Exposure

by James Lockhart Perry

  The gastroenterologist nodded. He understood exactly how she felt, just like he understood all of the other cookie cutter brains attached to the organs and shit chutes that were his life. Lydia got this, but it didn’t matter one way or the other. All she wanted to know was, could he cut and sew? So she sat and listened without listening, while he spoke without saying anything, until finally—finally!—she understood what all of the musical lyrics had been masking.

  "You want me to sign my husband over for surgery?" she asked with a minor gape. "Are you out of your mind?"

  "Well, he is unconscious—"

  "Because you put him there!"

  "Yes, of course, and the last time I spoke to him, he did have certain reservations—"

  "Reservations!"

  "—about the surgery. But you're his wife, aren't you? If he changed his mind before you brought him in yesterday... Well, obviously you would be the only one to know."

  The glistening doctor sat back in his huge leather chair, steepled his fingers, and waited for Lydia to catch up. Of all the possibilities, this one had never remotely crossed her mind. Was the man a complete lunatic? Had he no idea with whom he was dealing? Nothing could be more certain than that Sam would leap out of his hospital bed the morning after surgery and strangle her. And she would hardly blame him. Lydia forced herself to gaze at the doctor. The lengths some children would go to get their hands on their favorite gadgets and playthings.

  "Think about it," Gastro Dude suggested, when Lydia arose from her chair and walked out. Sure, she would. She would think about it all damn day.

  And she did, at least on the drive home. She had left the apartment that morning with a shopping list for after her appointment with the doctor, but that was long forgotten. The more she sweated the situation, the more she realized, there was only one thing to do. She had run out of options. The idea germinating in her cranium was ruthless, nasty, and ugly—and exactly what Sam would have done.

  In the bedroom at home, she climbed onto a stool and brought the locked mahogany box down from the closet shelf. She found the key in a drawer of her vanity, opened the box, and brought out the thirty-eight caliber Walther. She loved this gun with its clean lines, easy heft, and crisp delivery. She had bought it years earlier, when she first came to California. As a Kentucky girl, she knew her guns and was damn proud of it. But her favorite practice range was all the way up in San Gabriel, one thing had led to another, and she hadn't fired a round in years.

  No problem at the distances she was working with. She checked and slipped the weapon into her purse, picked up her keys, and exited the apartment. All the way to the hospital, she worked on her conscience, priming it with the calluses to carry this thing through. Sam had had his chance. She had given him every opportunity to morph into a human being. This was the only way. She was as locked as a missile on atmospheric re-entry.

  At the hospital, she surprised herself with her cool. She didn't shiver, shake, or peer around her for prying eyes. She walked past the nurse's station with a friendly nod and entered Sam's room to find him still asleep. She knew they had given him painkillers strong enough to knock him out, so she disconnected the IV, hid the leads, and sat down to wait.

  An hour later, he groaned awake. "Hey husband, recognize me?" she asked.

  "Of course. What's going on?"

  Instead of answering, Lydia went to the door. She had already noticed that it sported no lock, so she glanced out into the corridor, closed the door, and wedged a chair underneath the handle.

  "What are you doing?" Sam asked, suspicious.

  Lydia approached the bed, took out the Walther, flipped off the safety, and laid it on the nightstand. "Are you going to do the treatments?" she asked. She kept her voice as flat as death.

  "What? You're going to shoot me?" Sam tried to take it lightly, but she knew they were communicating. The sonofabitch was getting every syllable. She pulled up a chair and sat down.

  "Are you going to do the treatments?" she asked again.

  Sam sneered. They were definitely on the same wavelength now. "You want to shoot me, go right the fuck ahead."

  Outside the room, a nurse tried to open the door. Lydia ignored the sound. The nurse must have spotted the gun, because she started shouting and beating on the window. An alarm went off somewhere out in the corridor.

  Lydia stared at Sam, impassive. She picked up the pistol and eased it into her hand. She should have known better than to think she could change his mind. "Are you going to do the treatments?" she asked a third time.

  "Fuck no!"

