I see you everywhere (28 page)

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“It doesn’t hurt.”

He tests my darkened nipple, first with a finger, then the tip of his tongue. “Crusty. Like burnt toast.” He curves a whole hand over the breast. “Ground zero!” he exclaims, and, as if he were six years old, imitates the explosion of a grenade.

“Stop, Ray. It’s me here,” I say. I long for the days when he could bruise me with tenderness, pull me under, make me forget anything. But Ray returns to his kayak.

When I woke up after my second surgery, the real one, I lay still for an hour, dizzy, sore, so thirsty I began to hallucinate. The recovery room was noisy and chaotic. In the next bed, an older man bellowed at the nurses, lashing out at their sympathy. I resolved not to ask for a thing. I made myself small and floated away on some inner sea. Another mirage of drinking, drinking anything—Gatorade, dishwater, soy sauce—then I opened my eyes and there was Ray’s face. He wore a blue gown, backward, crinkled at his throat. The look he gave me was one I didn’t know. Alarm? Pity? Relief ? He held a tiny ribbed cup, the kind street vendors fill with gelato. He said, as if about to ask for a favor, “They said I could give you an ice cube. One.” For the next few weeks, he was full of kindnesses, small and sweet as that cup of ice.

“Are you angry with me?” I say now.

“Why would I be angry?”

“The taxi. Losing my temper at Preston.”

“People lose their temper.” His tone is like the night air pressing at the windows. It’s starting to snow again. Number fifteen.

“Sometimes you are so cold.”

“It’s a chore, Louisa. Being warm all the time, just for you. I want you to be . . . happy again, but . . .”

“But you’re no saint.”

“Committed scoundrel, that’s me.”

“You like those lines. Clever little sitcom punch lines.”

Slowly, Ray lifts his right hand above his plans and drops the pencil.

“I’m going to bed.”

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I remember, at the party, watching him from a distance, his arms dancing around to illustrate something. How happy he looked. He was describing the kayak.

“Isn’t it curious,” I say, and it’s too late to take back the meanness,

“your building a boat for one. Not two. Forget about three.”

Ray speaks slowly. “Louisa, everything isn’t art, some precious giftwrapped metaphor. Your life isn’t a biblical flood and I am certainly not your Noah.” He drains his scotch and walks around me. I follow him into our narrow kitchen with its bitter light and put my hands on his shoulder blades, my cheek against his neck. He places the empty glass in the sink, so carefully it makes not a sound.

“Nobody apologize,” he says. “Everyone’s going a little nuts.”

In bed, Ray falls asleep right away.

Dr. Bloom says he’s counting on me to make what he calls the mature decision and brave the consequences. He said it plainly, none of his usual camp-counselor verve.

Sometimes I fantasize about Dr. Bloom. Nothing sexual—though it’s funny to think that he’s been inside my body, his tools like scrabbling beetles right near my heart—but I do envision his other life, its ordinary details. I’ve imagined Dr. Bloom serving an ace, carving a roast, combing his horseshoe of otter-smooth hair. I see him in fleece-lined moccasins, reading medical journals by a crackling Manhasset fire, a chestnut boxer asleep at his feet.

I lie awake a long time, assuming Ray is fast asleep until he says,

“Game of cribbage?”

I can’t help laughing before I say, “Oh Ray, I could
die.
”

“Louisa, we’re all going to die.”

“But not before . . .” Before what? Before I’ve gone gray? Had two children, published a book, lived by the ocean, seen Tikal? His callused fingers brushing my cheek are a shock. “Hey,” he says. Because here they are, the tears. He holds me from behind, no baseball trades to read about over my shoulder this time.

∞

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I am on a brick patio, looking across a lovely tree-filled yard at night. Dr. Bloom, barefoot and wearing white pajamas, stands beside me. Our arms touch. The air is searingly cold, and I want to ask where his shoes are, but he’s talking and I mustn’t interrupt. I’m paying for his time. “Look up,”

he says. I obey. The sky is crisp, pricked through with stars. “That one is Hurtling Treasure.” He points. “There’s Methotrexate, Taco Arriba, Red Grooms.” I am outraged. I cut in: “Shut up. You don’t know the constellations. You’re a surgeon. You have to
be
a surgeon!” Dr. Bloom says, “It’s just a lot of connecting the dots. Anybody who can make kimonos can be a surgeon, believe me.” As he continues his ersatz tour of the heavens, he pivots like the beam from a lighthouse, always pointing.

