And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  “It sounds perfect.”

  20

  sophia and Darius seemed to be leading separate but parallel lives. They took their own cars to the hospital, sat apart in the waiting room, and timed their meals so that they would not be in the cafeteria together. At home, Darius had begun to sleep in the guest bedroom, a small afterthought of a room tucked under the attic staircase. As they had upgraded the furniture in the rest of the house, the bedroom had become the repository of all the unwanted, mismatched objects accumulated along the way: the nightstand painted a muddy eggplant, the clunky Colonial headboard, the rag rug heavy with years of dust. Next to the bed, a gooseneck faux-Tiffany lamp left by a favorite aunt gave off an ochre light insufficient for reading. The small, diamond-shaped window under a dormer hadn’t opened in years. A loud, square fan circulated the trapped, stale air. Sophia alternated between satisfaction that he was suffering in such an uncomfortable room and a physical ache over his absence. They’d never had an argument linger so long, and the strain was beginning to take its toll on her body—her neck and back hurt, as if she’d tried to lift something heavy. At the hospital, she could feel the nurses taking in their new, estranged seating arrangement. Mind your own business, she wanted to say to them. But did not. It had been four weeks since their fight. Three months since the accident. It was time to make up with her husband.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said to the top of her husband’s head, bent over a heavy textbook he’d been lugging around the last few days: Spinal Injuries: Causes and Cures.

  “Mmmm,” he said, without looking up.

  “I’m going shopping and then I am going to make dinner.”

  Darius looked up. His glasses had slid halfway down his nose. She had to restrain herself from reaching forward and giving them a push.

  “Dinner,” he repeated, his voice flat.

  “Yes.” Sophia nodded. She knew she ought to say more, to invite him or say something conciliatory, but she felt she’d gone far enough. Darius knew her well enough to understand that this was as close to a peace offering as she could manage.

  “Okay,” he said, ducking his head. “We’ll see you then.”

  He always used the impersonal we instead of I when he wanted to let someone know he did not entirely approve, but Sophia knew what he meant. Invitation accepted. Détente. For now.

  Shopping at the overpriced gourmet grocery store in their neighborhood, Sophia ignored the prices and bought what she wanted—ripe red tomatoes from Chile, massive shrimp from Indonesia. She could feel a festive stirring inside, as if she were planning one of the dinner parties she used to give when Darius was a young academic, striving to impress his elders. In line, she smiled sympathetically at a woman with two black eyes and a gauze headdress. Postoperative. People used to be embarrassed about plastic surgery, but now they went every where in the bandages. Sophia used to look down on those people, but now that her own face had begun to sink and sag in unfamiliar places, she found herself rethinking her position. Once she’d gone so far as booking an appointment for a “consultation” with a plastic surgeon but had canceled the day before. Where was she going to get $5,000 for an eye job when her kids were about to start college?

  When Darius arrived home, Sophia was at the sink, deveining shrimp. On the counter lay the stalk of fennel he had bought at the organic market a few days earlier. Its edges had gone a little brown, but with some careful trimming it should be just fine. She had already opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio—because the sauce needed it, she told herself—but was struggling to keep from finishing a whole glass before the meal was prepared.

  “Bouillabaisse,” he observed. His favorite dish. Sophia nodded, waiting to see if he would acknowledge the peace offering. Monty came scampering down the back staircase, his long toenails clicking on the wood floor. Darius sat at the kitchen table and scratched the dog’s ears. A good sign. The last few days, he’d come home, gone straight to the library, and ordered Indian takeout without asking if she wanted any. Sophia slid a paring knife across the back of a shrimp, extracting the glassine-like thread of its digestive tract. It was her least favorite part of the preparation, and when she was feeling lazy, she left it in, but tonight she was carefully removing every trace of black.

  “Is someone special coming?” he asked.

  “I asked Miranda, but she was seeing her boyfriend.”

  “Jack.”

