Borrowed Hearts

by Rick DeMarinis

  Mr. Sunderlin chuckled suavely. “Babsie, why don’t you let the poor gentleman go? I think he understands your feelings.”

  Barbara stepped away from Albert and leveled a vicious look at her father.

  Sylvia’s condition became worse. Dr. Bud Rossetti prescribed a more potent tranquilizer. “It’s time to upscale the chemistry, Albert,” he said. “I think it’s time to move up to the phenothiazines.”

  Albert had mentioned Sylvia’s dreams. They threw her into terrible panics. She screamed on waking. Sometimes she wasn’t sure she’d been asleep. And when she was awake, she sometimes believed she was still sleeping. In one dream there had been a basket of bleeding fruit on the breakfast table. Tommy would not eat. She tried to give him a bloody apple but he turned his face away. A butterfly big as a cat sat on top of the fruit basket. It turned to her and opened its jaws. Sylvia had thought that the butterfly was trying to speak to her. She got the idea it wanted to say her name. “I couldn’t,” Albert said, “make her stop. Screaming, I mean.”

  Dr. Rossetti wrote two prescriptions in a hasty scrawl. He shook his big dark head back and forth as he wrote. “Grim city, Albert,” he said. “All we can do is pray that it passes. The human organism is amazingly resilient. Think of it as weather, Albert. Good air will eventually blow the bad air out.”

  “No, it won’t,” Albert said.

  Dr. Rossetti took Albert in his big arms. “You have my personal guarantee,” he said.

  Albert pushed the big doctor away. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You’re a quality guy, Albert,” Dr. Rossetti said.

  Albert left Sylvia in the care of LeeAnn and drove out to the hospital. Tommy was having his wrists and arms rebandaged and after that a psychologist was going to give him another test. He couldn’t have visitors for a couple of hours. Albert decided to spend the time in the waiting room. He didn’t want to go back home, even though it was only a ten-minute drive.

  “Well, hi there, Mr. Court,” someone said.

  Albert looked up from the copy of Time he’d been reading. The harsh white light of the waiting room made his eyes blur.

  “It’s me. It is I. You know. Barbara Sunderlin.”

  She had been sitting across from him, not more than twelve feet away. How long had she been there? The feeling that she had just materialized, unbeckoned, struck him. His heart tripped on the idea, then began to beat noticeably. The mind was a magic crystal: things appeared in it out of nowhere. His whole life seemed to him like a series of abrupt manifestations, things and events without antecedents. Everything discrete, self-sufficient, like the binary digits of a computer program. Nothing had the old continuity of the analog model of reality. Multiplexor slipped into his mind, then a quick series of flip-flops between and-gate, or-gate, and zero-wait-state.

  Barbara came over and sat in the chair next to him. “Mr. Court, I can’t tell you how awful I feel,” she said, her voice rising. The receptionist looked up from her desk. “Look,” Barbara said. “I was going to give this to Tommy!” She held up a small gift-wrapped package. “It’s a new wallet. Alligator. A get-well present.” Her voice thickened with self-loathing. Other people in the waiting room were looking at them. The receptionist frowned at Albert. “What kind of rotten creep would give a boy who tried to kill himself a fucking alligator wallet?" She began to cry.

  “Maybe we should talk outside,” Albert said.

  They went out to the parking lot and sat in Albert’s car. Barbara was now weeping uncontrollably. She put her head on Albert’s chest. She didn’t seem thirty-five years old to Albert now. She seemed twelve. He was grateful for the anonymity of the parking lot.

  “Drive me someplace,” Barbara said, lifting her face from his chest.

  She was calmer now, and Albert was grateful for that. “Sure,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere. I always drive around whenever I feel too shitty for words.”

  “I’ll take you home,” he said.

  “No. Not there. Not home.”

  Albert drove aimlessly for a while, allowing himself to be drawn into this lane or that turn by the random pressures of traffic. He, too, found that driving around casually was a soothing experience. It was a California thing, he decided, it’s what we do. And now that the access ramps were computer-controlled, it made the whole process a lot easier.

  He merged into the fast traffic on the Santa Ana freeway. Barbara was slumped against the door, the side of her face pressed against the window. Her expression was calm and vacant. She stared straight down the freeway, eyes relaxed on distance.

