Storm Glass (6 page)

A combination of the beer they had consumed with lunch and their first morning of strong sunshine had made them feel sleepy. They decided to return to the room for a rest. The desk clerk smiled benignly as they passed through the lobby, his face altering to the odd grimace of a man barely able to suppress a wink. He was aware of their honeymoon status. She remembered passing through similar lobbies of similar hotels with men she had not been married to. The desk clerks there had remained tactfully aloof, the situation being less easy to classify.

After they made love John rolled over and lit a cigarette. Some of the smoke became trapped in the few beams of sun that had managed to penetrate the heavy curtains.

“Why wheelchairs?” he asked. “Why were they in wheelchairs?”

“Who?” she replied drowsily from the other side of the bed.

“Your boyfriends, your boyfriends in the dream.”

“Who knows?” she said, falling asleep. “Who ever knows in dreams?”

Later in the afternoon, when they awakened from their nap, John would decide to go for a swim. She would decide to sit on the balcony and write thank-you notes to her friends, the generous donors of “the lovely, the passable, and the impossible.” “Dear Lillian,” she would begin. Then something would capture her attention. It would be the sight of John walking down across the beach towards the water, walking on his beautiful spare legs. With his back turned he would be unaware that she was watching him. He would become smaller and smaller until, at last, he would collapse into the water. She would study the predictable repetitious motions of the waves surrounding him until, with a kind of slow horror, she would realize that the organized behaviour of the Atlantic was what the rest of her life would be, one week following another, expectations fulfilled in easy categories, and the hypnotic monotony of predictable responses. Oh, my God, she would think briefly—why does he seem to be having such a good time?

Then she would dismiss this and all other related thoughts from her mind forever and continue her thank-you note.

“Dear Lillian,” she would write, “John and I just love Blue Mountain pottery.”

W
hen she arrived at the hospital they put her in a wheelchair. Under the circumstances this seemed somewhat absurd. Certainly there was something wrong with her. Yes, something was definitely wrong with her. But nothing, as far as she knew, was wrong with her legs. At least not yet. But then she remembered. In hospitals they always put you in a wheelchair. Regardless of what the problem was, if you could still sit up they put you in a wheelchair. Probably to assure you that you were sick, even if you weren’t.

But she was sick. Just that morning she had announced to him, between sobs, “Harold, I’m sick,” and then, when he didn’t respond, “I’m
sick
, Harold. Put me in the hospital!”

After that he had sighed, put down the newspaper, and walked across the room to the telephone. She had continued to sob, her face buried in her hands, but she had left a tiny crack between her fingers so that she could see what he was doing. He
was fumbling through his address book looking for the phone number of the doctor.

“God, he’s slow!” she mumbled to no one in particular.

Eventually, and on the kindly advice of the family physician, he had taken her to the hospital. But let it be noted that he took his sweet time about it. It seemed to her that they had driven around each block six times before advancing to the next. She was probably right. He often played little tricks like this when he was taking her to the hospital. He hated taking her to the hospital. He thought it was ridiculous. She was perfectly aware of his feelings but she was also aware that they got there none the less. So there she sat in the wheelchair and there he stood at the admitting desk yawning over the same old tedious forms. She gathered together all the loathing she could muster and aimed it at the indentation just beneath his skull and in the centre of his shaved neck. To her amusement he brought his left hand up and scratched that very spot, just as he might have had an insect landed there.

She didn’t like him much and that was the truth. He didn’t like her much either, but then, what did he like? Certainly not his job at the Kleaning Cloth factory, which was boring and repetitious; certainly not his children who had, mercifully, all grown up and moved away; certainly not his dog who bit him daily, on his departure for and his arrival from the Kleaning Cloth factory, and certainly not these idiotic forms he had to fill out every single time he brought her to the hospital. He also didn’t like the itchy feeling he got at the base of his neck each time he turned his back in her presence. The terrible truth about all these things was that they were, in his eyes, ridiculous
as well. Not only was she ridiculous but everything connected to her was ridiculous: her tears were ridiculous, her meals were ridiculous, and whatever the hell was wrong with her was ridiculous. Her ridiculous doctors, in their ridiculous, kindly wisdom, could not bring themselves to tell him what was, in fact, wrong with her. Finally he stopped asking, and the minute he stopped asking he stopped caring.

