The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (18 page)

By rights, Jack should have headed west when his wife, Alex, left him, but they lived in California so he drove east, folding down the visor each morning against the sun. He didn’t wait to find a cheap motel at night, just pulled off the road and slept cramped in the car a few hours. At dawn he thrust a stick of Right Guard up under his shirt—the rock ’n’ roll shower—and drove until he found coffee. He thought that traveling alone was like being in therapy—the things you found out about yourself.

Speeding across the Bonneville Salt Flats, Jack played car golf, weaving in and out of the lanes trying to roll the Ping-Pong ball in the passenger seat well into the Styrofoam coffee cup that was on its side after spilling out most of the coffee. Jack was good at this.

Not that he’d been invited, but he was, he realized, going to New York, to the home of his friend the doctor, the closest thing to rehab he could find.

Jack signaled and changed lanes at the exit for the Long Island Expressway, and remembered Alex’s directions, the way she would say “then turn left six blocks before the liquor store.” He’d phoned from the last gas station. The doctor said they would be glad to see him. Jack had to ask, “Does Vicki still talk about feelings all the time?”

Vicki had given him a diary one Christmas, a blank book that stayed blank, and which Jack had titled “Jackie’s Log of Feelings.” Vicki was a good mimic and did a dead-on imitation of Jack as if he were a psychiatrist wincing at a patient’s confession, ordering a depressed person to “just snap out of it” or leaning forward in his therapist’s chair saying, simply, “Handle it.”

Jack had offered to take them out to dinner, but the doctor wanted to barbecue, so Jack stopped at a market and bought three big steaks on the way. It was too soon for even Vicki to try to fix him up is what he told himself when he considered buying four.

In summer, the town was a beach resort. In realtor parlance, Vicki and the doctor lived on the wrong side of the highway, but it was still only a five-minute drive to the water.

At the door, Vicki gave Jack a kiss and a bath towel, and pointed him down the hall, which made a thick gold bracelet slide the length of her forearm to her wrist. “It’s one of those ‘Honey, I’m sorry’ gifts,” she said, and Jack said, “Nice. Get him angry again.”

The doctor had a cold beer for him when Jack came out of the shower smelling of mandarin orange–scented soap. They showed him around the house, an Arts and Crafts cottage built in 1932. Since his last visit, they’d replaced the previous owner’s insane wallpaper (shelves of books behind chicken wire) and pried off the bedroom floors’ linoleum, the pattern of which was a photograph of carpeting, revealing wide planks of clean pine.

“We put up a detached garage,” the doctor said, adding, for the nth time, “it doesn’t care if you park in it or not.” The tour concluded on the redwood deck the doctor had built himself.

“Things are looking pretty swep’-up around here,” Jack said.

Vicki, in faded cutoffs, kicked off espadrilles and took the red butterfly chair. She observed that Jack always said he was on his way out when he called. “It’s like you can’t make an entrance until you’ve established your exit.”

Jack hated for people to analyze his behavior. He hated for them to notice it. He moved to give the doctor a hand with the steaks and managed to fork one off the grill and into the coals. “Oops,” he said, fishing for it. “Mine.”

“Doctors can’t say ‘Oops,’ ” the doctor said. “Doctors say ‘
There.
’ ”

Jack had resisted the temptation to run his latest symptoms by the doctor, but when the doctor asked him how he was, Jack told the truth about the shoulder that had betrayed him. The doctor was in orthopedics and so gifted at treating sports injuries that he had become a team physician, retained to see to football stars. It looked glamorous to Jack—his friend going out onto the field and examining the swelling million-dollar knees. But it was really “like veterinary medicine,” the doctor had told him. “You can’t get a history from those guys.”

“I’ll give you a shot of cortisone after dinner,” the doctor said.

Jack was glad Vicki had gone to check on the corn and hadn’t heard him use the word
betray.
When she joined them back on the deck, Jack asked Vicki if she would get him another beer.

“Why? Your leg broken, hon?”

“Bring me one, too,” the doctor told Jack.

They ate around a redwood picnic table with a pole poked through the center for an umbrella. There were pink flamingos on the plastic tumblers and chili peppers painted on the rims of the plates. “In a year or so,” the doctor said, “we’ll have a swimming pool to look out onto.”

Their aging dog, Banker, grayed at the temples and muzzle, with his air of a retired cruise director, got up from under the table to check out the new dog that had moved in next door. Jack and the doctor got going about the Knicks until Vicki mimed the act of sawing, sawing off her place from their part of the table. She had learned the gesture from Jack. When she had his attention, she said, “I want you to see my friend Trina. It’s not like that—she’s a psychic.”

Vicki’s favorite subject after feelings was the paranormal.

“You know, I bribed the doctor here to go to a hypnotist to quit smoking,” she said. “If he’d have given it a chance, it might have worked.”

“The guy didn’t swing a watch on a chain,” the doctor told Jack. “He just talked to me really slowly. He
bored
me into a half-trance, something you know I can get at any goddamn dinner party.”

“Trina has movie star clients,” Vicki said. “She looks like a movie star herself. She’ll come to your house.”

“I had an out-of-body experience before I left,” Jack said, playing with her. “And it was good,” he said, reflective, “’cause I could help myself pack.”

Vicki stood up to clear the table.

“It looks like Vicki here is doing all the work,” the doctor pointed out.

Jack leaned back in his chair and drawled, “
I
have no problem with Vicki doing all the work.”

