by Susan Conley
We sat at one of the outdoor café tables crowded with students. The city felt so alive. The trees hadn’t slipped their leaves yet, and the sun dappled everything in cognac. Who were these young people eating flan and drinking wine in the middle of the day? What was this city? I knew I wanted to live there. Anne-Marie ordered us mushroom omelettes and champagne and didn’t talk about her past or about the new book she was working on. She spoke about her lover, an older German novelist she lived with, and how he wanted her to bring him raspberry pastry when she returned to their apartment.
She was elusive. “I am a skeptic,” she said after her second flute. “So I’m doubtful about your project. But I wouldn’t be a poet unless I had hope.”
I flew home and finished my dissertation. A good university press—Michigan—bought the manuscript for a small amount of money. I mailed her a copy of the book a year later, and she sent me a postcard in Oakland with Salvador Dalí’s face on it. It said, “It’s a good book. You have absolved me of many of my worst writerly sins. Thank you. I’m still embarrassed to read about myself. Anne-Marie.”
I won’t get to have champagne with Sarojini Naidu. She died in 1949. But I’ve tracked down a woman named Padmaja, and I’ve begun calling her phone number in Dharmsala, in northern India, hoping she is Sarojini’s daughter. The phone rings and rings on the other side of the world. If she ever answers, I don’t know whether she’ll agree to let a foreigner look at her mother’s papers. I go to the kitchen now and dial this number again. It’s seven o’clock at night in India. I let it ring until it’s useless to keep trying. Then I put the receiver down and make a bowl of oatmeal with bananas.
There aren’t any clouds today. Sunlight has made its way over the highest buildings on the street and floods my windows. I can hear Madame Boudreaux and one of her boys talking on the stairs. We both still think the elevator is unreliable, even though the landlord had men with tools in this week to fix it. The next Rimbaud paper is laid out on the table next to my oatmeal. But Luke calls.
He says, “I don’t feel well today.” My heart skips. “Truly, it’s nothing. But I seem to be having trouble breathing again. It feels like there’s a lead weight on my chest.”
Shit. I take off my pajama bottoms in the kitchen while I talk. “Let’s go to the hospital. This is going to be fine. I’ll call Sara. I’ll call Dr. Picard. I’ll be there in thirty-five minutes. Can you wait that long? Should I call an ambulance? Have you called Gaird? Please don’t try to be a hero. Please tell me how you are? Please don’t try to be strong.”
“If you could calm down, that would be great. Then you could just come and get me. Gaird’s in Amsterdam till tonight, remember? It’ll be so much easier if I’m with you and not alone.”
I run into the bedroom and pull on jeans and a black T-shirt and go down to the street to find a taxi. When I get to his apartment, Luke’s standing in front, holding the keys out for me. He says, “Poincaré.”
I grab the keys without saying a word and run to find the car on Avenue Raymond Poincaré. Then I squeal back to him in the car and he climbs in. “God, you’re fast.” He coughs.
“Can you make it? Does it hurt? Where does it hurt, exactly?”
“It feels like there’s a gallon of milk sitting over my heart.”
“That’s got to be your lung again.” I don’t know where I’m going. East. I need to go east. I drive around the traffic circle at the arch and on impulse turn right down Avenue de Friedland. Then the streets blend together. I just keep going straight on Boulevard Haussmann and the names change, but I know the streets are moving me closer to the tenth.
“I hate that I’ve made you come out like this. You have classes, don’t you?”
“Which can be canceled with a simple phone call. I hate that you’re not doing well. Concentrate on breathing.” I’m trying to find that boulevard called Magenta. The traffic is horrible, and the wait at the lights feels excruciating. “God, I hate the traffic here.”
“It’s bad today.”
“How long has your chest felt weird?”
“It started yesterday.”
“You have to tell me next time. The minute it starts. It’s what you pay me and Gaird for.” Then we’re on Boulevard Magenta, and I go north until we hit a little grid of one-lane streets. I get glimpses of the hospital’s black mansard roof, but I can’t seem to get the car close to it. “Is there a map in this car?” I’m losing my mind here. “There’s got to be a map. Are you breathing? Tell me you’re breathing?”
