Doubles (5 page)

She said, “I have to have a record of the guy who saved Chewy.”

She put the camera to her eye. I smiled.

“But when I take it,” she said, “tell me what that guy did back there.”

“Where?”

“Don’t lie to me.”

I sighed and said, “OK. He broke the glass door, then slammed the girl’s face at the register into the counter.”

She lowered the camera. “What?”

“I’m serious.”

“No. I mean, I didn’t hear you.”

“He broke the glass door, then slammed the girl’s face into the counter. The girl at the register.”

“That’s what’s on TV,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

I followed her gaze to the television. It was as if some psychic cloud had descended on my life, because there, on the silent evening news, a grainy black-and-white security camera video showed the man from my car doing exactly what I had just described.

“Holy shit!” The sound was still off, and I was too consumed with the image to see the captions. “What did they say?” I said, stepping closer to the TV. I couldn’t find the volume on the set.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

By the time I found the volume, the segment had ended.

“Hey, weirdo. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I kept turning it up. “What’d they say?”

“You saw him do that?”

“Did you hear what they said?”

“I bet he was from that jail.”

“He was.”

“He say that?”

“Yeah. Right when we drove by the sign.”

“I didn’t hear him.”

“Well.”

“So you knew.”

“I knew once he told me.”

“What?”

“I knew once he told me.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“I thought you heard him.”

She shook her head. “You didn’t freak out?”

I shrugged, thrilled that she thought that it was information I took in stride. She looked at Chewy for a moment and seemed to take it in. “He would have killed us.” She handed me the camera.

“Here,” she said. “No, here. Don’t just hold it.”

I held it higher and looked at it, then back at her.

“No,” she said. “Take my
picture
.”

The small crosshairs in the viewfinder traversed her narrow nose, the sharp angles of her cheekbones, the bottom lip that protruded just a little further than her top. Her golden hair was like a dark canvas wiped free of paint, the white of the surface glowing through. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask if I was ready. I put my finger on the button. The room exploded with light. She took the pen from her hair and wrote onto the bottom of the developing photo, HAPPY (ABOUT MEETING THIS TALL GUY).

 

In the years since, Anne continued with the photos. I was always nervous around the camera. She would look at me through the viewfinder and ask me to tell her things that I’d never told a soul. I’d say, “I forgot to take out the trash last week.” Flash. “I called a ball wide that I knew was in.” Flash. “I read some of Kaz’s email.” Flash. She then would hand me the camera and tell me things I couldn’t believe she would admit. That she had dreamt of having sex with my mother. Flash. That she had walked in on her father and cousin smoking marijuana together. Flash. After each she would look at the photo, ignoring the sudden truth in the room, and write the revelation at the bottom. I HIT A DOG BUT DIDN’T STOP 3/19/03.

Polaroid film is not cheap. It comes out to basically a dollar a photo. We had so many thousands of Polaroids around the house that I tried not to do the simple math. I learned that, when she asked me if I liked a photo, the worse it was the more I’d better say it was good. If I ever told her that I liked the photographs that actually looked good she would just roll her eyes and sigh.

We married thirteen months after we met, eight years ago. Right away, Anne wanted babies. I agreed in terror and resignation, then spent the next six and a half years trying to conceive in frantic sessions between international flights. For years I’d been terrified of getting anyone pregnant—not that I’d had much of a chance to—but suddenly it was the last thing I could do. She said I didn’t want it. I went to the doctor of my own volition, the first time I had ever done that for anything other than an injury. He told me they needed to do further tests. I never took more tests. I never told Anne I’d even gone. She was against medical intervention. If it was meant to happen, it would, she said.

I took Anne to Forest Hills with me last year, like always. We stayed at Manny and Katie’s. During a discussion of politics, Katie mentioned that she had had two abortions. In bed that night, looking away from me on her side of the bed, Anne sobbed for hours. Three weeks later she called me in Paris to tell me she was pregnant. I thought how funny it was how these things work. I was so glad I’d never mentioned the doctor. The best part was simply how happy Anne had suddenly become.