“Jack?”

“Vick?”

“I used to think a lot of you.”

She brought out a stack of dessert plates and a string-tied bakery box. “You want to do a line of pie?”

“Dogs heard you,” the doctor said. Banker had returned from telling off the neighbors for starting their car. He had with him the puppy from next door, a clumsy mutt named Boss that it had fallen to Vicki to train.

“He’s been gaining a pound a day,” Vicki said, admiring.

“He’s a miracle of cell division,” the doctor said, scooting him over to Jack.

Jack examined the pup’s chest and belly. “Where do the batteries go?”

Over bourbon-pecan pie, Vicki asked about the breakup and Jack tried to change the subject. When she prefaced a remark with “She wasn’t nice enough to me not to tell you this,” Jack could tell she was in his corner.

None of it was news to him, but he could hear what Vicki was saying. Not understand “where she was coming from”—he could literally hear her voice. Toward the end, he hadn’t been able to hear his wife. When he asked her a question and cared about the answer, he could not seem to keep his attention fixed on her. “What do you mean?” he would say to Alex and hope she would repeat the gist of it.

Jack didn’t have to say anything to Vicki because, at their feet, the puppy let pass audible gas.

“The bloom is off the rose,” Jack said.

“The plug is on the nose,” the doctor said. Both men waved their hands in front of their faces.

A beetle flew into Vicki’s cleavage; she stood to flick it out, and the doctor said you couldn’t blame it for trying.

Jack said, “What movie star does your psychic friend look like tomorrow?”

Jack woke to the sound of his car alarm. He went to the kitchen to look out onto the driveway and found Vicki leaning on a counter, laughing.

“You missed it,” she said. “Boss went over to pee on your tire? He lifted his leg and set off the alarm and toppled right over.”

Jack disconnected the alarm—Boss had hidden in shame—and went back inside the house for coffee.

Vicki was running a roll of masking tape up and down an arm of her cardigan, picking up fur. She handed it to Jack to do her back. She said, “Breakfast?”

“What’ve we got?”

“If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs—” Vicki said, and waited for Jack to join her on “if we had some eggs.”

Jack looked at her samples of countertop materials—a kitchen renovation was next—and watched her chop a pepper for an eggless omelet.

“There are appliances that do that for you.”

“But I hate to move into the twentieth or twenty-first century, whichever this is,” Vicki said, and reached to turn up a song of busted romance that was on the kitchen radio. Jack listened until an ad for some lame kind of career came on. He had a small graphics business that ran itself; every ad he saw or heard made him think: Is this what I’m supposed to do next?

Vicki worked three days a week at the hospital as a physical therapist, sometimes carrying out her husband’s instructions. She taught people how to walk again, helped them recover a grip. She gave a surpassing deep-heat massage, the doctor told Jack, and Vicki herself had several times offered this to him. Jack had been afraid he might
respond
and embarrass them both, so had always begged off. But this morning, when she saw him straining to look over his shoulder at the dogs, he let her work on the back of his neck.

When she finished, he said, “I’ve got something for you.”

He opened his gym bag and took a tiny box out of a zippered nylon pocket. Inside, under a layer of cotton, were gold earrings that each framed a piece of round onyx in the center.

“You have pierced ears, right?” he said.

“I love them,” Vicki said, putting them on. She moved to a hallway mirror and pulled her tangled hair away from her face.

“They came with blue stones or red ones, too,” Jack said. “The salesgirl kept pushing me to get a color, but I’m a big black man.” He snorted and said, “Yeah, I’m Denzel Washington.”

Vicki touched her ears and turned from side to side for Jack to see. “Trina’s coming at two,” she told him. “I’ll be out of the way.”

“What do I do with her?” Jack said.

“
She’ll
tell
you
,” Vicki said, and left for the hospital.

Jack was wearing a T-shirt Alex had brought him from last year’s sales conference. It said across the front:
THE DAN
T
EL GROUP COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE
1993. His gym bag said: the
DAN
T
EL GROUP THE LEADERSHIP ADVANTAGE
1992, and—no telling why since they didn’t have a child—there was a baby’s bib in the glove compartment with another go-getter slogan. (Nineteen eighty-nine—
BUILDING ON THE BEST
—was the only year in their years together that Alex hadn’t brought Jack back a souvenir. That was the year the company had tried to cut corners. Alex’s budget for the conference had been reduced, and the motivational speaker she’d been able to afford was the backup quarterback for a losing team. He had, it turned out, one speech for all occasions and had earnestly urged the management team of The DanTel Group to “stay in school.”)

Jack hoped he had one clean T-shirt left. He had packed up a box of his clothes to take along, but instead of loading it into the car, he had left it beside a Dumpster, saying, “This’ll show
me
! This shirt I wore last summer?—I won’t be wearing
it
again.”

Jack shaved and put on an old blue shirt that Alex had told him played up his own blue eyes. He worked a snakeskin belt that belonged to the doctor through the loops of his jeans, then took it off in case it scrambled signals to the psychic. He practiced a clear countenance in the mirror, reminded himself that this was not a date, and smoked a joint while watching a sports roundup show on TV.

The psychic, who was only as spooky as any beautiful girl, had barely had time to begin when Alex called from California to tell Jack that her mother had had a stroke. Jack asked if she wanted him to come back, but Alex said no, she wanted to talk to him was all.

Jack apologized to the psychic as he walked her to the door. He asked if he could take her to dinner the next night in lieu of a reading.