Who Will Hear Your Secrets?

by Robley Wilson

  “Wicked weather,” she said. “You look a fright.”

  “I was afraid I’d blow away.”

  “Fortunate you didn’t.” Megan bent over her, smoothing Sarah’s hair away from her face, rubbing Sarah’s hands as if to erase the weather from them. “Now then, what have you brought us?”

  Sarah laid the portfolio flat on the floor, unlaced and opened it. She knelt before it and drew out the sheets that recorded her artist’s life for the past six months. Winter scenes, cold seascapes from a Provincetown weekend, the roiled skies of a looming blizzard. This was the best part, not counting the pleasure of actual studio time: setting a price on art, valuing that which had no value, bargaining with an agent who knew the market but might not necessarily know talent.

  For nearly an hour she forgot her headache, but by the time she left the gallery, she was so woozy she hailed a cab, and when she was safely inside her apartment, out of the wind and bluster, she went straight to bed. Her throat was raw, and she kept giving way to fits of coughing that left her exhausted and breathless. Along with all the rest of it, she had the mother of all headaches, the worst she’d known since her college migraines, and though she didn’t take her temperature—where was that damned thermometer anyway?—she knew she was running a fever. She was sure she had never felt worse in her life. The vomiting stopped after the second day, but on the third day her fever spiked and she began to hallucinate. It was an experience so entirely new, it terrified her; she imagined she might be going crazy, and the visions were omens of madness. When they ceased, the world seemed simply gray.

  For two weeks she left the bedroom only to relieve herself and to refill a water glass so she could take pills—Tylenol, mostly, or, when the headaches turned unbearable, an expired hydrocodone prescription borrowed years earlier from Perry Adams’s endless drug stash. Nothing helped, but her misery finally seemed to reach a plateau. By the end of April she felt well enough to visit a doctor, who chided her for mixing Tylenol and hydrocodone—”Not good for the liver,” he told her—but declared her on her way to recovery. “An overdose of New England winter,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.” She went back to bed anyway, but at least she felt well enough to eat.

  * * *

  THAT SUMMER SHE WENT to an artists’ colony in the Adirondacks, where she was given the use of a small, square studio perched on a hillside in the woods. It had adequate workspace, a lithography stone and a skylight that pleased her best when rainstorms splintered the incoming light. The space was furnished with a narrow bed, a hot plate, and enough storage shelves for her tools and few belongings. In one corner stood a woodstove for chilly mornings, a modest quantity of split logs stacked near it.

  She stayed a month, treating the stay as a working vacation, building her work routine around the routine of the colony. Breakfast was optional; she usually skipped it, waking at daylight and working until noon, when she walked to the Center to pick up the factory-worker lunchbox labeled with her name. In mid-afternoon she returned the lunchbox and stayed long enough to check the hall table for mail and perhaps glance at the day’s Times. At dinnertime she often came late, to avoid the writers and composers and other artists who gathered outside the dining-room door like cats around a refrigerator.

  She was not a social person; she didn’t belong with the New Yorkers and the New York connections around her. The closest she came to knowing anyone was on the day she held the obligatory open studio, when a lesbian poet flirted with her. The poet’s name was Marta, and she seemed to make a career of attending artists’ colonies. “I did Ragdale last summer, MacDowell this spring, Djerassi in the fall.” In between, she went home to live with her parents in Atlanta. She stayed in the studio more than two hours, asking questions—about Sarah, about Sarah’s friends, about Sarah’s work. She tried to be cutesy when she flirted, like asking Sarah what a tusche crayon was for and then saying, “I thought a tush was your pretty butt.” At least she never tried to put her hands on Sarah, who was pleased to embrace that small blessing.

  By the end of her stay she had produced a series of landscapes, lithographic silhouettes all done in blacks and grays that made them resemble a horizon ahead of a perpetual ominous sunrise. She hadn’t minded giving up color; its absence forced her to stretch her imagining, to teach herself techniques that hadn’t occurred to her until now. She framed one of the lithographs and made a gift of it to the Marta person, possibly as an apology for her failure to respond to the woman’s advances. The rest she stuffed into the woodstove and burned.

