Except that his eyes were open. They were dark brown and brilliantly alive, like shiny coins half-buried on a desolate beach. He lifted his head—barely—and moved his lips. Words escaped in a whisper. I couldn’t understand them.
“I’m sorry?” I said, moving closer. “Sir?”
His hand had snaked out from under the sheet and he beckoned to me. I went to his bedside. “I didn’t mean to walk in like this,” I said. “I thought the room was empty.”
He shook his head, dismissing the apology. Closer, said his fingers. I brought my ear to his lips and smelled the bitter dryness of him, something like baking soda.
“Take it,” he said.
“Sir?”
“Take the chair,” he said. “Nobody’s using it.”
When I returned to my mother’s room with the chair, I discovered her chart hanging on a little hook outside her door: “Hemorrhoidectomy,” it said. Surgery performed by a Dr. Martinez, and a touch of codeine prescribed for the pain.
My flight to Marshall had been canceled. In fact, there was even some doubt it had ever existed. “I know we used to fly to Marshall at that time,” the ticket agent told me. “But I don’t think we have for quite a while.” His appearance put me briefly at ease; he wore his hair short and unkempt and he had a little black goatee: exactly the way young men in Seattle were supposed to look in 1995. I explained that I’d been booked on the flight; it had to exist. I gave him my name and he looked it up.
“You’re booked to fly to Madison, Wisconsin,” he said.
“Marshall. Marshall, Montana.”
He shook his head. “Look,” he said. “I can let you use the phone.” He reached beneath the counter and pulled out a receiver with a glowing keypad. “If you know anyone in town, have them come get you and bring you back in the morning. We’ll get you out of here then.”
“That’s all you’re giving me? A phone call?”
He frowned. “Take it or leave it,” he said.
Janine arrived in the same Ford Escort we’d shared when we lived together in Marshall. Idling, it made a new sound, as if a man were crouched under the hood sharpening a large knife. She leaned across the empty passenger seat and pushed open the door for me.
The back seat was full of cardboard boxes with what looked like all her winter clothes spilling out. She was wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap and a couple of large crystal pendants around her neck. I knew the hat but not the pendants.
“I really appreciate it,” I said. She eyed me with a kind of dispassionate destructiveness, as if I were a walnut she was about to crack open.
“There’s a patch of cold floor with your name on it,” she said.
“Well, thanks. It’s a far cry from the airport.”
She took a cigarette from a crumpled pack on the dash and stoked it with the lighter. Look! she was saying. You drove me back to smoking! We listened to music without speaking for most of the ride back to her place. It was a mix tape of some kind, a compilation of songs that were popular before we knew each other. “This is a good tape,” I said.
“Somebody made it for me.”
“I see.”
She put out her cigarette. “So where were you flying back from?” she asked. A car moved into traffic behind us, illuminating the interior, and our eyes met, reflected in the windshield.
“Newark. My mother was in the hospital. She’s better now.” I considered telling her the whole story, but she interrupted the pause to tell me that her sister, whom I’d totally forgotten had been sick for a long time with bone cancer, had finally died last month.
“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
She shrugged. “It was only a matter of time. There was a memorial service. Everybody read a little something they wrote. I know everybody says this, but she would have really loved it.”
“It sounds like—”
“In fact I suggested to her that we do something like it while she was still alive. It would be kind of a party, and her friends and all of us would be there, and we’d tell her how much we loved her and everything. But she would have none of it. She was too proud.”
We were silent for a little while. She clenched and unclenched her hands on the wheel. I tried to imagine what this would be like, hearing everyone telling you they love you, knowing that they can say nothing else, because you’re dying …
“That would have been very powerful,” I said.
“I don’t remember asking your opinion,” she came back.
Janine lived in the basement of some rich people. They had fixed things up pretty nicely down there—a terrific kitchen with a tile floor, a fold-down Murphy bed, and some built-in bookshelves—but none of it could dispel the gloom. The air was clammy. Shrill sounds emanated from a clock radio sitting on an upturned milk crate. Janine threw her coat on the bed. “I’ll get you a blanket,” she said, heading for a closet.
“So what have you been doing?” I asked. “For a living.”
“Computer shit,” came her muffled voice. “I commute half an hour.” She walked out into the room and threw two rough army blankets and a stained pillow on the floor at my feet. “Don’t you want to know what I’ve been doing with my free time?”
“If you want to talk about it, I …”
She waved a dismissive hand at me and walked off, down a little hallway. I saw a light go on and heard water running. I spread the blankets out in a neat rectangle, set the pillow at one end, took off my shoes, and collapsed. I rolled to one side and stared at the carpet a while. It seemed to be moving. Squinting, I could make out a shiny black millipede. I reached for it, but it burrowed down into the weave.
Janine came out wearing a pair of pajamas I gave her for Christmas one year. “Don’t get up,” she said. She sat on the bed with her legs crossed and watched me. “How long has it been? Since we last spoke?”
“I’ll bet it’s six months,” I said.
“More than two years. Do you know I’ve been married and divorced since we broke up?”
I didn’t think she wanted me to answer, so I didn’t.