Her suitcase, he knew, was filled with ridiculous negligées, which she had ordered, over the years, from the back sections of movie magazines and comic books kept especially for her hospital experiences. He handed this precious cargo to a nurse who had appeared, like a long-awaited taxi, around the corner. Then he turned to leave. Just as he was about to enter the revolving glass doors he heard the nurse chirp to his wife, “And how are we today?” He thought this was a ridiculous question to ask anyone who sat sobbing in a wheelchair.

When she was certain that he had gone she stopped sobbing. Soon she was gliding through green halls, in and out of elevators, past rooms filled with fragrant flowers. She looked forward, with great pleasure, to her lunch which she knew would arrive on silent rubber wheels and would include fluorescent pink Jello topped with Dream Whip. Once in her room she picked out a fluorescent pink negligée to wear, knowing that it would match the Jello. Then she slipped between the delicious, starched white sheets and relaxed against the smooth, firm fibre of the hospital mattress. Let the bastard pack his own Twinkies, she said to herself just before she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke an hour later to the arrival of her anticipated lunch. It was everything that she had hoped and she devoured
it with relish, right down to the last, tiny, quivering mouthful. Then she reached into the night table drawer for the two wonderful books that she had stuffed into her suitcase along with the negligées. One of these books was entitled
Lovelier After Forty
and the other
How to Develop Your Personality, A New You!
Both had been written by an ex-heavyweight champion with whom she was, of course, in love. She could never hope to meet him but she was in love with him anyway. Contact was incidental. It was the tone of his words that attracted her. They were easy words; words that made her feel warm and comfortable in a way that Harold never had. During her frequent stays at the hospital she would often spend her afternoons imagining “the champion” (as she secretly called him) bending over her like a parasol of rippling muscles and shining skin, breathing easy words into her ears.

“Many a homely younger woman has, through persistence, turned herself into a beautiful, lovable, older woman,” he would whisper, and then, “You are not alone. There
are
order and truth and eternal reality in the universe.”

And when she danced with him upon the shores of her imagination he crooned exotic instructions into the microphone of her brain.

“Draw hips slightly forward then flick backwards quickly as if to strike imaginary wall with buttocks …,” he would sigh. Then she would sigh and chant along with his ballroom litanies, while her stark, private room turned from institution to palace, to mysterious night club, to the starlight lounge, to Hernando’s Hideaway.

During this particular stay at the hospital, dancing took up some of her time but the greatest portion of her energy was
devoted to personal development; that is, the development of her NEW SELF, a self that would necessarily be lovelier after forty. There were, she knew, seven success secrets and the champion had assured her that the mastery of these would result in a young and magnetic personality. SECFIMP was the key, seven was the number:

And the greatest of these was charity.

How kind she was to the champion, sewing imaginary buttons on his skin-tight clothing and cooking up imaginary feasts in her brain. She allowed him to read newspapers or watch ball games all night and she never complained. She ironed his imaginary socks. She kept his imaginary house spotlessly clean and she never burdened him with her own insignificant problems. She showed a definite interest in his career, encouraging him to confess to her those tiny nagging moments of self-doubt that afflict every man at one stage or another. But most importantly, she wore her negligées constantly in an effort to keep herself as young and attractive as she was the day she first imagined him.

