by Rafi Zabor
What shamed her additionally, as she dried her face on two paper towels she withdrew from the dispenser, was that it was her prettiness, which men found beautiful, but which she, at least for the moment, detested as a doll-hke caricature of who or what she might really be . . . where was she . . . that it was her prettiness and what could be done with it that had protected her from dismissal and oblivion, in such world as her profession afforded. No, call it by its proper name: not what could be done with it: what she had done with it herself, in the male world, with all manner of obscene protective flirtation, to ensure the continued existence of a niche in which she could live and breathe. Roger and his bulging shorts were wages she had earned with accumulations of petty sin. She had no grounds for complaint. As for a real love life, it had been awhile. Oh, she wanted one all right, now and then, and had once taken to sex easily and well, had regarded it as a natural enough component of a world of normal appetite, but these days once she saw the banal and blinkered hunger her own light, introductory music of desire evoked in the one or two men for whom she had played a few bars, she was repelled, not only by them, but by the whole hot compulsive machinery of the dance, and by the inescapable, demeaning note of puppetry in it all.
Her face was still there in the bathroom mirror, dry now, too articulate and precise, too expressive, there for all to read, a giveaway. Her good French clothes, bought fi-om discount fashion outlets, fit her well. Iris looked at her watch. Yes, she could seem sufficiently busy for the next two hours, then go out for lunch and, if she had to, come back to the lab and appear briefly conscientious before tearing off to her other life downtown. She was still woman enough to manage that.
The Bear Comes Home 127
Crosstown traffic that day was heavy and the city came at her in pieces, the details too diffiise and at the same time too clearly rendered for her to navigate the maze in comfort: a beggar's pained face, a litter of rags and bodies, predatory looks in men's eyes, the odor permeating the backseat of fate's allotted taxi.
But at length she had reached St. Vincent's Hospital, solid on a corner of Seventh Avenue just up the street from the Village Vanguard, where she had once gone to see Miles, Trane, Ornette, Mingus, Sonny, Shepp, just about everyone who counted. For a moment she remembered in a quick shuffle all the musicians who had tried to pick her up, how they had leaned over her table, the variety of their smiles. Goodness, she thought in a mixture of embarrassment and pride, there were more than a few of them, down the years. One drummer, stricken by a single look it seemed, had fallen down half the Vanguard's entrance stairs and landed at her feet, provoking general laughter. Hey, one musician's voice said to a buddy somewhere in the halls of memory, look what I just found here.
—O my America? she remembered asking the guy.
—Huh?
—O my America, O my newfound land. Is that what you've got on your mind?
No question about it, she'd been pretty nervy once upon a time, and she did know how to shed musicians. She'd tried wide-eyed poetry on the Bear too, but he'd grinned back at her and come up with a deliciously obscene pun about a well-wrought urn and a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
Iris looked up at the slant brick face of St. Vincent's newest wing, over-tipped the cabbie, decamped onto the asphalt beneath the building and felt an anticipatory. Bear-connected and therefore threatening movement in her heart.
How long had Jones been out of Intensive Care? Two days? Three? No news yet on any proposed release but it seemed in any case that he would live.
All set to enter the building, though, she retreated in momentary panic and bought herself an intermission at the little patisserie-cafe tucked into the street that ran behind the Vanguard, where she lit a cigarette—she'd been trying to quit but couldn't, which struck her as odd, since she was usually able to manage a break from the habit without much effort—drank down two mugs of good black coffee—one too many for the health of her nerves, she knew: there was the beginning of a twitch in her right eyelid—and nibbled her way, it was such a literary cafe, through an order of four madeleines placed beside her coffee on a small white saucer. Her memory did not need
128 Rafi Zabor
the additional stimulation, however; tiie vessel of Iris was already full, and trembled with sufficient surface tension at the brink. Her mind's eye skimmed two images in the middle depths: the Bear in her old apartment years back, one day when the sex-question that had been hovering between them raised an obvious and alarming head from the Bear's lower regions— she remembered the furious embarrassment in his eyes, and her own confused mixture of panic and not quite desire; then the second, less threatening memory of the Bear in her living room before his arrest that winter: it had been good to see him. And then gone. In place of whatever music had hovered at the brink of audibihty between them, there was a palpable lack of resonance, worse than silence, now.