“Adopted, adopted, adopted,” he says to each star. I feel a rush of love and pity. How can I expect him to know outer space? All he knows is the inside of a human body—but he can find anything there. He needs my protection to get it just right. I reach out, and he lets me hold him; in my arms, he feels like a little boy, so bony and slight. Waking is a vortex of words: constellations, consolations, consummations.
Make it simple, Ray,
I think. Though of course he never has.

“Party shoes!”

My next to last treatment; Patrice is centering my legs.

“A work party.” My red tights and black suede heels protrude brazenly from the hospital smock.

“A party’s a party. . . . Off with the left shoulder, relax. Hon, you’re a pro at this.” Patrice has now coaxed my flesh into place, pushed my face to the side, twenty-nine times; it’s become a casual yet intimate task, one girlfriend brushing another’s hair. She says as she works, “My boys learned snow angels yesterday. I look out the window one minute and see them running around. Next thing, they’ve vanished, and lord do I have a stroke. I’m out there in my socks, freezing my butt off, calling their names, and boom! Up they pop. Yard’s nearly three feet deep! You never saw New Jersey so gorgeous.”

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She pats my knees, and Juan comes in. As usual, no small talk from him. He handles the machine, not me.

The long loud buzzing begins. A sudden comfort, like bees browsing in a sumptuous garden. A sound I could sleep through, so different now.
After tomorrow, Blue, we won’t meet anymore. Do I wish we could go on
and on; am I crazy?

I remember when I met Ray for the very last time. That’s what it was supposed to be. We’d been seeing each other in secret for only two months, and I thought I would die from the exhaustion of lying—

or, rather, of not even having to use the lies I’d wrung myself out to invent, because my husband never mentioned my absences (long and flagrant), my rages (at his smallest imperfections), or my culinary binges (a nonstop hysteria of bouillabaisse, lemon mousse, roast duck, lamb tajine . . . by the end, a freezer full of crepes and sorbets, duxelles and shellfish stocks). We lay on Ray’s bed, fully dressed. I thought, Never ever ever again. I hadn’t told him it was over, only that Hugh had finally guessed, but Ray said, “It’s over,” and began to sob. I had never heard a man cry so hard. “Do you want it to be over?” I said. “No,” he said, and I said without thinking, “Then it won’t be.” Why I kept this promise before others (I exacted so much misery to keep it), I still can’t say. Maybe because I’d thought he would give me up easily and I was wrong. When the buzzing stops, I look up into that secretive eye. Nothing new, just myself in the glass, a fish beneath rain-grizzled water. I reach up and touch my machine. His skin is unexpectedly warm. Patrice says, “Now you go have fun.”

“Tomorrow’s my last day.”

She helps me down. “Everyone cries at the end. It’s just the weirdest thing.” She hands me a Kleenex.

In the changing room, I put on my red velvet dress, tight and sleeveless. I comb my hair and twist it against my skull. Outside, it’s still light for a change, just barely. Dozens of clouds fill the sky above the park, pink as peonies. Across Fifth Avenue, Ray sits on a bench, reading his paper. I call his name and he looks up with delight. Do I give him this much pleasure, still?

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But before he even steps into the street, he calls out, “Jim Abbott!”

“What?”

“The one-armed pitcher with the Angels. They bought him.”

“Is that good?”

“Good enough for me.”

As we start downtown, I look sideways at his clothes: black jeans, leather jacket over a tweedy sweater. The two of us mismatched as ever. I reach for his hand. He resists, but I hold on tight. Tomorrow he flies to Canada. He put it off as long as he could. Then I recognize the man heading toward us, a man in an orange turtleneck, coatless and hurrying.

“Hello!” I say, blushing. I’m thinking how odd Dr. Bloom looks in such a loud color as I remember the last time I saw him—wearing pajamas.

“Louisa,” he says, without hesitation. “Don’t you look lovely.” He turns to Ray. “Riley—yes? The Hollywood stuntman, am I right?”

Ray shakes the doctor’s hand.

“Taking fine care of my star patient there. You keep that up, Riley.” Dr. Bloom looks back at me and displays a pair of quarters in his priceless right hand. “My wife’s meter.”