Luke’s eyes are closed. He doesn’t hear me. I finally find a one-way lane that takes me through to the hospital gates. I double-park outside the door to the emergency room, which is all the way around the back. Then I jump out and help walk Luke inside.
The nurses are on him in seconds with lots of questions in French. “I can’t breathe very well,” he says in English, and I translate his words into French in case anyone has missed the import. But the nurses take the breathing thing very seriously, and within minutes he’s wheeled behind a door that I’m not allowed to go through. Oh, God. Please don’t let him stop breathing. Don’t let his lung collapse again.
It’s very quiet in the hospital lobby. What should I do with his car? I run outside with the keys and move it to a spot in a lot across from the emergency entrance. Then I jog back in and sit in one of the bucket seats bolted to the cement floor. It’s like an airport lobby from the 1960s in here. Seat colors alternate yolky yellow and robin’s-egg blue. I have the feeling that we’re not really at a hospital but at a departure terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and this carries me for a few minutes.
Then a nurse takes me behind the check-in station, down a brightly lit hall to a small examining room where Luke lies on a gurney in a blue johnny. The neckline hangs low in front so I can see how his clavicles jut out. The depression above each of those bones is so deep you could spoon water in there. We aren’t doing a very good job of helping him gain weight.
“What’s happening?” I say. “Can you breathe? I’m so sorry if it hurts.”
“I’m better.” His eyes and closed. “They gave me oxygen. Now they want to take blood, and I want a witness.”
“A witness?”
“I want you to distract me from the needle.”
“Of course! Of course I will.” He’s always been afraid of needles. He used to cry on the way to Dr. Burden’s when we got vaccinations. My mother bribed him with new books. Mysteries were best. I take his hand. “We can get a new Hardy Boys.”
“I’ve read them all.”
“Squeeze my fingers as hard as you can.” He winces when the needle slides in. He’s thin, yes, but that’s not new. It’s the color of his skin that’s changed—paler now. Grayer. There’s tired skin under his eyes, and the bones of his face are also too defined. I can make out the sharp line of his jaw too clearly under the skin and the mechanism that opens and shuts his mouth. I hate seeing him like this. He has always been the strong one.
“Where is Dr. Picard? Where is your doctor? We need X-rays. We need chest scans. You couldn’t breathe. Where is Sara? I’ve got to find Sara.” I go out into the hall and find another nurse at the check-in desk; she says she’ll have Sara paged and that Picard’s at a conference at the Pasteur Institute with Dr. Montagnier.
“He is the doctor who discovered the HIV virus. All the leading SIDA doctors from around the world have come to France this week.” The nurse calls AIDS by its French name, SIDA, and I nod. It makes sense—Picard’s the doctor in charge of infectious diseases at St. Louis.
We see the attending, instead of Picard, whose name I instantly forget, much younger than Picard, with wavy brown hair over his ears and a wiry body like a marathoner. He says he’s worried about white blood cells.
A different nurse comes in to take more blood then. She has a short, copper-tinged perm, and mumbles something to herself.
“What are we looking for with the blood?” I ask in French while she fills the second vial. I�
��m on alert now. I’m speeding up.
“Screening for viruses, madame,” she says in English with a heavy French accent. Then she eases the needle out, places a square piece of gauze on Luke’s wrist, and puts a round Band-Aid over the gauze. Luke falls asleep instantly, which surprises me. How did he get so exhausted? The nurse hands me a small bottle. “There is Valium inside.”
“Valium?”
She nods. “The doctor thinks your brother’s having anxiety. Which may be why he couldn’t breathe.”
“Anxiety? His lung collapsed once. It was three months ago. I didn’t know this was about anxiety?” I think Luke’s been living alone too much. He hasn’t said anything to me about stress. But I’ve been so caught up in Macon. I’ve been selfish. How do I track down Sara?
He sleeps for another half hour, and I sit on the black stool with wheels next to his bed and watch him breathe. Then Sara bursts in. “My God. What’s going on with him now?”
“You found us!” I hug her. “It’s not so good, Sara.” Then I start to cry, which surprises me. I didn’t realize I was holding it in.
