Out of the Blue (20 page)

“With MS, you never know what’s going to happen,” I replied. “Probably it’ll gradually improve but I’ll have some impairment. Then I’ll get to wear some truly ugly glasses. I’m just warning you.”

“We want you to come back, Ms. Bolles.” Eddie said. “They gave us another horrendous substitute—”

“You always hand our papers back with a page full of comments,” Rudy said. “She gives us one sentence.”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Like ‘This sucks. D-minus.’ Real constructive.”

Sukey jumped in. “She’s stupid? I mean, all she does is make us read two hundred pages a week like we don’t have any other subjects? And we’ve got semester finals coming up and she gets
us
to make presentations so she doesn’t have to, like, review the material. She even filed her nails last week, like it’s … So. Gross? My parents want to fire her.”

They also wanted to fire me once, I remembered, but kept it to myself. I was getting aggravated over Sukey’s portrait of my botched course. I decided to change the subject. “What’s going on otherwise?” I asked.

I wanted to see if they’d raise the issue of Duncan Reese’s departure. It was Rudy who cut to the chase.

“Dr. Reese left. There’s someone new in his office.”

“I’m glad he’s gone,” Sukey said. “Ee-yew, what a sleazoid.”

“A person can’t help it if he falls in love,” Rudy said.

“Ms. Lassiter was
supposed
to be in love with her husband.” Astonishingly, that came from Eddie.

“You don’t have control over your heart,” Rudy said in a voice of one who knew. That answered one question—he was still carrying a torch for Michelle.

“Who’s going out with whom?” I asked.

“This school is so not into the social thing,” Sukey complained. “Nobody does anything except watch stupid videos.”

“I keep asking her out, Ms. Bolles,” Eddie protested, “but she always turns me down.”

I heard another whack followed by Mark’s caustic, “I wonder why, Eddie.”

“Michelle’s with Wilson,” Eddie said, undaunted. Wilson Parker was Cameron’s sole football hero in a school that prided itself on never winning any sporting events other than chess tournaments.

“Yeah, they’re going to the winter formal.” Rudy tried, and failed, to sound upbeat.

“Don’t give up, Cootie,” Eddie said. “You never know.”

“We brought you some candy, Ms. Bolles,” Sukey said. “It’s on the table.”

“Skittles,” Mark said. They knew my weakness.

Feet were beginning to shift. I sensed it was time to wind things up. “Thanks. You know I’ll enjoy those. And thanks also for coming,” I said. “It’s wonderful to see you all.”

I could imagine them glancing at one another over this. They started trailing toward the doorway.

“It’s not the same at school,” Jennifer said. “Dr. Reese’s gone and now you’re stuck in here.”

“You have to come back soon.” Rudy’s voice. I wished that I could see his face, those brown eyes.

There was a chorus of “’Byes” and they were gone. But I heard Sukey’s stage whisper outside. “Oh. My. God? I think I’m going to
cry.
”

Which is exactly what I did. But not for long, not with a bag of Skittles lying in wait at my bedside. I ate them all.

Once I began to get my eyesight back, other symptoms cropped up in a trade-off. Two weeks into my hospitalization, I woke to find that I could make out a faint circle of light. If I passed my hand across it, there was a shadow. As the hours went by, shapes emerged from the murk. Dr. Klewanis was pleased, and launched into one of his sports analogies—the rewards of tenacity in long distance marathons or something. I didn’t quite get the connection, but nevertheless his cheer was a comfort. Later that same morning, I began to have severe cramping in my calves and then the familiar weakness that put me back into the wheelchair.

On top of all this, Joe phoned to say he was coming into the city and would stop by to see me. This would be the first time since the upstate debacle, and I’d had a lot of time to ruminate about what I was going to say when this moment finally came. I had imagined that I was prepared. But of course I wasn’t, not when I actually saw his face. Joe looked beautiful even through the distorting lenses of my science-fiction MS glasses. He leaned over the bed and gave me a long, lingering kiss. When I didn’t respond in my ordinary breathless fashion, he stood back.

“I knew there was something,” he said.

“Close the door, will you please, Joe?”

He did. Then he pulled a chair up next to the bed, where I could see him better.

“I said I’d give it a try,” I began, “when I agreed to go upstate with you.”

“You told me we were all right.”

