Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  Duse’s being Duse affected Martin a little differently than it did Isadora. His experience was not the same as Isadora’s, separated by miles and wires and television tubes. He was herded with Duse into a room and told to wait, that someone would come and get Duse when they were ready for her. Donuts were brought in and some strong coffee. Duse didn’t like the way the staff people were milling in and out, balancing clipboards against their hips, glancing at her without really taking her in, and then waltzing right out again. She thought they were smirking at her and she couldn’t seem to breathe with all that false humor frying up the air. Martin settled into a chair and then leaned forward to diddle the TV dial. He never watched the show Duse was on. He wanted the news. They were both sitting there listening to a bulletin about a military coup, watching the grainy footage, when a staffer came in with more donuts, and, annoyed, switched the TV back to the show. He told them not to fool with the dial, that the TV was on that station for their benefit, not his, that it was no sweat off his back.

  Martin looked at him for a moment and then very politely said that the sound hurt his ears, and did anyone have any objections to his turning it off?

  “Yeah,” the man said. “Me. I do. You’re not going to be the only one in here this night.” He pivoted and left, but it annoyed Martin so much that he got up and sat on the far side of the room where he couldn’t see the screen. He found yesterday’s newspaper and he amused himself by reading every line in it, by doing the crossword puzzle and the children’s puzzle page as well. He read the food pages and tried to see if each recipe sounded good or not, if he might want to make it. It was enough for Duse that he was there. She wasn’t going to badger him into watching her, and before she was led out, she went right over there and touched the tips of his fingers with her own. “Smile,” she told him. “Say cheese.”

  The woman who brought her out into the studio made a fuss over her, called her a star, but she didn’t treat Martin that way. She didn’t say two words to him although Duse made introductions. Duse saw how it washed over his face, and she felt the landscape of him changing.

  She was furious when she left the studio. She and Martin walked to the car in silence and it wasn’t until she was seated that she told him how they had treated her on camera, how they had acted. She thought his face was stone because he was feeling for her, but when she took his hand, she didn’t feel the tension in it.

  In the weeks that followed the show, Martin began coming home from work depressed. She couldn’t understand it. He loved his work, the clean way he could patch up the mistakes nature made, the botched way teeth pushed themselves free of gum. She kept prodding him and prodding him to tell her what was wrong. “Oh, I miss Isadora,” he said, but Duse wasn’t convinced.

  She came to his office one day, determined to take him to lunch, to see if she could loosen up some of that misery. She was talking to the dental assistant, waiting, when the girl told Duse how a patient had come in the week before and asked for Duse.

  “What?” said Duse. “What would I be doing here?”

  “That’s what I said. But this woman said she had read about psychic surgeons in the Philippines, how they could slice you right open without a knife, how they were removing tumors and cancers without a shiver. She said she wanted you to do her root canal.”

  “Oh God,” said Duse, sitting down.

  “She said she saw you on that show. She called every dentist in town until she hooked up with Martin. I heard him on the phone with her, how gentle he was with her, but toward the end his voice got bitter, tight. He offered to hypnotize her, but she hung up on him.”

  Duse didn’t say anything. She let the assistant go back to work and she waited out there for Martin, thinking that as soon as he came out she would tell him how important he was to her, how he was her destiny. The trouble came when a little boy was tugged into the office by his mother and unceremoniously dropped off. He slumped in his chair, picking at his nails, a habit that always unnerved Duse because of her reverence for hands. She watched him, and when he started to cry, slashing at his tears with his fisted hands, trying not to make any noise at all, she leaned forward. He was sobbing so hard she didn’t think that he would be able to latch onto his breath, so she just went over there and took his hand, she just touched it with her fingers. She was just trying to soothe him down when Martin came out. He saw that small hand in hers, and he walked over and wrenched it free. The boy really started crying then, and Martin, furious, told Duse that there was a place for everything. “My office isn’t your office,” he said.

  “I was just holding his hand,” Duse said.