“I married this guy practically on a whim, about five months after I moved here. He had a house in Queen Anne and bought and sold art for a living. He traveled a lot to Europe and didn’t invite me along. I went to work, you know, and would come home to this enormous house with all this art on the walls. Then one time he brought this painter home from Poland, this gigantic kid who did these stupid splatter things, and the kid moved into one of the upstairs rooms and did his thing in there, and Ernest, that’s the husband, sold his paintings. And then one night this Polish kid got drunk when Ernest was away and beat the shit out of me and tried to rape me, and when Ernest got back and I told him about it he kicked me out.”
“God,” I said.
From her breast pocket she produced another cigarette and a lighter. She smoked quietly and continued to look at me.
“I cannot believe you called me and asked me to come get you,” she said. “I absolutely cannot believe it.”
Obviously this had all been a mistake. Of course I’d been thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind, that one thing might lead to another and we’d end up having sex or at least sleeping in the same bed. I sat up. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Maybe I’ll just get a cab back to the airport, and—”
“Oh, chill out, please.” She leaned over and switched off the lamp, and I could see the cigarette’s tip gently rising and falling in the dark. “You can get your cab in the morning.”
The flight to Marshall took off without difficulty and with me on it, exhausted. I was eager to get home and go to bed, my own bed, and sleep for a great many hours, without regard for the time of day. I’d arranged to take several days off from my job—iworked for a telemarketing company, listening in on the conversations of the telemarketers, making sure they said the right things—and I figured I would just keep a low profile and pretend I was still with my mother.
I wondered if Janine remembered that I, too,
had lost a sibling. His name was Richard and he’d lived to the age of twenty. I was eighteen and had graduated from high school about a week before he died. He was in the back seat of a car driven by a drunken friend that careened into an abandoned quarry filled with about thirty feet of murky water. The other two people in the car died too. It was an event of unequaled notoriety in our town, and one that cast upon me a tragic air that followed me all that summer, wrecking my relationships with the very friends who might have been able to make me feel better. In college I occasionally used Rich’s death to get girls to sleep with me.
Richard was a careful and serious person. It is inconceivable that he would have been in this car, with these people, drinking. All the same, there he was. Our father was never the same; he died in his sixties of a heart attack sustained while trimming the hedge. But Mom didn’t crack. She contained her grief, promptly screwing the lid on it and meting it out in private over a period of years. By tomorrow night she would be back in our old house, lying on the couch in her robe, telling her dog how happy she was to be home.
I carried the chair into her hospital room but never did sit down. “Hemorrhoids?” I asked her.
She smiled as if she thought I’d known. Her lips moved a little before she spoke, uttering the ghost words that haunted the things she really said. “Paulie, you can’t imagine the pain.”
“You told me you were dying.”
“I said no such thing.”
“Do you know how much it cost me to come out here? Do you know what it’s like trying to get off work with this kind of notice?” I conjured the image of my boss, mush-mouthed reprimands pouring from his face, to rally around. “You lied to me.”
“If it’s the money that bothers you, Paulie, I’ll pay for your ticket.”
“It’s not the money. I don’t care about the money.”
“I said I needed you.”
“You lied.”
“I wasn’t lying,” she made herself say. “I wasn’t lying.”
She lay back, spreading herself across the bed like a jelly. Tears welled in her eyes. But still I persisted, not yet sorry for what I was doing. “You could ask me. You could ask me to come, and I’d come.”
“Not true,” she whispered.
The crackle of an intercom brought me back to the plane. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain was saying, “welcome to flight 2195 to Marshall, Montana. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we’re not going there. There’s been some kind of incident at the Marshall airport, nothing for us to worry about, but it looks like they’re not going to clear us to land, so I’m taking us back to Seattle.” A groan went up around me.
“He’s lying,” someone said nearby.
“What’s there to lie about?” someone replied.
“God only knows. I don’t want to know.”
In a moment we were banking back toward the coast.
“Rent me a car,” I told the ticket agent, who was young and alert, had probably had a good night’s sleep followed by several cups of hot coffee.
“The car-rental offices are right—”
“I know, I know. I want you to rent me a car that I can drive to Marshall. I want it instead of a plane ticket.”
“I can get you on the next—”
“Just the car. It costs less than the ticket, right? You’re getting a great deal.”
I was the first bad thing to happen to the clerk so far that day, and I suppose I felt a little sorry for her, but not really. She stared ragged smoking holes through me. Her hands were poised above the computer keyboard. I stared back.
“Come on,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“You can. You can. You’ll be commended for doing it. You’ll get rid of me and from here on you can have a normal, pleasant day.”
She rolled her eyes. “I wish,” she said, and I knew I had her.
I listened to her breathing over the car phone. Through the windshield I saw the lights of a plane pulsing; they rose in my field of vision, dimmed in the shaded strip of glass, and disappeared. How long would she have waited for me to say something? Maybe forever.
I said, “Don’t. It’s all right. Don’t.”
“I might as well just die,” she said, not so sure of herself. “Maybe I should. Die, I mean.”
“There’s no reason to die. Don’t say that.”
