by Ann Bauer
“Stunning,” she said for the third time. “But I couldn’t get good radar on her. What do you think? Straight? Bi?”
Carmen was oddly hurt yet amused by her own reaction. I really do think I’m the center of the universe, don’t I? she commented to her internal Jobe.
For the first hour, she lay back and pretended to sleep while Jana paged through a magazine and opened the curtain periodically to check for the lush figure of the Jamaican girl. Carmen waited, expecting the poisons to roil inside her and rise up suddenly, causing her to have a heart attack or begin retching blood. But nothing had happened for more than a day last time, she reminded herself. And eventually she gave in, not relaxing so much as resigning herself. Another round of severe dehydration could put her in real danger, Dr. Woo had said at their appointment yesterday. She was to call him the moment something happened. She touched the cell phone at her hip in which she’d programmed his pager number. That was all that could be done.
“So what’s up with you and Danny?” Jana asked suddenly.
Carmen peeked out from under her eyelids. “Absolutely nothing, why?”
“I don’t know. I just thought you were getting into a pretty deep conversation that night. I guess I kind of wondered what happened, why he left so fast.”
Carmen wished that one of them was a knitter. It had been so much easier talking to Glen’s wife while her eyes were on her yarn. “He dumped me,” Carmen said, holding her face as still as plaster so Jana wouldn’t see even a twitch of pain. “Okay, it wasn’t exactly like that. There was a lot of stuff about his marriage and how he’s trying to do the right thing. But basically, that’s the gist. He’s gone.”
“And you’re okay with this?” Jana’s eyes narrowed in. She saw. It didn’t matter how blasé Carmen tried to be.
She sighed and let go of the last of her false indifference. It was a relief, as with Danny when she had allowed her blouse to slip down and her scar to show. “No, of course I’m not okay with it. But I keep telling myself this is exactly what I deserve. It’s like you said a couple months ago: I was supposed to be the good-time girl. No complications, just sex. But then my husband died, I got sick. And to top it all off, I got ugly. Skinny and bald. I suppose that’s what I deserve, taking up with a younger guy. I probably look like his”—she gulped before saying a word so terrible—“mother.”
For once Jana was hesitant, her words thought out. “I’ll admit, you do look different.” She glanced at Carmen, checking for a reaction. “Beat up and strung out and not so much old as, well, a little like an alien.”
Carmen’s neck burned from shame. She poured a glass of water from the plastic pitcher at her side and took small sips.
“But.” Jana raised one warning finger. The Rastafarian school-marm. “I think you’re selling the guy short. I don’t get the feeling this is about your hair or your …” She motioned up and down Carmen’s half-reclining form. “You know, the way you are.”
“Excuse me?” Carmen struggled to appear powerful and indignant, which was hard while she was tethered like a trapped animal. “This is a guy with a blow-up doll for a wife. Besides, wasn’t it you who predicted he would run for the hills the minute I was diagnosed?”
“Yeah, well, I hadn’t met him yet. I was wrong.”
I was wrong. It echoed in Carmen’s mind. Twice in the past few weeks someone had told her this, when for decades she’d assumed that it was she alone who kept doing things wrong.
“Look at it this way.” Jana parted the curtain and peered out for a couple of seconds then snapped back. “Blow-up dolls are only good for one thing. Maybe Danny can’t get a jones on for his gorgeous wife.”
Carmen had closed her eyes again and the chair felt airborne. Like dying, but in a good way. “Funny,” she murmured. “That would be the one thing Mega and I have in common.” The next second, everything came horribly sharp and clear. Had she really said that out loud? Dammit. She hadn’t meant to. “Anyway,” she said, opening her eyes, desperate to move on. “How do you know Danny doesn’t … ?”
“Wait a minute. What did you mean by that?” Jana was staring. “Are you talking about you and Jobe?”
