my sense of isolation and exile heightened by the sight of these items so far removed from where they belonged. Slowly, I approached the first box filled with books and undoing the tape picked out Doctor Faustus and found underlined inside: “Adrian had not asked for a physician, because he wanted to interpret his sufferings as familiar and hereditary, as merely an acute intensification of his father’s migraine,” and then, in a paperback copy of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: “Eliot rook a drink of Southern Comfort, was uncomforted. He coughed, and his father coughed, too. This coincidence, where father and son matched each other unknowingly, inconsolable hack for hack, was...” What, I wondered? I didn’t remember underlining these passages, and thinking of my father then, miles away in his own single flat, I pushed the box of books back and shifted my position against the wall.
I closed my eyes and thought of Gee, who appeared at once, lovely as always, her green eyes large and bright, her red lips full, her nose thin and angled out between high, round cheeks. Her figure was fine, not overly curved yet sensually set as if drawn by a confident hand. I let my imagination wander up and down the length of her and bastard that I am, unable to resist, I slipped off her clothes, desperate to enjoy having her with me once more. No sooner did I do so however, then I realized the mistake I made, how receiving her image in the form of a ghost only drew attention to her absence, and the moment I opened my eyes she was gone.
Alone, I told myself not to panic—“Settle down, Walter. Settle down.”—and gripping the side of my legs, repeated, “Here is where you are. Here is where you’ve come and here is where you need to be.” Eager then to demonstrate my resolve, I leaped to my feet with the intention of unpacking my books and clothes, only my light-headedness got the best of me and I wound up dropping to my knees, the abrupt fall jarring loose the last of my resistance, and before I realized what was happening, I began to weep. (“What’s this?” my mind was slow to catch up.) The sound I emitted was loud and gasping, not cathartic but bleak, confused and dire, and hunched over, I rubbed at my eyes with the heel of my hands, the warm tears rolling down as I cried out, each wail torn between my teeth.
I held my breath in order to swallow back my sobs, but the result was an even more pathetic whimper, and as I tried to stand I stumbled and fell toward the door. The desire to leave—on hands and knees if need be!—struck me worse than ever, but I was much too weak, and howling then, helpless and writhing, I lifted my head as best I could and stared across the room at the shape of something moving. Baffled, I squinted through my tears, blinking hard several times in an effort to be sure, and called out tentatively, then delirious, “Gee? Gee!” The very sound of her name lifted my spirits (Rejoice! For she is here!) and scrambling to my feet, I wiped my face, staggering forward until I could see clearly enough, devastated and giving way again, falling burdened and grievous back to the floor.
Myrian worked the lunch hour at the Appetency Café and had added extra shifts to her schedule in order to purchase supplies for her new canvas, but the crowd that afternoon was less than average—a handful of regulars and a few other people straggling in off the street—and the minor amount she made in tips was disappointing. Walking home, she ignored the chill and occupied herself with thoughts of her newest painting. She had in mind a woman set opposite a man, the female form a more outwardly physical force, while the male figure possessed the same dashed and damaged beauty as Janus. She wanted to convey somehow a sense of harm and strength, of injury and endurance, yet none of her sketches came close to achieving her vision.
She climbed the stairs to her apartment, still lost in thought, and only as she reached the third floor landing was she alerted to the sounds coming from the flat next door. She stopped and assessed the wails, unsure what to do, and finding the door ajar, called out, “Hello?” and took two tentative steps inside. “You there. Are you all right?” She walked around the boxes, coming within a few feet of the man who suddenly jumped up, sobbing and calling out what sounded like a woman’s name—Jean or Jane—before collapsing a second time, dropping to his knees and groaning in great gusts of torment and surrender.
Myrian got him to the couch where she checked his forehead and found him hot with fever. As a means of testing his coherence, she questioned him further, asking, “Are you the man who’s moving in? Who exactly are you? What�
��s wrong? Are you sick? Do you need a doctor?” She decided to call Janus, and with the phone in the man’s apartment not yet turned on, transported him next door. Walter felt himself being lifted, guided into the hall, and settled once again into a chair before Myrian disappeared into the kitchen and phoned the clinic. She returned a minute later with a dishtowel soaked in warm water. “For your face,” she said. Walter took the cloth. “Thank you,” his voice was tremulous, low and weak.
Myrian removed her jacket, kicked her wet shoes across the room, and sat on the couch as Walter sank further down inside the chair. He was dizzy, and looking about the apartment with its painted walls covered in so many colors and shapes and arresting configurations, his head continued to whirl and he felt for a moment as if he was inside the body of an enormous canvas. He thought once more of Gee and the art she admired, of Miró and “The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Couple in Love,” and before he could catch himself and keep from dissolving again in front of his new neighbor, his lower lip began to tremble, his eyes filling with tears, his hands shaking as he hurried to bring the wet cloth over his face.
Janus entered the apartment to the same sobs Myrian first heard a half hour before. He stood for a moment, then approached the chair, studying the man quivering in expensive shoes and slacks, with hair once nicely cut now grown out, his face hidden, though even before he lowered the cloth and stared up, Janus somehow recognized him and mouthed the words to Myrian, “How in the world did he get here?”
Walter Falls Page 14