“I know I did. But I realize now that I was only postponing the inevitable.” I hated the way I sounded. That’s what happens, I guess, when you rehearse something too much. Joe got up and started walking around, something he does when he’s agitated.

“Okay, Anna,” he said. “We might as well have this out once and for all. The way I see it, you’re making a decision for me that you have no right to make. You’re such a pathetic specimen that I can’t possibly be in love with you. Not for the long haul. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“I’m not presuming to tell you what you should feel. I can only speak for myself. I don’t know how I can make you—”

“Please don’t tell me I can never understand what it’s like to be disabled. You’ll never get what it’s like to be male. I’ll never get what it’s like to be a teacher. Nobody can ever understand what it is to live in anybody else’s shoes. It’s hard enough to figure out how to survive in your
own
shoes, for Christ’s sake. People have a lot of differences. That’s good. That’s what makes it real and interesting. We don’t have to be the same to be together.”

“But there’s such a thing as too much difference,” I said.

Somebody knocked. Joe shouted, “Go away!” and the steps retreated down the hallway. He went to lock the door and came back, twisting the chair around so he was facing me over the back of it. The slats made a barrier between us.

“You think I haven’t thought about this,” Joe said, “that I’m just brainlessly walking into it?” I didn’t answer. “After I met you in the gallery,” he went on, “I spent weeks mulling it over. I told myself I wasn’t involved yet and I could still choose not to pursue it. I read everything I could get my hands on about MS, and we all know it’s not a happy story. But I also realized that what happened between us was rare and amazing. What you could mean in my life, and I wasn’t wrong. Goddamn it, Anna.”

He stuck his finger out at me and went on. “I want you to explain to me why two people who are so completely connected to one another can possibly live apart.”

For somebody who didn’t talk much about his feelings, he was on quite a roll.

“Because one of them needs it so badly,” I answered.

There was a long silence and then I continued, haltingly, but at least now I was speaking from the depths of myself and not just rehashing some glib speech I’d been reciting for days. “I’ve had almost six years to figure out a way to live with MS,” I said. “Plenty of times it seemed easier to just throw myself off a bridge. Pardon the image.” Full circle, back to his photograph in the gallery that first summer day. I could tell by his ironic grimace that he’d thought of it, too.

“I’m sorry if I sound maudlin or self-pitying,” I went on. “But the fact is, when I met you that day, I had finally come to terms with my life and my future. I was even pretty happy.”

“I screwed that up, did I?” Joe asked. His voice was an even mix of sadness and sarcasm.

“Yes.”

“By dragging you back into the world?”

“Being with you makes me feel like a walking sack of symptoms!” That was cruel, but I couldn’t seem to get it across to him. “I didn’t dwell on my illness, not even when I had a relapse. I just got on with my job and the life I’d carved out for myself. But once you showed up, I started having major regrets again. I kept thinking about all the things we couldn’t have together—like a normal sex life and a normal marriage, and kids. What I regret the most is that I hauled you into my denial. But I can’t do it, Joe. It’s just too painful.”

“I want to be with you the way you are and the way you’ll become,” Joe said. “If I can do it, why can’t you?”

“Because you’re not the one who’s sick. I hate having to worry about leaking all over the bed when we make love. It can get a lot worse, too. My intestines will be next. You want to be changing my diapers in the middle of sex?”

“Look, Anna, when my grandmother was dying of colon cancer, I shoved suppositories up her rectum twice a day. It didn’t change the way I felt about her. Your shit is just another part of your body.”

“Did you ever think that maybe I’m a replacement for her?” I asked.

“And maybe you believe every male is a jerk just like your father,” he shot back.

We sat in silence for several seconds.

“If I’m the kind of person who needs to take care of someone,” he said quietly, “is that so terrible?”

“I can’t help it, Joe,” I said.

He was staring into my face. Even through my strange lenses, I knew I’d never seen his eyes so dark. He got up and carefully replaced the chair in its niche against the wall. My heart started crashing in my ears. Watch him, look at him, it’s the last time, I told myself. Burn it into your brain so you never forget the beauty of him. The grace of him. The goodness and miracle of him.

“’Bye, Anna Marie,” he said. And he walked out the door. I strained to hear his footsteps all the way to the elevator. I told myself he wasn’t really gone until the elevator bell dinged. I could still call him. I could still begin screaming from the bottom of my soul, “Stop him! Stop that man!”