Inside, Carmen was apologizing as if she was praying. Despite Rory and Danny, all those clandestine meetings, this felt like an unforgivable betrayal—even though Jobe had been dead for nearly half a year. She weighed her answer carefully. “My own husband,” Carmen finally said, “wasn’t able to.” She swallowed. “I mean, there were times when it worked. But for the most part Jobe just didn’t seem, uh, turned on by me. In the slightest. He couldn’t …”
“Are you telling me he had erectile dysfunction?” Jana cried, and Carmen imagined the question slipping out under the curtain, bouncing around the room full of dying people. She grinned briefly, then sobered and nodded. “Eight times out of ten. We barely ever. You know. It’s a miracle we had three kids.”
“Christ, it must be absolute hell to be a man.” Jana knotted her forehead, concentrating. “You know what I think? I think Jobe loved you completely—enough to leave you the goddamn key to the mathematical kingdom—and the whole sex thing … Well.” Jana looked up at the ceiling. “You were pretty attractive in your heyday but let’s face it, you were also kind of a narcissistic twit.”
Carmen stared. “This is supposed to be helping build my self-esteem, right? It’s really hard to tell.”
Jana laughed and leaned down to hug Carmen roughly. “See? That’s why I keep you around no matter how big a twit you can be.”
They settled back into their respective spots, like actors returning to their places onstage. Several minutes went by before Carmen broke the silence.
“I’ve always wondered,” she said, then caught herself in the lie. “No, that’s not true. I’ve only just now thought: It’s possible I would have grown to love Jobe, exactly the way Olive said I would, if we’d just kept at it.”
Jana cocked an eyebrow.
“Stop it. I didn’t mean it that way.” Carmen looked down at the crook of her arm, delicate skin bruised purple and green. “Or maybe I did. But the way we were with each other, it became like a habit. And I wonder if somehow we’d have found a way to touch each other, you know—literally. Instead of always being so distant and formal.”
Carmen thought back to the night of her flu, Jobe’s long hand stroking her hair. And a third path unfolded in her imagination: an alternate world in which she moved toward him and he slid his arms around her. Where she was held in the space just under his chin, not just on that long-ago winter night but for years afterward and even now.
“I think—and please don’t tell me it’s too late, because I know that—but I really think I could have.” She paused, startled. There was something at the back of her head, an inexplicable softness cupping her raw and fragile skull. “Fallen in love with him,” she finished in a low tone.
Jana eyed Carmen in a challenging way. “Maybe it’s not too late,” she said. Then she tilted her chair onto its back legs and sat precariously tipped against the wall with her arms crossed.
By the time the nurse finally came to remove Carmen’s IV—sadly, for Jana, not the Jamaican but a fretful gray-haired woman—nothing had happened. Carmen considered each part of herself but felt no more light-headed or ill than she had walking through the door. “You call the minute there’s a problem,” the nurse said, looking at Carmen with dour eyes. Even this did not faze her.
“I think I’m fine.” Carmen turned her face to the sun as they walked out of the building. “You can drop me off at home and go back to the café. I know you need to. I’ll pick up Althea myself.”
“Are you sure? Maybe I should go. Maybe”—she turned to Carmen, leering—“Althea is some hot Greek lesbian. Did you ever think of that?”
“No. I never did,” Carmen said. “Tell you what, assuming I don’t die in the next couple days, I’ll invite you over for dinner. You can figure it out for yourself.”
Jana stood on the curb, sudde
nly serious, assessing Carmen. “Are you sure? I mean, you look fine now….”
“As fine as an alien can.”
“Exactly. But something could happen. This afternoon. Will you call me?”
“Yes.” Carmen took Jana’s arm, like old ladies do, to cross the street. And Jana let her. “I will call if I need you,” she said.
As they crossed to the metered spot Jana had run out three times to fill, Carmen tightened her grip. For the first time in her life, the idea of someday becoming that doddering old widow who clutched at her friend’s elbow didn’t seem so bad.
Carmen waited outside the airport terminal in almost the exact same spot where Jobe had sat in his BMW on that scorching day that she first arrived.
