Dance for the Dead (15 page)

“What is it?”

He handed it to her. “Don’t
look free samples in the mouth. Doctors get an incredible number of
them, and once in a while you get something you can give your friends
legally. This stuff is terrific.”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s not medicine.
It’s just glorified massage oil. It’s got a very mild
analgesic in it, so it puts a deep warmth on sore muscles.”

Jane opened the bottle and
sniffed it. “You’re not lying, anyway. It smells too good
to be medicine.”

He took it back. “Come
on,” he said. “Lie down and I’ll put some on you.”

“Lie down, Carey?”
she asked. “Could you be a little more specific, please? Or
maybe less specific?”

“I assure you, madam, I am
a qualified physician. Board-certified. Climb up there on the board.”
He pointed to the dining room table.

She walked uncertainly in that
direction and stared at the table skeptically. “The table? Are
you sure?”

“Well, if I asked you to
lie down on your bed, would you do it?”

“Maybe,” she said.
Then she wondered how much she had actually meant by that. If it
wasn’t what she was afraid it was, why had she hesitated?

He said, “Okay, if it’s
not occupied, let’s use it.” He walked to the stairs.

Jane took a big gulp of her
champagne. They had been friends for so long that the possibility of
a sudden change was unsettling. She didn’t want to lose him.
She picked up the bottle and followed. “I was thinking about
you a few days ago,” she said. “I was talking to a little
boy.”

“Tall or short?”

“Uh… tall, I guess,
for his age. He’s eight.”

“Tell him surgery, then.
Dermatologists are short, as a rule. Surgeons are tall.”

He stopped at the door of her
bedroom, and she edged past him and sat on the bed. She looked up at
him. “Are you sure you’re not just trying to get funny
with me?”

Carey sipped his glass of
champagne thoughtfully. “It’s crossed my mind. Always
does. We never have before, and this may not be the best time to
start. I sure don’t want to lose you just because we disagreed
on how to go about it. It’s kind of tricky, and you’re a
very critical person.”

“I am not,” she
said. “But what if it turned out to be an awful mistake? Would
you still be able to call me up when you wanted to go someplace where
no respectable person would go with you?”

“It’s hard to know.
How about you? If you needed somebody to make fun of, would it still
be me?”

She stared at him for a moment.
“I don’t know. I guess we should talk about it sometime
when we’re not exhausted and the bottle’s still corked.”
She flopped onto the bed on her stomach with her arms bent and her
hands under her chin. “Right now I need an old friend who’s
willing to rub my sore back.”

He sat on the bed beside her,
lifted the sweatshirt a few inches, poured a little of the oil in his
hand, and then slowly and gently rubbed it into the small of her back
in a circular motion.

“Ooh,” she sighed.
“That’s good.”

He worked patiently, his strong
hands softly kneading the sore muscles in exactly the right spots,
working up higher on her back now, to the shoulder blades. She could
feel the tight, hard knots of muscle relaxing under his touch. The
hands kept moving inward toward the tender muscles along the spine.
When he stopped to pour more oil into his palm, Jane pulled the
sweatshirt up almost to her shoulders, hesitated, then slipped it up
over her head and set it beside her. She was naked to the waist now,
but it had seemed that making him work under a shirt was idiotic. If
Carey saw her breasts, he saw her breasts.

His hands were on her shoulders,
and then the connecting muscles to her neck and then along the back
of her neck to her scalp. She felt goose bumps and shivered, then
relaxed again. She was so loose and at ease now that all the muscles
on the top half of her body were on the edge of some kind of sleep, a
paralysis of laziness, so happy not moving that they didn’t
quite belong to her anymore. They were just there waiting for him to
touch them again.

Carey said, “How’s
it going so far?”

“I’m ready to die
now,” she announced. “Just give me more champagne and
keep rubbing, and you can tell them to pull the trigger whenever.”

He worked back down her spine,
and she began to imagine that she could see him clearly from the
position of his hands on her skin. She remembered telling Timmy about
him. She had said he was special, and he was. Without warning, the
word
angel
appeared in her mind, and she laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing,” she
answered with the smile still in her voice. “You’re being
an angel.”