  “Listen, Mr. Court,” she said abstractedly. “I’ve been thinking. I’ve got this great idea.”

  “I’d better be getting home,” he said.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Just fucking beautiful.”

  They drove without speaking. To the right of the freeway, the Alps of Disneyland loomed against the grainy sky. The spires and towers of Fantasyland leaped up at them like a forgotten childhood dream returning, colossal and strange, as if it had been growing cancerously in some dark comer of the mind.

  “My father is an intellectual snob,” Barbara said. “You know the kind—reads Aldous Huxley and Ayn Rand, always quoting them. He never once took me to Disneyland. Even when I was in grade school and couldn’t have understood what he meant, he made cutting remarks about this place. Hell, maybe he was right. I don’t know. But I’ve always wanted to come here. It’s as though there’s this denied child within me, and this has been her secret ambition forever.”

  “Okay,” Albert said, flipping on his turn signal.

  Albert bought two multiple-ride coupon books. The crowd was relatively small. Albert and Barbara were the only couple on the trip to the moon. There were only four other passengers on the submarine voyage. There were more people on the flatboat trip through the jungle, but it was a quiet crowd. They seemed unaware of the festive nature of the giant amusement park. Barbara called them Russians. In fact, they did look like foreigners—East Europeans, possibly Russians. The men were wearing dark, bulky suits and the women were stocky matrons in low heels. There were no children with them. It was a solemn crowd that looked somehow displaced, and the entire trip through the jungle seemed more like a forced trek to some grim place of exile than an amusement. The crowd at the Haunted House, to Albert’s relief, seemed more typical.

  “I just love it,” Barbara said gaily. “Don’t you, Mr. Court?” They were out on a mall, strolling among human-sized mice.

  He wanted to answer her, he wanted to say, Yes, I love it, but he frowned and looked at his watch instead. “Almost four,” he said.

  A very tall man wearing only Jockey shorts stepped into their path. He’d been hiding behind a closed information kiosk. “Nay!” he shouted. He was at least six feet ten inches tall and his coarse gray hair fell past his shoulders, stiff with grime. Black hearts the size of dimes were tattooed across his chest. Little red arrows, the tips dripping blood, pierced the black hearts. “Nay!” he repeated, his voice cracking with either emotion or the chronic strain of his existence.

  Barbara took Albert’s hand and tried to pull him to one side, but Albert froze before the giant. The giant stepped closer to Albert and glared down at him. An extreme truth danced lightly in his wide, pale eyes. Other people passed by swiftly, hoping to escape unnoticed. But the giant man in Jockey shorts seemed interested only in Albert and Barbara.

  “I am the god Cupid,” the man said. He placed his hands on top of Albert’s and Barbara’s heads. “Kneel before me, my children.” His voice was now rich and sonorous, a melodious basso, vibrant with self-confidence.

  “Do it,” Barbara whispered. “He’s nuts.”

  Albert saw the security guards running towards them. The guards were heavy, slow men. Albert sank to his knee.

  “Thus do I bind thee together in the eternal bower,” the giant said. The powerful hands of the giant brought Albert’s and Barbara’s heads together gent
ly. Barbara’s face felt cold against his. Albert noticed that the giant’s feet were bleeding, as though he’d been walking through broken glass. Barbara squeezed Albert’s hand as the giant rotated their heads slowly until they were face to face, lips against lips. “Blessed are they who loveth,” he pronounced. Then the security guards arrived and dragged the man away.

  “Well, we have one more ride left,” Barbara said, dusting off her skirt.

  “I don’t know,” Albert said, his voice shaky. “I don’t think I’m up to it.”

  “Sure you are. He was just a harmless old nut. They thrive around here. The setting appeals to them.”

  There was a long line in front of Pirates of the Caribbean, but Barbara insisted they get in it. “It moves fast, you’ll see,” she said.

  When it was their turn, they boarded a small, two-person boat that was launched down a dark tunnel. Soon they were out on a subterranean river. Crazed buccaneers leaped out at them from dark crevices, cutlasses brandished high. These were crude robots, their movements too stiff to be believable. Even so, Barbara cringed away from them. Across the water a galleon burst into flames as cannons boomed. Their boat rocked in the churning water. Tongues of real fire licked out at them. Explosions rumbled through the caverns. Bloodthirsty laughter avalanched down from a black, starless sky. Islands of booty glittered in the amber light of torches. The screams of a Spanish princess locked in the brutal arms of a hairy corsair rose above the din. “!Ayudame!” she called.""!Por favor! !Ayúdame!"

