Fever (2 page)

He was touching his cutlery, moving his hands with precision and a certain amount of tension which she couldn’t read, but when he finished speaking he lifted his head and smiled at her in a way that was almost embarrassed. “And I liked you as soon as I saw you standing in the lobby last night with that same puzzled look on your face while your husband checked you in.”

“I saw you too,” she said, finally, and noticed that the hum in her head had lessened and that the room was a pleasant temperature, not too cold as she usually found restaurants. She relaxed a little, then thought of Colin.

“If you’re worried, phone the hospital again,” he said. “There are pay phones in the lobby.”

When he left her at the elevator, he paused, and leaning in the open door, kissed her gently, not quickly, on her mouth. Thinking about it later as she lay in bed, she told herself, I knew he was going to do it and I didn’t back away or try to stop him. I wanted him to kiss me. And she felt a burning through her body, even in her arms and the palms of her hands, a burning that she recognized as sexual longing. She who had never been unfaithful, who had never dreamt of such a thing, and Colin so sick.

She passed another restless night and was at the hospital before eight. Several doctors were standing around Colin’s bed gazing silently down on him while the head nurse stood by tensely. She noticed Cecilia in the doorway and spoke in an undertone to one of the doctors.

“Ah,” he said, turning to Cecilia.

“I’ll stop in at noon,” the second doctor said. He and the third doctor walked out of the room past Cecilia and down the hall.

“I’m Dr. Jameson,” the first doctor said to her. “Dr. Ransom asked me to have a look in.”

Colin lay motionless on the bed, his eyes closed, an unnaturally red spot of colour high on each cheek. His lips too, were more vividly coloured than usual. Dr. Jameson took her arm and said, “Let’s just sit down and talk this over.” He guided her into a small office behind the nursing station, held a chair for her and sat down himself.

“Now,” he said, “your husband is very sick. But you know that.”

She said, “Have you found out what’s wrong with him?” He didn’t reply directly, but instead, not looking at her, began to list the different tests they had done and the result of each. He remarked on certain possibilities and dismissed them with a gesture or left them open. Cecilia tried to listen to him, but her mind wandered to Colin’s strange colouring, to the fact the head nurse was a different one, and to wondering who Dr. Jameson was and what might be his field of specialty.

Gradually it dawned on her that Colin was worse, a good deal worse, and that was why Dr. Jameson had brought her into this room and why the nurses and aides at the station or passing down the hall had avoided looking at her as she followed him.

She tried to get a grip on this idea, to admit, to force it to penetrate the shield of her own bewildering indifference. She repeated to herself, Colin is desperately ill, but still no shiver of fear passed down her spine. Dr. Jameson stopped talking and went away. Cecilia went back to Colin’s bedside.

At noon he opened his eyes and spoke to her.

“They are coming with flowers,” he said. “They want to speak to us. Be ready.”

“Yes, Colin,” she replied, and bent to kiss him on his hot, dry forehead, but as her lips touched his skin, he turned his head fretfully
away from her much as a cranky, feverish child might, and screwed up his face before he lapsed back into unconsciousness. Later he said, “It is very big and there is an echo like silver.”

They were keeping the door to his room closed now and had hung a ‘No Visitors’ sign on it. Nurses moved swiftly, silently in and out of the darkened room, staring down at Colin with pursed lips before they went away again.

“I don’t understand it,” Dr. Jameson muttered to Colin on one of his several brief visits.

At eleven that night the head nurse came, put her arm around Cecilia’s shoulders and told her to go back to the hotel and try to sleep.

“I know you want to be here, but you don’t want to collapse when he needs you. Is the rest of the family on its way?” Cecilia shook her head numbly, no.

“His parents are dead,” she said, “and I don’t want our children here. If he isn’t better by morning, I’ll tell his sister to come.”

“Go back to the hotel,” the nurse said in a kindly way, “if you are carrying this alone. I’ll call you at once if I think you should be here.”

Cecilia obeyed and took a taxi back to the hotel. Just as she entered the lobby the doors of the elevator opened and the man she had talked with the night before stepped out as if he had arranged to meet her.

