Dreams Are Not Enough (50 page)

Juanita didn’t answer. She had gone to the bed to wring out a washcloth and sponge Alyssia’s pale, sweating face.

“Barry’s here,” she said quietly.

Alyssia, in the midst of a battle to inhale, opened her eyes, staring at him with an expression that mingled agony and humiliation.

“Get out!” she cried through clenched teeth.

He retreated to the hall. By now he was no longer positive she was in labor. She could equally well be in the acute stage of some pulmonary disorder like pneumonia. In either case, medical aid should be summoned. But whom would he call? And how could he explain the problem when he didn’t have a clue to it himself?

Juanita has matters in hand, he told himself. But he felt an inept craven as he trudged downstairs. Using the espresso machine to squeeze an elixir so strong that his heart palpitated, he waited in the library—his writing room—until, finally, the maid came down.

“I’m sorry about yelling at you, Mr. Cordiner,” she said, contrite.

“But when Mrs. Cordiner gets like that she don’t want anyone to see her.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Uhh … she’ll explain. She’d like for you to go on up.”

Alyssia lay on top of the smoothed bed. A fresh negligee trailing about her, her face a delicate white porcelain, she resembled one of those full-skirted dolls that women once had used to adorn their pillows.

Why, she’s fragile, he thought. Small and rail

For Barry, Alyssia’s strength had been the cornerstone of their relationship. From that first meeting at Ship’s Coffee Shop in Westwood, he had perceived her as ebulliently healthy, a plucky fighter with street smarts. Never once had he considered that she could be prey to the physical and psychological meg rims prevalent among delicately reared females. This view of his wife as an invincibly tough broad had permitted him to depend on her, and to neglect her.

Now, staring at the bed, his mouth went dry. He was experiencing an actual physical wrench, as if some inner organ had burst within him.

The image he’d always held of Alyssia was crashing down, shattering into a thousand irreparable pieces.

“I can’t bear anyone around when I’m like that.” Her murmur was flat, apathetic.

“Juanita says it’s not connected with the pregnancy.”

“I can’t catch my breath, that’s all.”

“Hon, what I saw was distinctly worse than mild hyperventilation.”

“It’s called an anxiety attack. It happens to me at work.”

“Is that why you sometimes go dashing from the set?”

“How can I let people see me?”

“Right now you’re not working,” he pointed out.

“The thing’s been getting worse and worse since I heard about Hap.”

“Why didn’t you ever mention these attacks to me?” he asked, unable to repress the thought of how little of his own emotional landscape he had shared with her.

“Everything connected to them seems weak, shameful.”

“What about a shrink?”

“I tried one, years ago. It didn’t help. Later I tried a psychologist.

For a while she did me some good. “

“You need some type of therapy now.”

“What good would it do? Hap’s dead. He’s dead….” Her head sank back in the heaped pillows and she appeared yet more friable.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Barry took her lax hand.

“Hon, he was a unique person. Honorable, clean, decent. All my life I tried to emulate him.”

She withdrew her hand.

“Did you?”

Barry’s lips creased downward as the tears he’d not yet been able to shed for Hap pooled in his sinuses.

“I did love and admire him … but always I envied him, sometimes unbearably. Long before I ever met you, I saw him with the monster’s green eyes. Not because he was rich, a Wasp, but because he was immeasurably decent and generous and brave.

After you and he. I felt so unworthy. How dare I compete with somebody like him?

I .

I thought the baby was his. “

“So did he.”

Barry heard the confession, yet his tears for his dead cousin continued flowing.

The remainder of that afternoon he felt as if his brain were floating several inches above his skull, a peculiar sensation he attributed to lack of sleep. Whatever the reason, he was able for the first time to accept the truth about his relationship to Alyssia.

His crusade to stay married to her had been a ridiculous mistake. They didn’t belong together.

Yet paradoxically, his tenderness toward her had never been greater.

He sat next to the bed, lighting pipe after pipe as he told her how it had bolstered his poor, weak ego to be her husband, and how grateful he was that she had earned their living at the beginning—he even admitted his shame that she had done housework. He told her he had admired her courage ever since the first day of their marriage, when she had faced down the motel manager. He said if it weren’t for her, he would have drunk himself into the grave. He told her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and he cherished her flesh insofar as he was able”—I must be lacking in androgen.”