The big difference was that unlike Jobe, she had no idea what to look for. Danny had described Althea as young, a graduate student. But beyond that, Carmen had nothing to go on. She kept looking for lone women, dark ones, emerging goddesses, when there was a knock on her window. Carmen turned sharply, expecting to see a police officer who would order her to pick up her party or drive on. Instead, she looked directly into the face of what appeared to be an Iowa farm girl: plump and rosy-cheeked with wild red hair caught back in a cloth scrunchie—the kind that American women had abandoned fifteen years before. It was only upon noticing this that Carmen realized she’d forgotten to do anything about her own head.
Carmen pressed the button to lower her window and watched the girl’s face drain of color. “Apparently, no one told you I’ve been sick,” Carmen said as levelly as she could. “Don’t worry. Get in. I feel better than I look.” She yanked down the sun shield, lifted her sunglasses, and glanced in the mirror. The woman who peered back at her had a pointy, hairless, ratlike appearance. “Much better, actually.”
Althea clumped slowly to the back of the car and lifted the hatch, shoving two huge bags inside. Was she planning to stay for a month? Carmen wondered. She’d forgotten to ask Danny this, too.
They were mostly silent on the drive through rush hour back to Carmen’s house. Once, she asked Althea how the trip had been and the girl shrugged then said, “It is okay,” in an accent so exotic that Carmen looked directly toward the passenger seat, then remembered she was driving and turned back just in time to brake behind a bus.
“You’re not from Greece?”
Again the girl shrugged. “Romania,” she said in the voice of a fairy-tale spirit, with the vowels broken in unexpected places and a soft whisper underneath the R and the N. “My mother is Greek, my father Romanian.”
It seemed unbelievable to Carmen that this simple person would be able to decipher Jobe’s work. She had a twinge of fatigue and wondered, too, if the chemotherapy was closing in and about to make her wretchedly ill.
Thankfully, they had reached the edge of Carmen’s neighborhood. “I’m afraid I haven’t done much in terms of dinner. I’ve been out all day….” She stopped, not ready to discuss it with this person. “You’ll be staying with my mother-in-law. But she had a commitment for tonight.” Because my former lover made the arrangements to fly you in and communication between him and the mother of the man I cheated on with him has been a little difficult.
Carmen almost laughed but caught herself. She took a long breath and the cloud of weariness abated. “Anyway, I hope you don’t mind takeout.”
“I like Wok and Roll.” Althea grinned, as proud as a third grader, and her wholesome face lit up, becoming as beautiful as any Greek goddess Carmen could imagine.
“How do you know Wok and Roll?” Carmen turned onto their street.
“From when I live here before,” the girl answered, but said nothing else.
They left the suitcases in the car, though Althea removed a small mesh bag from one that Carmen could see contained female supplies: mascara, lip gloss, tampons. She ached briefly to be a woman who needed only those things to freshen herself. Then she followed Althea inside.
Luca was there, waiting in the living room as if he’d known the precise moment they were due. Carmen introduced the two and watched carefully as Althea warmly shook her son’s hand with both of hers. There was none of the shock in her face that Carmen’s appearance had provoked. Althea must have known about Luca; Jobe must have told her. But Carmen could not imagine a circumstance in which her taciturn husband would be moved to do such a thing.
Siena was out with Troy, and Michael was in his room, playing Halo. It was not quite five o’clock, which felt too early for dinner, so Carmen offered Althea a cold drink and showed her around the main floor, purposely ending her tour in the dining room where Jobe’s papers lay in three neat stacks on the table. Althea recognized them instantly and stood as if in supplication. Carmen hung back and barely breathed; she wouldn’t have been surprised to see Althea bow or genuflect. “Would you like to look?” Carmen asked.
And despite what must have been a fourteen-hour flight, Althea nodded reverently. She walked toward the table slowly, as if she were approaching something living. Carmen could have sworn there was a glow emanating from the girl.
She left to fetch soda water and took her time preparing two glasses with ice and cutting limes. “Would you like one?” she asked Luca when he wandered into the kitchen.
“Yeth,” he said. He stood watching as Carmen filled a third glass and garnished it with two lime wedges. Then, as she handed it to him, he spoke. “I like her.”