But I didn’t. I took off my glasses and laid them on the table and waited until at last I heard the little bell sound. It tolls for thee, Anna, I thought. It’s over.

When the newspaper arrived with breakfast the next morning, I noticed the date: January 16. The anniversary of my father’s departure. It was a day I had always remembered to mark in some fashion. One year I wore one of his old neckties to school. Once I made a little shrine of photos and artifacts—a cigarette lighter, a
Playbill
from a musical he’d once taken me to, a Tootsie Roll—a miniature one like the kind he always carried around in his pockets. I lit candles and prayed on my knees that he’d come home again. Then when I was fifteen, Patsy and I collected the videos he’d produced and systematically yanked out the tape from every one. It made a mighty impressive pile of mediocre acting and predictable dialogue. Then we wrapped a Ken doll in that same old necktie and skewered it with half a million needles. All of it went into a pillowcase and down the chute into the garbage compactor.

I stared at the IV in my arm, which was the color of a ripe plum from so many punctures. It seemed very clear to me now. With that private ritual so long ago, I had sealed my own fate. My father frolicked in the playing fields of California while I lay impaled here in punishment for my own vicious brutality. I was bad. Always had been.

I looked up toward the foot of my bed where a row of nurses had suddenly appeared. I didn’t recognize them, and it was strange that they had arrived so silently.

“You’re not the regulars,” I said, squinting at them through my special glasses. Their uniforms were white leather, an extravagance, I thought, given this era of HMOs.

They raised their forefingers simultaneously. “Evil girl,” they said. “Disgusting girl.” I watched as their hair, even their eyelashes and brows, sprouted like barbs on a cactus. Suddenly I realized that these weren’t nurses at all but prosecutors come to exact vengeance on behalf of all those people I had wished ill over my lifetime.

“How did you get in here?” I cried. “It’s not visiting hours!” In lock-step, they swayed toward me with thorns rattling. They smelled foul with the rotten-egg stink of sulfur.

I tore at my IV, sending a spectacular fountain of blood spurting over the sheets. I tumbled onto the floor and tried to run but my legs were too weak. The nurses reached for me, laughing at my pitiful attempt to escape. I sliced my head on the edge of the door as I fell and then everything went dark again as they caught me and buried me alive in a suffocating hole. There wasn’t even a coffin, just heavy clods of dirt that clogged my mouth when I opened it to scream. I could barely breathe and all I could hear was the high-pitched howl of my own blood coursing through my veins. I willed myself to die—anything to release myself from this hell. Bad. Bad. Bad Anna.

“Anna. Anna.” It was too bright. After the darkness of my grave it was painful to open my eyes. But at least I was out of the hole.

“Did I die?” I asked. Perhaps this drifting sensation meant I had at last been purified and sent on to another easier life, a life with no MS, no loss, just peace.

“You want me to close the blinds?”

“Yes, please.”

I risked opening my eyes a crack and saw Dr. Klewanis sitting beside my bed. I made a quick survey to make sure there weren’t any evil harpies hanging around.

“You’ve had a reaction to the drugs,” he said. I tried to grasp the words but they seemed like a puzzle. “Do you understand me, Anna?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you remember coming to the hospital? You couldn’t see.”

“Yes.” And then I remembered a worse thing. “No more Joe,” I said. A cry seeped out of my mouth.

“Would you like me to call him?”

“No,” I said. “Where’s Ma?”

“In the hall outside. I just need to take a look at you first. All right?”

He had never spoken to me this way, as if I were breakable. But I felt myself gradually coming back into focus, like a photograph floating in its chemical bath. “Who won the game?” I asked him.

“What game?” He was looking into my eyes with that dreaded mega-wattage flashlight.

“Any game.”

“Philadelphia,” he said bitterly. “Bad calls.”

He leaned away and I took a look at my aching arm. It appeared I’d had a run-in with somebody’s Cuisinart.

“You got rid of your IV,” Dr. Klewanis said.

“What am I on now?”

“Lower dose of steroids and a little something for the mood. Sorry about the bad trip.”

“I got my sight back.”

He stood. “Okay, sport. I’m sending your mother in. She’s been what you might call a trifle anxious.”

