She pulled on her jacket, wrapping a kerchief around her hair. She bent to pick up her basket of clothes and he knew that he had to do something.
“Can I get your number? Would you like to go out to dinner some time?”
She looked at him, considering, and for a moment, he thought she was going to say no. “Yes,” she said finally. “Yes, I think I’d like that.”
HE MADE A reservation at Prunella’s, which Mick had told him was his wife’s favorite restaurant because the waiters kept refilling the bread basket without being asked. It was one of those new fondue places that were springing up, and though Lewis wasn’t sure how he felt about dipping bread in melted cheese, he thought it might impress Rita. They were supposed to meet there, and he got there first, his heart hammering. The restaurant was dark, and every table was lit with candles, and all along the walls were green, leafy fern plants.
As soon as he saw Rita come in, in a fancy dress, her ringlets piled on top of her head, he wanted to kiss her, to touch her hair, but instead he waved. They were led to a table, and he held the chair for her, before the host could. “A gentleman,” she said, pleased.
He didn’t want to blow this. He could tell that she was nervous, too, by the way she kept twisting one of her hoop earrings round and round. Maybe he couldn’t calm himself down, but he knew, from his work at the hospital, how he could make her relax. It was all in how you spoke to people, lowering your voice, tilting your head to show you were really listening. It was how you looked at someone, and she was so pretty that he could have looked at her forever.
They were halfway through the fondue, Lewis already sick of the cheese, when she started telling a story of how she had been so traumatized seeing White Heat that she refused to go to high school because her science teacher looked just like Jimmy Cagney. “White Heat,” he said, amused. “That’s an old movie.”
“I saw it the week it came out.”
“You must have been five, then,” he said, and her fork hovered in the air.
“Seventeen,” she said.
He looked at her in wonder, doing the math in his head. “I’m thirty-two,” she said quietly.
“Twenty,” he said, and she put her fork down.
“Seriously?” She tilted her head. He reached across the table and took her hand, feeling a jolt of heat. “Who cares how old we are,” he told her. “What matters is we’re having a good time.”
He saw her relax, her features softening. “Maybe,” she said.
All through dinner, he didn’t worry about the age difference. He saw only how the light seemed to shimmy through her curls, how delicate her hands were. Plus, he liked listening to her. She was smart, and she made him laugh. But that night, after walking her home, he began to worry about it. She was in her thirties. She must have had other boyfriends, and how could he compare with someone who probably knew how to tip a maitre d’, or who even had a passport. He had kissed women before, but he had never slept with one. He had always thought he’d fumble his way through with someone as new to all of this as he was, but he hadn’t counted on someone like Rita. How long would it be before she learned he was too green for her? He told himself he’d just have to show her that their age difference didn’t matter.
He didn’t want to go bowling Friday nights anymore, because he wanted to be with her, but he didn’t know how to tell the guys, so finally, he just told them the truth. Mick grinned, waving his hand. “Go, go,” he said. “When your feet hit the ground again, we’ll be here to bowl with you.”
THE FIRST TIME they made love, he was careful because he didn’t want Rita to know she was his first. He knew the mechanics of sex, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure how you went about it. She had opened all the windows in her apartment, so the air felt like a drug. She shone in the moonlight and then he kissed her, and it didn’t matter that he didn’t know what to do because he stopped thinking altogether.
Afterward, they sprawled on her bed, the sheet over the two of them. He couldn’t get over the shape of her shoulders, the way her neck sloped. Every time he looked at her ears, he felt a pull of desire. He wanted to kiss them. “Tell me everything,” she said, and he told her how Sheila had told him that her husband had died when he was about to take his first subway in New York, getting dizzy and falling off the platform right onto the tracks. He told her how John was taking up golf, and how Mick was going to night school to get his GED because he didn’t want to be an orderly all his life. Rita sat up. “Tell me something about you now,” she said.
He angled his body over hers. “This is what I want to tell you,” he said. He kissed her neck, the hollow below her throat, and then he kissed her mouth until he felt her kissing him back.
ON MONDAY, WHEN Lewis walked into the break room to get a packet of sugar for his coffee, one of the aides actually smiled at him. “I saw you the other night with your girlfriend. I waved but you didn’t see me.” She pulled a chair out at her table and Lewis sat down. There it was, the coffee pot, bubbling as always. The donuts layered onto a tray, even though all the women always complained they were too fat and they really shouldn’t.
Just like that, things changed. The nurses began to talk to him and even confide their secrets. They told him that, unlike their boyfriends, he really listened, and how could they get their guys to do the same? They began to rely on him more at work, too, to appreciate that he might just be an aide, but he had a reputation for calming patients down. “Mr. Tranquilizer,” one of the aides called him. They began to give him useful tips, like showing how to rely on a drawsheet instead of lifting patients up under their armpits (“Your back will give out in two years,” one nurse said).
He found himself gravitating back to the nurses, wanting to hang out with them in the break room. “Call me Angie,” one nurse said, even though he had always called her Miss Roget.
