I see you everywhere (22 page)

“The worst thing that could possibly happen to you. To a parent.”

“And if you’re not, what’s the worst thing then?” I said.

“That you’d be conscious of ? AIDS. Watching helplessly while your body’s colonized by a kamikaze virus. Or genocide. Watching your family get slaughtered by your neighbors.”

“What a nice imagination you have. But what do you mean, ‘conscious of ’? What’s the biggest tragedy you
wouldn’t
be conscious of ?”

“Letting life pass you by. Living like a starfish, clinging to your one unchanging colorless rock.”

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 146 146

Julia Glass

“Don’t scare me.”

“But you wouldn’t.
We
wouldn’t.” With his neck pulled up short on my belly, his laugh came out a contemptuous snort.

“Well, aren’t we superior. Living our lives like the glorious vertebrates we are.” On TV, another borrowed snapshot: a fireman, younger than I am, killed in the line of duty.

“But some people,” said Jerry, “say life passes you by if you don’t have children. Having children
is
life. Being a parent.”

“Is that what you want?”

He tilted his head back to see my upside-down face. “A few years from now. Sure.” Unspoken was a clear
And you?
Was this a potential invitation? An early appraisal, like the first vetting on a thoroughbred? I looked at the TV. I didn’t say,
Not on your life
or
Scares the bejesus out of me.
I said, “Guess I’ve yet to meet a gene pool worthy of mine.”

He laughed. “Or you’re afraid of your animal self. That’s the danger of living too close to the beasts. When the idea seems repulsive to me, the idea of kids, that’s what I suspect. Like, all this education, all this cerebral honing, and I’m going to what? Fritter away my time sniffing small butts? Aiming spoonfuls of mush at drooling mouths? But even more, I think, will I let myself knuckle under to my instincts, with no more control than my ancestors down in Olduvai Gorge?”

“Victim of your own biology,” I said, relieved. I frisked his hair.

“But,
but.
” He twisted around and sat cross-legged, looking at me.

“I’ll always be a Catholic, at root.”

My turn to laugh. “Doesn’t mean you have to reproduce like one.”

“I want a wild and freewheeling life, a life of pick up and go,” he said.

“I believe anything can happen; there’s no individual ration of good and bad. But I can’t lose sight of God’s purpose—it’s sort of there all the time, just outside my peripheral vision. Embracing us everywhere, a grand invisible womb.” I listened to his voice slide away. I let that be the end of it, and so did he. He straddled my thighs and began to massage them, smiling.

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 147
I See You Everywhere

147

I wanted him too much to laugh at the notion of a grand womb (why did I see a circus tent?). Before we let go again, I made him promise we’d drive to Chicago for dinner and dancing. Then I said, “Prove you want it wild.” Four hours later, we stood at the top of the Sears Tower, the image of my sequined dress, bought just for this trip, confounding the lights of the city. We talked about Africa, and I remember not saying
Take me with
you
but teasing him instead, singing “Born Free” to the lasso of shoreline below us. Even his ambitions made me jealous when I saw how tightly they held him.

The drama king is the first to reach my bed. “Honeybee, they confiscated your flowers!” He saves me the difficulty of a reply when he kisses me, long and tender, on my mouth. I gasp, not just at the shock of being kissed like that by a stranger but because I’ve grown so used to Jerry’s beard, its prickle and rasp against my mouth. I feel like I’ve just been kissed by a Victoria’s Secret model.

Behind the guy who kissed me, Louisa gloats like a yenta, and behind her, Dr. Athanassiou makes his typically fragrant entrance. Dr. A. (which is what the other doctors and nurses call him) smells like what I imagine backyards must smell like in Greece, like plants that are green but frugal and thorny, thirst-proof succulents. Ordinarily, I find perfumed men repulsive, just as, ordinarily, I find doctors tedious. To both rules, this man is an exception. Yesterday he came to see me three times. Whenever he arrives, he stands very still for a moment at the edge of my curtain, an unspoken request for permission to enter. He never barges in or bustles around. He’s no Dr. Slocum. He asks me strange and amusing questions, like “Can you name for me the capital of France?” “The vice president of your country?” “Your favorite fruit?” “Do you habitually wear pyjamas?” “How many first cousins have you, maternal and paternal respective?” My favorite so far: “What is chivalry?” He has a regal posture, a thicket of a black mustache, slightly salted, and an accent that I like to imagine comes from Athens by way of upper-crust Nairobi or some-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 148 148