  * * *

  WHEN SARAH CAME HOME to Brookline Avenue in July, the city sweltered. She had no air-conditioning, and so for the first time in ages she decided to visit Wiley Galvin, who did. She still remembered sitting in his kitchen on summer afternoons, a glass of wine in front of her, the room marvelously cool and its windowpanes misted over against the heat outside.

  Climbing the stairs to his apartment, she wondered what she would say to him after so long. She supposed she would tell him about her work and the plans she hoped lay ahead of her. Certainly she would talk about her Upstate adventures; Galvin would especially enjoy flirty Marta. He’d know Sarah was only here for the air-conditioning, but he’d pour the glass of wine anyway, make her feel at home for old times’ sake.

  She pushed the doorbell, hearing the muffled chime inside. When no one came, she rang again. Finally, she knocked on the door; the sound echoed in the hallway. He had to be home. Sarah couldn’t imagine him going outside on a ninety-degree day.

  “If you’re looking for the Lowries, they’re away for the month.”

  The voice came from behind her. Turning, she saw a blond woman, small and fortyish, standing in the doorway across the hall.

  The woman noticed her confusion. “They have this summer place in Maine,” she explained. “I think they go there every year around this time.”

  “Where is Wiley?” Sarah said.

  It was the woman’s turn to look confused, but only for a moment. “You must mean Mister Galvin.”

  “Yes. Wiley Galvin. He lives here.”

  “Used to,” the woman said. “He died.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Almost a year ago. The ambulance came and took him off to the hospital, and a couple of weeks later we heard—my husband and me—that he’d passed away. The Lowries bought the apartment.”

  How long since she’d been in touch with Galvin? Four years? Five? And now he’d been dead a year and she hadn’t even known. “What did he die of?”

  “We heard it was pneumonia.”

  Poor Wiley, Sarah thought. No adventure in that.

  The next day she went to a Sears store and bought a window air-conditioner. She named it the Wiley Galvin Memorial and installed it in her bedroom for the sake of a decent sleep on hot nights. Sometimes during the day she brought her sketch pad and propped herself against the bed pillows to work, though she rarely managed to finish a sketch before she dozed off.

  She realized she was sick of Boston. Late summer and fall brought her a succession of fresh illnesses, some of them minor—a nagging cough that annoyed her for almost two weeks, a brief bout of whatever flu strain was going around—and one of them major: a pre-Christmas attack of bronchitis that frightened her so badly she went to the BWH emergency room and waited two hours to be given a chest x-ray and a prescription inhaler. By the middle of a miserable rain- and fog-filled January, she was ready to say her goodbye to New England.

  * * *

  FLORIDA, WHERE SHE HAD MET FRANKLIN so many years before, was temperate and high-skied in February, a far cry from the Boston Sarah wished never to see again. She rented an apartment not many miles from the Space Center: a corner unit, third floor, that gave her a direct view of the Intracoastal. Eastward was the Atlantic Ocean, whose waves she couldn’t see, though—if the wind was onshore—she imagined she could hear them. The place was furnished with wicker: chairs, couch, a glass-topped table. On the walls were seascapes�
��not the turbulent kind sold in New England, but serene vistas of cerulean and sun interspersed with slender palms. An efficiency kitchen offered an electric range, a refrigerator, a battered coffee maker and a blender missing its cap.

  The bedroom had a dresser and two wicker nightstands alongside a queen bed. For her first few days in the apartment, Sarah spent most of her time in that bed, nursing the cold she had brought with her from the north. She read magazines she had bought at Logan, and when she laid them aside to rest her eyes she gazed out the window at great boilings of cumulus cloud unlike anything she had seen in the north. They were clouds you could vanish into, clouds from which you would never re-emerge. She was thinking more and more about Franklin; she imagined it was clouds like these that had swallowed him so long ago and would never give him up. So many years had passed, and how quickly.