  “Jason,” Sophia corrected him. It was a mistake he never would have made a few months earlier, when the appearance of a young man in Miranda’s life would have occasioned much speculation between the two of them. As it was, they’d only met him once, briefly, in the driveway, when he’d dropped off Miranda after a movie.

  “He seems like a nice young man,” she ventured. “I think he actually called me ‘ma’am.’”

  “Yes,” Darius agreed, trying to remember something distinct about his daughter’s first boyfriend. Having been a professor so long, he had developed a classification system for his students. Mostly, they weren’t that different from when he and Sophia had been in college. There were the stoners and slackers who arrived at class messy haired and glassy eyed; the jocks with their coiled, confusing energy; the hipsters wearing black and affecting an ironic diffidence way beyond their years; recently, he’d noticed a whole new category he privately called the thugs. Kids, sometimes black, but usually white, who dressed like gangsters with do-rags on their heads, jeans that barely covered their asses, and oversized basketball jerseys. Jason was at the other end of the spectrum, in a category he dubbed “Mormon.” Respectful white kids from the middle of the country who dressed conservatively, called men “sir,” and inevitably wrote their papers on concepts like honor and duty in the Henry plays.

  “He’s not at all what I would have predicted,” Darius said, squeezing his bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger.

  Sophia used the tip of her knife to remove the black shrimp feces lodged under her fingernails. “Who were you expecting?” she asked, taking a sip of wine.

  “I don’t know. An East Coast kid. Someone with a goatee. The hipoisie.”

  Sophia moved on to the fennel, expertly slicing the end off the bulb. The cooks in her parents’ restaurant had taught her the proper technique, using the fulcrum of her shoulder, instead of the wrist, the way most amateurs did it.

  “I see the charm in him,” she said. “He’s got a low-key, Gary Cooper thing going. You were like that, at his age.”

  Darius grunted. Handsome men usually had something cruel in their face, a mouth that got meaner with time or a brow that expressed permanent impatience. With Darius, his face had gotten kinder, more generous. Out in the world, women responded accordingly. She could not leave him alone in the produce department without some divorcée asking the best way to cook manioc. “Uh,” he’d answer nervously, looking for Sophia over the woman’s shoulder, “I could ask my wife.”

  Sophia dumped the shrimp in the broth.

  “Did you know,” Darius asked, “there’s a paralyzed man in Peru who is communicating with his doctors through a computer chip?”

  “What’s he saying?”

  “He’s just responding to simple yes-or-no questions, but it shows that he can think, even if he can’t move.”

  “Je pense, donc je suis,” Sophia said.

  “Exactly.” Darius smiled. She immediately felt guilty. Just because she understood his viewpoint didn’t mean she agreed with it.

  “Has anyone asked, ‘Do you want to stay alive in this state, yes or no?’”

  “No,” he answered coldly, glancing at his watch. “I think I’ll grade a few papers before dinner.”

  As soon as he left, she drained the glass of wine and poured herself another. Over dinner, the silence hung awkwardly between them, sapping her appetite. Once upon a time, conversation had flowed gracefully between them. Like good dancers attuned to each partner’s move, they had intuited each other’s responses, ceding space and time accordingly. Now it was all h
erky-jerky fits and starts, as if the weight of their secrets were making them stumble.

  After the dishes had been put away—a joint exercise in civility—she suggested tea in the room they ambitiously called the library. While Darius made it, Sophia tried to formulate a strategy of what to say and when, but it was like playing chess. Two moves in, and her mind shut down, overwhelmed by possibilities. Darius put the tray on the coffee table, something vaguely Art Deco made out of teak that they’d picked up twenty years earlier in a Goodwill in San Francisco, certain they’d replace it when they felt prosperous enough.

  “I hear you’ve been talking to Kelly,” he said, lowering himself onto a seat across from her. Kelly was the social worker who had suggested the PALOC meeting. Mostly Sophia tried to avoid her. It was Darius who seemed to have long, intense conversations with her in the hallway outside the family waiting area. “She says we need to decide where to send Helen by the end of this week.” Darius carefully brought his teacup to his lips.

