Sliding Past Vertical

by Laurie Boris

  “It’s me. Can I come in?”

  “Um...sure, I—just a minute.” She heard a rustle of paper, the scrape of chair against floor, a thump and then an expletive.

  “Em? Are you all right?”

  He whipped open the door. “Stubbed my toe.”

  The typewriter still hummed.

  There was nothing in the carriage.

  Emerson, wearing a faded robe over faded pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, reclaimed his desk chair. The only other seating in the room was an overstuffed Salvation Army chair heaped with clothing, so she curled up on his bed and wrapped an afghan around her shoulders, not as much for warmth as for protection.

  He waved an open bakery box at her. She shook her head. He shrugged and plucked out a fat, glazed chocolate donut. Breaking it into two pieces, he placed half on an empty plate next to his typewriter and chomped at the half in his hand. Flakes of glaze clung to his lips. He licked them off and washed the mouthful down with gulps of milk straight from the carton.

  Suddenly Sarah wanted a donut more than anything. She poked out a hand and there was the box—like old times when they used to study together late at night. She chose one with pink frosting and broke off tiny pieces to make it last longer, but it was still gone too quickly. They passed the milk back and forth and for a long time, said nothing.

  His room hadn’t changed much since she was there last. It was a little seedier, and a little dingier, like an undershirt washed too many times. A row of dusty science-fiction novels spanned the shelf over his desk, which was heaped with a disorder of manila files and magazines. A tatty blacklight poster adorned his closet door. Snapshots were tacked to the wall behind his typewriter: one of her, one a school photograph of a sad-faced, fresh-scrubbed little boy.

  She couldn’t bear to think about Thomas.

  The picture of her was one she’d sent him last year, taken at Boston’s Black and White Ball, a charity event for creative types. She focused on it and realized the picture had been cleanly sliced down the middle and all that remained of the artist boyfriend she’d been so proud of at the time was a disembodied hand on her right shoulder.

  “You couldn’t sleep?” Emerson said. “Is it the bed? I’ll switch with you. I’ll take my stuff and work in the other room. Or is that what’s keeping you awake? The typewriter? Is it too loud?”

  I’d never write about you.

  “No, it’s...just restless, I guess. First night. New bed.” Her gaze landed on a sheaf of typewriter paper underneath the dictionary on his desk. “What were you working on that I interrupted?”

  He gave a near-imperceptible start. “Nothing really.”

  She grinned, and it felt forced. “More spray cheese?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Your short story?”

  “Something like that.”

  Whatever it was, he seemed uncomfortable discussing it. Or not discussing it.

  She reached for another donut. So did he. It was so quiet she could hear herself chew.

  “I feel like we should be studying,” she said.

  Finally he got it. “Oh. Right.”

  His hesitation made her acutely aware that they were alone in his room in the middle of the night. That she was on his bed in a Penthouse T-shirt with nothing underneath, one bare calf sticking out of his afghan. She tucked her leg beneath her and gathered the throw tightly around her body.

  His typewriter still hummed. The pitch of it vibrated through her. Suddenly the air felt close and seedy. Like Dirk Blade would have walked in any second and taken her like he took his other women. The walls exhaled hot breath. The narration hung in the air, the words that had been pounded in testosterone-induced heat against the rubber carriage of his typewriter. Who knew what he’d hidden from her underneath the dictionary, what turgid phrases had tangoed into print while she lay in the dark across the hall, unable to sleep?

  Insomnia isn’t so bad, she decided. When pursued alone. Across the hall. With the door locked.

  “Well, I...think I’ve bothered you enough for one night,” she said, taking his afghan with her, still wrapped around her shoulders. “Thanks for the donuts.”

  Chapter 16

  Sarah woke early, tired, but eager to start her new life. She wrote off the bizarre feelings of the previous night as an adjustment period, getting reaccustomed to being around Emerson.

  She’d done it once before, when she returned to college after a summer break and reconstructed a friendship with him, negotiating the initial speed bump of awkwardness. She could do it again. This time should be easier. This time she wasn’t a clueless kid stumbling over shards of his broken heart.

