“It’s completely gone, isn’t it? Your sense of smell,” Maisy said, studying him now.
He sat down, sipped his coffee. “I could smell it even after I was awake,” he said. “It lasted about a minute, then it went. Same smell, every morning. I can’t pin it down, but it’s so real.”
“Something’s not right.”
“It can’t amount to much, Maisy.”
“You walk around the house trying to smell things. The other day I saw you light a match and inhale the sulfur. Only someone who couldn’t smell would do a thing like that.”
“Maybe it’s just an allergy, a temporary thing,” he said, making a show of inhaling coffee steam with unrestrained pleasure. “The mulberry trees are budding out now. You know how bad that pollen can be.”
Maisy sighed. “I don’t like being waked up like that, Leon. I don’t want you smelling me every morning. It gives me the willies. Something’s wrong with you.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Leon said. “I feel fine. A lot of people lose then-ability to smell things. I’m sixty-five. I can’t see as well as I could twenty years ago, either.”
“But you smell phantoms. I want a doctor to look at you just in case. I’m thinking a neurologist.”
“It isn’t a medical problem,” he said. “How could it be a medical problem?”
“Milder symptoms than that are medical. I’m going to call the clinic.” Maisy had been an army nurse, and had served in Korea and then again, after an interlude as a surgical nurse in Tucson, in Vietnam.
Leon chuckled, shaking his head, but it was an act. He felt like crying again. It was frightening, this sudden deprivation of one of his senses. He remembered being inducted into the army, a hundred naked boys bending over and spreading their cheeks for the examining doctors, the overpowering anal stink misting his eyes and making him gag. Oh! if he could only smell those scared young sphincters again!
The loss was frightening, but it was more frightening that he would receive powerful smells in his dreams, smells that were so insistent that he woke up with them still present, his heart pounding and his mind reaching back for something in the distant past that cried out for recognition. It was like a blind man waking up from strongly textured visual dreams in which an unidentifiable scene from his past presented itself and continued to present itself in the minutes after he was fully awake, mimicking restored sight.
Maisy opened the morning paper. “I think you’re having seizures of some kind,” she said, scanning headlines.
Leon put on his sweats and walked down to the workout room, angry at Maisy’s casual diagnosis, a diagnosis that implied a serious medical condition. He looked forward to working out his anger on the weight machine. One of the reasons they had moved to this new retirement community—Sierra del Monte—was the splendid exercise facilities. A personal trainer was available, but Leon preferred to work out using his own routine. The trainer held group sessions in the afternoon. Leon worked out in the morning.
Dick Drake was standing in front of the universal gym when Leon arrived. Dick was a big man with long, scraggly white hair that still showed shocks of red in random patches. He stood like a stone image contemplating, it seemed, the lat machine. Leon knew him well enough to give him a nickname. He called Drake “Rasputin.” Drake, in turn, called Leon “Captain.” Leon assumed this was because of his silver crewcut and for the pressed khaki slacks he wore exclusively.
Drake, in his early seventies, had a recent heart transplant and was exercising now under his doctor’s orders. He was broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, and tall, a onetime college basketball player. He enjoyed his special status as a transplant patient. He told the details of his operation to anyone who would listen— how the heart-lung machine’s connection to his aorta had failed and how his blood left red slicks on the operating-room floor. Drake was full of life and bravado and endless talk. He had neither self-pity nor conceit, which, Leon thought, ennobled him. Leon liked Dick Drake; Maisy did not.
“I’m defibrillating,” he said to Leon’s greeting. “I’ve got to stand still.”
Leon sat down at the leg press and started exercising. There was too much weight on the rack, but he didn’t stop to change it. After half a dozen presses, he quit. Drake was still standing in front of the lat machine as his defibrillator hammered spikes of voltage into his misfiring heart.
“Son of a bitch,” Drake said, touching the bulge in his side where the defibrillator had been implanted.
“You okay?” Leon said.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m on a high wire stretched over Niagara Falls.”