  Sophia looked away. Something about his gesture made him look old and frail, as if she had glimpsed a future version of themselves. “They’ve been saying that for weeks,” she shrugged, drinking her tea quickly, like whiskey, to offset her husband’s daintiness.

  Darius reached into his pocket. “I think they mean it this time.” He handed Sophia a list.

  She read the addresses—San Pedro, Simi Valley, Harbor City, nothing within a forty-five-minute drive. “These are terrible,” she said.

  “There are other options,” he answered.

  “No.” Sophia shook her head.

  “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “She’s our daughter. She has a right to come home.”

  “We’re not trained professionals, we’re not capable of taking care of her.”

  “It’s not hard to learn. People make the choice all the time. I’ve been to a group. You should hear what people say. It changes their lives.”

  Sophia imagined her daughter upstairs in her bedroom, hooked up to a ventilator, limbs twisted into a semi–rigor mortis, tubes coming in and out, suppurating bed sores, the constant wheeze of the machines filling the house twenty-four hours a day. What would happen if a lung collapsed or her heart stopped? In the hospital, Darius always left the room when the nurses changed Helen’s catheter or wiped her behind after a bowel movement. Who would do all that? Sometimes Sophia liked to imagine Helen was conscious inside her head, silently watching every thing that was going on around her. Other times, she looked at her and saw only inert proteins—blood, bones, hair, teeth. It was possible for her to hold both versions of Helen in her head. All Darius ever saw was a Helen who had gone into a temporary slumber. Despite what every doctor had told them. “Why does every doctor say she’s gone?” she asked.

  “Doctors say what they were taught to say in medical school. The field is changing every day. A hundred years ago they were burying people in comas because they thought they were dead.”

  “I think”—she faked a yawn—“I’ll go to sleep.”

  “They’ve found coffins with scratch marks on the inside.”

  “Good night.”

  “I told you about the autopsy in Madrid? The one where the patient woke up? They drove that doctor out of town on a rail.”

  The next morning, Sophia stayed in bed until she heard Darius’s car pull out of the driveway. She tried to think of a reason to get out of bed, but the best she could do was coffee. She went downstairs to make a large pot. Ever since she had started drinking more heavily, her mornings had begun to feel queasy and blurred. When she was younger, a medium-rare cheese-burger and a hot shower were enough to clear up hangovers, but now they seemed to linger longer, even gaining in strength as the day wore on. She tried to read the paper but her mind kept wandering to Darius. They would make it up somehow, wouldn’t they? Everything that bends does not break, does it? And yet even as she repeated those teabag aphorisms, a part of her feared this was different. Something had changed. He seemed uncharacteristically irrational to her, like one of those anti-abortion kooks and their mindless veneration for the primitive blastocyst. It wasn’t as if she wanted to pull the plug and he didn’t. She wanted to keep hope for Helen alive as much as he did, but not by turning their home into a hospital. It wasn’t the work that frightened her. She’d sat by her bedside long enough to know that taking care of an inert body wasn’t all that different from tending a newborn. You fed them, you cleaned them. If you loved them, you did it gently, with tenderness. If you didn’t, you did it with indifference. What frightened her was the relentlessness of it. Home was a refuge, a place to escape sickness and death. If she gave that up, she didn’t know if she could survive what had happened to them.

  Yet the more she and Darius argued, the more convinced each had become of their own positions. Sophia remembered that this was what it was like to be a child. To have such strong feelings but no way of bending the world to your will—it was why two-year-olds threw tantrums.

  “Stability,” she said out loud, “is an illusion.” It was an old joke between them. They’d been renovating their kitchen when the contractor, a philosophy grad student who never managed to finish his dissertation on Wittgenstein, had pulled up the linoleum to discover joists that looked like brown cornmeal. “Termites,” he said, as if he’d been suspecting them all along.

  Sophia had kicked the rotten wood, instantly creating a five-inch gash. “Oh, my God,” she’d said with a shiver, “this could have collapsed at any moment.”

