Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (13 page)

Then I began to worry that something might have happened to her. A flat tire. Engine trouble. The way she was driving, she could have had an accident.

The streetlight in front of Alicia's house was out, and before long I was sitting in complete darkness, watching in my rear-view mirror for her car to turn onto the street.

LATER THAT NIGHT
I called her, pressing Redial every thirty seconds, pacing the apartment. I turned the scanner on low, listening for accidents. I thought about calling Holman to see if he had heard of any crashes on the highway.

I imagined visiting her at the hospital, bandaged, stabilized, surrounded by tubes. I'd bring her flowers and books and newspapers, keep her from sinking into total despair. I'd stay with her every night on a cot in her room in the ICU, then move into the guest room on Dalecarlia Drive when she was ready to go home. She'd have to learn to walk again; rehab would take more than a year; every day she'd want to give up. In the end, she'd tell all of our friends that I saved her life.

When I finally reached her, she sounded drowsy.

"It's Gordon Hatch," I said. "I thought we were going to meet at your house. I must have lost you."

Alicia perked up. "Where were
you?
I thought you were right behind me. What happened?"

"I was following you for a while until I got stuck in the slow lane. I looked up and you were gone," I said. "My car's pretty old. It doesn't do so hot on the highway."

"Well, there was definitely somebody following me. I thought it was you," she said. "I stopped at the Zebra Room. They've got little jukeboxes at all the tables. I thought we'd have a drink first."

I felt a flutter of excitement at the word "first," whatever "first" meant. We'd have a drink "first," and then what? I stood up with the phone and walked the perimeter of the throw rug in my living room.

"Should we try again tomorrow night?" I asked. "I've never been to the Zebra Room. I'd love to see it. Those jukeboxes—"

"Great jukeboxes," she said. "I love that about St. Louis. There are a lot of authentic bars, the kind that were actually built in the forties and fifties rather than just made to look that way."

"What time should we meet?" I was surprised by my own boldness.

"I'll go to the Zebra Room, sure," she said. "I've got the appraiser coming in at six. They serve great pizza. We can get a pizza and then go out somewhere."

All morning at work I replayed this conversation in my head for clues as to how the night would go. She had as much as invited me to her house. I made a mental collage of her willing looks: smiling when I kissed her hand, brushing against me as we left the museum, looks that ordinarily would have paralyzed a man like me.

Late in the morning, Thea called.

"Let's do something," she said. "I have the afternoon off."

"How did you manage that?"

"I think they're worried I'll collapse on them. I've been sleeping in chairs for the last four days."

"Then take a nap. Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm fine," she said. "Honestly. I'd really like to catch up with you. There's a lot going on."

We agreed to meet for lunch at an Italian place near the
Independent.

Thea was leaning over the bar drinking a Diet Coke when I walked into the restaurant. I tapped her on the shoulder and she swiveled around, biting her lip. Her skin was unhealthy, the color of metal, her hair pulled back in a long ponytail. She wore faded jeans and leather sandals and a white T-shirt with "St. Louis" and "University" curving around a red caduceus.

"Don't be overwhelmed by my beauty," she said. "It's only a temporary thing."

She slid off the bar stool and hugged me. I hadn't remembered her being quite so tall.

In our booth toward the back of the restaurant, she asked me about my job and I was vague in answering. I said I was busy with a number of assignments, some of them confidential, and that I was still at the obituary desk. I talked about my difficulties with Ritger and St. John and told her what my mother used to say, that I had a poor temperament for responding to authority. I went on for a while about the job, bringing up my father, who had never worked for small-minded men, having shot to the top so quickly. I was tempted to tell her about Alicia, but I checked myself.

Thea said that she'd been thinking about her father too; he'd recently been out visiting.

"Everything is different now," she said. "I wanted to tell you as soon as it happened, but not on the telephone." She paused. "On Sunday, as he was leaving to go back to Columbia, my father had a heart attack." She was sliding her fingers along the edge of the table. "He's in Intensive Care at the VA Hospital."