Drake’s forehead was yellow as wax. His grand nose hooked out of his face like a damaged keel. He grinned, his pale eyes alive and merry under shaggy gray eyebrows. “What do you say we trash this for today and go out for a plate of bacon and eggs?” he said. He raised his arms and flexed the biceps. The lumpy muscles bucked erratically under the sagging skin. “I’m in good enough shape to miss a day. What do you say, Captain?”
Maisy wouldn’t go with them. She didn’t want to hear Drake describe his operation again. Leon showered, put on his gabardine slacks and a Hawaiian shirt, then walked to the Lanai room, one of three cafeterias in the Sierra del Monte complex. Drake was already there, seated at a table. He hadn’t changed out of his sweats. Leon pulled out a chair and sat down.
“You didn’t have to dress up for me, Captain,” Drake said.
“I didn’t,” Leon said.
A pretty waitress came by, a girl just out of high school. Leon ordered corned beef hash and poached eggs. Drake asked for the fruit plate.
“Damn,” Drake said, leaning sideways to watch as the girl moved briskly between the tables. “Doesn’t that make you want to start the nonsense all over again, Captain?”
“She’s a baby, Rasputin,” Leon said.
“I was a baby once, too,” Drake said gravely. His collapsed Ups drooped into a sad inverse smile.
“What’s wrong?” Leon said.
“I feel so goddamned useless. How come Dick Drake gets a brand-new heart when he can’t do anything with it anyway? I’m just waiting to die, like the rest of us. Seems like a waste.”
Drake never talked like this. “Something’s bothering you,” Leon said.
“I think the Nigerian wants his heart back, Captain.”
Leon knew that Drake’s heart had come from a Nigerian cab driver, killed in a head-on collision in Washington, D.C. The Nigerian was twenty-eight years old at the time of his death. His heart was flown to El Paso from D.C. in four hours. Except for the heart-lung machine problem, it had been a perfect transplant.
“FibriUating again?” Leon said.
Drake shrugged. “Off and on. Nigerians are big on ghosts. Maybe the cabby feels he can’t break away from the earthly bonds until his heart is buried, too.”
“Mumbo jumbo, Rasputin,” Leon said, though he did not think Drake’s superstitious fear was unreasonable. He was tempted to let apparitions, visitations, or vibrations in the ether account for the phantom odors he woke up to every morning.
Drake raised his napkin to his face. He coughed and something came up. He folded the napkin and put it on his plate. “I’m okay,” he said. “Sometimes when I retch I can put pressure on the vagus nerve. That makes it quit.”
The young waitress came by and leaned over their table. “Is everything okay, guys?” she asked.
Her thick auburn hair, electrified by the dry desert air, fell inches from Leon’s face. He closed his eyes and breathed in, nostrils flared, but he could not smell her fragrance.
“I was as good as dead,” Drake said to the waitress. “Now look at me.” He opened his shirt and showed her his smooth wide scar. He raised his arms and made the gnarly biceps leap. The shadow of melancholy and doubt that had obscured his optimistic nature had passed. “I’m going to live forever, honey,” he said.
Leon got up and went into the men’s room. He stood in front of a urinal. Before he unzipped, h
e tried to smell the powerfully astringent deodorant bar that lay next to the drain. He knelt in front of the urinal and breathed in the fumes. His eyes watered, but he smelled nothing.
A man in a wheelchair rolled into the men’s room. “Are you okay, buddy?” he said.
Leon stood up, embarrassed. “Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Age had not made Maisy lose interest in sex. Leon was capable, but had little staying power. “Sorry,” he said, breathing hard. He rolled away from her. “I’m short on wind these days.”
“Don’t worry,” Maisy said. “I’m not going to start trolling the playgrounds for teenage distance runners.”
They both laughed. It had been a good marriage. They had no children and were content with that. Maisy had been thirty-six when they got married, Leon thirty-five. Ten years before that, Maisy had been married briefly to an army officer.
They took a shower together. Leon put his face directly under the spray. He smelled roses in the steam. The showerhead ovevwhelmed him in fragrance. He stepped back, startled. “Is that your shampoo, Maisy?”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “I’m not shampooing yet.”