  "Then I'll see you in hell," she murmured. And raised the Walther to her own right temple.

  Part II

  Rudy

  Chapter 13

  "Hi everybody. My name is Lydia, and I'm an alcoholic."

  There. She had recited the mantra. She wasn't sure how sincerely she meant it, but then Group Leader Bob had told her to be patient. Enlightenment and conviction would come later.

  Or not. Did she really need all this? Not that it mattered—Sam's condition for taking the surgery and chemo had been that she get help in handling the booze. She was actually touched by her husband's feeble attempt at negotiation—as if he had any choice, now that they both knew precisely how far she would take things—but she wasn't about to pour salt on the tiny sapling of his co-operation.

  "Would you like to share anything else?" Bob asked.

  Lydia came back to earth with a shake of her head. Was it her imagination, or had she been doing this a lot lately, running off in the middle of a thought? She pondered a moment. She hated the sharing part. Maybe it was all those years with Sam the Clam, but going on about herself like this felt like stripping off her clothes in a crowded square. Oh well, she sighed. She had to give them something. "You all remember that my husband was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer, that he refused any treatment?"

  Nods all around the circle. "But you convinced him, didn't you?" Bob said. This was old news. They were looking for the good stuff.

  "Oh yes, I convinced him." If you could call a half-dead husband leaping off his hospital bed through the air to punch your head out of the path of a bullet convinced. Lydia fingered the residue of the black eye she still refused to cover with make-up. Just this morning, she had stood for an hour in the bathroom gazing into the mirror and gloating over it. Sam assumed she was dragging him along on some sort of guilt trip, but it went so much deeper than that. The hideous bruise was a hint that she might be alive and fighting, and not simply occupying space on the planet's surface.

  Bob kept prodding, "So how do you feel about it now?"

  "Excuse me?" There she had gone again. "Oh, I feel liberated. I suppose. Before I was so ... angry." And it was true. Not the sharp, stabbing fury of her husband, but a dull ache that she only understood after it lifted off her shoulders. "Of course, I still have the court date coming up..." Puzzled stares all around. That's right. Damn. She hadn't shared that tiny item.

  "What? A speeding ticket?" the boy Johnny snorted. As if squeaky-clean Lydia could hurt a flea. Johnny was in the program as part of a court judgment. He was the group hoodlum, at least until Mommy arrived in the family SUV to pick him up. His leather jacket must have cost his parents hundreds of dollars before he scuffed it up. None of the women, including Lydia, could bear the snotty wheeze of his high-pitched voice. It wasn't their fault that Mommy had ripped his baby gums off her teat a week early. Just now, the insolence provoked Lydia into, "Actually no. Discharging a firearm in a hospital."

  That got their attention. "It was an accident," she added quickly. "More or less. It's a long story." Rudy's fool of a lawyer had told her to expect jail time for just about the worst weapons violation in the book, short of killing someone. But she wondered if he was just setting her up for a burst of gratitude when he galloped in on his hyper-expensive legal steed to get her off. Rudy had told her he tended to do that.

  "So where do you go from here?" Bob asked dutifully, to nudge
her onward. The group evidently couldn't decide whether to take her confession literally or to attribute it to an alcoholic's vivid imagination.

  Lydia smiled. At least they had sidestepped the question of Ms. Squeaky Clean bringing a gun along on her candy-striping hospital rounds. "Well, I'm taking care of my husband of course, if you can call it that. And I have my new job, and that seems to be going well, as long as I don't kill my boss—"

  Bob choked, two of the women giggled, Johnny gaped. "Not literally!" Lydia laughed nervously. Not the best phrasing for a deadly femme fatale on the hook for a gun charge. "I guess I should find a different way of putting things, but Rudy is one very large pain in the ass."

  "And incompetent," one of the women offered from memory.

  Lydia grimaced. "You might have caught me on a bad day with that one." Not that Rudy had any idea what he was doing, but already and in spite of herself, Lydia had started to include the young hoodlum in the porous membrane of affection she dragged around those unfortunate enough to wander into her life. Odd as it struck her, Rudy might be a clown, but he was her clown. And Sheri's of course...