  No noise came from the room across the hall and probably wouldn’t for a while; Emerson didn’t have to be at work until ten. She dressed quickly and rushed downstairs, hoping to catch Rashid and have some company for breakfast, but the bottle-green sedan was already gone from the driveway.

  Even through the kitchen’s greasy yellow drapes, the morning sun betrayed every crumb, crack, and smear. Things stuck to Sarah’s bare feet. She wiped them one after the other on the legs of her jeans. The scent of freshly brewed tea lingered. A mug, a spoon, and a Rose teabag rest glistened in the dish drainer. A note on the coffee pot gave her Dee Dee flashbacks, and she expected to see a self-help pamphlet and a list of household chores.

  “Instructions for Use” was written at the top of this note, the letters small and perfect. It certainly wasn’t Emerson’s handwriting, and until classes began, only the three of them were living there. Below the coffee pot directive, Rashid mentioned he’d be having a lunch meeting that day but didn’t currently have dinner plans should the two of them wish to include him in something.

  He’s cute, Sarah thought, and without thinking grabbed a ceramic mug from the cupboard. It whacked against the door and split cleanly in two—more broken pieces. She left them in the sink. Maybe later she would glue them back together. With a sigh she took a new mug, an indestructible plastic one, and followed Rashid’s instructions. She sat at the table, waiting for the coffee, waiting for the rest of her life to begin.

  It took a while for her to notice the absence of trolleys and rush hour briskness. There was no Dee Dee, scolding, primping, and warbling Whitney Houston and Madonna songs off-key. She heard lawnmowers, the shouts of children at play, and the occasional summer student, padding toward Westcott Street.

  As she poured her coffee, the mug reminded her of Jay. He’d learned relatively quickly never to give her something she could break.

  Well, with one grave exception.

  She wondered if he would ever get clean. If he really meant what he had said in the car or had only been telling her what she wanted to hear.

  Just then she heard rustling upstairs and, soon afterward, the shower. A short while later, Emerson came down, wearing a tank top and old jeans. The sun glinted on his wet hair. His shoulders were bigger than she’d remembered, the skin still as pale a fish’s belly. His face was shiny where he’d shaved it, and he looked tired around the eyes. She could only imagine how cruelly the sun exposed her.

  “Do you really think people can’t change?” she asked.

  He took the carton of milk out of the refrigerator, and, noticing the broken mug in the sink, put the pieces in the trash.

  “In your case?” he said. “Yes. You’ll always be Sarah.”

  * * * * *

  After Emerson left for work, Sarah spent the rest of her morning settling into his spare room. It didn’t take long. She had few possessions and little money, so there wasn’t much she could do. She hung a couple of posters on the walls and rearranged the books in her milk crates. Nipping down the block, she purchased the bouquet of the day from a florist and a new mug to replace the one she’d broken. She experimented with draping Emerson’s afghan in different places: over the tiny bed, over the desk, and over the closet door that wouldn’t stay closed.

  By one o’clock it looked less like a sad yellow room and more li
ke a decorated sad yellow room.

  By two o’clock, she was restless and considered getting out her résumés and looking for a job. Then she remembered what Emerson had said over breakfast. His explanation of why Sarah would always be Sarah.

  “You rush into things, so you don’t realize you’re in trouble until it’s too late.”

  Her high school diving coach had basically said the same thing. Her approach seemed adequate, but she over-rotated on her entries. An absence of thought as she left the board led to diving in too fast and too late for correction. From the resulting splash, she might as well have been doing cannonballs, at least from the judges’ viewpoint.

  “Sliding past vertical,” the coach had called it, shortly before she’d quit the team. She’d put on her last Speedo and blown her last entry.

  The affliction, however, seemed to have bled into the rest of her life. Or maybe she’d suffered from it all along and didn’t recognize it until Emerson pointed out the symptoms.