  Once she had shaken off everything of the cold but a persistent cough, she fell easily into her tropical routine, waking early, brewing tea and drinking it on the balcony that faced the river. Escadrilles of pelicans cast angular shadows across her mornings; gulls and cormorants cried over the water. After the first month she bought an Audubon book, wanting to name the birds that waded and swam along the shore. Stilt-legged white heron and wood stork, ibis and egret, snake-necked anhinga. She tried to memorize them all. Great blue heron, roseate spoonbill; some days an osprey swayed on a high branch of the nearby mangroves.

  This was in the early nineteen-eighties. The hostage crisis was over and a movie star was President. Sarah was in her fifties, had few friends and scarcely any connection with the outside world save for whatever the day’s mail might bring. Her steadiest lifeline was the peripatetic Marta, whose insistent attraction to Sarah was one of life’s great mysteries. Postcards forwarded from New England arrived on a quarterly schedule from whichever arts retreat accepted endlessly promising poets: now the Virginia Center, now Anam Cara, once even a place called Calcata, in Umbria. The cards were scarcely informative. They served only to advertise Marta’s literary desirability; Sarah tossed them as soon as they arrived.

  She scarcely thought about working, hadn’t even unpacked the tools of her craft and art. An easel leaned in the front-hall closet, boxes and jars and a canvas duffle shoved into the corner behind it. She might wake early and alert, ready to apply fresh energy to her new life, but long before noon she felt herself giving way to familiar lethargy. She blamed Florida for making her lazy: all that sun, sky, the distractions of fauna and flora.

  Across the river was a hospital, multi-storied and white-stuccoed, looking for all the world like a cruise ship that never sailed. Sarah could see it from her balcony, and she marveled at how the sunrise made the building glow. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that she would ever see the inside of that dazzling place, but one morning she awoke feeling feverish, headachy, an oppression reminiscent of the excesses of long-ago nights at Wiley’s—alcohol and nicotine and whatever drug it was that passed from hand to hand in his apartment. She was afraid she was being revisited by last spring’s flu bug. Only it was worse than that, and at the end of the day, propped against pillows with a book she was trying to read, she coughed blood.

  A taxi took her across a causeway to the white hospital. In the emergency room she tried to describe to a receptionist how the book’s pages were splattered with vivid red. “Don’t make me sick,” the woman said. A very young doctor ordered x-rays, took blood, listened to her lungs. “Is there TB in your family?” he wondered. She told him no. He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I think we’d better keep you here,” the doctor said. “Just for a while.”

  The room they gave her looked eastward. If she propped herself up in bed, she could see across the water the balcony where she sipped her tea and memorized her water birds. The distance between yesterday and today seemed nearly infinite.

  Doctors, the young one and two others, older, visited her often in the following days. At first they wore masks, but then they ruled out tuberculosis and she saw their faces again. Sometimes they asked questions, other times drew fresh blood, more than once assigned a nurse to wheel her to x-rays and scans and mysterious probes. When she asked—as she often did—”When may I go home?” they had no answer.

  * * *

  AFTER A MONTH, her first college roommate visited her in the hospital. Ginger Pierce was now Ginger Edelmann, wife of an executive at IBM, living in West Palm. Wealth became her. She was exquisitely maintained, looking far younger than her fifty-plus years.

  “Don-John had a stroke,” she told Sarah. “It was six or seven years ago, and he’s been out in Arizona ever since. They’ve just moved him into one of those hospice places—you know: like the elephant graveyard they used to teach us about in grade school.”

  “I never thought of him as an elephant,” Sarah said. “More like a weasel.” The word “weasel” turned into a wheeze that became a coughing fit, the phlegm gurgling in her lungs and throat until she gagged. The pain felt as if someone with strong hands was tearing her lungs like a lettuce head and strewing the leaves of her breath on the floor around the bed. Ginger held her hand and looked away until the attack subsided.

  “Jesus,” Sarah whispered. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “I’ve often wondered what I ever saw in that man,” Ginger said, still preoccupied with Don-John while Sarah struggled to reach the water glass on the bedside table. “I think Daddy liked him, and I suppose that’s why I kept on with him.”