  “I know what you were doing,” he said, leading the boy into the office, stooping to try and calm them both down.

  She wouldn’t stay there, she decided. She got up and went home, and when Martin came back into the house, she sat him down, she said they had to talk it out.

  “I don’t feel good,” he said. “I want to lie down.”

  Duse sat at the kitchen table, her hands pressed along the Formica surface. She watched him leave, heard the shower running, but she waited ten minutes until she unfolded her fingers.

  Duse called Isadora to ask if Martin had called her, if he had said anything. She told Isadora what was going on and Isadora promised to call Martin.

  She got him at his office, but he didn’t want to answer anything, he wanted to ask. She answered his questions about her classes, she told him about botany and he picked up on that; he wanted to know what other sciences she was planning to take. “I like math,” she said thoughtfully, and he said that was good, that numbers were precise. “You taking care of your teeth?” he wanted to know. “You know, you could always become my partner, being good in science like that. Dental school would be a whiz for someone like you.” When she said she didn’t know, maybe, she heard how his voice lifted.

  “You’ve turned out to be my kid, after all,” he said.

  “I what?”

  “Nothing. I’m just being silly.”

  “I miss you,” she said. Then she said she had heard from Duse how wonderful he had been to go to the station with her, how much Duse loved him for that. “I couldn’t have done it,” she told him.

  “Yes, you could. Better than I did.”

  “She loves you for it.”

  “She does a lot of things,” he said. “Come home, Isadora. Really soon. I like seeing you. It balances things out for me.”

  When she hung up, she wandered back into the living room where Daniel was. She watched him for a moment and then she walked over to him and curled up beside him. She rested her head against his shoulder. “I miss my father,” she said.

  14

  Isadora was in the middle of her exams when her father had his heart attack. She was in a vacuum of studying and scribbling papers, pressing to finish early so that she and Daniel could take a vacation, go somewhere without Allison to see how that would feel. Daniel had already bought tickets to Santa Fe, had them taped up on the kitchen wall, and he promised her chili for breakfast, chili muffins for lunch, and chili spaghetti for dinner. There were lots of phone calls being made, a lot of arrangements, calls to a woman he knew named Jo. She ran a hotel, he told Isadora, and she had the longest fingernails he had ever seen. She looked like Rita Coolidge, he thought, and she had taken in a brain damaged dog named Feeble. “I like her best for that,” he said. There were so many phone numbers and messages piling up on the bureau that Isadora didn’t really notice the message for her to call a strange name, a message Daniel just left there.

  He reminded her about it a few times; he said it had been urgent, he remembered, but the area code was Madison, and Isadora knew the kind of people her mother attracted. She didn’t call the number, but she did try Duse, letting the phone ring fifteen times before she hung up. She tore the message up. “If it’s so urgent, they’ll get me,” she said.

  They got her. At three A.M., jangling her awake. She slid one arm out of her sheet cocoon and hel
d the receiver lazily to one ear. When Daniel stirred, she said, “Go to sleep,” and patted his thigh.

  She wouldn’t remember the name of the woman. Her mind wasn’t focusing in on anything, but then the woman said that she was a client of Duse’s and Duse had asked her to call because Duse herself simply couldn’t. “Your father had a heart attack,” she said.

  Isadora pushed the sheet off her. She stood up, naked, and flooded the room with light, ignoring Daniel, not seeing how his hand sleepily fumbled for the light. “Is he all right?” Isadora said. She was suddenly aware of her own heart, of the way it beat and groped inside of her.

  “Come home,” the woman said. “I called you before. You should have answered. You come home now.”

  When Isadora hung up, she went into the kitchen and turned on the light. She was sitting at the table, rubbing one thin wrist against the other when Daniel padded out, blinking at the light. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  She gave him a blank look. “I don’t know,” she said. “My father. He had a heart attack.”

  “Sit,” he said. “Don’t move. I’ll make plane reservations for both of us.”