Julia Glass

where equally dashing. He makes me feel like the winning guest on a game show. I don’t think I’ve flubbed an answer yet—but he’s still being cautious. Otherwise, he’d have released me to the upstairs world of flowers and phones. And there’s the gash under the bandage on the back of my head. When I asked him how much they shaved, he frowned at me and said, “Would not a touch of baldness be but a trivial price for your life?”

The first thing he does today is wheel my bed around, so once again I’m looking out the window at the parking lot. “I prefer that patients face the light,” he says.

After I introduce him to Louisa, the drama king grabs his hand. “Larney Poole. I’m the one who got her into this pickle, I fear.” Pickle? Is this guy related to the Dr. Slocum of
copacetic
and
noggin
? Dr. A. pats him on the shoulder and says, “I am quite sure your young woman does not believe sailing is checkers.”

We chuckle politely.

He turns to me and says, “It is what day today?”

Thursday, I tell him.

“Who are your visitors today? Tell me of your companions here.”

I try to draw out a speech on Louisa—how she lives in New York, she’s four years older, she’s an art critic at a magazine, her husband is a guy named Hugh who teaches American history at a prep school. . . . Dr. A. interrupts graciously. “And this young man?”

“Barney,” I say quickly, pleased that I’ve remembered his name.

“He tried to bring me roses, but roses are taboo. Well, I guess you know that.” I crane my neck, which hurts like hell, but I need to see the waiting-room window. Still no Jerry. Instead, Mom. She waves a shopping bag in the air and grins. She’ll have to wait for someone to leave, since Gwen never bends the two-guests-only rule. “And hey, there’s our mom.” I point.

I can’t tell what Dr. A. is thinking. His tone is always so calm and professional. He says, “We know that you do not remember the accident which placed you here. This is not unusual.” He explains to Louisa and Barney what he has already told me. “The memory is not there to retrieve Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 149
I See You Everywhere

149

because it was never encoded in the primary instance. The trauma of the moment precluded any recording of events as they had come to pass. The tape, you may say, is not erased but blank. However, your actual memory loss of the entire preceding month—that you believe we are still in the month of June—this is of greater concern. . . . Possibly it is a vestige of shock or of oxygen deprivation.” He turns back to me. “But if this young man was a vector in the accident, it is to my great curiosity whether you remember
him.
”

I take a good look at my admirer. The passion that gleams from every microscopic pore in his patrician face is way beyond flattering; anyone could see it’s been requited. Other than his madras bow tie, I guess I could see myself not turning him down. He is Newport handsome, with eyes not Jerry’s wild-yonder blue but the earnest blue of Lake Michigan as seen from that Milwaukee suite. My heart sinks; he is the inverse of Jerry. He is rebound material par excellence.

“You don’t, honeybee, do you?” he says. “Remember me.” He looks more amused than offended, even touched.

“I don’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t know you from Adam.”

I wait for him to look wounded or angry. But his expression remains bright, and then he actually laughs. As if I’ve just confessed undying love. He comes over and kisses me again, this time on the hand snagged by the IV. “Then you’ll be my Eve. I’ll have to convince you what a fine time we’ve been having, win you all over again. What a challenge—what a pleasure!”

Louisa says she has to make a phone call. Dr. A.’s beeper goes off. He says he has grand rounds but will return after lunch. This leaves me alone with the stranger who thinks he’s my boyfriend. Or the boyfriend I’ve mistaken for a stranger.

“Barney, I’m sorry, but who
are
you?”

“Larney,” he says. “I’m the guy who was lucky enough to offer you a ride before the rest of the world had a chance.”

I am trying to frame a question to this alarming statement when Mom joins us.

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 150 150

Julia Glass

“Hello there, you dapper young man.”

“Hi, May.” He kisses her on the cheek.

“Did my daughter dent your uncle’s boat? Clement’s made of tougher steel than the hull of the
Intrepid.
Don’t you mess with her.”