He was pleased but not entirely satisfied. He introduced her to his greatest beauty secret—a three-week plan to beautify
her bust contour. He assured her that no one was more interested in helping her with this delicate problem than he. He sympathized. He understood. Hadn’t he once been a ninety-pound weakling, who through persistent effort had raised himself to the very heights of power and personal magnetism? Hadn’t he counselled countless other women who were suffering from the misery and self-consciousness of possessing an unattractive bosom? Didn’t he know everything there was to know about the growth and tone of pectoral muscles? Of course he did. Of course he had. And he would help her by setting out a rigid schedule of exercises that she could begin that very day.

The weeks rolled by both in illusion and in reality. Nurses glided in and out of her makeshift gym. They trod softly on squeaky shoes. They carried their trays of Jello and Dream Whip with courtly precision. They wrote mysterious messages on the chart at the foot of her bed. They gathered in huddles and murmured outside her door. They brought in fresh white slabs of clean starched sheets. They distributed pills and tiny paper cups filled with lukewarm water. They administered enemas. Their wedding bands glowed on their smooth white hands. And they tactfully ignored the presence of the champion, to all intents and purposes didn’t see him at all. And so, of course, they couldn’t notice how, when the wheelchair, which would take their patient back to the lobby where Harold was waiting, appeared at the door, a man in skin-tight clothing put down his barbells and scratched the back of his neck, just as he might have had an insect landed there.

M
onsieur Delacour was certain that it was spring. “Spring is here,” he announced, silently, to himself. The thought rattled in the rafters of his brain, avoiding altogether the area phrenologists label
voice
. Monsieur Delacour hadn’t had a voice for years. Some mysterious being or event had snatched it away from him and, the truth was, Monsieur Delacour couldn’t have cared less.

He also didn’t care about his left side. Whoever or whatever had snatched away the voice part of his brain had also made off with the area that controls the left arm and leg. And so Monsieur Delacour got around with the aid of a wooden crutch and his wonderful talent for hopping. A long, thin man, who had always resembled a large wading bird, Monsieur Delacour had adjusted, years ago, to his one-legged method of transportation. It suited him just fine. Later a doctor would actually remove the non-functioning left leg. But, at the moment, it was still attached to Monsieur Delacour. Still, he didn’t care about it. Not one bit.

He did, however, care about spring, and now, despite the winter chill that still hung in the air, he knew it was spring. His stubborn belief was based on the fact that today, for the first time in six months, a tiny feeble ray of sun had entered the damp octagonal square where Monsieur Delacour’s house occupied a corner. The sunbeam had paused briefly on a mouldy stone wall and then had quickly disappeared as if it were in a hurry to visit more attractive places; where grasses, or even weeds, were conceivable.

But sun, you say, can enter enclosed spaces even in winter. Not these spaces, not those winters. The sun had barely the strength to drag itself above the horizon, never mind the bravery to invade the narrow twisting streets and the slimy paved piazzas of Monsieur Delacour’s home town. Tall mossy walls everywhere, grey-green vegetation of the parasitic variety, everyone relocated or dead of the plague in the year
1527;
that’s what it was like. We tourists love places like this. We think they look like the environments of fairy tales. We have never lived there.

But Monsieur Delacour loved it too—because it was his home town and because it provided him with a corner in which to live. Here he did what he could with his chickens and rabbits, did what he could with his wife. It had become apparent, early in his relationship with her, that whoever or whatever had snatched away the parts of his brain labelled
voice, left arm
, and
left leg
, had decided to leave the area marked
privates
totally unaltered. Hence Monsieur Delacour could do a great deal with his wife. And at the moment that we find him watching the sun on the wall he had eight children. And there would be more.

Monsieur Delacour’s wife was a handful. “She’s a handful,” said Monsieur Delacour, silently. Then he chuckled to himself.
Like everything else the chuckle rattled in the rafters of his brain, refused, as it was, the release of vocal cords. A large woman, whose remaining teeth had been seriously eroded by the constant assault of chocolate, Madame Delacour was interested in everything: from weather to underwear, from school to defecation, from witches to astronauts, from politics to wheelchairs. And she would talk to anyone; to you or me or dogs or cats or chickens or the mayor or the curé. It was all the same to her.