When a reply was called for she would nod torpidly, as if speech were beyond her strength. Her unresponsiveness did not slow his confessions.

Nothing could have silenced him.

He was unwinding the spool of their marriage.

He asked Juanita to bring his dinner up to the bedroom. Alyssia dipped her spoon in the cream soup, a dutiful gesture that she soon ceased.

He ate hungrily. He was finishing the wedge of brie when Alyssia gasped. The awful racked breathing started again.

“Go away!” she panted shrilly.

“Hon, you need a doctor” — “No! Get out!”

Hurrying to the kitchen, he summoned Juanita, then waited on the top step, a vicious draft whirling away his pipe smoke.

His usual mode when faced with unpleasant decisions was avoidance, but as a carryover from his recent beatific state he accepted that it was up to him to take charge. Alyssia can’t stay here, isolated in the country with only me and an illiterate servant to take care of her, he thought. She ought to be under medical supervision.

He went to dial the Tours number on the card that he’d glimpsed on the telephone ledge.

In less than an hour Dr. Fauchery arrived. After he examined his famous new patient, he drew Barry downstairs. He spoke no English.

Enunciating slowly and loudly for the American, he voiced Barry’s own belief that it was imperative that Madame Cordiner spend the remainder of her term at his private lying-in facilities.

“I am not going, and that’s that!” Alyssia walked agitatedly up and back the length of the bedroom.

Barry was already in bed. Weariness had hit him like a blow. Yawning, he said, “Hon, be reasonable.”

“You had to call the quack! Now the two of you have decided I need locking up.”

“It’s nothing like that,” Barry said in the calmest tone he could muster.

“He explained to me that many of his patients who live outside of Tours come to stay at the clinic before their due date. He’s thinking of the baby.”

She began to cry. Woozily he got up and went to her—had her shoulders always been this slight? —leading her to her side of the bed.

When the lights were out, she whispered in a tear-clogged voice, “You’re right. I can’t risk the baby. But I don’t want any nurses, Barry.”

“Who’ll look after you?”

“Juanita.”

He rolled onto his side. It seemed reasonable enough that she wouldn’t want strangers seeing Alyssia del Mar in her weakness, possibly selling the story to a gossip sheet.

“Let me see what I can arrange,” he said, and fell asleep.

After breakfast the following day the three of them drove to Tours.

The lying-in clinic was a commodious private house near the cathedrale. The rooms were booked months in advance, but a comtesse had delivered her fourth son before she could leave her country estate, so the second-floor suite was vacant. The airy bedroom came with a small, adjacent sitting room where a cradle could be installed with a private nurse.

That same morning. Dr. Fauchery ushered up Dr. Plon, a goa teed psychiatrist. Plon stayed, talking to Alyssia in formal English for about an hour, witnessing an attack. He then retired to consult with the obstetrician. An ardent convert to drug therapy, Plon wanted to use pharmaceuticals to alleviate her hyperventilation, but Fauchery flatly refused this course until after the delivery. The two physicians compromised on a minimal dosage of Librium.

Barry, who had taken a room at the Trois-Rivieres Meridien, could see no benefit whatsoever from the tranquilizer. Alyssia’s attacks came as frequently and were equally severe.

The third day after Alyssia’s arrival, April 30, a balmy sun shone on Tours. Dr. Fauchery, making his morning rounds, coaxed Alyssia to sit by the open window of her small sitting room. She was in the armchair when Barry visited. Juanita took his hyacinths and daffodils to arrange, tactfully leaving them alone.

A strand of black hair blew over Alyssia’s forehead. She didn’t push it away.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said in a dulled tone.

“About what, hon?”

She sighed.

“Us. It’s over, Barry.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“We’ve been tenacious for twenty-odd years. Nobody can say we didn’t try.”

After a long pause, she said, “The baby? What are we going to do about the baby?”

“That’s the prime consideration, of course.”

“I won’t be much of a mother.”

“You’re going through a traumatic phase,” he said.

She gave him a bleak look.

“Hon, eventually you’ll get over Hap.”

“I won’t, Barry. Not ever. And the attacks—what about the attacks?