  "Excuse me?" she asked yet again. Damn! What was wrong with her?

  "Nothing, I was just thanking you for sharing," Bob assured and dismissed her.

  Lydia nodded, relieved. Her quota of naked sincerity filled, she fled the circle and threw away the cup of rancid coffee she had meant to refuse. The hideous residue on the parched flats of her tongue reminded her that it was time for a cigarette, so instead of sitting down again to doze through the next tale of woe on the group agenda, she excused herself. She had been doing this a lot lately, and she could tell that Bob was close to losing his endless supply of patience. After all, wasn't it Lydia's island existence that had driven her into this mess? Share and care. Share and care.

  Lydia never got her cigarette break. Sheri was waiting outside for her in Rudy's convertible, thirty minutes early. Apparently, the girl had read her mind. They hugged, and Sheri took off, driving carefully, hunched over and intent, a baseball cap wedged backwards onto her mop of hair. By no means Lydia's favorite fashion statement, but she gazed out of her window and forced herself to let it go. None of her damn business. Maybe, maybe not.

  San Pedro harbor flowed by in a million tiny, erratic points of light. Lydia had come all the way around Palos Verdes to this San Pedro support group for fear of meeting anyone she knew in Redondo. Sheri had offered to drive her, until the routine became a fixture for both of them, a chance to unwind together, with no more than a handful of words along the way.

  "What do you say we put the top down?" Lydia asked.

  "Sure. You want to take the coast road?"

  "Why not?"

  So Sheri pulled over and, while she took down the top, Lydia found the thick, old cable-knit sweaters in the trunk. The women bundled up and took off back the way they had come, around to Western Avenue and the Palos Verdes cliffs. It was a beautiful night, with a scattering of clouds and the moon spewing a highway of bright white effervescence across the waves to split the empty, black Pacific Ocean in two. At Portuguese Bend, they passed the road sign that warned of constant land movement and the water pipes that ran above ground to prevent them from snapping in the daily grind of tectonic geology. Constant land movement had pretty much summed it up for Lydia, until she anchored her life in a mind-numbing bottle of Bourbon. Now she was floating again above an exhilarating and terrifying precipice of sobriety.

  Sheri unexpectedly took her hand and squeezed. Lydia stopped herself from jolting out of the car. She was still getting used to this sort of thing from the girl. From the day Sheri took to her, Lydia had felt antsy about it. Rudy was so much easier to deal with, if only because he kept himself latched down tight like the rest of them. But the minute Sheri opened up to Lydia, she opened all of the way. For no reason now, Lydia thought of a can of anchovies—once you inserted the key and rolled back the top on the unexpectedly pungent delicacies, there was just no closing it again.

  "What?" Sheri asked.

  "What?" Lydia repeated, then realized she had been laughing to herself. "Nothing," she lied. "I was thinking about the group."

  "What about it?"

  But Lydia gazed out at the fleeing highway, until Sheri let it go and drove onward. The last thing Lydia needed was a vortex of girl talk and female bonding to drag her under. She wasn't the kind of woman to befriend a crowd, and anyway, Sam had always been a full-time job, even when he wasn't. At Point Vicente, Sheri pulled up to the chains that had closed off the whale-watching park for the night and turned off the engine.

  "What's going on?" Lydia asked.

  "Nothing. I just wanted to take in the ocean for a second." Sheri sat back in a visible effort to relax, but left eight telltale white knuckles clenching the steering wheel.

  Lydia gazed at the girl in the dark. "What's going on Sheri?"

  Sheri sighed. "Rudy took the Axelrod job."

  "He what!" Lydia's voice echoed up the cliffs and back again. At least in her imagination. Both of them glanced behind them along the empty road. The night smelled lonely and marooned, if that was possible. Lydia found herself wondering if this was how it smelled on the moon—empty and full of dead anchovies.

  "He signed the contract this afternoon after you left," Sheri was saying. "I don't know what to do."