I believe she was realizing that I was not who she thought I was and deciding what, if anything, to do about it. I had to say something, otherwise she would hang up. At that moment a trailer truck came roaring into the parking lot, slowed briefly as it passed my car, then sped up again, barreling down the exit ramp. I watched its red running lights shrink into the distance.
“What was that?” she said.
“Big rig.”
I could hear her licking her lips. “Please forgive me,” she said. I tried to picture the room she was in: a sloppy twin bed, maybe, the sheets half pulled from the mattress and leaving a bare corner exposed; dinner plates with crumbs on them stacked on the carpet. A roommate sound asleep behind a thin wall. I was starting to understand what a jerk I was, why I lived alone in a hick town, in a silent apartment, where no neighbors ever visited and no cries of passion ever sounded.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for what happened.”
The blackness outside seemed to expand, taking on the shape of something huge: if I opened the car window I could touch it. I found myself gripped by terror and pressed the phone closer to my ear.
“Do you love me?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Take me back,” she cried. “Will you take me back?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Come home to me!” she was saying, but I could barely hear.
When I woke again it was still dark, and the phone lay silent on the passenger seat of the car. I opened the door and stepped out. It was cool, the air fresh, my fear gone. I walked to the low brick building that housed the restrooms and peed to the sound of quiet music. When I came out, I saw, for the first time, an illuminated booth in the parking lot, staffed by a clean-shaven middle-aged man watching a small television. Had he been there all this time? How had I failed to notice him? He presided over a narrow wooden counter under a sign reading FREE COFFEE.
“Free coffee?” he said. His words carried across that scant distance with perfect clarity, as if ferried by swift small birds.
I went to him. Crickets were exploding in the weeds beyond the blacktop. A plastic basket of broken cookies lay on the counter.
“Okay,” I said. “And the cookies?”
He nodded. While he fixed my coffee, I tried to rearrange, with gentle fingers, some of the fragments into one whole cookie, but they didn’t fit. I picked up a few of the larger pieces. “What time is it?” I asked.
“Nearly three,” he said, handing me the coffee. He had made it with cream, which is not the way I drink it, but it seemed important to accept what I was given.
The man didn’t seem real to me, and because I thought I might be imagining him I never thanked him. For the rest of the drive, even with the radio going, I struggled to convince myself that there wasn’t someone else in the car with me, hiding behind the driver’s seat or maybe in the trunk.
My building was quiet when I arrived, and I couldn’t get in because my keys were in my duffel bag. I wondered if I would ever see the bag again. I walked around outside, trying the windows, which were locked, and I noticed a blinking red light inside: there was a message on the answering machine. Finally I went to my door. A box lay on the hallway floor, with my mother’s return address scrawled in her florid hand. I sat down and leaned against the wall, to wait for dawn and for the landlord to wake up.
The Future Journal
I had a brilliant idea for my classroom bulletin board, but when the principal scuttled it I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to teach second grade this year, or perhaps ever again. The bulletin board was going to be an evolutionary chart, starting on the
left with some chemical symbols meant to represent amino acids and progressing through single-celled animals and amphibians and apes all the way up to man, who would not be a man at all but a seven-year-old child wearing a mortarboard and holding a scrolled-up diploma. I was going to get Gwen, the art teacher and my significant other, to draw the child in a way that evoked the development of reason through natural selection. Each student would have his/her name markered onto the left-hand column, and with each book he/she read over the course of the year a promotion in evolutionary rank would be awarded by me. I was very excited about this and couldn’t wait to get my hands on some construction paper. And then, in an exuberant aside in the break room, I described my plan to Doug, and Doug told me that this was a Christian community and that while evolution was part of the curriculum there was no reason to ruffle any feathers by emphasizing it unnecessarily. Also, while he had me, my practice of encouraging extraneous reading tended to make self-conscious those students who didn’t like to read, and since we were on the subject, from now on we would be referring to students as learners and to teachers as facilitators, at the request of the parents’ association. I tried not to cry right there, and in fact I made it into the parking lot before I broke down, flinging my empty briefcase at my car and cursing the day Doug was born while tears streamed down my face. I cry easily, for a man. I’m not ashamed of this.
Once I’d caught my breath I picked up my briefcase and got in behind the wheel. It’s a little car, a Volkswagen Golf, red, with a bumper sticker depicting a businessman smugly chattering into a cell phone beside a message reading DRIVE NOW, TALK LATER! A few people have honked at me after reading it, or given me the finger. Let them! I say. I am not afraid to voice my opinions; in fact I believe that to do so is absolutely vital for the advancement of the democratic ideal. It was noon, and I was hungry. My briefcase was empty because I had been eating my lunch during Doug’s little speech, and I had left the lunch, largely uneaten, on the break room table when I ran out. It was hot: there was still a week before school was to start. A few of the custodians were hanging around in the parking lot nearby, smoking, though Doug had insisted that all smoking take place off the school grounds. Perhaps the rule wouldn’t take full effect until classes began. Anyway, it wasn’t my problem. Get fired, gentlemen, if you wish! Die of lung cancer!
See You in Paradise Page 20