“You look so tired,” he said to her, without any preliminaries or surprise. “Come and have a drink with me before you go to bed.”

“I don’t think I could sleep anyway,” she said. They went together into the bar across from the restaurant and Cecilia had a glass of scotch. She inhaled its fumes, finding them delicious, she let them rush into her brain.

“He’s worse,” she said. “He may not live through the night,” but her own words carried no meaning, she frowned with the
effort to feel them, but they seemed to be as on the other side of an impenetrable glass wall. Finally she abandoned the effort; she was too tired. “I guess I shouldn’t be here,” she said, meaning that she should have stayed at Colin’s bedside, not that she shouldn’t be in the hotel bar with a strange man.

He was thoughtful for a second, then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “There comes a moment … If it’s his fate …” She studied him. He had such bright eyes, so blue, and the intensity in them fascinated her. She remembered Colin’s eyes the night he had gotten sick, as if, behind their transparent glistening surface, they opened into worlds she hadn’t been to, hadn’t known existed, didn’t want to know about. He took her hand and held it tightly.

“Hold on,” he said. “You’re not alone. I’ll stick with you.” At that moment all she could feel was the pressure, almost too hard, and the warmth of his hand around hers. And then he put his other hand on the side of her face. She turned her head into his palm and breathed in the smell of his flesh, she opened her mouth and touched her tongue to his palm, tasting the faint salt taste. They sat that way for a moment, she with her eyes closed, until he loosened his hold on her hand, and slid his other hand down to her shoulder.

“Better?” he asked. Yes, she was better. Surprised, she opened her eyes. He was staring at her with a slight frown, his blue eyes burning with a steady light.

He walked with her to the elevator and this time, instead of letting her get on alone, he got on too, and pushed the button for his floor which came before hers. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, he got off and began to say good night to her in an oddly formal, unsmiling way, when she stepped off the elevator beside him. He stared at her, perplexed, not speaking. She
touched his arm in a tentative, supplicating way, holding her eyes on his face.

He hesitated, then took his room key out of his pocket and led her down the hall.

His room was identical to hers except that it was less tidy and he had left a lamp burning. The desk was covered with papers he had evidently been working on, and his pyjamas lay across the foot of his bed. She closed her eyes again and after a pause, he kissed her.

At one moment, finding herself in a posture both undignified and profoundly arousing, she had felt a second’s horror at what she was doing. For she had never consented to such behaviour—or even thought of it—before in her life. She was reminded of the ugly grappling of pornography, and for a second she was filled with distaste at where her body had taken her, as though she had wakened now, but only to the flesh, to the room, to the rug on the floor and the bed and the walls and the dusty
tv
set in the corner, and to his hands and mouth on her, and hers on him; she was filled with amazement.

And my husband sick, dying, she thought.

She told him what Colin had said, about the big room with the echo like silver.

“Maybe he really is somewhere else,” the man said. “Maybe he’s somewhere in a big place and it has an echo like silver. It sounds beautiful,” he added. “It doesn’t sound like you should be worried about him.”

“I didn’t like the sound of it,” she replied. “So remote, so cold.” She shivered, lying in his arms, and was glad of the warmth of his flesh against hers.

“We thought it might be his pancreas,” Dr. Jameson said to her in the morning, “but now we’ve ruled that out, too.” She had
given him their family doctor’s number so that Dr. Jameson could consult with him about Colin’s medical history. She could have told him there was nothing: flu, colds, a broken bone in his foot.

At noon the head nurse who had been on duty when Colin was admitted came in and read the record of his vital signs and intake and output of fluids that lay on the stand by his bed.

“That’s better,” she murmured, then went out without saying anything more. Cecilia meditated on this till the nursing shifts changed at three and the new nursing team came in and clustered around Colin’s bed. She was about to ask if he was improving when the new head nurse said to the others, “A slight improvement here.” Cecilia could see no difference, except perhaps that the unnaturally bright colour in his cheeks had faded.

After they had gone, she stood beside his bed.

“Did you hear that, Colin?” she asked. “They say you’re getting better.” Colin’s eyelids flickered and he looked at her with that same well of darkness behind his eyes.

