by Jill Malone
Later, when she moaned, I cradled her into me, memorizing the strawberry scent of her hair, the soft haven of her throat.
As Lucy waddles into the room, I know that something has altered, transmuted—broken the mystery of my case wide open. Her smashed pug face can’t repress its sneer of delight as she records my temperature in my chart. No doubt she draws a little smiley face inside the degree symbol. I let her fester as I continue to stare out the window at the edge of blue building and drab condominiums my view affords.
“So,” she says finally, looking down at me with a hint of triumph in her grunting pronunciation. “You’ve got a visitor.”
I nod as though this were perfectly reasonable, expected even, a visitor after more than a month.
“Feel up to seeing this visitor?”
Ah, what a coy little ape. I stare at her and then blink twice. After a fleeting dirty look, Lucy turns away from me and toddles for the door.
“I’ll send your husband in then.”
She casts this sentence back like a stone and doesn’t wait for my reaction, though certainly my reaction would have gratified her. What fucking husband? From the hallway come the murmur of voices—a rare event indeed at Kapiolani, where no one ever thinks to lower the decibel of her voice for the sleep-deprived, body-ravaged squatters hunkered in these dismal rooms—and I strain to remain detached, to continue to stare out the window as if a visiting husband were truly something ordinary.
How would Dr. Mya react to the news of a husband finally come to claim me? Her porcelain face forced to express an emotional reaction for the first time in her starched life. A husband! Why, Jane, I misjudged your situation entirely. This changes everything. A husband would almost be worth the opportunity to fuck with her mind.
A moment later Nick walks, unescorted, into the hospital room—his orange shirt a beacon in the fluorescent-drenched sea of white and pastel—and stands several feet from the bed before he braves the distance to lean over me. His hand grazes my neck like the blade of a knife:
“Hey, kid.”
His voice, a pitcher of water tipped over my mouth. I have a vision of reckoning yanked from some black and white Western, where the hero returns like Odysseus to reclaim all that seemed forfeit. Husband. Husband. I want to believe.
“Where have you been?”
“San Francisco, then Seattle. I just arrived home this afternoon to a machine full of messages from the hospital, the police, supervisors from UPS and U.H. … Everyone freaking in this high-pitched mayhem—it was surreal, listening to message after message. I kept waiting for the one that said this has all been a terrible mistake. If they’d called the studio instead, my secretary would have gotten word to me before.”
Before: such a sad, comfortless word. He looks pale and thinner as if he has become adolescent somehow; his head shaved to a fine stubble that accentuates his nose even more dramatically and the startling green of his eyes. Sliding his hand under my neck, he looks down at me and then scans the room, taking in the obscure view, the dark television, the IV stand, and the hospital paraphernalia littered among get-well cards (from the ramp crew at UPS) before he finally lets his gaze settle on me again.
“That nurse told me you’ve been here over a month.”
I nod.
“A coma?”
“Briefly.”
“And the other injuries?”
“Splinters and breaks. I’m on the gauze and morphine treatment program.”
I wave my left hand dismissively, careful not to hurl the IV stand at my husband.
“That nurse said your condition’s still serious.”
“She’s a meth fiend.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t like you, either.”
He brushes the hair from my forehead, his hand resting longer than necessary on my widow’s peak.
“Husband?” I ask.
“My house still smells of you … the cupboards, the clothes.”
Before.
“They’re worried about the scars on your back and wrists. That nurse said …”
“None of this is your fault.”
“Why hasn’t anyone come to visit you? Why haven’t they called your dad?”
“I’m OK.”
“She said your injuries were so serious that—”
“Nick.”
“Where the fuck is Grey?”
“In Washington, divorcing his wife.”
“And Emily?”
“Paris with her mother.”
“Your dad?”
“Not like this.”
“Jane, this isn’t like your sexual preferences, you can’t keep your accident from everyone. You have broken bones, for Christ sake. This isn’t a fucking government secret. Let me call your friends and family.”
My friends and family. I let the idea simmer in my head like a migraine: Nick phoning my scattered comrades to report the accident, my condition, my hospital status; Nick acting liaison to my recovery; Nick making everything right.
“I’m tired.”
I shift lower into the bed, exorcising him from view. Dismissed, I want to tell him. I’ll survive this as well. Run away to the Mainland. Let me keep what I will.
“Jane.”
Calm again, he crouches beside me, fingers sifting smooth against my dry lips. I want to weep for us, for the decline of empires.
“Does it hurt?”
“The morphine, remember?”
What had it taken for him to come to this hospital room? Had it taken courage after so many months of absence? Could curiosity alone have propelled him here? Was this the same prodigal boy touching my face?
“The nurse told me they haven’t given you morphine for several days now.”
“Then I must have another kind of delusion.”
He smiles then, almost tenderly, or maybe it is tenderness and the fluorescent lights make it difficult to recognize. Clearly I had expected him to come to the hospital, to keep my secrets and his own. What prompted this faithfulness from either of us?
A girl used to go to the edge of a cliff every day to watch hawks swirl and dive. For years, she stood and watched until even the slightest movement in their musculature became apparent to her, until she could anticipate the purpose of their movements, until she could emulate those movements. Then she jumped.