Every morning during her pregnancy, she attached her camera to the top of a small tripod and stood at the end of our hallway, in front of the white closet door, and pushed a button at the end of a wire. Her body—always so thin, hip bones protruding—was becoming something she had always desired—a thing with curves, a place brimming with life. She wanted it all on film, every step. In the photos, she rarely looked at the camera, just to the side, as if she were in a scientific study. When I returned between tournaments, she would show me the daily growth of her stomach, frame by frame. Each day, her stomach grew closer to the closet doorknob, like a sentence slowly writing itself up to a period. By January, when I was home for two weeks before the Australian, the sentence was almost completed.

One night, I sat in the living room, reading the paper for the first time in weeks while Anne washed dishes in the kitchen.

“There ice in the trays?” she called out.

“Yeah, I think.”

“Hey, Slow, there ice in the trays?”

I sighed, stood, and set the paper down.

“Yeah,” I said, stepping into the kitchen. “I said yes.”

“Will you look?”

“Why do you need ice now?”

“I might want some after the dishes.”

I opened the freezer. There was no ice. I filled three trays and put them back in.

“It won’t be frozen by the time you finish,” I said.

“I think so, yeah.”

“No,” I said, raising my voice. “I said,
it won’t be frozen
.”

She kept placing dishes on the rack, washing, placing. Finally, when she saw that I was still in the room, she said, “What?”

“The ice is
not
going to be frozen,” I said. “It’s not even going to be close.”

She shut off the water and turned, her stomach suddenly huge and tight before her as she dried her hands on the top of it.

“What?”

Even though she was looking right at me, from only feet away, and the water was off, I raised my voice. “I said the ice isn’t going to be frozen!”

She turned back to the sink in silence.

I looked at the words in the morning paper again until I heard Anne on the front stoop. Our windows were open at all times, on days when it was so cold morning condensation would freeze on the inside of the panes. Anne felt strongly about the circulation of air. I opened the door. A blast of cold air blew in hard against my flesh, and I thought how nice the Australian summer was going to be. It was only days away. Anne was on the top step, her back to me.

“Let’s go for a ride,” I said.

It was all I could think of that might cut the tension. The Dart was our emotional normalizer, an eraser of marital stress. I had begun to learn how to repair it. I felt like the work I put into it was work into relationship stability. That morning, I’d fixed the radio and installed a new brake pedal. The brake pedal was easy. You just detach the foot plate with a pin, lead a little piston into the hydraulic lever, and put the pin back in. What I was most excited about was the radio. It was an easy fix; the speaker connections were just corroded. I hadn’t told Anne. The radio was going to be a surprise.

She followed me across the mossy lawn like a pregnant sleep-walker, silent and mysterious and removed. We drove through our neighborhood in silence, slowly, running low in third gear. I’d set the idle high for the cold weather, and at stop signs we pittered loudly in the darkness like a huge boiling vat. I was saving the radio until University Lake. We slowly approached 15-501. This was one of the local roads rendered unrecognizable with civic growth. Headlights flew by in expanded lanes at speeds that were unvisited on my speedometer. I downshifted and stepped on the new brake pedal. But my foot couldn’t find it. I looked down and in the dim light saw the pedal lying on the floor. I didn’t panic, just began to ease the emergency brake up. I don’t think Anne even noticed something was wrong. For a brief moment, as we rolled into the intersection, I still thought we were going to be fine. Then we jerked to the right, and the sound of crunching metal filled the car as a red mass exploded through the windshield.

A headlight, still lit, was suddenly where Anne’s belly had been. Handlebars reached at odd angles around her head. Somehow the radio was now on, and Bob Seger was singing “Night Moves.” Cars screeched. A Hummer slid off the road and shuddered to a stop in a ditch. I opened my door. A man kneeled on the pavement, holding his shoulder. He pulled off a gleaming black helmet. “I’m fine!” he said,
almost cheerfully. “I’m fine!” A motorcycle lay on the hood of my car, its back wheel spinning slowly in midair.

