The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (65 page)

Poor Ian—how could he ever have expected to protect her when he couldn’t begin to protect even himself? In just one instant that evening Rosie had been shown both of them with perfect clarity.

“Look at that,” he said, as water poured from the sky. “Just what we need.”

If he’d actually cared about her he wouldn’t have taken her along to meet those people. At least, not in the condition she happened to be in. Because by the time you see there’s a decision to be made, you can be pretty sure it’s a decision you already have made.

Rosie thinks so often these days of people, children, who have had to leave the country where they live. What it must be, that last morning, pressing every detail into your brain to preserve it on your long journey—the journey that’s going to last for the rest of your life. The color of the light that day, or the feel of the air, a certain little shrub in the park you always pass on your way home from school, the tender little waves that reach out for the boat as you embark—all those precious things which once breathed and lived in your casual attention, no better than powdery old petals pressed in a book: you’ve left your country for good.

That last night, proceeding through her bedtime ritual as always, she thought at every step:
This.
And
this.
Her cup of good cappuccino sat in front of her, and the rubbing alcohol, and the glass of Evian water. Her hairbrush was waiting, and the clean, clean sheets.

Opening the white-paper bindle; pouring, more carefully than ever, the contents into her silver spoon; drawing the water all the way up into the syringe and discharging it gently over the pure white powder. The match bursting into flame, the softly boiling solution, the needle pointing heavenward to coax the air bubble up and out, the bubble moving higher, higher…the precious liquid glittering for a moment at the tip. The rubber around her arm, good and tight, the pumped vein rising, the seeking needle, the stunning penetration, the drop of hungry blood, released to commune in a faint whorl with the contents of the barrel and plunge back into her body, step by teasing step: the first floating radiance with its delicious burn, the second, and, finally, the third, lighting up the splendid corridors.

After swabbing the site of the injection and sluicing the pure water through the syringe, she put the cap on the bright point for good. She brushed her hair over and over, watching her reflection, went into the bedroom, and lay down to sleep, as if on a bier.

In the morning, Ian gave her a little kiss, checked his E-mail, and went out on rounds.

Rosie had planned well; she’d contacted Jamie, checked schedules, looked at maps, and so on, but it came on quickly, the outrage of her body. It was as if she’d swallowed in her sleep a sleeping bird that awoke, then panicked, and by the middle of the day all those plans of hers were rearing up in shivering columns, swaying and crashing back down. Could her hands actually have been shaking the way she saw them shake? And what on earth was happening with her legs!

How did she get out that afternoon? Practically crawling, through the air’s hammer blows and sirens, her vision all fretted and dazzled, falling away in glaring planes, past the razor-sharp, poison-colored blades of grass growing by the house…

How far was her foot from the step, the step from the ground? How big was the doorknob? She’d had to jam her things into the duffel with her fist. In the cab to the station, for all she knows she was screaming.

She was a reverse pioneer. The train brought her in from the western edge, steaming east toward the plains. The settled territories flickered by the window like film, into oblivion, as the vacuum of Rosie’s brain stripped off the names of the towns, and then the towns themselves.

She stopped for some days, as she’d planned, to let the worst of it come up and drain away before she presented herself to Jamie. Not much she remembers about
that
: a room up some stairs, stumbling down to get Cokes, or once in a while, when the nausea gave over a bit, a sandwich; cold sweats in sheets that absorbed nothing and slid around on the mattress.

The configuration of wrinkles on the sheet, the untied shoelace of the waiter downstairs in the coffee shop, the little stain on the plastic lid of her Coke, the sickle of dust on the bureau, echoing the curve of the ice bucket—details hung at the forefront of her attention, like inadequately assimilated commands. In the halls, the Asian maids congregated by their filthy canvas bins full of used linens, talking for hour after hour in a cool, rippling language that blended with the noise of machines working on the pavement outside and of the televisions in the nearby rooms. Sometimes it seemed to Rosie that she could almost understand, that if she could only assemble the elements of her brain properly…and then sometimes a slippery phosphorescence would irradiate the sounds, and she did understand: they were whispering stories, complicated, tiresome, and interminable, about talking animals, underground kingdoms…

One morning, she woke up to silence. The thrashing wings inside her had drawn back, folding into a painful little lump in the region of her lungs. She stood looking at the long mirror in the thin sunshine that came through the window. Well, well; so this is what the person who had risen from the bed looked like—skim-milk pale, much younger than she really is. The drug-becalmed marble glow of her skin has moderated into a petal-like softness, as if she’d just been born. Her body is thin, unmuscular, childish—unmarked except for the raised, red dots on her arm.