I closed my eyes for maybe longer than I thought, and when I opened them again, Ma was there. She looked haggard but gave me a smile. She’d shoved the table across the bed and put a plate with some kind of cake on it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Tropical fruit cake. It’s got mangoes and papayas. The nurses say it reminds them that warm weather still exists somewhere.”

I realized that I hadn’t spoken with Ma since Joe’s visit. This wasn’t going to be easy but at least I was under the influence of some drug that gave me a pleasant what-the-hell feeling. It made me understand addiction.

“Nice to have you back,” Ma said. “You feel okay?”

“Dandy,” I said. For someone who’s been buried alive. I pinched off a snippet of cake and chewed. We both knew I was doing it for show.

“Joe called the bakery to see how you’re doing,” she said. “He sounded like shit.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re not paying attention. You stoned?”

“Broke up,” I said.

“What.” It wasn’t a question exactly, just another of Ma’s symphonies of meaning in one syllable.

“We broke up.”

“You or him.”

“It was mutual.”

“Like hell it was.”

“I gave it the old college try.”

“If you can’t make it with Joe, you can’t make it with anybody.”

“That’s correct.”

“Single forever.”

She was silent for a long while. This was unexpected. I had imagined outrage and what I got was a face that had suddenly acquired a few more creases. She went to the window.

“Would you do something for me?” she asked, turned away from me.

“If I can.”

“See a psychiatrist.”

“I don’t think so, no,” I said. “It just isn’t for me. Everything’s so much harder to bear.”

I watched her absorb the blow as she had so many others. After a moment she squared her shoulders and swung around. “Well, I’ll miss him. He was a goddamn saint, only a lot more fun.”

“You want to take the rest of the cake to that kid next door? I’m not all that hungry.”

I left the hospital in my wheelchair a week later. Alone in the apartment, thoughts of Joe propelled me into a kind of panic. So despite the fact that there were icy patches and that New York taxicabs were notoriously casual about crushing disabled people, I took daily forays into the urban winter. I wheeled myself up and down Third Avenue, stopping to look in the windows and to chat compulsively with the dry cleaner and the deli owner.

My neighborhood felt unfamiliar, as did everyone in it. The druggist appeared surly, almost menacing. I asked him if he’d grown that moustache recently, and with a startled look, he told me he’d worn one for fifteen years. I told Ma I didn’t like the ugly color of the new paint on the bakery window trim, but there’d been no paint job. With all this pointless babbling at people and zooming around, I quickly wore myself out and was forced to retreat to my room where I stared at my wallpaper and curtains and bookcases and realized that they weren’t the same either. When I said good-bye to Joe, colors dulled, events lacked interest, nothing much mattered. I told myself that I’d get over it. After all, I’d adjusted to MS, hadn’t I? It was simply a matter of patience.

“Did you feel depressed and strange when Dad left?” I asked Ma. We were watching a video of
Barton Fink.
I had discovered that movies by the Coen brothers coincided perfectly with my bleak state of mind.

“No. Relieved. Why?”

“Just curious.” My left leg did a little hop by way of punctuation.

“You sure you’re ready for work?”

“Oh yeah.” I was depending on my job to save me. From the anxiety, the loneliness, the conviction that without Joe nothing meaningful would ever happen to me again.

I had arranged to start the next week. With a new semester beginning, perhaps I could repair some of the damage inflicted by my substitute. By prearrangement, Grant picked me up in my lobby.

“Whoa, you look wiped out,” he said. “You sure you’re ready for this?”

“Why, thank you so very much,” I said. I didn’t tell him I’d woken up at five and lay there for two hours trying not to wonder what city Joe was in.

“I forgot how long it takes to get ready when your feet don’t work,” I told him. “Can we pick up some coffee on Lex?”

“Sure, honeybaby. My, but aren’t those perky little Lana Turner glasses?”

“Lana Turner didn’t wear glasses,” I said, giving my chair a mighty shove to get up the curb at Eighty-fifth Street.

“You’re not going to quibble, are you?” he asked. “I hate it when you’re quibbly.”

“I’m nervous about work, that’s all.” People glared at us for taking up too much space on the sidewalk, but Grant knew I liked him to walk beside me so we could talk. He held the door while I zipped into the
Refill,
a coffee dispensary whose only asset was its wide doorway. Despite the fact that I was directly in the counterman’s line of vision, he looked up at Grant.