  Lydia put more conviction into it than she felt. "For God's sake! Doesn't he understand anything? He doesn't know enough to shoot a wedding. They'll take the business away from him! And why would he want to shoot a wedding in the first place?"

  "Because we told him not to."

  "For God's sake!"

  That Rudy could be such a twit. The Axelrods were one of the leading families of the South Bay. The daughter had decided she wanted a Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer for her three-hundred-guest wedding. Rudy took the call and forgot to mention that the nearest Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer had ridden off into the sunset in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag. The problem was, disappointed brides tended to sue photographers, and with a daddy like Councilman Axelrod, they tended to sue and win.

  Sam would never have taken a political job like this. He would have sat the bride and her mother in his office with its walls covered with wartime photos, then exited to let all of the blood and misery change their mind. At least he knew his business, knew people. Rudy hadn't a clue. He was still too busy measuring his crotch and finding his place in the world to run anything, much less a business.

  "What did you say?" Lydia asked. She had lost the thread of the conversation. Again.

  "I was saying that maybe I should work on how I talk to him."

  "You think?"

  Sheri balked at the tone. Lydia held up a placatory hand. "You're right, you're right. I'm no one to talk."

  "You think Sam would help?"

  Lydia erupted with laughter. "With the shoot? You really are running short of straws, aren't you?"

  "I have to do something."

  "No, you have to get Rudy to do something. He might be a pig-headed boy, but he's no fool. You might just have to try a little charm."

  "I was afraid you'd say that. It's not my strongest suit." Sheri chuckled. "But at least I've got you to help me figure it out."

  There she went again. Lydia barely managed a nod and a mumbled reply. The neediness of the girl unnerved her, even if she reciprocated the affection. She quickly found something for her hands to do, to take them out of squeezing range. Sheri didn't seem to notice. She put the car into reverse, backed out, and took off along the coast.

  Neither woman said another word on the long curve around the coast to Redondo. The engine mixed with the chilly zephyr of the convertible's wake to render conversation difficult. Outside Lydia's apartment, she took Sheri's peck on her cheek and stood on the sidewalk, watching the lonely taillights drive away. She wanted to help the girl, truly wanted to toss her a lifebuoy and yank her out of the boat-swamping waves of her confusion. But the truth was, all
three of them—Rudy, Sheri, and Lydia herself—were flailing about helplessly in the sudden break with their histories. None of them had any idea where it was all going to lead. Only Sam seemed to know his way—either that or he did a damn fine job of hiding his fear and hesitation. Even now, post-surgery, and injected with one chemical poison after another, Lydia's husband had sucked it all up like the tough, intimidating bastard he always pretended to be. If the others were wounded fish writhing on the surface, Sam was a cancer-riddled rock, shot through with terrifying holes, but unmovable.

  Instead of going in, Lydia sat down on the steps of the apartment and gazed out at the moonlit ocean. She had never seen it so placid, at least from this distance. Yet those same sleepy waters had drowned thousands, maybe even millions, in their sudden and inexplicable rages. The kind of blind, angry, destructive force that lurked just beneath the surface of existence everywhere.

  Or not. No matter how doomed and terrified Lydia found herself, there was one incontrovertible fact she could hang onto, and that was the certainty that she had single-handedly wrenched her husband, her hero, her rock, back from the dead. At least a shadow of the guy, and at least for now. And if that was the best she could get, then to hell with the rest. For tonight anyway, she was too damn tired to dream.

  Chapter 14

  Rudy slammed the car into park in the center turn lane of Western Avenue and leapt out. Above him, the Spanish-Mission-style American Film Institute peeked out through millions of dollars of stately palm trees. Rudy wanted a photo of Porsches and Rolls Royces streaming along below this wealthy icon at the northern and Hollywood end of the longest boulevard in California. He had done his homework. Western Avenue passed through every possible layer of Angeleno life, from ritz and kitsch to slums and industrial, from criminally insane to the gorgeous ocean bluffs of San Pedro. Somewhere in all the disjointed contrasts, in all the fraudulent highs and lows, Rudy figured there had to hide a photo story.