“I’ll come again tomorrow, alright?”
I blink twice.
After that first evening with the Montana dykes, my mind, so purposefully resolved to liberate Audrey from the ordinary of our relationship, faltered. We had planned a trip to Maui to stay with Therese and my father for several weeks that summer. We’d agreed to chair a beach cleanup rally in September. She had more art commission projects and needed my help with supplies, logistics, supervision. We had obligations. We had this scaffold of a life girding our commitments, our habits, our sleep and waking; who would bring her tea to the studio in the evenings, steeped exactly four minutes? Who knew to buy the brand of vegetarian baked beans that did not contain gluten? How her fingers opened and closed when she dreamt, her fetish for frozen bananas, the way she whistled whenever she was nervous—I wanted more than the memory of these peculiarities, I wanted the peculiarities themselves.
Glenn and I had surfed every morning the chicks stayed at Audrey’s. Eventually Gloria and Fiona had tired of the guys in canoes trying to railroad newbies into the reef that edged Queens like a picture frame. They’d opted instead to spend their mornings hiking with Audrey before testing our favorite cafés for breakfast. Glenn surprised me, she was so hardcore. Granted the waves at Queens were only four–six, but a lot of aggressive surfers competed for swells and hesitation was costly: they’d fucking mow you over if you didn’t seize or vacate. Glenn blitzed: arms like rotor blades propelling her into the swell, her long legs dragged along the board’s surface in a single motion, before crouching, body cocked to spring, to break the wave. Her tremendous upper-body strength seemed completely incongruous to her slender poet’s frame until, several
days into their visit, I’d discovered that she owned a climbing gym in Montana and was a nationally ranked climber.
In the cold outdoor shower, we blasted salt from our hair, skin, surf shorts, bikini tops, and, particularly, from our mouths. Since I didn’t drive, Glenn had rented a minivan for their last week, and we dried the boards as thoroughly as possible so they could be scuttled in the van while we ate crepes with fresh mango and blueberries at Solstice Café, drinking several pitchers of water to rehydrate and counteract the six cups of coffee.
“I’m going to miss Oahu,” Glenn said between mouthfuls of sliced mango.
I smiled at her, a fleeting scene of piled snow and black ice flashing through my mind. Montana seemed as foreign a concept to me as the Alaskan wilderness, and somehow the re-introduction of wolves coupled with the idea of territorial grizzly bears spoke more to the journey of Lewis and Clark than the reality of this rogue model with her achingly sculpted skeleton. Climber or no, she just didn’t look like a granola girl to me.
“I’m going to miss surfing with you,” I told her. “You’re a natural, man. Seriously, you’re fucking fearless. You scared the testosterone out of that canoe crew, and those bastards would bludgeon their own mothers.”
We’d thrown long-sleeved shirts over our bikini tops, and the watermarks on our chests gave the impression of Mickey Mouse ears. Hanging with these chicks comforted me, and the longer the girls had been at the house, the more I envied their community in Missoula, in spite of bears and blizzards. In fact, I marveled at Audrey’s ability to leave that community for the isolation of Oahu. She must be lonely.
“I was really worried about this trip, but I’ve had a great time.”
“Worried how?”
She spread syrup and powdered sugar around the plate with her fork. Her nose had started peeling, but the rest of her body had tanned a brown as deep as her eyes. Solstice Café’s tinted windows lent a moody shade to the yellow and blue interior. Disjointed impressionistic paintings from several local artists hung on the walls. I stared at the piece behind Glenn: in red and blue streaks, a woman appeared to be screaming, her mouth shaped like a violin, her hands dissolving into white.
“Gloria and I have been together a long time—nearly five years—and sometimes monogamy has been really challenging. Gloria had a lot of affairs before she started dating me and from her perspective monogamy is a hetero convention, you know? We live in a community of ex-girlfriends. I mean, she and Fiona used to date. She’s had to redefine her perspective to stay with me. Sometimes I feel really terrible about needing a monogamous relationship—like it’s a failure on my part.”
“Why do you feel like it’s your failure?”
“I don’t know. It worries me to confine another person. Who am I to say what’s right for someone else?”
“You’re just saying what’s right for you. That’s not the same thing as confining someone else, is it? I mean, everyone has boundaries.”
“I’ve only dated four girls since I was sixteen.”
“Seriously? How is that possible?”
“See, you think I’m a freak too.”
“No, not a freak, just, I mean haven’t you ever had an affair?”
She shook her head, finally meeting my eyes for the first time since we’d begun this peculiar conversation. I tried to remember the last time I’d been monogamous. The dentist probably, unless letting a guy feel me up at a dance club in London counted as an affair.
“Every once in a while I’ll be hanging out with someone and there’s this spark, right, there’s this pulse between us, but I’ve never acted on it. Not even during grad school when gallons of liquor eliminated all inhibitions. Honestly, I find denial much more sensual than skulking around behind my girlfriend’s back.”
She’d tucked her hair behind her ears, which were bright red, presumably from the subject matter; her fingers fluttered nervously like a startled dove.