He was walking down the halls when he saw that Sheila was back, sitting in a hospital bed surrounded by magazines. “Hey stranger,” he said, coming into her room, and she smiled, waved, and then tapped her chest. “Always my heart,” she said. “Come talk to me.” He pulled up a chair, listening to her talk about how the doctors were treating her, why she especially loved the lime Jell-O. He couldn’t resist telling her about Rita, as if the old woman’s approval would cement things. “She’s beautiful,” he said and Sheila nodded, settling into her sheets. “My Bill was beautiful,” Sheila told him. “His being pretty got us through a lot of rough patches.”
They had been going out a year when Rita came down with a flu, the first time she had been sick since he had met her. She called him, her voice froggy and miserable. “I’ll see you as soon as I’m better,” she said, but Lewis came over with soup and orange juice, knocking on her door. He heard her fumbling with the lock, and then there she was, in her robe, her hair matted in damp coils, her eyes bleary with fever. “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said. She kept trying to fix her hair, and he pulled her hands down. “I like it mussy,” he said. She half smiled. “Come on, let’s get you to bed,” he said. Lewis changed her sweaty sheets and heated up the soup, helping her eat it, cupping his hand under the spoon with each bite. When she finished it, he put a cool cloth on her forehead.
“You’re so kind,” she said.
All that week, he took care of her, coming over in the morning and then after work, even taking her laundry to Suds and doing it for her. And then, as soon as she was well, he came down with it.
“My turn,” she said, showing up at his door with soup and crackers, but he wouldn’t let her in. “I don’t want you to get sick again,” he insisted, and she looked at him, perplexed. “I was already sick,” she said. “I’ve got immunity. You work in a hospital so you should know things like that.” She held up the bag. “I have chicken soup and those crackers you like.” She peered past his door. “Plus, your place is a mess. I can clean it up for you.”
“Rita, please, I just need to sleep,” he said. He thanked her, but kept the door half-c
losed. He sent her away that day, and the next day, too, and when she called to say she wanted to stop by, he said, “I’ll call you soon as I’m better.” By the end of the week, he had bounced back. He couldn’t wait to see her, but when she came over, she looked smaller somehow, and her face was pinched with hurt.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have sent you away,” Lewis said. “But honestly, I wasn’t doing anything but sleeping.”
“I missed you,” she said. She sat on the couch next to him, leaning her head against his shoulder. “When I was sick, one of my older customers actually left me a box of Miss Lydia’s Powders for Female Troubles outside the door. The landlady sent up cough medicine because she said she needed to get some sleep and I was hacking too loudly. And I had you to care for me. It made me feel so good. I wish you had let me take care of you.”
“I said I was sorry.”
Like an engine running down, she was suddenly quiet. She took her head off his shoulder and looked at him. “I’m bound to say something wrong, since I’m the one who has to do all the talking.”
“Okay by me. I like hearing what you have to say.”
“But what about what you have to say? Don’t you ever want to talk with me, share things?”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”
She got up from the couch. “Why didn’t you let me help you when you had the flu?”
“Come on, it’s my job to take care of sick people, not yours.”
She shook her head. “But I wanted to take care of you, to feel needed, to get closer to you.”
“You’re making a big deal out of something that’s not a big deal at all.”
“Lewis, I feel lonely with you. You never talk about anything important with me. I never know what you’re thinking. I don’t even know that much about your past. I thought maybe things would change when you got to know me better, but now I think that maybe they won’t.”
He felt as if every cell of his body was exposed. She was inches away from him, but she looked so far away. “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” he said. “I’m thinking how lucky I am that I met you. I’m thinking that you make this town feel like home to me.”
“What did home feel like?” she asked. “Tell me about your parents, about what you were like as a kid. Anything.”
He felt as if a hood had been dropped over him. He couldn’t say a word, couldn’t look at her.
She stepped back, and looked at him sadly. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” she said. She grabbed her jacket, heading for the door. “It’s just not going to work out.”
“You’re leaving because of this?”
“This isn’t what I want for myself. I need someone who lets me in.” She was watching him, as if this was a test she knew he’d fail.
“Maybe I want someone who doesn’t leave the first time things get difficult,” he countered.
“The first time?” she said, astonished. “Are we in the same relationship?” She took her hand off the doorknob and studied him. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Let’s try this. Do you have anything to tell me?”
His mind fished for things to say. “My mother worked for a plumbing company that made plaid sinks and toilets. She was almost never home.” His words hung in the air.
He thought she’d be happy, but Rita frowned. “You told me she didn’t work,” she said curtly. “You told me she was always home.”
She put one hand on her hip, shaking her head, and he felt an itch of anger that she was blaming him, because this time, he had really tried. “Rita, what does it matter? Who cares what my mother did or how I grew up? What does it have to do with us today?”