I suddenly felt weak, as happens with bad news. I wanted to say the right thing, even, simply, "I'm so sorry, Thea," but instead I sat there speechless.

When the waitress came by with menus, I opened mine, to fill the space, then felt embarrassed to be holding it.

"A few months ago he had a silent heart attack," Thea said. "A portion of the heart muscle died, and a thin scar formed in its place."

"That's really awful." My eyes were fixed on the daily special, eggplant parmigiana, $5.95 with a house salad. I couldn't stand eggplant.

"The scar wasn't strong enough to contain the pressure of heart contractions, so he developed an aneurysm. It's like a sac bulging outward with every beat." She demonstrated with her hands. "The aneurysm was making the heart overcompensate."

Too distracted to focus, I had only a gauzy sense of Thea's father, tall and narrow with a rocking gait. I tried to listen, telling myself that Thea was once everything to me.

The waitress returned, and Thea ordered a cup of minestrone.

"That's it?" I asked. "You've got to eat."

"I'm really not hungry," she said. "I haven't had an appetite."

"I'll have the chicken sandwich," I said to the waitress, handing her my menu.

She opened the menu, placing it back in front of me. "This is Italian food, honey. We don't do a chicken sandwich. You can try the chicken parmigiana or the chicken florentine—"

"I'll have the special," I blurted out.

"Eggplant?" she asked.

"Fine." My face flushed.

I found myself watching Thea's hands as they skimmed along the surface of the table, rising to make a point or to demonstrate a medical procedure.

"When they removed the aneurysm, they sewed in a shunt," she said. "The success rate is pretty high, but a lot can go wrong."

I thought of when I had known her so well, never noticing these square hands, small-fingered, wonderfully wrinkled around the joints. I felt myself staring, had the sense that I must have looked odd sitting there as distracted as I was, every expression somehow wrong.

But Thea seemed not to notice. She continued to detail her father's condition, as though finding a kind of comfort in the sterile language of medicine.

"Well, it's so lucky that we live in the same town," she concluded as the waitress brought our food. I jabbed at the eggplant, a sponge slathered in tomato sauce.

"My other friends are too young. Nothing has ever happened to them. It makes them nervous to talk about sickness or death," she said. "But you understand because of your father."

"I didn't really know my father," I reminded her. "He was dead by the time I was five." I pushed my plate aside. "My father is really a collection of my mother's stories."

It occurred to me that this was something new. I hadn't thought about it that way—the words had just come out—but somehow what I had said felt like a truth.

"I remembered that he worked in Chicago," Thea said. "I took a tour of the
Tribune
once and tried to get his articles for you, but the guide told me that it couldn't be done."

"Not unless you work there," I guessed. "It's company policy a lot of places."

"But
you
must have a way of getting them," Thea said.

She was right, of course. I could have gotten them. My father's clips were a library request away, a few punches on the keyboard and up they would come: ten years on the fronts of history. My mother had never shown me the clips and I had never asked. My assumption was that one day we'd sit in the living room and spread them all out and read them one by one over a long, rainy weekend. When I had made it, when I had truly arrived as a journalist, she would open the rolltop desk and I would know everything.

After lunch I walked with Thea to the bus stop. It was getting colder. The sky was darkening. By the time we got there, a drizzle had begun to fall.

"It was nice to see you again." I rolled down my sleeves. "I'm very sorry about your father. Let me know if there's anything I can do."

She nodded and embraced me, lightly, as if one of us were breakable, saying, "Thank you, Gordie. Next time you see me I promise I'll wash my hair." She laughed, stepping into the shelter beside the bus stop.

On the walk back to the
Independent,
a cold wind blew up and the drizzle became rain. I crossed my arms, pulling in my shoulders, turned off Locust to Seventh Street. For three o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon, downtown St. Louis was desolate—nothing but gray buildings with dark lobbies, empty sports bars and greeting card shops. Seventh Street stopped at Busch Stadium, where, a month before, baseball season had ended. Without any people, without the bright colors and the movement of fans filing in, it was a lifeless concrete bowl.