  Sudden high seas made their boat lurch. A hurricane warning sounded. Barbara fell across Albert’s lap. Albert caught her by the shoulders and tried to lift her off, but she didn’t move. He watched helplessly as her thin shoulders quaked.

  “Barbara?” he said. “Are you crying?”

  She lifted her head slightly. Albert saw that her face was wet, that her tears were real and abundant. “I’m trying to have fun,” she sobbed, miserably. “Honest to Christ, Mr. Court, I am trying.”

  “It’s okay, Barbara,” he said, as the people in the boat ahead of them turned to see what the trouble was.

  “It’s not okay!” Barbara shouted. “God damn you people, can’t you understand that it’s not okay?”

  A breeze from the approaching exit cooled Albert’s face. “No one holds you responsible, Barbara,” he said, surprising himself.

  Barbara raised herself and looked at him. “What are you talking about, Mr. Court?”

  “Tommy. You couldn’t have known, could you? I mean, known what he was going to do. I don’t condone what you—”

  “Jesus H. Christ on a skateboard,” she said.

  Albert wiped her face with his handkerchief. He was thinking that her life was probably not as easy as it looked, not nearly as privileged. Those parents of hers, cold as ice and on the climb, socially. “Don’t—you shouldn’t, Barbara— punish yourself.” A tear he had missed sparkled on her chin. He dabbed it away with his handkerchief.

  She laughed suddenly and he was shocked by its metallic brilliance. It was an eerily beguiling laugh. It made his scalp tingle. “You silly person,” she scolded. “It’s you I’m crying for, Albert. And me. It’s you and me, that’s who I’m crying for,” she said.

  It was dark when they left. In the parking lot, Barbara kissed Albert. He’d been unlocking the car when she slid between him and the door. He tried to back away from her, but her hands locked at the back of his head. He put his hands on her shoulders to force her away, but she yielded so dramatically that he couldn’t bring himself to be rough with her. Then her tongue, hard and minty, slid past his Ups. He made a sound in his throat, but it didn’t deter her. His thick, bewildered tongue met the cool, flexing sweetness of hers hesitantly. She was able to do things with her tongue that had the intricacy of ritual. Then, by strong suction, she pulled his tongue into her mouth. he moved it dumbly, without skill. It was like laboring for speech, and he began to sweat. In the car, he said, “I’m sorry. I should not have done that.” His voice was small but passionate with shame.

  “Don’t be a goof,” she said. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  Albert bought Tommy a new set of steel-belted radials for his car as a welcome-home present. They stood in the garage looking at the new tires. Tommy was feeling much better. He was a good-looking boy, a fine athlete, and he was intensely humiliated by what he had done to himself. That slime hole, he thought. He couldn’t believe he’d let a punchboard like Barbara Sunderlin get to him. That crab farm, he thought. That pus pit. That walking slit trench. He ran his hand over the bold tread of the tires. Fucking Pirellis, he thought, jubilant. He pictured himself banking into a hairpin curve up in the Sierras, power on, engine winding out, downshifting dramatically to third, the road treacherous with rain, a semi jackknifed across the road ahead, then barreling into the ditch and powering through it, and up the embankment around the trailer, back onto the pavement, control a beautiful dream come true, and there, ahead—check it out—a lovely woman behind the wheel of a stalled BMW, her hopeful eyes meeting his....

  Albert, though he loved his son’s obvious enthusiasm for the tires, wasn’t feeling very well. Guilt and lust had grown in him like twin tumors. He had tried to bury himself in work. He stayed late at the office, studying new software proposals, new marketing areas. He attended engineering meetings that were over his head, sales meetings that didn’t concern his territory. But nothing helped. A physical memory of Barbara’s busy tongue in the Disneyland parking lot broke his concentration. And to make things worse, to complicate things further, they made plans to see each other again. What in the hell am I trying to do? he thought. Wreck what’s left?

  He met her in public places. Beaches, amusement parks, cafes, McDonald’s, movie theaters, and Disneyland. They went to Disneyland often and once made love in the back of the submarine when they were the only passengers. He half expected to see the psychotic giant who called himself Cupid, and kept a wary eye whenever they went to the huge amusement park. He could still feel, when he thought about it, the giant’s powerful fingers on his skull, forcing his face into Barbara’s.