“The blueness of things,” he said, in a voice that might have been awestruck, had it not been so faint.

“The antibiotics are working,” she said. There was no response. She wanted to reach down and shake him. She was his wife, she had been his wife for fifteen years. They had children. What right had he to ignore her in this way? The doctors and nurses whisking in and out of his room barely glanced at her, spoke to her only occasionally, waited politely for her to leave the room before they pulled the curtain around his bed to do some unspeakable thing to him. Was she of no account at all? But Colin had become a stranger, while the man she had gone to bed with the night before was not. She tried to summon some remorse for what she had done, or sympathy for Colin lying so ill and in pain, but all she could feel was anger.

At six the nurse who took his vital signs replied, when Cecilia
asked her, that Colin’s fever was still elevated, and she smiled at Cecilia in a commiserating way.

“A little change this afternoon,” she said, “but now he’s much the same.”

Around seven Colin said loudly, in a clear voice, “Let me sleep,” then, more quietly, “I’m tired and the music lulls me.” Cecilia put her hand on his forehead. It was damply cool now, and beads of cool sweat sat on his upper lip. He didn’t respond to her touch and after a moment, she took her hand away.

At nine she went back to the hotel. The man she had slept with wasn’t in the lobby or the restaurant. She went directly to the bar, stopped in the doorway and peered from table to table through the smoky gloom. He was seated on a stool at the bar and when he glanced back and saw her standing in the doorway, he stood at once, put some money beside his half-full glass, and came immediately to where she waited for him. They went to the elevator, got on, and went up to his room.

This time their coupling was less dramatic, less violently experimental than it had been the night before. Lying beside him on his rumpled bed before she returned to her room, she said, “Today when I tried to talk to him, he said, ‘the blueness of things.’ What do you suppose he was dreaming about?”

“Or thinking,” he said. “Or maybe he was somewhere else.”

“Do you think he’s trying to tell me something?” Cecilia asked. “No,” she answered her own question, “I don’t think he is. But what did he mean?”

“Maybe he’ll be able to tell you when he wakes up,” the man said. “You should write down what he says so you can ask him.”

“If he wakes up,” she heard herself say, and refused to amend or qualify what she had said.

“Do you love him?” he asked her.

In the same unemotional voice she replied, “Yes, or I did when
I married him and we’ve been married fifteen years, so if I don’t love him anymore, I don’t think it makes any difference.”

“Tell me then …” he said carefully, and paused. “Tell me. Do you ever wish that …” He paused again. “Do you ever wish that he would die?”

“No,” she said. “Why would I wish that?”

He shrugged, was perhaps a bit embarrassed. “To free you.”

She started to ask him why he thought she wanted to be free, then realized where she was and what she had just done. She got off the bed and gathered her clothing.

“No,” she said. “I don’t wish that.” When she had dressed she left the room without saying good night. He didn’t say anything either, although she had glanced at him before she closed the door behind her and saw that he was watching her steadily across the shadowed room.

In the late morning Colin opened his eyes

“You’re here,” he said to her and his expression seemed almost amused.

“Yes,” she said softly and rose from her chair in the corner to stand by his bed.

“I feel like I’ve been on a long journey,” Colin said, looking up at the ceiling, “and now I’m so tired.”

His words, his tone of voice were so obviously normal that her stomach turned over. He closed his eyes slowly and seemed to fall asleep. Cecilia went to find a nurse to report this turn of events to and the nurse was so surprised that she came with Cecilia, setting down the tray she was carrying on a trolley as they passed it. She took Colin’s blood pressure, his pulse, and then his temperature.

“I think there might be some difference,” she said cautiously.

Colin didn’t wake again or speak until Cecilia was preparing to leave for the hotel. His voice was very faint as he asked her about
the children and the appointments he had missed. Then he began to shiver so violently that Cecilia rang his bell and got a nurse in at once. The nurse came in, took his temperature, went out of the room and returned with a thick white wool blanket. She covered Colin and in a few moments he had stopped shivering. Cecilia waited a little longer and when it seemed clear that this had passed, she went back to the hotel.