How had she ever had the nerve to call Jamie, she wonders. She wouldn’t have it now. Fortunately, though, at the time she’d been desperate; fortunately, she hadn’t been thinking clearly. And who else could she have called, anyway—Mona McCauley? With her house and her husband and her dog and her child? Lexi Feld?

Jamie was two years older, and he had been kind, all through school. It had been obvious that he’d be going on to college and obvious that Rosie wouldn’t; God knows, her mother had never had that kind of money, and, assuming her father did, it would go, presumably, to his younger children, wherever. So there’d always been plenty of differences between her and Jamie, but there are differences which when you’re young, she thinks, run all up and down your life that you still assume are just incidental.

After school, Jamie had gone on to college, and then to art school, and by then Rosie had pretty much lost track of him. Bits of news came back, through one person or another. Jamie was still painting. But not (people were quick to point out) making any money at it. And there was Vincent. Who moved in, and, fairly recently, had moved out.

With every phone call Rosie had made to trace Jamie, it became more of a certainty that she really was going to leave. But leaving was one thing, she realized when the taxi let her out at a real house, and she rang the real bell of Jamie’s apartment, and she walked up the two flights of real steps, and arriving was another.

Of course you could forget about your past, but then—how funny—there’s someone on your doorstep ten years later:
Hey, didn’t you drop something?
She and Jamie looked at each other as if they were studying a map, an aerial map of all the years that the mirror Rosie had studied earlier was not able to see.

In the morning, Rosie awoke in a dark-blue room. She was in Jamie’s apartment. Yes, and the room, obviously, must have been Vincent’s. There was nothing in it except a bed, a light, and a painting. A door opened into a small closet with a few shelves and a place to hang some clothes. Rosie has since noted that the painting is the only one in the apartment. It’s by Jamie; this she knows from the signature. Most likely, it was a gift to Vincent.

Rosie paused in the kitchen doorway. Jamie was sitting at the table, beyond a pillar of dusty light, drinking coffee, and just staring out. He was wearing a heavy kimono—faded red silk, covered with designs of clouds and birds.

Impossible: Her ten-years-later self, in underpants and a tank top, standing at the door of a place that’s Jamie’s kitchen. But maybe that’s what life is always like. All the time, for everyone. Maybe any moment you could say, this is normal; it’s just what’s happening. And you could equally well say, this is the strangest thing that ever could be. Probably so—it’ll just depend on where you start the story.

She stood for a moment, shivering, feeling her body taking up space, pushing the air around in ways that were unfamiliar to the room, sending off its tiny, continuous demands. Jamie’s face had changed so much, really; by more than just time. Well, but what would that be—
just time
? “Morning,” she said.

Jamie glanced up. “Morning,” he said. He indicated her arm. “Very chic.” Then he wandered out and returned with another kimono—also heavy old silk, but blue, with designs of waves and flowering trees. “Here. Say yes to shame.”

He sat again, folded his arms, and rested his head on the table. It looked as though he were exhausted, too, although, throughout the long night, Rosie had pictured him luxuriously asleep in the next room—his silky hair, his comfortable, appealing body, which her body had had sex with a few times back in high school, before Mr. Tomlinson showed up and settled the matter for Jamie once and for all.

Jamie opened his eyes and considered Rosie in the kimono. “O.K.,” he said, and sighed. “Well, that’s all right.”