“Mom, I’m right here. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

She reaches into her shopping bag. “Yes you are, sweetheart, and we have never been so grateful to know it, believe you me.” Mom wears large gold fox heads on her ears and a scarlet knit dress that few women her age could pull off. She’d never dream of a face-lift or color her silver hair, but years of posting in a saddle have preserved her tight hips and legs. She sets on the chair a racehorse mystery by Dick Francis and a hotoff-the-presses book about the
Exxon Valdez
disaster. “But wait till you see this,” she says triumphantly. She plunks a book on my lap called
Why
the Reckless Survive.
“I was relieved to see someone thinks that they do! A scientist, no less.” She points to the Ph.D. after the author’s name. Larney laughs. He seems to laugh as readily as most people blink. Mom points back at the shopping bag. “Bananas and grapes, clean undies, Jergens lotion. Am I a good mother?”

“Yes, but you’re making me nervous rushing around. Sit.”

“That’s because I’m temporary.” In her maddeningly androcentric way, she addresses herself to the man in the room. “I’m going to wash the grapes, and then I’m leaving you two alone and heading off for lunch at the Chilton Club. I talk too loud for the place, but they’ll just have to squirm their way through it. I give the maître d’ a naughty thrill. He loves me. He’s from Duluth; we talk about the Vikings between courses.”

After she leaves, Larney puts the books back in the bag and pulls the chair to the bed. He leans an elbow against my hip. “I’m not going to take advantage of your forgetfulness. I know I’m just a vacation in Bermuda. I know about your animal self. I know about the sperm king. But we were having a fabulous time. You’ll have to take my word on that.”

“What
about
my animal self ?” (Though I want to ask, “What
about
the sperm king?”)

“How you’re giving in to it, letting it rule; those were your words.”

Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 151
I See You Everywhere

151

I sigh. Would he mind just telling me how we met? He attacks the task with pleasure. I was hitchhiking south of Boston. The sun was setting. When I got into his car, he could tell I was very upset: heartbroken, angry, or both. When I told him where I was headed—to my parents’, God knows why—he said his destination was just ten minutes from there. He got me to talk about my policy work on conserving seals in the Northwest and convinced me to go to a cocktail party the next night (at the home of his uncle, skipper of the fateful boat). I showed up at the party in what Larney describes as a Minuteman missile of a sequined dress, a dress intended, in his opinion, for tearing off. I agreed to go home with him if he understood one thing. “You said, I remember exactly, ‘I’m in the market for a little amnesia.’ ”

“Well hey, if I’m in the ‘Be careful what you wish for’ sweepstakes, I just won. So, did you tear it off—my dress?”

He closes his eyes. “I came close. I pictured all those popped sequins like shooting stars. But no.”

“Thank you. That dress is one thing I do remember. I got a third Visa card to buy it.” It was the dress I’d bought for my Ms. Accomplished weekend with Jerry. We laugh together as Larney holds the hand that emerges from my sling. He is smitten, and I know a good drug when I see it. The pleasure is surprisingly real.

“May I take you wherever you’re going, whenever they let you out?”

he says. Because he sounds as if he’s sure I’ll say no, I tell him of course.

“What do you drive?” I ask, because cars so readily seduce me. Maybe I will remember his car.

“A blue SL convertible. You liked how it matched your dress. You told me what you needed right then was an expensive car and, if possible, a large cock. Again, I quote you verbatim. I’m nothing if not honest. You told me honest was just what the doctor ordered. You took my breath away.”

This is making me feel ill, but I press on. “One more question. This is important. Do I have a job yet?”

“No,” he says, “but you’re closing in on a good one, and damn it, Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r2.qxp 7/28/08 7:55 AM Page 152 152

Julia Glass

it’s going to take you miles from me, way the hell out to the Rocky Mountains.”

This is when Louisa returns. Larney says he’s sorry but he has to get back to “the firm.” (Law or brokerage, I assume, though his fanciful image of flying sequins makes me think interior design. He’s too sweet to be a lawyer.)

Louisa’s mood has cooled; she seems agitated, impatient, no longer my willing slave. She picks up one of the books and pages through it. She doesn’t sit down.