This was uncharacteristic. Luca rarely offered his opinion, unless asked, and tended not to judge people—good or bad. Still, Carmen had noticed he had an uncanny sense: He had always steered away from Fred Lang, for instance, despite the fact that her boss had oozed interest in Luca’s direction. “Why?” Carmen asked, almost fiercely. “Why do you like her?”
Carmen was desperate for guidance. It was imperative that she know whether she could trust Althea, but the girl left her conflicted. One moment Carmen wanted to confide in her, the next she felt something surreptitious. But if Luca liked Althea, that might mean Carmen was imagining the latter. Perhaps chemotherapy had interfered with her ability to read people, the way it had altered her senses of taste and smell.
Luca stared at his feet for a moment then shook his head, like a cow lowing. “Ah don’t know,” he said. “Ah just do.”
Carmen was growing more tired by the second. She had to muster all her will to go into the other room. When she did, she saw that Althea had in that short time completely rearranged the pages, taking some from each pile and arranging them in a circle. The rest she had laid out at various intervals. She raised her head when Carmen came in. “Do you have, ah …” She made a pushing gesture with her thumb. “Tape?”
“Of course.” Carmen crouched to put Althea’s glass on the floor, away from the papers, and was swept with vertigo as she rose. She tilted, spilling half of the other glass she’d been carrying. And suddenly Althea was there, holding her, supporting her with strong farm-worker arms against a soft, generous chest.
“You sit?” she asked, her mouth as close to Carmen’s ear as a lover’s. Carmen nodded, and together the two propelled toward the large, armed dining room chair at the table’s end. Althea lowered Carmen into it, settling her gently. “Here, I take,” she said, prying the half-full glass from Carmen’s hand.
Once Carmen was settled, her pointy body slumped in the vast chair, Althea left the room and Carmen could hear her talking to someone rapidly. Surely it was Luca, and she was speaking English. But the distance and Althea’s accent combined to make it sound as if the words were in a foreign language, some mystical combination of Romanian, Greek, and math symbols. Carmen shook her head, trying to clear it. But now that she was seated, she did not feel dizzy so much as sunk into a thick, golden haze.
Althea came back with a roll of paper towels and squatted, efficiently mopping up the puddle on the floor. She also, Carmen was amused to note, had the Scotch tape in her hand. Either she’d consulted Luca or she’d simply pawed through the kitchen drawers until she found it. Once she’d dried
her hands thoroughly, Althea started anchoring down each page with two strips of tape.
“Is it there, the solution to Riemann?” Carmen asked weakly from her chair. “Have you had enough time to look?”
“Of course, it is here.” Althea moved around the table and frowned, jumping one paper over another before securing them both down. “But it always is here. We are waiting only for you.”
Carmen squinted, having trouble making sense of this. “What are you saying?”
But Althea didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled out her cell phone and began taking pictures of the design she’d made.
“I have a digital camera,” Carmen said. She had made her decision: Althea was to be trusted with Jobe’s work. Whatever clandestine thing she sensed, it had nothing to do with this. “Go into my room. Top of the stairs, to the right. The camera is on top of my dresser. You’re welcome to use it.”
Althea stood for a moment, hesitating. Then she said, “Thank you,” and strode toward the stairs. No one would know she’d been awake for more than a day; or perhaps she was one of those calm, robust people who can sleep on planes.
Carmen pondered the possibilities, and when Althea returned, with the sleek silver camera in her hand, Carmen asked the question that kept blossoming in her head. “Have we met?”
“Yes.” Althea hardly responded, and just started clicking pictures. “It is maybe eighteen month.”
“Jobe was in remission.” Carmen saw a look of confusion and struggled to clarify. “The cancer was … on vacation. He was not sick.”
“Yes.” Click, click, click.
“Were you one of his graduate students?” For the first time, Carmen saw Althea wince. But she recovered quickly.
“I am on … ex-change.” The word clearly was hard for her to pronounce. “For one semester. To work on Riemann.” This she pronounced like a song. European names, Carmen mused, always sounded better in the mouths of those from the Continent. It had been that way in Italy, too. Giovanni. Parmigiana. Ferrari.