Before going into the hospital, Iris looked up long enough to acknowledge the brightness of the day and wonder if spring had arrived for real. Just when you think it's here, the sky broods itself into one last grey knot of concentration and unleashes upon you a staggering mindstorm of snow. It was a lovely day, though, whatever its duplicity or sequel.
Jones looked, Iris thought, a bit hke . . .
"Death warmed over?" Jones suggested from his pillow.
"Microwaved," said Iris, surprising herself with something the Bear might have said. "You do look haggard, Jones, which is not surprising under the circumstances, but you also have a certain cat-that-ate-the-canary air."
"Do I?"
"I'd say."
"Then you're very observant. I did in fact eat a canary. A large one."
"Romance with a nurse?" Iris asked him, arching an orthodox eyebrow.
"Wrong guess," said Jones, smihng, thought Iris, more than a little smugly. "You could just say I'm more than usually glad to be alive. So: ya bring me anything? Chocolates? A fifdi, despite my perforated intestines, of VSOP?"
"Afraid not."
Someone coughed weakly on the other side of the white cloth partition that divided the room. Against the daylight. Iris could make out the outline of an uptilted bed and at the top of its slant the silhouette of an aged male head with its mouth fallen open. ''Rose" it said.
"It's his late wife's name I think," said Jones. "Sleeps most of the time. Very weak."
Iris composed herself before inquiring: "I understand you nearly died."
"Nearly doesn't cover it," Jones told her, laughing weakly. "I was out there, Irish," once upon a time one of the Bear's nicknames for her. Nearly all
The Bear Comes Home 129
her ancestors were French, but in fact Iris resembled her Irish grandmother Kathleen.
"Out where?"
"There," Jones not very helpfully said, waving a vague arm. "Among other things," he continued, "I saw the Bear."
Iris felt herself flushing red. "Saw him where?"
"In my mind's eye. Toots. Well, sorta saw him. I don't know if he's dead or alive but we certainly made some kind of contact. You all right, kid?"
"Fine." She was not. "You do look changed."
Jones profiled left, gaunt and a trifle melodramatically on his pillow. "Everything's changed."
"Your eyes seem a little wild," she hazarded.
"Oh yeah, pretty lady," Jones said, and hoisted himself up a notch amid his bedclothes. "I finally saw some of the stuff the Bear used to go on about years back."
"I see," said Iris, feeling the outline of her world beginning to waver, but keeping to her normal voice nonetheless.
Jones looked away again, Iris thought, with a certain gauche sense of spe-cialness. "It was a trip and a half, as we used to say in the good old days."
"Has Sybil been in to see you?" Iris asked, wanting to change the subject, but mused on the fact that in the good old days she had taken a few trips and j
a half herself. Which was where, she was convinced, her fracturing or shat I'
ter
ing had come. In the aftermath of the divorce, when Herb had stripped her of Tracy and Amy, in all the merciless exposure of a court of law, there she had been, stripped and alone in the brutal immensity of America. Without the Bear to reach out to back in New York—she didn't feel, having left him, that she had the right to try—she returned, after a while, to the psyche-delics that had meant so much to her back in her schooldays and which, in the sense of expanded possibility they gave her, were linked to the jolt of knowing the Bear. And it had been on one night, when she had certainly dropped too much acid, that she heard, in the middle of a streamfalness whose essence she no longer really could recall, a little click, and in that moment some fundamental connection between her body and her soul had been severed—simple as that: click: for what was after all so insignificant a body, so simple a soul—so that she could put a precise finger to the moment in which her personal shattering had taken place and, later, in its inescapable train, her professional decline begun. This click and its consequences had left her not a little afi-aid of transcendent experience of any kind—keep to the earth, her uncertainty had advised her, and to your fragile stance upon it, lest worse things overcome you—and recently, when she'd seen the fragmentary
130 Rafi Zabor
newspaper reports of the Bear's presence in the nightclubs of New York, it had taken some ultimate degree of courage for her to taxi down to Sweet Basil and say hello to him again at a small table while wielding a protective cigarette. And here she was in a hospital room with Jones, where his path of glor^ had led him, and her. It was a small circuit, it seemed to her, perfecdy round and without sufficient issue.