  “No,” she said. “Just me. If you come, I won’t be able to be strong.”

  “Isadora—” he said, but she shook her head. “Call me, every hour if you want. Will you do that?” he said.

  “Why not?” she said. She stood up and then she sat down again, remembering. “I don’t even know if he’s all right. I don’t even know who that woman was, what her name was. Why did she call me? Why didn’t she tell me if he was fine? What if he isn’t?”

  “She would have told you,” Daniel said. To reassure her, though, he offered to call all the hospitals in Madison and see if her father was a patient. He said he could send a cable to Duse. All the time he was making these verbal plans, Isadora was standing up and sitting down again and then standing. She said she was almost afraid to know.

  Daniel got her a flight within the hour. “You won’t sleep tonight anyway,” he said. “This way, you’ll be in motion. You won’t have to think, you’ll just have to do.”

  She let him do things for her, let him help her dress, let him stuff some of her clothes into a suitcase. She didn’t think to tell him that the leotards he was packing were dirty.

  She had always thought that her parents would have a dramatic, violent kind of ending. She sometimes pictured Duse speaking before a huge crowd, an audience, and then someone would stand up, pull himself free from that clutter of faces, and accuse Duse of something, of failing to find his son, of not telling him his daughter was dead. Martin would be standing up on a podium, right beside Duse. Isadora felt her fingers twitching around the shape of a gun, she heard something whizzing, striking bone. Her own head vibrated with the shot, with the felling of her parents. “Daniel—” she cried.

  He was busy, he was clicking her suitcase shut. “What?” he said. “You okay?” But she couldn’t look at him, and she couldn’t cry, not even when he put her on the plane, when he made his whole body a plea to come with her, to be her comfort. Oh, she felt the crying, but it was taking place somewhere deep inside of her, rising a little as she breathed, tilting toward her lungs.

  No one met her at the airport and she cabbed home. She still had her old key and as she jerked it into the lock, she heard the phone, ringing and ringing.

  She found Duse in the kitchen, just watching the phone, her body swaying with each ring, moving forward and then back as the sound died. When she saw Isadora, her face calmed. “I didn’t know,” Duse said.

  “I’ll drive. Let’s just get to the hospital. Please,” said Isadora.

  Duse started. “Baby,” she said. “He’s dead.” She made Isadora sit down. The whole time Duse was telling the story, her face was bland, her eyes were raw and unfocused in her head. It was almost as if Duse were telling her something simple and uncomplicated, like the washing machine breaking, or about a dinner party she had gone to. The one detail Isadora would always feel prickling through her, though, was when Duse’s hands started shifting in her lap, when the right hand clasped and unclasped the left, when the palms pressed together as if Duse were waiting for a glue to set them permanently into one piece. “Stop,” Isadora said, pulling those hands apart. Duse looked startled. She left her hands lying dead in her lap, but a moment later, they took on life, drawing together, performing.

  Duse told how it had happened, how sudden it was. She had just stepped outside to watch the shooting stars because she had always loved the way that glow pinwheeled across the dark, the way that matchstick fire disturbed the night. Martin was watching a baseball game, and when she came back inside, she thought he had fallen asleep. It was a habit that really irritated her. She couldn’t understand why he couldn’t control himself enough to put himself into bed. She had shaken him, roughly, but he hadn’t moved, and then she had panicked. “I knew he was dead,” Duse said. “I knew. But I called the ambulance, I let them do the pronouncing. I let them use that word. I sat in the back of the ambulance, holding his hands, rubbing warmth into them. I pressed his hands until they seemed to pulse like tiny hearts inside of me.” Duse fiddled with her hair. “Isn’t it funny? That man rarely even had a cold.”

  She said she had wanted to call Isadora, but she couldn’t say the words, she couldn’t make herself hear them coming from her own mouth, so she had had one of her clients call. “You didn’t mind that, did you?” Duse said, and she started when Isadora began crying. She lifted her hands. “Don’t do that,” Duse said. “Please don’t do that.”