  “Look,” Emerson had continued, in a gentle, patient tone. “I’d be paying rent on the room whether you’re here or not, so you might as well take advantage of it. Take your time and get a job you’re not going to hate in six months.”

  Why not take my time, she thought. Why not take the opportunity to do things differently, the right way, now that I’m starting over?

  So instead of looking at the classifieds and fretting if she had the right shade of pantyhose, Sarah decided the day was too gorgeous to do anything but take a walk. She didn’t feel ready to see the campus again, to discover that things weren’t where she remembered leaving them.

  Instead she decided to visit Emerson.

  * * * * *

  On the way to the infirmary, Sarah passed block upon block of shabby, postage-stamp lawns and dark, sagging houses like Emerson’s. It was as if some dour zoning authority had decreed that housing near the university could only be painted evergreen, brick red, or chocolate brown. The only light color allowed was a dirty shade of yellow, frequently used as trim. Was the decorating scheme designed to retain heat in the winters, Sarah wondered, or so drunk undergrads stumbling home could find their houses in seven or eight feet of snow?

  After all that gloom it was a relief to come upon the overachieving cheerfulness of the county infirmary, a squat gray box of a building with gardens, a gazebo, and a man-made duck pond just off a mum-bordered circular drive. Two elderly women in wheelchairs were parked beside the pond, in front of a low cement barricade. One was knitting; a ribbon of the palest blue trailed from her clicking needles. The other flung what looked like gobs of bread onto the ground. A gang of ducks splash out of the pond to gobble them, quacking and pecking at each other.

  “That’s good, Mrs. Nickerson, that’s good!” squeaked a teenage girl in a white uniform, who then took the woman’s arm and guided it toward the water. “Here, throw it this way.”

  Sarah watched them for a moment, swung through the main entrance, and asked the woman at the desk for Emerson McCann. She was directed to a large, sunny room that smelled like disinfectant and had a black and white checkerboard floor. There were only a few patients, some in wheelchairs, some toddling around with walkers, guided by nurses or visiting family members. She picked out Emerson immediately, by his orange coveralls. He was kneeling, adjusting something at the footrest of an old man’s wheelchair. The coveralls resembled the kind prisoners were given. For visibility, he’d told her, because some of the patients didn’t see so well. But orange wasn’t his color; it made him look washed out and tired.

  “There you go, Charlie,” he said. “Good as gold.”

  She knew the name from Emerson’s last letter. Already paralyzed from the waist down, he’d just lost a lung to cancer, which was spreading. She worried about the way Emerson grew so attached to his patients.

  He straightened Charlie’s useless feet on the rest and smoothed the legs of his trousers. The gestures looked respectful, almost tender. Less like an orderly and more like a son. She imagined the many nights Emerson had put his own mother to bed. No wonder he fell into this job with such resigned ease. From the start, he’d been accustomed to the work.

  Then Charlie mumbled something while staring directly at her.

  “Who’s having dinner with you?” Emerson was still on his knees.

  Charlie raised a finger toward Sarah. “My girlfriend,” he said in a raspy voice.

  Emerson turned his head, smiled, and gave her a wink. “No, she’s not your girlfriend,” he told Charlie. “That’s my friend, Sarah. She’s staying with me for a while. I guess she’s here to visit us.”

  Sarah nodded. Emerson asked her to come over and say hello. She hesitated. Old people made her nervous, especially old, sick people. She was doubly afraid of saying the wrong things or even hurting them, but she didn’t want to be rude.

  “Hi, Charlie.”

  He bowed, as well as one could do in a wheelchair.

  “Emerson’s mentioned you,” Sarah said.

  “Just the good stuff, I hope.” He had brush-cut silver hair and a deeply creased face, with skin as thin and dry as paper. His shirt and trousers hung on his bones. He grinned at her, and she saw how he got all those creases. He still had a bit of the dashing rogue about him. Probably put the old ladies in a tizzy. It was breaking her heart to think he’d been given so little time to live. She didn’t know how Emerson could stand this, being around people he knew were going to die, and soon. Perhaps he’d gotten used to it. Or walled it off somewhere inside him.