  Sarah sipped water, whose coldness seared her throat when she swallowed. “I didn’t know him. Not until after you’d broken up with him.”

  “He was with us in Havana. Don’t you remember?”

  “I was too wrapped up in your father,” Sarah said. “And you and Don went off by yourselves.”

  “Poor Daddy,” Ginger said. “It’s a shame we can’t have Cuba any more.” She took a cigarette pack out of her purse, then realized what she was doing and put it back. “How are you liking Florida?”

  “I liked it better before they put me in here.”

  “You’ll be out soon enough.”

  “I always thought that if I knew I was about to die, I would travel to as many places as I could—the places Franklin and I went to, the new places we’d promised ourselves.” She paused to gather her breath, thinking of Havana and Beirut and all the other destinations Franklin wouldn’t recognize if he came back from the dead. “How wrong I was.”

  “Are you about to die?”

  “Sometimes.” Sarah shivered. “Sometimes I think so.”

  “Exactly what is it you have?” Ginger said. “What do the doctors say?”

  “They say a rare kind of pneumonia. Some weird viral.”

  “Can’t they knock it out, like with a miracle drug?”

  “They let me have painkillers if I ask. That’s all.”

  “Are you contagious?”

  “They say not.”

  “Are you a prisoner here?”

  “Not of the hospital.”

  “Then you should get out,” Ginger said. “Enjoy some fresh air.”

  Sarah wanted to agree. “If I were stronger,” she said, “I’d love to be in the sun.”

  Ginger stood up and went to the narrow closet where a nurse had hung the clothes Sarah wore to the hospital all those weeks ago. “It’s lying in bed that makes you weak,” she said. “And it’s good old Florida sunshine that’ll perk you up.” She brought the clothes to Sarah’s bed and laid them over the footboard. “I’m kidnapping you for your own good.”

  “You know I can’t do this.” When Ginger threw off the covers, Sarah resisted. The cold that swept over her was more than she could bear; she clawed at the lost blanket, the smooth sheet that had cocooned her. “Ginger, please.”

  “Try,” Ginger said. “Just try.”

  But she couldn’t. Ginger’s hands around her wrists were like machines pulling her arms from their sock
ets. The pain knifed from her shoulders to her spine. She screamed and fainted.

  When she came awake again, Ginger was gone, the clothes were back in the narrow closet, and the young doctor was standing at the foot of her bed studying a clipboard.

  “How’s the pain?” he said. “Too much for you?”

  The answer was a wheeze, perhaps a word, though Sarah herself didn’t recognize it. She felt like something made out of old paint rags, her lungs burning from turpentine. The doctor frowned and nodded and wrote something on the clipboard. Twenty minutes later a nurse came in and injected her with something she supposed was morphine.

  * * *

  THIS TIME THE HALLUCINATIONS were so vivid she believed them to be real. Ginger hadn’t gone, but was only waiting for the doctor and the nurse to leave the room so she could make Sarah ready for the escape. She retrieved Sarah’s clothes from the closet and laid them across the bed. This time Sarah sat up without pain, half standing, half leaning against the side of the bed while Ginger helped her dress. Only it wasn’t Ginger; it was relentless Marta, the eternally traveling poet.

  “Where shall we go?” Marta asked. “Shall we go to the mall? Would you like to stroll the arcade and gawk in shop windows?”

  “Yes, let’s do that.” She pushed Marta out into the hospital corridor, and the two women hurried toward the main entrance. Everyone they passed—doctors and nurses and visitors carrying bouquets of red flowers—smiled and nodded as they passed. “They all look so happy,” Sarah said.

  “They see a perfect couple,” Marta said. “They see how sexy we are together.”

  But she didn’t feel sexy. She felt—how would Perry have said it? “You tether yourself too tightly to earth,” he had once told her; yes, that was how she would describe her present self: untethered. Ahead was the hospital entrance, the sun outside a blinding rectangle of light she drifted weightlessly toward.

  “You go on ahead,” Marta said. “I’m due at Yaddo.”