  “Stability is an illusion,” the contractor answered.

  The phrase became a shibboleth to the universe of their marriage. Upon hearing that the couple across the street was breaking up, finding their favorite restaurant shuttered, or watching a colleague depart for a better job, Darius and Sophia would look at each other, shrug, and say it. “Stability is an illusion.” But before, the joke had always been on others.

  To get her mind off the subject, Sophia tried writing thank-you cards for the food and flowers that had arrived after the accident.

  Dear Max and Judy,

  And then she stopped. What was there to say?

  Thank you for the veal meat loaf you brought by when our daughter’s skull was smashed like a pumpkin after Halloween. The garlic was just the right touch to make us forget the motherfuck fuck fucking tragedy of our lives.

  Eventually, she settled on:

  Dear Max and Judy,

  Thank you.

  She stared at the two words on the card. They seemed cold and lonely, without any kind of buffer to warm them up. She took her pen and added a short vertical line over the period.

  Thank you!

  Breezy, given the circumstances, but it would have to do.

  21

  anton was reading a short story by a Czech writer in a six-month-old copy of The New Yorker when the phone rang.

  “Hello?” He did his best to sound like a citizen of the world, filled with optimism about the near future, but the chances were high that the person on the other end of the phone was from the Punjab and calling about a bill that had not been paid. He had learned to dread the polite persistence of their rhetoric. “We value you as a customer, when do you think you might be able to make the payment?”

  “Mr. McDonald? Have you directed any feelms yet?” The voice laughed. Cyrus Dumond. Anton’s heart began to race. Every week, he had been writing down names of former film school classmates as proof of his alleged job search. Most of them had jobs in the business, but none had the power to actually give him a job. Having worked his way through the class, he’d begun to recycle a few names. Was Dumond busting him?

  “A job came in you might be qualified for. ‘Experienced cameraman needed. Union not necessary. Day rates, two hundred fifty dollars.’ That’s more than I make.”

  “Really?” Anton asked.

  “I’m not in the habit of making jokes about a man’s livelihood
.”

  “Do they need a reel?”

  “A what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Given the fact that they want you to start work tomorrow, I gather the previous employee walked off the job in a somewhat precipitous manner.” Dumond gave him an address off Ventura Boulevard in the Valley, told him to show up at eight a.m., and wished him good luck.

  Anton stared at the address. Outside, the sun was the deep yellow of an egg yolk. Headache-making light. He rarely went to the Valley but he knew its reputation. Korean nail salons. Sushi restaurants. Moms in SUVs. Pornography. The grease pan collecting the film industry’s leftovers. Did Cyrus Dumond know that? Anton’s friend Scudder once worked as a grip on a two-day shoot filmed on a boat moored off the Catalina Islands. The first day, he said, he had a hard-on the whole time. The second day, he was disgusted by the sight of a human body. His girlfriend claimed Scudder was never the same in bed after the experience. Anton wasn’t sure what she meant and never asked.

  He needed the money. More important, he needed an adventure. In the three months since he had lost his job, he’d been having the literally sickening feeling that the world was moving forward while he was stuck in one place. Like the inner-ear confusion of sitting on a stopped bus watching another bus in motion. But Anton was afraid of sex. He’d done it once in high school and a few times with two girls from film school. Each encounter had been a fumbling, knee-bumping, nose-crushing exercise in awkwardness. Every time he got close to a girl, he could smell the onion odor of fear rising off him. His hands trembled like an old man’s, and he could hardly breathe long enough to maintain a decent kiss. Everywhere he thought to put his hip, there was girl flesh getting crushed, her whimpering a soft “ow.” Sorry, sorry, he’d mutter.

  At first, he thought it was because he liked the girls too much. So when pale, square-faced Maddie Famm, who had a mouth like a grouper fish and protuberant eyes that took every thing in without blinking, had asked him out, he’d said yes. Maddie wanted to be a screenwriter, but nobody could tell if her scripts were comedy, suspense, or horror.