I opened Anne’s door and pushed the bike away from her. Freed from her flesh, the headlight now flooded the car with light. The skin on Anne’s forehead had been wiped aside like wet dough. Her dress was molded around shapes I did not understand, red seeping through the fabric like a paper towel placed atop spilled wine. A falsetto moan came from my mouth, a sound I had never before made. It was animal.

“What happened?” Anne said.

I sang that eerie note and held her, my face on her shoulder. I could feel the blood pumping out of her and onto my arms. I couldn’t speak. I just moaned. She leaned her head onto mine as Bob Seger sang about working on his night moves in the sweet sweet summertime.

 

At University Hospital I waited for news on our baby, but it never came. I deduced that it was gone over a night of slow, silent logic. I never learned the sex. I never even asked. I was too scared that I might be charged with killing it. At first the surgeon said Anne would regain consciousness, that there was brain trauma but no permanent damage. Their biggest concern was a piece of spring from the front seat that had lodged itself in her spine.

After that first night in the hospital, I packed a bag with three changes of Anne’s clothes, her bathrobe, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, and her camera. But when that first day—filled with fluorescent-lit faces puffed with fear and ballpoint pens tearing into damp forms with nibs that wouldn’t flow—neared a close, I took the camera out of her canvas bag and shot her myself. There was no longer a baby inside that skin, but I knew that Anne would want the photo. It was another opportunity to watch her body transform, this a newer stage, a movement apart and away. She would appreciate my filling the brief
window of time that she couldn’t. Then two days passed, then five, then a week and a half. I forgot about the spring. Comas existed only on
General Hospital
. I didn’t know anyone who even knew anyone who had been in one. But now Anne was in what the doctor called a coma. I called it a strung out state of living death, of waiting, of beeping and whirring and sponges. But still I continued to shoot. After a week I couldn’t imagine stopping. The accumulating frames made me feel like I was in control of a situation that was uncontrollable. As long as I photographed Anne every day, nothing could happen—not even a change of the sheets—that I didn’t know about. During the initial transformation, the changes were dramatic. Weight loss and a tightening of features combined with the healing of wounds and the disappearance of bruising. Then, after about five weeks, she leveled off. The only change over dozens of photos was a rotation in bedding, in pillowcases, in different colored tubes into her nose and mouth. Otherwise the photos looked the same. They all looked like someone who had at one point been my wife, had once been alive, had once kissed me and started to cry because she was afraid I wouldn’t love her as much once the baby was born.

ANNE BEGAN TO
appear. The faint outline of her head darkened first from the Polaroid murk, then a glistening spot on her withered bottom lip wet with saliva and salve shone out from the hardening form. Turquoise bed sheets rose in the bottom of the frame like a small body of water lapping up at her chin. Before the color could fully develop I wrote the date on the bottom and slid it into the envelope.

“You hear me, girl?” Manny said, waving a hand in front of Anne’s face.

I placed my fingers around her wrist just to see how easy it would be. Her pulse drummed hidden and buried within. It was the one magic trick of life I could still always locate.

“You think if she wakes up, she’s going to have amnesia?” Manny said.

“Why would she have amnesia?”

“Hey, girl.”

“Why would she have amnesia?”

“She doesn’t deserve this place,” Manny said. “Let’s get her out of here.” He swung his arms around her face. “Hey,” he said, “I know you hear me.” After a few moments he gave up and said, sighing, “My cousin works here.”

“Who?”

“You know Yellow Dog?”

I knew Yellow Dog. He had a short blond moustache and spiked blond hair and wore a hemp choker necklace with beads. When he
introduced himself to me, he said, “Yellow Dog is un
usual
.” I hadn’t seen him in years.

“I’m gonna go find him,” Manny said.

“What’s he do?”

“Anesthesiologist,” Manny said. “I know. Right?”