  She didn’t think she’d have the strength.

  “You think she’ll have dinner with me?” Charlie asked, hiding his mouth with his hand.

  Mischief sparkled in Emerson’s eyes. “Ask her yourself.”

  “They’re serving pork chops tonight,” Charlie told her. “With applesauce.”

  “That just happens to be my favorite,” Sarah said.

  * * * * *

  Sarah reached for Emerson’s hand as they walked out to the parking lot after his shift. She felt small and scared from being around all that sickness and potential death, and wanted someone to hold on to. During dinner, she tried to pay attention to Charlie as he told her stories, sometimes interpreted through Emerson. She tried to nod and smile and act pleasant and interested. But she kept stealing glances at the others at their cafeteria table, wondering how long each of them had, wondering if they were ever going home.

  Emerson opened her door and came around to the other side of his car.

  “How do you—?” Sarah swallowed and lowered her voice. “How do you do this? When you know they’re just going to…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

  He sighed as if he’d been thinking the same thing, and sagged into the driver’s seat, one leg still out the door. “You never really get used to it. But, hey, it’s a part of life. I try to make them more comfortable, and make them feel less alone. Some of them don’t have any family or at least any family that gives a damn about them.” He paused. “It’s a really lousy place to be when you don’t have anyone.”

  She wondered if his patients knew how lucky they were to have someone like him taking care of them—someone who gave a damn.

  He pushed lank hair off his forehead. The air was softly dampening, the sun beginning to set. He’d changed out of the coveralls back into his civvies but still looked tired and washed out.

  “You want to do something?” he said. “Go to the mall, maybe catch a movie? I think RoboCop is still playing. I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.”

  “Don’t you usually write after work?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t have to.”

  She took a deep breath, knowing at some point this topic would come up. “You don’t have to change your life for me just because I’m staying in your house.”

  He jabbed his key into the ignition. “I don’t have to write tonight, okay?”

  “I know you don’t have to, but—”

  “I don’t wa
nt to. Is that better? Am I allowed to not write if I don’t want to?”

  His tone silenced her. She felt even smaller and more scared. Afraid that if she looked at him she’d start to cry, she turned toward the window and saw the duck pond. The gardens. The gazebo. The squat gray building. The death within. Just then she realized where he put his grief and knew the walls could only hold so much.

  Chapter 17

  Emerson had never intended to kill himself in his freshman year of college by leaping out the eighth-story window of his dormitory room. He’d never even intended to kill himself with the vial of prescription pills someone named B. Finklestein had left behind on a dining-hall tray. All he wanted was a break from the sting of Sarah’s fickle heart and to stop feeling for a while. But the medication turned out to be diet pills, and he’d leaned out the open window because he was sweating out the bulk of his bodily fluids and couldn’t breathe. Somehow in his metabolically enhanced state, he thought that the farther he got his head out into the courtyard, the more oxygen he could suck into his lungs.

  His roommate saw the situation differently. When he came in from dinner and found the screen hacked away with a letter opener and Emerson dangling ass-up out the window, he called the resident assistant, 911, the suicide hotline, and any able-bodied male within shouting distance.

  Twenty minutes later, Emerson was in the Medical Center emergency room with a tube shoved down his throat.

  The next day his mother arrived, sober, having recently substituted God for alcohol, in the guise of a gentleman friend from the Church of Never-Ending Life. The two of them pulled Emerson out of school with barely a word.

  Once ensconced in the bosom of what was left of his family, Emerson balked at his mother’s suggestion of the church youth group, volunteer work at the local nursing home, and—with lowered eyes and a whisper—a therapist. Instead, Emerson preferred to bask in tortured adolescent self-pity. But after a few weeks, this grew tiresome. A tortured adolescent mourning the loss of his five-year-old brother and charged with alternating currents of love and hate for the girl who’d held his heart hostage and then dumped it bleeding onto the tarmac didn’t make for very good company. Neither did his mother nor her gentleman friend from the Church of Never-Ending Life.