The Zebra Room was a quarter mile down the same road in St. Charles as Crawley's Funeral Home, in the first block of a recently gentrified stretch of upmarket shops and chain stores. It sat at the front of a brand-new parking lot, a brightly lit relic from the soda shop days, made of red tile and chrome with a long zebra-striped awning reaching out toward the main road.

Inside, the place was crowded, a curious mix of older couples who smoked and looked out the window and upper-income families of four in bright polo shirts. The hostess said it would be a half hour before a table was ready. Alicia had not yet arrived, so I put my name on the list and waited outside.

The rain had stopped, and the parking lot asphalt drew water into its pores with a hiss. I slouched against a pole at the end of the awning, picturing myself from the road where Alicia would soon be turning, my posture under the streetlights out of film noir.

"This place has certainly been discovered," she said, walking out of the darkness into my line of vision. She must have used some other entrance to the parking lot. "Have you been here long?"

"I just got here," I said, though it had been twenty minutes. "Our name's on the list."

"I can't stand it when places I like get discovered. Last night was okay, but this is ridiculous. Look at them all pressed in there."

She was in blue jeans and sneakers and a white cotton sweater. Anyone seeing us together would have thought we were the same age.

"How long is the wait?" she asked.

"No more than ten or fifteen minutes."

"That's too long. Let's go to my house," she said, touching the sleeve of my pullover rain jacket. "It's kind of a mess, but I've been to the grocery today. Do you like stir-fry?"

"Sure I like stir-fry." A current of anticipation rolled over my ribs as I began to think that it
was
me she was interested in, not the article on Arthur.

"I've got
Fanny and Alexander.
Have you seen it?"

Thea and I had rented it once, giving up after the first cassette of crazy uncles making jokes that didn't translate, dinner parties at long, abundant tables, and, ultimately, unhappiness.

"I've heard it's his most brilliant film," I said. "I'd love to see it."

This time I kept up with Alicia's driving, following her for a couple of miles to Dalecarlia and Kingshighway.

She must have known that the Zebra Room would be crowded; she'd been there the night before, after all. I had the feeling, catching a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror as we turned onto her street, that Alicia had done this all quite deliberately: the groceries, the video, the crowded restaurant. My certainty that this was the night gave me a rare confidence.

Her house was a mess, but there was something romantic about a house in transition. She brought tablecloths and blankets from a dining room cupboard and a couple of throws from an old Army chest, and we draped them over the boxes cluttering her living room.

The living room was dark, lit by a single floor lamp next to the hard Victorian couch that sat in her bay window. Loose trinkets—a silver snuffer, porcelain dogs, a cherub figurine plucking a harp—lay around the coffee table. All the pictures were down from the walls, leaning against the fireplace, the one in front a watercolor of the houses of parliament seen from across the Thames.

"I'm sorry about the state of the place," Alicia said. "I'm getting ready to move."

Newspapers and packing tape and bubble wrap were strewn on the floor. She gathered the newspapers into a pile, dropping them in a grapefruit box.

"It's charming." I popped a few cells of bubble wrap. "Almost gothic if you had some candles and spider webs."

"I do have candles, lots of them." She walked to the dining room, opened a box, and unwrapped a few three-pronged candlesticks and candles. She placed the candlesticks on top of boxes around the room, then went to the kitchen and lit one of the candles from her gas stove, dipping it wick to wick so that soon the whole room was flickering with candlelight and shadows.

I was amazed that she had taken what I'd said and made something beautiful of it.

Alicia herself seemed in transition. She was more optimistic than before, even happy, like someone anticipating her future.

"You do the rice and I'll chop," she said, opening a bottle of white wine and pouring us each a glass.

Her kitchen, small and cramped, had for the most part yet to be packed away—more evidence, I assumed, that she had been planning to bring me here all along.

When the water came to a boil and I had put the lid on the rice to let it simmer, I leaned forward on the counter, and asked, "What else?"