“How about your legs?”

“What about them?”

“Do they hurt?”

She considered the implications.
He couldn’t rub oil on her through a pair of blue jeans. He
knew that. “Not at the moment.” When she had said it she
felt a sense of loss that she didn’t have the time to analyze
if she was going to fix it. “You can’t be too careful,
though.” She reached under her stomach to unbutton the jeans
and give a tug on the zipper.

He slipped the jeans down her
legs and off her ankles, and she felt tension in her throat. Then his
hands were on the soles of her feet, squeezing them with tiny
circular movements, until she began to imagine she was feeling him
sending messages up the nerves to her shoulders and neck. The tension
didn’t go away, but it wasn’t unpleasant anymore. He
worked up the Achilles tendon, the calves, and very softly the backs
of her knees, and then slowly and carefully up the hamstrings. She
was calm and happy, and she wasn’t thinking at all anymore,
just following his touch. But then the circular movement of his hand
passed for a moment between her thighs and she caught herself arching
her back to spread them apart the tiniest bit.

He kept working on her legs and
back, but she could feel that the hands weren’t alternating
anymore, so he was undressing with the other. Then she felt the
panties being peeled off, and he turned her over to gently kiss her
bruised face, and they slowly joined in the embrace that she had
always known would come.

Everything began with a slow
inevitability, a luxurious ease and simplicity that made her feel
warm, then eager, and then glad. But the feeling didn’t fade.
It built and intensified. After that, every second, every heartbeat
expanded into a moment of its own. Suddenly she became aware that she
was hearing a woman’s voice, and she wondered how long she had
been doing that, moaning and making little cries that she couldn’t
have silenced if she tried. Then she went beyond thinking into a
place where every sensation seemed to go up one notch on the scale to
the highest frequency – colors, sounds, movements. She was
almost afraid when the intensity kept building, and the word
angel
came back to her, but this time she didn’t laugh, because
everything was bright and fever-clear and immediate, with no distance
left at all, no will inside her but his.

The whole night passed without
her knowing the time, because she had the sense that she would have
to give up something in order to think. They would pause and let
their heartbeats slow, lying together still clasped in the same
embrace but not the same now, somehow friends simply passing together
into sleep. But then one of them would stir, and the other would
silently say yes, each time the question and the answer completely
different, because every time the last time had not faded or gone
away, so it was like going up another step on a stairway.

At dawn they were lying on the
bed, eyes closed, when he said, “What do you think about
getting married?”

Jane’s breath caught in
her throat. Have beautiful tall children. Live here – not in
this house, but at least close by, in the big old stone one in
Amherst with him. Maybe that was where all of this had been taking
her, leading her away from death the way she had taken other people.
She would never have to tell him what a guide was because it would
all be over – already was over when you started losing.

“No answer?” he
asked.

“Every girl’s
fondest wish,” she said. “Think the guy who owns the
Buffalo Bills might be interested in marrying me? Maybe the one who
fathered those quintuplets. There’s a guy who knows his way
around a diaper.”

“I mean it,” said
Carey. “We should get married.”

Jane sat up, then leaned over
and kissed him, letting her hair hang down on both sides of their
faces like a curtain. She lay back down. “Thank you,” she
said. “I guess we ought to have a serious talk about it
sometime.”

“Does that mean yes?
That’s what you said last night.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“Meaning?”

“I’ve always loved
everything I knew about you.”

“So why are you saying
no?”

“I didn’t say no.”
She sat up again and ran her fingers through her hair to find
imaginary tangles. “I said we should have a serious talk
sometime. I’ll start any time you want to, but I’m not
going to say yes right now.”

He sat up too. “I can do
that.”

She sighed. “When was the
last time you had sex, Carey?”

He pursed his lips and said
reluctantly, “The other night.”

“You mean the night before
last night. The last time you came off a shift.”

“It was a colleague. It
wasn’t a routine procedure. She’s a terrific
diagnostician, a person of the highest – ”

“I don’t want to
know.”