I’m bad news for a baby. “

A sparrow came to perch in the tender new greenery of the Virginia creeper outside the window. Barry gazed at the drab little bird and for the first time thought about fatherhood.

Oh, he had daydreamed often about the child, invariably visualizing it as male, seeing him a gleeful toddler being hoisted onto the merry-go-round at Santa Monica Pier; a small boy sharing peanuts at Dodger Stadium. (Barry disliked every type of sporting event, and found baseball an indescribable snore, but his mental imagery discounted this. ) His most cherished projection, however, was of a tall adolescent rising to his feet in boisterous applause as he, Barry Cordiner, picked up his National Book Award.

Now, though, in the soft French sunlight, for the first time he faced the realities. Unless Spy hit, and he could afford servants, he would be in for dirty diapers, two a. m. feedings, vomiting, car-pooling, as well as back talk drug involvement and teenage sex.

“Don’t downgrade yourself,” he said earnestly, “You’ll be a marvelous mother. Erda personified.”

“Oh, Barry….”

“You’re saying / should have custody?”

Abruptly she slipped into her agitated mode. Jumping to her feet, she exclaimed, “Of course not! What makes you say that?”

“This entire conversation.”

“It never crossed my mind for one instant that I wouldn’t have the baby. How could I not? It’s mine.” She tugged at her fingers.

“But it’s awful to be raised by somebody who can’t function as a mother.”

In spite of her persistent denials, it appeared to him that she was offering justifiable excuses to avoid custody of the baby.

All at once he recalled his twin’s despairing tone as they’d said goodbye at the Los Angeles Airport. What were her words? What wouldn’t I give to be having this baby!

That evening he ate at Barrier, Tours’ two star restaurant, which had previously been known as Le Negre. After the rich terrine, the saumon en papillottes, the delicate white veal, the cheeses and an ethereal raspberry souffle, he felt in need of a walk, so he strolled along the embankment of the Loire.

He had been thinking about his unborn child ever since he’d left Alyssia this afternoon. However much he attempted to evade the unpalatable fact, he was accepting that she was in no shape to look after a baby. He, temporarily at least, would be the parent in charge.

And who was Barry Cordiner to take on the responsibility of a helpless infant?

He stared disconsolately at the Pont-Napoleon, seeing neither the bridge nor the reflection of its looped lights in the blackness of the river. In a rare moment of total self-honesty, he was seeing exactly who Barry Cordiner was.

An alcoholic. A hack writer who without his Cordiner connections would never have earned a living. A son who had abdicated his filial responsibilities to Beth. An unfaithful husband whose infidelities seldom reached honest consummation—he pawed women’s breasts and pubic triangles as an act of vengeance toward Alyssia, punishment for making him feel third rate, which he probably was. He had played on her weaknesses to keep her apart from his immensely more worthy cousin.

(In his morbid honesty, however, he conceded that here fault lay partially with Alyssia, whose dogged loyalty had always made her his patsy. ) / can’t look after a baby. It’s impossible.

His twin, not he, had inherited the genes that constitute a sense of responsibility.

“Beth, it’s Barry.”

“Where are you? I’ve been beside myself. I called the Norfolk. They said you’d never registered. And that she had checked out.”

“We’re in Tours. Alyssia’s at a maternity clinic. She’s in rotten shape, Beth.”

“I knew it! At her age doing that difficult role in Africa, then chasing around” — “This has nothing to do with the pregnancy.”

“Is the baby a breech?”

“There’s no problem whatsoever with the child.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“Uhh, she appears to be, uhh, having what we laymen call a breakdown.”

“A nervous breakdown?”

“Yes. Hap’s death has hit her very hard. That’s why she’s at the clinic early.”

“Was she violent?”

“The reverse. Most of the time she’s numbed and lethargic, the way people get in deep depression. Also, she has attacks of hyperventilation.”

“You’re positive the baby hasn’t been brain damaged?”

“Will you stop harping on the baby? Not being a prenatal expert, I am taking the highest regarded local obstetrician’s opinion that all is well!” After a moment he said, “Sorry I lashed out there, Beth, but I’ve been under an annihilating strain. Alyssia and I have decided to split.”