“Oh, Christ.”
“He felt like he couldn’t breathe.”
“I haven’t seen the report or the labs. I don’t know anything yet.”
Luke wakes up then and smiles. “I needed a good nap. I feel fine now.”
“Sleep as long as you want,” I say. “They’ve given me drugs that you’re going to like.”
“What flavor?” He looks too much like a really sick person lying on the bed. I’m desperate to get him up and home.
Sara reaches for his arm. “She’s not telling you until we get you home.”
“Let’s go, Luke. Let’s take you back. We have work to do. People to see.” I don’t look at Sara while we help him get dressed because I’m afraid I’ll start crying again. How did this happen? He’s so tired that he doesn’t protest when I help him with his socks and his sneakers.
We walk into the hall, and Sara hugs him. Then she pulls me close and whispers, “I’ll call you the minute the labs are ready. Could be days, though.”
“The second they’re ready.”
There’s a light rain falling outside, and the sky has turned pewter. On the drive home the pink hydrangea in the parks look gaudy. Luke would like a coffee. He says he feels better. I don’t believe him. He insists, so I find a spot on Victor Hugo and we walk to Madeleine’s on Avenue Raymond Poincaré. It’s his favorite café. I get a table away from the draft.
It’s timeless inside—dark wooden chairs and round tables. Jazz. A black granite bar. The service is good and slightly formal. Our espressos come quickly on miniature saucers. Was the attending doctor really worried or only a little worried? Is Luke breathing okay now? Is there a pain in his chest, or is he having an anxiety attack? How have I not seen any of this coming?
“It’s a tea party for dolls in here,” Luke says, stirring his coffee with the tiny spoon.
I drop two sugar cubes in my cup. “You need to call Gaird. He’s got to come home.”
“He’s supposed to be gone one night. I’m going to be fine. I’ll call him this afternoon. But I bet he’s already on his way home.”
“Would you like me to cook for you tonight?”
“You don’t cook.”
“I cook.”
“You make instant oatmeal.”
“You need help. You’re not staying alone.”
“I talked to Dad last Thursday.”
“Oh really.” I lean forward. “And why?”
“I do every week.” He turns back to the window. “You know this. Or at least I thought you knew this. We talk water. We talk engineering and if I’ve hired the right guy to run things. Dad wants a real engineer in there instead of the policy guy I picked. He asks about you.” He reaches for his coffee. “He says God’s watching out for us.” Now he unwraps his black scarf from his neck. “He said he’s praying for us.”
My mother died in her bed on March 8, 1988. My father lay next to her. He said she moved her arm as if she was going to roll over, but then she couldn’t. She was only sixty-one. Dad made Luke and me fly to Hardin, Montana, afterward to bury her in her family’s plot. The three days before our flight Dad badgered me about words for that bench he was having made. He was furious because I couldn’t think of what to write. He didn’t speak to us the whole flight to Bozeman. We landed in a blinding snowstorm and made our way outside the terminal to Avis. Then Luke drove us slowly, very slowly, to the church in Hardin, where Mom’s younger sister, Happy, still lives on a sheep farm. It was like we’d landed on the moon—the wide-open swales next to the road blanketed in deep pillows of snow, and the low arms of the trees. Luke hardly spoke. He was so focused on getting us through the storm.
Aunt Happy belonged to a white Congregational chapel with a steep, pitched roof and a musty alcove. Dad’s two older brothers flew in with their girlfriends and kids from their first marriages. Dad didn’t speak during the funeral. He just cried and hugged people. His grief was too big to allow him to do anything else. I could almost pretend none of it was happening—that we hadn’t just flown from San Francisco and driven three hours in a Montana whiteout. Luke took me aside in the church and said, “I don’t want to spend my afterlife buried in the ground in Hardin. Don’t ever let this happen to me.”