“I’m thinking about tomorrow,” she told him. “About us down the line. I’m thinking about giving more and more of myself, but you’ve never even let me stay over the whole weekend,” she said. She leaned along the wall, waiting, and he knew that he was supposed to invite her, tell her how much he wanted to be with her. But he thought of a whole weekend of her questions, her wanting to know everything about him. And besides, she kept telling him how much she wanted to be with him, but look at how easily she was ready to leave. How would it be if he got used to having her around and then she left again? He thought of the way he had waited and waited for his father and all there had been were broken promises and then silence. His own mother had lied to him about his dad. Jimmy had vanished and Rose’s letters never came. “I have a really physical job,” he said quietly. “I get up early. I come home late. And right now, I just got over the flu.”
He saw how her face hardened, how she drew herself up. He wanted to grab her hands, but instead, he stayed planted to the floor, folding his arms across his chest.
“I had really fallen for you,” she said, and then, before he could open his mouth to stop her, she was gone.
THAT NIGHT, HE roamed Madison, stunned at how much he missed Rita already. He walked to her apartment and rang her buzzer, but either she wasn’t home or she wasn’t answering. He stopped at a pay phone and called her, and then he began thinking about what she wanted from him, how he’d have to revisit his past and spread it out in front of her like a poisoned banquet. He had come here to reinvent himself, to start anew, and she wanted to take him back to what he had been.
Pained, he hung up the phone before she could answer.
HE DIDN’T TELL anyone he had broken up until the next week, after he had given up hope that she might call. Missing Rita was like an ache he couldn’t soothe. Lewis thought he saw her everywhere. Even the smell of the soup in the cafeteria, the watery canned tomato stuff, made him remember the way he had fed her when she was ill, how grateful she had been and how good it had all felt.
After two weeks, he admitted to the nurses and his friends that he and Rita were through. “You’re a young guy, you should be playing the field, anyway,” Mick told him, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
The nurses took him on as their pet project, inviting him to dinner, telling him there were more fish in the sea. It was as if going out with Rita had left a shine on him that other women were drawn to. He ended up dating one nurse for two weeks. He dated an aide’s best friend for over ten months. What Rita had said thrummed inside of him, and he tried his best to be different, to talk more, to open up, but no matter what he did, sooner or later, every relationship fell apart. His latest relationship, with a nurse named Dolly, didn’t last through August. “You have so many beautiful qualities,” Dolly said. “The way you look after me, the way you open doors. You never once forget to say God bless you when I sneeze. But I feel like I’m the only one in this relationship.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, and she shrugged. “I feel like I don’t really know you.”
“You know me.”
“Fine. Let’s try this then. Tell me one thing personal you’ve never told anyone else.”
Lewis felt the world clamp shut. He could talk about Jimmy, about Rose, about how his mother had so many boyfriends, but that old world seemed too large for him, as if it might swallow him whole and he’d never emerge again. “I have a rotten sense of direction,” he said, and Dolly sighed. “I rest my case,” she said, “and I knew that already.” After that she refused to go out with him anymore.
He still dated, but he began to read the signs that a relationship was going to end. The look in a woman’s face when he leaned in to kiss her, how her body angled away from his. A woman would tell him she wanted time to think their relationship over, and then a week later, Lewis would see her holding another man’s hand. They always said the same thing. I can’t get to know you.
ANOTHER YEAR PASSED and it was winter again, New Year’s Eve, and Lewis was working, walking the halls, ignoring the HAPPY 1966 signs that were posted on the doorways. Already, he’d seen a patient with a broken leg who’d skidded on a patch of black ice. Two seventeen-year-old kids had been treated with Thorazine because they had taken too much LSD at a party, and their parents, mistaking Lewis for a doctor
, had grabbed his arm. “We didn’t even know he smoked marijuana,” the mother cried. “That’s how it starts, isn’t it?” Lewis just nodded because they wouldn’t believe him if he said no. One of the aides had actually brought in hash brownies for the break room tonight, and the only reason Lewis hadn’t grabbed one was because he still had to work.
Maybe when he was done, if everything wasn’t all gone, he’d drop over there later and have one, along with some champagne. He looked in a room and saw that Sheila was here again. She never seemed to stay out the hospital for long, always back with heart or stomach pains, needing tests. She was sleeping, but he came in and sat beside her, just for a moment. He had looked up her chart after he had first met her and had asked the other nurses about her. She didn’t have any family. She was back in the hospital now because neighbors had noticed a smell coming from her apartment. They had knocked on the door repeatedly and then someone commented that he hadn’t seen Sheila in days, even though she usually went out every single day for a walk to the local church, her hair veiled, her hands clutching a white leather Bible. They knew she lived alone, without even a pet to keep her company. But this silence scared them. The landlord had broken in and found her on the floor, lying in a pool of urine.
The nurses all thought Sheila was a lot of trouble. She would get up and wander off by herself. She wanted to know what every pill and every procedure was for. She would listen to the news on a little transistor radio and then, five minutes after she had heard it, she’d want to talk to the nurses about it. In November, when there had been a march on Washington to protest the war, she insisted she wanted to go. When there were race riots in Los Angeles, she clucked her tongue, and when Bob Dylan came on, her favorite, she sang along to “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “She’s just lonely,” Lewis would say, but the other nurses sniffed. No one came to visit her in the hospital and she received no cards.
Is This Tomorrow Page 20