  Barbara wrote poems dedicated to him. She mailed them boldly to his house, the envelopes addressed to Alberto Cortazuma. He hid the poems in his workshop and read them at night with the table saw running. The things they did together were gathered in farfetched metaphor and simile.

  They exchanged small presents. He bought her a gold bracelet. She bought him garish, hand-painted neckties. She even had herself tattooed for him: flaming lips uttering, by means of a comic-strip balloon, his name.

  Pretending to be serious, they discussed eloping to Mexico. In bed, late at night, listening to Sylvia’s tranquilized breathing, he would convince himself that they were serious, and he would try to visualize the uncomplicated air of the lower Baja.

  But he had obligations, duties. My son, for instance, he reminded himself. What would Tommy think? How could he expect Tommy not to react with scorn and rage? And then, how could he possibly sleep easy in Mexico knowing the total wreckage he’d left behind? He looked at his son. Tommy was hefting a Pirelli. His tanned biceps were round and hard as apples. Albert loved him. He would give his life for the boy without thinking, without even a sense of martyrdom. A gesture as automatic as a leaf falling in October.

  “Tomaso,” he said, hoping that speech would not fail him this time.

  “Yes, Dad?” Tommy said, glancing at his father quickly, then, just as quickly, looking away. It’s Father-and-Son Time, he thought, peevish.

  Albert wanted to make sure that Barbara was out of the boy’s mind, but he wasn’t sure how to open the touchy subject. “Deep wounds,” he said at last, “sometimes don’t heal completely.”

  Tommy turned his face away from his father so that his smile would not be seen. He picked up another tire, pretended to inspect the tread. “Don’t sweat it, Pops,” he said. “Old Shit-for-Brains has learned his lesson the hard way.”

  Albert began to labor. He
arched his back and breathed deeply. Tommy looked at him then. “What I mean, Tomaso,” Albert said. “What I’m trying to get at is, will she—”

  “She?"

  “Don’t be annoyed, son. I mean Barbara. Barbara Sunderlin. Will Barbara—”

  “Bum me out again? That blowjob?”

  Albert chewed the inside of his cheek as a stopper moved into his mind. Rom, rom, rom, like an audible, high-blood-pressure pulse, richly liquid, staggered him. Then he realized that it was his pulse, and that he felt wobbly with vertigo, and the palms of his hands were damp. “Let’s get those tires on, Tommy,” he said.

  Albert dreamed he had fallen out of a hot-air balloon. A rope wrapped itself around his thigh, saving him. But as the supple rope tightened, it made a noose around his genitals. He was hanging from a balloon, high above Disneyland, by his genitals. The pain was spectacular. A crowd of solemn Russians looked up, attracted by his screams.

  He woke to find Sylvia pulling his genitals. She had a white-knuckled grip on them. She seemed to be asleep, but her eyes were partly open. She wasn’t making a sound other than the slow, deep breathing of a sleeper. He took her by the wrist and tried to remove her hand from him, but she would not release her hold. The pain was severe. He slapped her face as hard as he could from his awkward position, and kept slapping her until she raised her hands to protect herself. Albert got up and went into the bathroom.

  After his pain subsided a bit, he found her pills. “Is it one from the blue bottle and two from the red, or vice versa?” he called, but Sylvia didn’t answer. He carried the bottles of pills and a glass of water into the bedroom. Sylvia was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up to her chin. Her eyes were fiercely distrustful.

  He put the glass of water and the pills on the night table on her side of the bed. Sylvia’s eyes, watchful and bright, like the eyes of a cornered animal, studied his every move, unblinking. Albert put on his bathrobe and Sylvia’s eyes darted to each small movement of his hands as he looped and cinched the belt. He glanced at their twenty-three-year-old wedding picture on the dresser. It startled him. Then he went down to his workshop to listen to the saws. Barbara wanted to go to Palm Springs for the weekend. Albert told LeeAnn, the nurse, that he had to go north on a business trip. Sylvia accepted the story without comment. Dr. Bud Rossetti had changed prescriptions once again, but Sylvia had not improved noticeably. Tommy’s return from the hospital did not have the salutary effect Dr. Rossetti was hoping for, either.