"Sybil," Jones rephed in the perceptual shards of Iris' present time, and laughed a little. "Sybil is more or less consumed with guilt—now there's a change of roles for you. We, um, had a little lover's tiff and that was why I was out walking late and got knifed, but she's not the responsible party. If you ask me, that's not what it was about at all."
"W^en do you think they'll let you go home?" There was something, thought Iris, vain and offensive in Jones' tone, and she wanted to keep the conversation fixed on the matters immediately at hand.
"Any day now I think. I nearly bought the farm fi*om loss of blood, but what's keeping me here now has to do with the patchwork job they did on my intestines. The outer incision's still pretty raw too, though they'll leave the stitches in awhile. Need an office ^sit later to take them out. Wanna see?"
"Not really."
"I only meant on a professional basis."
"That's not the kind of work I do," Iris reminded him.
The figure in the next bed groaned weakly in its sleep. ''Rose" it said again.
"Hey," said Jones, "wanna go out in the lounge with me for a smoke? You still smoke? Really? One of the few of us left. You got a pack? I'm out. They won't let me light up in here." Jones jerked his chin at the silhouette. "It's okay, I can get up on my own. Just grab ahold of the IV^ pole so I don't send it flying."
"Oh look what a beautiful rose you brought me," said the sleeper's voice as they left.
The corridor, thought Iris, was a typical hospital hallway, the routine number of efficient-looking nurses with done-up hair shuttling between doorways of disaster and collapse—Iris looked in at bodies strewn on beds, attendant relatives, televisions craning down on articulated iron arms offering diversions or the news—was it that late in the day already?
"Looky there," said Jones, nodding backward at the words NOT AN EXIT printed large on an arch midway down the hall. "I looked up at that from my gurney when they wheeled me down from ICU and I felt kind of reassured. Hello, ladies," he said to the nurses' station. "They're cool," he told Iris.
The Bear Comes Home 131
"That's nice," she said, but with one still half-professional eye read the label on the two IV drip bottles hanging from the aluminum tree that rolled between them and decided that Jones' condition wasn't as wonderfully stable as he seemed to assume, even though, she was glad to see, the nurses weren't telling him Now now, Mr. Jones, and directing him by an ambulant elbow back to the safety of his room.
"But the smokers' allotment is tiny and out of the way," he was telling her. "Soon there won't be anything left for us."
When they found the smokers' nook, after a bend and then another bend, it was a small alcove with a rudimentary loveseat—lacquered pine frame, worn floral-print cushions—two companion armchairs, and a rounded pinetop table on which old New Yorkers socialized with stray Scientific Americans and rootless Cosmopolitans. An overweight sloppy-looking guy was asleep on one end of the loveseat, a cigarette burning down in one corner of his mouth. A premature wallow of gut hung over his beltline, and he seemed to wake halfway up when Jones and Iris lowered themselves into the armchairs.
"Hey man," Jones nodded.
"Hey bear," the man nodded back, and scratched randomly at his beard.
Jones and Iris did a small doubletake between them in answer.
"In-joke," the guy explained, and pretended to straighten himself in his I
seat. I
"I'll say," Iris told him.
"Visiting my wife," the guy said back. "They're looking to see if she needs another kidney operation or not."
"Visiting him." Iris indicated Jones with a suddenly colloquial jerk of her thumb, and pulled her tin of tobacco from her purse. "Do you mind?"