It was roses and more than roses. He could almost remember the place—a riverbank, maybe a lake, a fine house in the country. And there was a gathering of some kind, people he knew but could not name. There were voices among the roses, by the river or lake, and the familiar house, a handsome place tucked in green hills, was full of music and roses, thousands of roses. He’s here, he heard someone say. Someone else said, Sure enough.
He fell to a squat on the tiles, shaking. Maisy turned off the water and left the shower. When she came back, she toweled him dry. “I’ve called for an ambulance,” she said.
“I’m okay,” Leon said, standing up. “I almost remembered it that time, Maisy.” Tears rolled down his face and his voice shook.
“There’s nothing to remember,” she said. “You had a seizure, a bigger one this time.”
“Maybe heaven,” he said. “Maybe heaven smells like flowers, and the houses are full of roses and music, and the people are sweet.”
“Take it easy, hon,” Maisy said. “They’ll be here in a minute.”
It was an aneurysm. A bulging vein, dangerously fragile, had pressed hard against a branch of the olfactory nerve. The pressure the aneurysm had exerted on the brain had also stimulated the seizures. The seizures—the nostalgia-rich odors of nowhere—stopped after the operation. And after a while his sense of smell came back. Leon was able to smell ordinary everyday things again, but his dreams were odorless. Stripped of fragrance, they no longer had the power to draw him into haunting and familiar landscapes where people he recognized but did not know welcomed him. He missed this, which was foolish, and made no sense.
He wore a cap to hide his shaved head. A long red arc traveled from his right temple, across the top of his skull, ending just over his left eye. He wanted to show Dick Drake his scar, wanted to bore him with the details of his surgery— Rasputin had it coming, after all—but discovered that Drake had been taken back to the hospital where he’d received his heart transplant.
Leon visited him. Drake’s Nigerian heart was failing rapidly and he was waiting for a new donor.
“Jesus, I hope this time they give me the heart of a goddamn Swede. Swedes don’t believe in ghosts, do they, Captain?”
Leon went along with it. “You want a Swiss heart, Rasputin. The goddamn Swiss only believe in money.”
They were out in an open-air plaza between buildings. Fast-moving springtime clouds moved them in and out of shade. Dick Drake sat bundled in a wheelchair. He looked thin and wasted, but his spirits were high.
“The Nigerian’s calling it in,” he said. He looked up, as if he could see the Nigerian cabby gesturing among the clouds. “He can’t travel without his heart.”
Leon stopped at a flower shop on his way home. He bought a dozen roses for Maisy, a mix of reds and yellows and pinks. The roses filled the car with perfume. It was a happy smell, the fragrance of optimism and hope, a fragrance that would be welcome in anyone’s idea of heaven.
He knew he did not need to, but he wanted to win her heart again. He wanted to win her heart every day for whatever time they had left together. It made no sense, but it didn’t have to. Nothing had to.
BORROWED HEARTS (New Stories)
A Romantic Interlude
He came into the Lost Cause Bar and Grille out of the noontime desert heat and began to suck down Bloody Marias as if they were snakebite antidote. Ever since his wife left him, it had become a lunch-hour ritual. But today the generous hits of Herradura Reposado—a very good tequila—pulled him into a situation he ordinarily would have backed away from. He antagonized a woman who carried a.22-caliber mini revolver in her kangaroo pack. He should have been sensitive to the situation, but he persisted in stumbling blindly through life on the thorny path of his nagging sorrows.
The woman didn’t seem unapproachable. Hadn’t she been sitting alone for the better part of an hour at the bar? Didn’t that give him license? Anyway, his remark had been mild by any standard. “You have priceless Virgin Mary skin,” he said. “Unblemished as the Jesus-haunted communion wafer itself. I raise my glass to original skin.” He chuckled attractively, monitoring his performance in the bar mirror. “I hope my little pun is acceptable to you, Miss.”
“Keep your little pun in your shorts,” she said unpleasantly, not bothering to turn her head. Her voice was flat, without nuance. A bored voice, a dead-end voice. The voice, he realized when it was much too late, of a woman on a mission. “Drinking your lunch again, I see,” she added.