After the ceremony, Aunt Happy served fruit punch in a glass bowl in the alcove with star-shaped shortbread cookies on dark wooden trays. Then there was a caravan to the graveyard and more talking and hugging outside in the snow. The minister, a tall, gray-haired man in bifocals, gave a brief sermon. None of it was happening to me. I was outside my body—up above the cemetery watching with my mother. We were accomplices. She and I. The heavy piece of orange equipment needed to cut through the frozen ground sat one hundred yards away next to a wooden shed. It looked like a tractor or a monster, depending on your mood. The minister spoke about the generations of Mom’s family who’d been buried at the plot. Their surname was Alder. And Alders had been buried in that ground since Alders began coming to Montana from Holland.
Everyone else drove back to Aunt Happy’s in a snaking line of four-wheel-drive vehicles. Then it was just Dad and Luke and me. The hole they’d dug in the ground was very deep for the casket. How had that monster machine done this with all the snow? Dad knelt on the ground next to Mom’s casket and started rubbing his hands together. Why was there a casket? I didn’t think Mom would like that. I’ve always been afraid of caskets. Scared of them the way I’m scared of elevators and of being stuck underground in the Paris metro—a fear of being closed in that I inherited from my mother. Why were we even at a graveyard?
I needed something from Dad. Anything. There were rows and rows of gravestones. They looked like round loaves of bread. Dizzying. The light never rose above muted. Some people welcome the introversion of gray, but my mother built a life in California based on the sun. Yellows and ochers and oranges—brightly striped scarves that she wore over her braid and tied at the nape of her neck. At night she’d take her scarf off in the kitchen and unwind her hair until it fell in her face. I was eight and nine and ten, and I’d sit in her lap on the rocking chair in the corner by the door and brush her hair back from her eyes with my hands until she began to look like my mother again.
I hated it when she got haircuts because she wasn’t familiar to me in the first days afterward. I never wanted to be without her back then. When I told her this one night in the rocking chair, she said, “And so you won’t be. I’ll always be with you. You’ll always be able to feel me.” I put my face close to hers and we kissed once, twice, three times, and one more kiss on my nose. I wanted to sit in the rocking chair with her for hours, because I couldn’t always get my hands on her like this. She was beautiful. It was a beauty that wasn’t mediated by anything. Just simple.
“Why are we here, Dad?” I said in the snow at the cemetery. “She wouldn’t have wanted to be here.”
“You two don’t understand.”
Then he sobbed. I’d never seen him cry like this before. It should have brought us closer, but instead it served to heighten some impasse. “I know what she wanted. Family meant everything to her. She wanted to be buried near family.”
“It’s too cold here for her. What have you done to her?” I needed him to be strong like he was in the desert. I was yelling now. “Why did you leave us? Why did you ever go away?”
I’ve always been able to become the most upset around my family. Luke took my arm and pulled me back toward the rented Honda. Dad never looked up at us. He shut me out. What I didn’t say then was that I’d missed him more than he ever knew when he was gone. I haven’t spoken to him since the funeral.
Luke takes a sip from his espresso cup. “We’re in Dad’s prayers.”
“Even the gay son?” Luke is beyond grudges. He’s the oldest. The fixer, just like Mom was, which always makes him more evolved than me. He and Dad have done so much work together on the Water Trust projects. There were very few foreigners in China in the early eighties, when Dad started going there. He was zealous about his religion and wary about being in a country where Christianity was all but banned. But he and Luke worked all day in desert towns. Dad didn’t speak Mandarin and Luke didn’t speak the Bible, and they got along fine. They enjoyed it. I think it was exhilarating for them—building something that had purpose. Dad believed in the importance of water almost as much as he believed in my mother and in God and in math.
Luke reaches for his cigarettes in his coat. “You’re sick,” I say. “You can’t smoke.”
“You’re furrowing your brow again. It’s nice that Dad calls me. I like it.”
“Just be careful.”
“You’re edgy. Dad screwed up at the funeral. Get over it. You’re too old to hold on to it.”
He clasps his hands in his lap and looks monkish, like our father. I stand and grab his scarf off the back of his chair and put it around his neck. We walk out of Madeleine’s and make our way to his apartment. He lies down in bed, and I give him the phone receiver and the remote control and one of the Valiums. Then I bring the note from the kitchen that has Gaird’s hotel on it. “Call him,” I say, handing it to Luke. “Now, please. So he can come home.”