"What I'm here for," said the guy, and took a last pull from his diminished ,,,,
cigarette. "Was I asleep?" ill!
"Looked like," Iris informed him.
"Bad job, bad hours," he said. "A real jail."
"Ain't they all," Jones commiserated.
Jones and Iris nodded at him in polite dismissal, then rejoined each other exclusively.
"You still smoke those rollups?'.'Jones asked her. "Three Caftles?"
"You do know that the additives are more harmful than the tobacco itself," she reminded him. "Sometimes I smoke American Spirits, available by mail order from Native American tribes and also free of additives, but more often I—"
"All right all right all right, I'll take one, if you can make it for me."
132 Rafi Zabor
Iris rolled a couple of cigarettes and they lit up, trying to ignore the heavy guy on the sofa so they could talk at ease.
"You heard Cummins is bringing the album out?" Jones asked her.
"Sybil called me," Iris nodded.
"So have you heard any news," said Jones, reverting to a long habit of secrecy in the company of strangers, "of our mutual friend?"
Iris shook her head side to side, resisting the tendency to go tearful on the subject.
"You ask around some more?"
"I've already asked ever^one in my profession who might know," she said, offended, "or who might know someone who knows."
"Hm."
Iris unpleasantly felt the attention of the big bearded guy, but when she looked up at him he had lit another cigarette and appeared to be examining the false-marble black-and-white vinyl tiling of the floor. "Is your wife all right?" she asked him politely.
"We're waiting to hear. Tests and more tests. Thanks for asking."
"You're welcome," Iris said, but something bothered her about the man. "I hope it works out."
"Yeah." He nodded with what seemed a wear^ stoicism, but something about him still tugged at her attention. Was he watching her too closely? Was he a freak? Iris couldn't put her finger on it. If he lost some of that weight he wouldn't look so tired and defeated and creepy. But why should she think he felt tired, defeated, etc.? She hadn't any right, really, but just look at the slump of those big shoulders.
"Your work okay?" Jones had asked her.
"I get by."
"Me, I'm in shtook," Jones said. "WTien I get outa here I won't be ready to work anpvhere yet, and in addition to being about as broke as usual there'll be all these bills. Xo health insurance, of course. Perish the thought."
"Stiff them awhile. Claim indigence. You'll get
some threatening letters but they'll write you off after awhile. What about living on some of the advance money from Cummins?"
"There isn't much but I don't feel like I have any right to it. It's his."
"If, when you get out the hospital," Iris advised him, "you're not able to work, you should take what you need to live on from the advance. I'm sure he'd want you to."
"Of course he would."
bOf
t
The Bear Comes Home 133
"I suppose . . . but for some reason I can't do it. Some form of keeping the faith."
"That's silly."
They smoked together quietly for awhile, Jones pulling uncomfortably hard on the handroUed job. "You have to work to keep it lit," he said of the cigarette.
"Not really," Iris assured him, and puffed easily. When she looked up, the heavy guy was staring at her without social disguise.
"Excuse me?" Iris asked him.
"I don't understand this," he answered. "This isn't logical."
"Is it about your wife?" Iris, noticing that his eyes seemed moist, asked with some concern.
"No," the guy said, a tear starting a run down one of his cheeks but no weeping shakes to accompany it. He didn't even blink. "I don't know why I should say this, but I think, you know, I'm very moved by your beauty, I think it's about..."
"Hey?" Jones asked him, but the guy waved him away.
"It doesn't make any sense to me," the guy said, "but I think it's about..."
"Hey buddy, you okay?" Jones asked him with some insistence, and this time Iris physically backhanded him aside as an irrelevant buzz. That was when Jones started to realize there was something strange going on, the guy sitting there with tears pouring down his face, and some kind of energy, you could feel it, kind of vibrating off of Iris, whose face was flushing red in successive waves and whose hands had begun to tremble.