“What is this? You pry and
then pretend you’re not interested?”

“You’d make a lousy
husband.”

“Jane, this thing with my
colleague. It’s not anything to get jealous about. It was a
single, isolated event. Two patients died at the end of the shift
after we did everything we could. I think we were just comforting
each other. There’s something buried deep in the cerebral
cortex that gets triggered when you lose a life, some primitive
forgotten instinct that says ‘Fuck while you can, because one
of these times that is going to be you.’ It’s the
practical animal reaction that evolved to keep the species alive
after prehistoric kill-offs. She’s probably mystified that we
did it. Next time we do a shift together we’ll be perfectly
professional.”

“I’m sure you will.
You’re a good doctor, and you’d know if she weren’t.
But I assure you, if you had her in the sack, she’s not going
to let herself get too mystified. She’s probably waiting on
your doorstep. If she isn’t, it doesn’t matter, because
there will be another along shortly. There is, in fact, isn’t
there? Me. The world is full of women – an endless supply –
and every last one of them has something about her: a little smile
that makes you want to smile too, or breasts like two perfect
grapefruits. Remember her? That’s probably why she hung around
your supermarket – so you could make the comparison.”

“That’s not fair,”
he said. “You want me to start quoting you?”

“No,” Jane answered.
“It isn’t fair. That’s part of what I’m
talking about. What we know about each other looks a little different
if marriage rears its ugly head. And I’m not criticizing you.”

“You aren’t?”

“No. I never thought for a
second that there was anything wrong with anything you do. I still
don’t. But the only way it would make any sense to marry you is
if I had some reason to believe you had become monogamous.”

“You actually think I
can’t do that?” Carey asked.

She smiled and lay down with her
head on his shoulder. It was surprising how good it felt. In a moment
she said, “Want some breakfast?” and was up and heading
for the kitchen. She slipped her bathrobe on as she walked down the
hall. Then she heard the
beep-beep-beep-beep,
stopped, and
walked back to the bedroom doorway. He was sitting on the bed staring
sadly at the pager attached to the belt on the floor. “Your
alarm’s going off,” she said. “Somebody seems to be
breaking into your pants.”

Carey picked up the beeper,
slipped on his pants, walked to the telephone by the bed, and cradled
the receiver under his chin as he dialed. “It’s the
hospital,” he said, and buckled his belt. As she walked back
down the hallway she heard him say. “Dr. McKinnon.”

Jane went into the kitchen and
packed him a little lunch while he talked on the telephone. She could
hear him thumping around up there, probably not doing a very good job
of making himself presentable. When she heard his feet on the stairs
she came out and handed him the little brown bag.

“Sorry,” he said.
“I’ll call you as soon as I’m off and get some
sleep.”

“Thanks,” she
answered, then added, “If I’m not around, don’t
worry. I may have to go out of town.”

“See?” He grinned.
“Nothing’s changed. You always say that.” He gave
her a long, gentle kiss, picked up his black bag, and hurried out to
his car.

Jane thought about what she had
said. She had no plans to go anywhere. It was simply the old habit:
never give anyone a reason to ask the police to look for you.

She considered going back to
bed, but if she did she would be out of step with the sun and moon,
and she hated that feeling more than being tired. She spent the day
cleaning her clean house, cutting her lawn, and weeding her flower
beds. She tried not to think about what Carey McKinnon was doing, or
about being Mrs. Carey McKinnon, or about finding the right way of
loving a particular person. What she needed to know wasn’t
something that could be figured out in advance. She had to wait until
she was sure she wasn’t taking an old friend and converting him
into the consolation prize for failure. It was only after night had
come that she went back up to bed and allowed herself to sleep.

Jane
sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. The sun was beginning to come
up, the light now diffused and gray beyond the window. She wasn’t
sure how long she had been hearing the birds, but they were flitting
from limb to limb now, making chirrups. She used the hot coffee and
the silence to work her way back through her dream, and she knew
where every bit of it had come from.