  There wasn’t anyone at the funeral that Isadora recognized. Even so, a smattering of people had come over to Isadora and had apologized, as if they felt themselves somehow responsible. Duse moved in stone; she showed no emotion at all, and it frightened Isadora. Duse wouldn’t let anyone come back to the house with them. She didn’t care that they had made cakes and sticky buns and casseroles, that they wanted to sit and talk, that they thought it was their turn to help her. Duse didn’t even speak to Isadora the whole cab ride home, and when the cab pulled over to the curb, Duse bolted out. Isadora called and called to Duse, telling her she hadn’t brought her purse, she didn’t have the fare, but Duse was slamming herself into that house, making a barrier of the front door. The driver was beefy and tanned and sympathetic to Isadora’s teary face, and he told her he would take her I.O.U. “It’ll be between us,” he said. “Don’t you worry. Hey,” he said, squinting at her, “you’re crying even harder.”

  “It’s because you’re being so nice to me,” Isadora said. Her hands were twitching with grief, but she took the card the driver gave her and she signed her name and number and address to a card he had. He helped her out of the car, folding the paper into his front pocket.

  The house was locked when she got there and she banged on the door. She rang the bell, furious; she kicked at the wood, stubbing her toe, and when the door pulled open, Isadora started shouting at Duse. She said she was a person, what did Duse think she was doing? “I don’t know,” said Duse, letting Isadora in, and then she followed her into the kitchen and they both sat down, exhausted. “Are you all right?” Isadora said.

  Duse rested her arms on the table. “I swore and swore that I’d always be prepared. Do you remember any of that, how careful I was with my death files? After my mother died, I swore I’d never let death surprise me again, that I’d get control. I did, too. The person down the street could keel over and I would know it before it was in the paper, I’d know just about when it happened, and why. I got lax about those files because of you, the way your face changed when you saw me picking at the obituaries.”

  Isadora pushed her hands up toward her eyes, rubbing.

  “Martin,” said Duse. “It was so stupid how he could just drift away like that. I never even thought to check him, to watch his lifeline like my own. He never liked to read his palm, not after the first time, when we met. Did you know that? He never believed I had any gift, not that man, but he us
ed to say that J was the gift, a gift to him.” She shook her head. “Martin,” she said. “I used to take peeks at his palm when I could. I’d wait until he was asleep. I’d carefully lift his hand out from under the bedclothing, I’d squint at it in the darkness, and gradually, I learned to read his lines the same as if they were Braille. I could tell something from the swellings, the indentations. I never told him the things I read. He wouldn’t have wanted to know. I figured that since he respected my reading palms, I could just as easily respect his wish not to want to hear about it.” Duse got up from the table. “I never noticed his lifeline snapping short. I never even saw a fork in it—forks, those mean illness, sometimes death. Jesus, there wasn’t any sign, not one damned thing. Even the death files were clean and innocent of anything having a remote connection to him.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” said Isadora, her voice dull.

  “I’m going to sleep. I want to dream,” said Duse. “It’s so stupid. I keep looking and looking for a sign, for something I missed. I keep hoping that if I dream, maybe I can dream an answer.”

  Isadora sat in the kitchen after Duse left. She wouldn’t be able to bear it; nothing was more terrible than losing a parent, it was somehow losing a part of yourself. She jerked herself upright, she felt herself sweating. Her hands flew along her face, feeling the skin shaping her features.

  Duse wouldn’t answer the phone and she wouldn’t allow Isadora to pick up the receiver either. The doorbell rang unanswered, the condolence cards flopped into the house and collected rug dust. Duse wasn’t interested in sympathy, she was interested in signs. She kept a notebook by her bed in case she dreamed something. The quiet she carried about her gradually splintered. She got headaches and couldn’t sleep anymore and Isadora saw her taking pills, but then Duse complained that she was robbed of her dreams, that because of the pills, she couldn’t remember anything at all during the night, even if she got up to get water.