He took her through the frozen city. The neighborhood, with its Polish, Greek, and Hungarian bakeries, the hardware store, the German butcher shop, the fish market, the bank, the stationery store. Then farther afield to bars with sad pianos, and coffee shops that stayed open all night, to a bookstore with its webs of old light, to several little neon-festooned night clubs in a jaunty row, and to the downtown, where he and Rosie are working now, with its gentlemanly old office buildings and shining towers. What has all this to do with her? Once, glimpsing a cluster of blue needle caps discarded in a gutter, she is blinded for a moment; she might as well have glimpsed a company of angels departing the earth forever. Yes, this was where she lived; this barren, icy planet was where she lived now.

She was still feeling far from recovered—though who was to say what “recovered” felt like? Her legs were still subject to involuntary actions; her body rebelled against its new unprivileged condition with small colds, infections, and rashes. Going to the corner for ice cream, washing a dish or two—for the first weeks anything might take her most of the day. She’d get lost no farther than a block from the apartment. Things slipped from her grasp, as if her hands had been confiscated and exchanged for paws. No amount of clothing was adequate to keep her warm or to locate her in space. She spent most of her time in Vincent’s room, in bed, wearing Vincent’s kimono. It was fantastically difficult to bathe; the prospect of water next to her skin brought her nerves right up to the surface, and Jamie’s best towel could have been sandpaper. Her hair became stiff with grime. By way of encouragement, Jamie bought her a little rubber duck. She saw its sunny shadings and its calm, blue eyes, and she rocked unsteadily on her feet. “Jamie—?” she said.

“Drug-crazed twisto,” he said, and put an arm around her.

They went on the little train, winding quietly among lines of laundry and fire stairs. They stared into back windows at people staring out at them just as they stare out from Jamie’s kitchen window at the people going by on the train. Rosie leaned back and closed her eyes. A voice near her said to someone, “This is my stop.”

“How does he know?” Rosie said.

“Well, I guess it’s on his card,” Jamie said.

Rosie opened her eyes.

“His card, the little card they give you that tells you what your stop is.” Jamie looked at her. “Oh, didn’t you get one?”

The train is audible from Vincent’s room, but the tracks run by the back of the apartment, just outside the window of the kitchen. The people on the train stare into the window as they go by, and Rosie and Jamie stare back.
Who are they? Who are they?

Beyond the tracks are the backs of other houses, hung with a dirty lace of fire stairs. From Vincent’s window and from Jamie’s what you see are the fronts of the houses—turrets and complicated shingles—all dilapidated, with the oily gold light spreading out at night in the windows, and the grape-colored shadows.

Nights, Rosie fades in and out, echoing with footsteps and whispers, traces of invisible inhabitants. She lies awake in Vincent’s room with its peeling, dark-blue paint, and the city breaks up into pieces, like a puzzle. All the various neighborhoods that Jamie showed her, the little train, the narrow tracks with street lights drooping over them tenderly, like dying flowers, this tiny, dark-blue room, the downtown—that shining wedge that pushes up from flatness and drops off in a sheer glass-and-steel cliff by the water. It floats through the darkness now in a bright sphere. The windows are cold and starry; green tendrils wind around the bed.

The pieces of the city stream off into the darkness, and even in her sleep, the watery, transparent kind of sleep she has these days, Rosie listens for the little train to start up in the morning, swinging through the city, fitting the pieces back together.

There are some things, Rosie thinks, that she ought to have dealt with long before she did. To be fair, of course, she’s had her hands full just standing upright. Just trying to work up some traction. Just dealing with the fact of herself, which pops up in front of her every day when she awakes, like some doltish puppet. So certain other worrisome items have just slid right off the agenda.

Jamie didn’t make a living from his paintings, it was true. He did other kinds of painting, Rosie learned, to make money. From time to time he’d spend a few days or a week on the job, getting up early in the morning and going off to work in some rich person’s home. But when he wasn’t making paintings in his studio, Rosie noticed, Jamie became very…distant.
Estranged
…How long would it be before he got sick of her and tossed her out? It was a miracle he’d taken her in in the first place.