“So, you’ve had the impulse before but you’ve denied it. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah. I mean, I have the impulse right now.”
I felt my face go warm, my eyes widening despite my best efforts at nonchalance. She cleared her throat, her eyes darted to mine and back to her plate.
“I’m not trying to seduce you or anything; I’m just illustrating my point. To me, it’s much more interesting not to have an affair. No drama, no casualties, just the ache, the friction of being with a person you’re into and denying yourself the chance to experiment.”
“So you’re an emotional masochist.”
She frowned, considering my accusation. I’d finally recovered from her sucker-punch confession and felt I’d gotten one of my own off.
“I’m not sure the denial is painful,” she said finally, “but on some level, I see what you mean. Anyway, the whole reason I started blabbing on and on about this is that I worried about taking a vacation with Fiona and Gloria—there is no predicting what Fiona will do at any given moment—and seeing Audrey again was a test as well.”
The waitress removed our plates and I asked her to bring us a couple of beers. Glenn raised her eyebrows, settled back in her chair, and stretched her long legs beneath the table.
“You and Audrey had sparks?”
“I always thought so. But, of course, I had a girlfriend, and … Audrey’s one of those instantly fascinating people. I mean, well, obviously you know what I mean. Anyway, I’ve watched the two of you together and it’s just so cute. You guys are so cute.”
“Cute?”
The word seemed desperately out of character for both of us. Glenn’s voice had pitched into a little girl singsong when she’d uttered it—twice.
“Yeah, she’s so obviously in love with you. I just hadn’t expected that. I’ve known Audrey for years and I’ve never seen her in love. That first dinner at the apartment eating tofu curry, there was this amazing sexual energy between the two of you that just crackled.”
The waitress brought our beers and another pitcher of water. I tried to reconcile cute with crackling sexual energy. Clearly, Glenn had meant it as a compliment.
“You’d think,” she went on, “I’d feel really staid and domestic by comparison. Instead, I feel hopeful. This trip has reinvigorated my perspective and made Fiona’s choices seem more like failure than my choices. That probably sounds really petty. OK, it is really petty, but I’ve worried lately about becoming almost filial with Gloria, you know what I mean? That easy comfortable feeling you develop after you’ve been with someone for a while that may signal passion’s demise. I’m not worried about that anymore.”
I nodded, gulped my beer. Somehow cute had inspired hopeful, and as improbable as that seemed, I knew exactly what she meant. Raising her beer, she smiled at me.
“Anyway, it’s been a good trip. Thanks.”
“No worries. I’ve enjoyed it as well.”
Maybe the woman in the painting didn’t scream, maybe she sang. Glenn peeled the label from her beer, her expression absorbed in the meticulous un-sticking. I had no idea how old she was, but she seemed very young to me, her moods always so apparent on her face as if she hadn’t learned to hide exactly what she thought or felt. Was it innocence? Was that what made her so appealing?
“What was Audrey like at school?” I asked.
She glanced at me and shrugged, “Same as now in a lot of ways. She lived in Missoula for about six years, didn’t date much—a few affairs—but then Audrey has always been independent. She generated a lot of buzz in the community, you know? The mysterious artist is always sexy. I guess the biggest change about her is you. She was the perfect climbing partner: focused and self-reliant. We went on a few extended climbing trips and I swear we spent whole days together never exchanging more than fifty words. I always dug that about her: the stripped utility of her company.
“I’ve wondered about that silence thing. Sometimes she makes that a frightening weapon.”
“There’s nothing worse than the silent treatment
. Give me a shouting match anytime, man. I can’t bear neglect.”
She laughed into the neck of her beer, finished the last sip. I paid the bill and followed her to the parking lot. Outside, the sun had scalded the minivan, creating dangerous weapons of door handles and seatbelts. After rolling down the windows, Glenn let the van idle, and stared at me.
“I want to ask you about something,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil anything.”
Concern had drawn her eyebrows together.
“Ask me.”
“Your wrists,” she said haltingly, “and your back. I, well, I wanted to ask about—” Her face agonized over the proper phrasing and though I felt guarded for the first time since I’d met her, I stretched my arm toward her reassuringly, trying to make the scene easier on both of us. Sleeve pulled back so she could scrutinize the lines on my left wrist, I palmed the armrest nervously with my free hand.
“Contact sports,” I told her.
She didn’t understand. Blushing, she rubbed my wrist with her cold fingertips as though she might find the answer in my skin—intuiting that my body had always been more forthcoming than my mind.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, and was.
How to explain? Her fingertips brushed along my wrist burn, reminding me of that first night with Audrey in her lavender flat. Drowsy, intoxicated, aching—and if I lived by Glenn’s rules, I’d have denied myself the slow, tempered kiss Audrey gave me, I’d have withheld myself because of Nick.
“I’m a masochist, and a while ago the situation got a little crazy. I let it get a little crazy.”
And if I lived by my own rules, I’d leave Audrey soon despite holiday plans and voluntary commitments because that easy filial comfort was hard to diagnose—sometimes it wasn’t bliss but death. And maybe I didn’t want either.
“Before Audrey?” she asked.
“What?”