“Nice to see you,” I say.

A block later, Ray says, “Dr. Doom, yes? Vincent Price of oncology? Guy who sounds like Joe Pesci trapped in the body of Alvin the Chipmunk, yes?”

I stop. “Ray, what could you possibly have against him?”

Ray shrugs and walks on. But as I look at his back, it’s obvious, really. Brilliant as Dr. Bloom is, he’s not brilliant enough, not for Ray. Ray wants him to promise he’ll cure me for good:
Skip all the pleasantries,
buster, and do it.
I’m no different, resenting Ray for not being stronger, as strong as he looks when he’s leaping, ducking, rolling over and over, jumping from planes, so certain he’ll hit the ground whole.

“Two favors. Please,” I say. Ray stops and turns around. Behind him looms the Guggenheim, a spacecraft aglow in the dusk.

“What,” he says bluntly, but he looks open to anything.

“Could you pick me up?”

He lifts me quickly, his leather sleeve cold behind my knees. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 192 192

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“And make your skunk face?”

It takes him only a second to remember. He purses his features into a rodent mask and snorts loudly, turning me in circles. I snort back. When he puts me down, I can’t stop laughing.

“We are certifiable,” says Ray. “We are out where the buses don’t run.”

In front of the museum, a knot of people wait to go in, stamping their feet like horses, their steamy breath rising in plumes. One at a time, they enter a revolving door that flashes back the headlights of limousines and taxis. When it’s our turn, when we pass into the warm sparkling cocoon of the party, separately and then together, I can still feel the weightlessness. Exactly what I wanted to feel yet still such a surprise. I walk to the center and look straight up. At the top is a blue egg of twilight, electric against the white walls. “Like being inside a tulip,” I say.

“More like a missile silo,” says Ray. “Where’s the bar?”

I’m about to show him the way when something hits me. “How can a pitcher be one-armed?”

“Oh, he’s got two, but one is . . . There’s only the elbow and then this deformed hand—or I don’t know, maybe none. He wears his glove there.”

“But the wind-up, the balance . . .”

“Nobody makes a big deal of it.”

“I guess you couldn’t, could you,” I say. “Ray, this guy—will you point him out on TV? I want to see how he does it.”

“I just want him to save my team’s sorry ass. That’s all I want.”

I begin to see familiar faces. “I’m going to find Esteban’s piece before this place is mobbed. You find the drinks.” I set off, away from the crowd. It stands in its own room:
Coat of Many Colors,
stately and vivid. It is made entirely of the fine, brightly colored wire the telephone company used before fiber optics. From a distance, it’s a pure passionate red, but close up, the wires are an orderly tangle flecked with fine stripes of orange, purple, fuchsia, blue. Woven like a basket, like a nest. The coat is a bell-shaped goddess, wide sleeves beckoning. Back in Esteban’s studio, I saw it as a self-portrait: Esteban’s garish feminine warmth, his towering joy. But no, of course it’s his mother. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 193
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The few people in the room admire it from a distance. But I step right in, through the narrow entry. Light pierces the weave, casting a splintered radiance across my naked arms. Above me, the peak is a vortex of stars. Press my face against the side and I can just make out Ray, by the door, holding our drinks. He starts to circle the room. I lean out and wave.

I pull him in and take my champagne; it’s in a plastic flute, the kind with the base that always falls off. I raise it. “New pitcher, new season.”

He says nothing; I’m being my overly metaphorical self. So I’ll ride out the silence, one more unknown, but even in the fractured light, secure inside Esteban’s coat, I see Ray looking at me the way he did when he crossed the avenue and called out Jim Abbott’s name. He raises his cup—its bottom already lost—and touches the rim of mine. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 194 The Price of Silver

may 1993

It makes me happy to see that Doris and the cubs have found themselves a great big juicy carcass, a full-grown buck. Snowfall was light this year, so the body count is low. R.B., who scouts the terrain obsessively, tells me he’s seen it firsthand: spring pickings are slim. It could be a sign, depending on others yet to come, that the mamas will wean their youngsters on the early side. R.B.’s addicted to prowling the woods, to hunting even when he’s not out to kill. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out here right now, watching this very same scene, watching me watch it. Or maybe that’s just what I wish.