He regarded her. Did he know this woman? Was she a regular at the Lost Cause? She was dressed in light workout clothes: nifty half-zip sweatshirt, the chopped-off sleeves revealing weight-trained biceps; teal-blue nylon running shorts; canvas kangaroo pack snugged against her flat lower abdomen; expensive cross-training shoes—a lunch-hour jogger or power-walker. A dark hourglass of sweat sopped the area between her compact breasts; her hair was tied back in ordinary twine. She was pretty, but this wasn’t immediately apparent. Melancholy overruled her natural beauty, made it irrelevant. She reminded him of his ex-wife: big-boned, solid, good neck, tennis-firm legs and arms, and—he glanced down at the brass rail—long, narrow, highly arched feet. He pictured her in a low-cut cocktail dress, her face made up and her hair sexily crimped, and he felt an old sentimental attraction.
“Just what do you think you’re staring at?” the woman said.
“At a memory of loveliness,” he said.
He meant it. The salt of nostalgia stung his eyes. Sentimentality lurked in his blood like a defective gene. The divorce papers had arrived earlier that day and the bottom dropped out of his world. He was sick with the vertigo of weightless fall.
The woman sipped her club soda. “You insincere prick,” she said quietly, facing him now. It was an impersonal observation. The world was plagued with insincere pricks, and this was just one more confirmation.
He regarded her, his mood souring. He shrugged. Then he made a critical mistake. “Okay, then: doleful dildo banger; lonely rider of the electric zucchini,” he said. “Midnight baton twirler,” he added.
It seemed reasonable: If this woman took compliments as insults, she was likely to take an outright insult as a compliment. He winked at some of the regulars down the bar, sharing his amusing inverse logic. He searched his memory and came up with a choice fragment of an Irish curse: “May the devil take the whey-faced slut by the hair, and beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.” This couplet from a James Stephens poem presented at auditorium volume in a makeshift brogue drew more phlegmy cackles from the afternoon corps of drinkers.
The woman crooked a beckoning finger at him. She smiled. Believing that he’d been correct, that she had been favorably stimulated by his crude remarks, he leaned toward her. She brought her lips close to his ear, reached between his legs. She found his balls and
squeezed them with a need that made his spirits rise. He waited—hope soaring—for her electric tongue.
“You are going to die for that filthy remark,” she said, squeezing harder. “And you’re going to die shitting yourself, like the dirty little sewer rat you are.”
His bowels acknowledged the threat: eruptive liquid gaspings. He tried to lurch away from her, but her gym-trained hand on his balls became a vise. Embarrassed by pain, then fear, he said, “Look—she wants me, guys!” The regulars made uncivil noises, signifying approval. He rolled his eyes and bit the tip of his tongue puckishly.
He didn’t see the slap coming. It was not a hesitant slap, flicked ladylike from the wrist. She held him in place with her left hand and walloped him with her right, the blow achieving maximum velocity at the radius of her long arm. It caught him flush against the ear. He’d been leaning backward to offer yet another raffish observation to the regulars and was swept off his stool by the force of the blow. She gave his balls one last iron-fingered squeeze and let him go. He hit the floor on the point of his tailbone and yelped, his head roaring with colossal chimes. This amused the regulars greatly. He picked himself up to a grainy chorus of barks and hoots. He dusted his jacket and slacks with nonchalance, but then the stab of pain in his lower back made him grab the bar and cry out.
“I meant what I said, bozo,” the woman said, with a calmness that he finally realized was pathological. She stood before him—ready for war, her knees bent—anticipating his first move. Bands of visible muscle writhed in her legs. Her biceps were veined, the muscles round and hard as baseballs.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said.
“You’re confusing me with someone else,” he managed.
“Am I? Maybe so. But I don’t think I am.”
“I’m not the guy,” he said.
She shrugged. “What’s the difference? You’ll do.”
“Look,” he said. “Whatever it is you think I’ve done, I want you to know that I’m...”
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