“I’ll have the Colombian, black,” I said.

“To go or to stay?” the clerk asked Grant.

Why is it that if you’re sitting in a wheelchair, people assume you require a spokesperson? This guy was no more than thirty inches away from my face. It was far more trouble for him to crane his neck up at Grant.

“To go,” I replied.

Again, the next question went straight over the top of my head. “She want sugar?”

“The asshole wants to know if you’d like sugar,” Grant said to me.

“Hey,” the clerk objected.

“Please tell the man no sugar, won’t you please?” I said to Grant, handing him two dollars. “And would you be so kind as to pass this along? I’m simply too invisible today.” I was instantly sorry. The guy didn’t have a clue so what was the point in torturing him? Grant opened his mouth. “Close that thing, Grant,” I said in my sternest teacher voice. “We’re out of here.”

“Don’t you
dare
tip,” Grant bellowed, and we sailed out.

“He can’t help it,” I said.

“I hope he gets his dick caught in the cappuccino machine.”

“You must have a grotesque fantasy life. When’s the next faculty meeting?”

“Yesterday,” Grant said.

“When were you planning to tell me about it?”

“When you asked.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Chubb’s on the selection committee for the new headmaster.”

I was dumbfounded. Who would trust that slug with such a crucial task?

“He’s also put in his bid to run the English department when Mary Feeny retires.”

“But she’s not going for another couple of years.”

“Well, her daughter just lost her husband. Cancer, and she’s got little kids in the wilds of Massachusetts. Mary wants to help out.”

“You couldn’t have broken this to me before?”

“Oh, hell, Anna, you know I’m a coward when it comes to this stuff.”

“You mean when it comes to giving me bad news.”

“All right, yes. I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” He was getting excited. Steam poured out of his mouth like Puff the Magic Dragon on bad drugs.

“Think they’d hire a crippled teacher at Dalton?” I asked.

We paused at the end of the block. The younger kids were hurrying inside while the older ones hung out on the sidewalk, many of them concealing cigarettes.

“Okay, Grant. I can take it from here. Call me tonight, will you?”

“Sorry to be so clumsy,” he said. He kissed his finger and pressed it to the top of my head. Then he disappeared through the front door. I averted my eyes from the gate where Joe had stood when he picked me up on the motorcycle.
Swallow it down, Anna,
I told myself. That lump will just have to go.

I wheeled up to Michelle. She saw me too late, and while trying to ditch her cigarette brushed Sukey with the hot end.

“Ow-wah!” Sukey yelped.

But I was too pleased at the sight of them to complain. Michelle had obviously put on weight over the past month, maybe even ten pounds. She looked great.

“Ms. Bolles!” Her face was a confused jigsaw of guilt over the cigarette, delight in seeing me, and dismay at the wheelchair and strange glasses. I held out my hand and she took it. No gloves on this frozen day and I could see she was still biting her nails. “Are you okay? I mean, oh. My. God. We had the
worst
teacher. We so didn’t learn one thing.”

“I heard you were in the dance recital,” I said.

Sukey, rubbing her cigarette burn, piped up. “She was amazing, Ms. Bolles. Everybody said so. There was somebody from a dance company there who wants her. They didn’t even ask Jennifer.”

“I felt weird about that,” Michelle said.

“Well, congratulations,” I said. “We’d better get inside.” There were only a few stragglers left on the street, and my inner clock told me the bell was going to ring before we made it upstairs to homeroom. “You girls go ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I waited inside the lobby for a moment, soaking in the atmosphere, listening to the sounds of shouts and running feet, and smelling the mix of steam heat, wet wool, and sweat. It saddened me to think of Duncan Reese’s office occupied by someone else. How could Duncan be feeling, with a stranger usurping that battered leather chair he had occupied for two decades? I hadn’t realized until this moment how much I had depended on his support. I felt vulnerable and ridiculous in my wheelchair.

On my way past, I glanced at the notice board just to check out the current climate—a batch of flyers decrying cruelty to animals with photos of mutilated creatures in traps. An index card tacked to the bottom caught my eye. Scrawled on it in red pen was the observation:
BULLETIN: Martine reached her goal! She’s a C-cup!
Ah, it was good to be back. I ripped it off and stuffed it in my pocket for filing with other such treasures.