The Ladies' Man (11 page)

“Yes?” she says crisply.

“Can you come down?”

“Why?”

“Harvey! I hit him and I knocked him out.”

It sounds to Nash as if there is a laugh traveling through the intercom, but he can't be sure.

“Dell! Please! It's no joke. He's out cold.”

“You
hit
him?”

“Not with my fist. With the pot. Bring some paper towels.”

Kathleen must have released the button because she is returning to his side. Plenty of time, he thinks, to come to.

“Harvey!” she yells again. “Can you hear me?” The toe of her shoe prods his outer thigh. He doesn't react. She takes his hand and feels the inside of his wrist. “Good,” she murmurs after a few seconds. “Good.” She smells nice, he thinks. Something floral and powdery. Dina wears perfumes and emollients extracted from vegetables and seaweed. Kathleen pats the dry side of his face, tentatively at first, then with increasingly harder slaps. He murmurs so she'll stop.

He hears the elevator whirring and a bell dinging.

“Here!” yells Kathleen.

Nash doesn't open his eyes, and can't hear footsteps. He allows one flutter to assess the situation: It is Adele in a navy blue fleece bathrobe and crew socks, her hands on her hips, staring down at him.

“He's certainly not dead,” she says.

“He won't wake up,” says Kathleen. “Maybe we should lie him down flat.”

“You're not supposed to move someone who's been injured,” says Adele.

“Are you okay?” Kathleen asks her sister, annoying Nash with her misplaced tenderness.

“I choked on a piece of steak, and broke a rib. He broke it doing the Heimlich maneuver.”

Nash groans.

“Harvey?” says Kathleen.

“Nash?” Adele says more sternly. She asks Kathleen if the pot broke in the act or when it hit the floor.

“Both. I think the pot broke on him, and the lid broke when it hit the floor.”

“I meant, did it cut him? I don't see any blood.”

Disappointed, Nash moans.

“Do we have smelling salts?” asks Kathleen.

“Smelling salts? Who has smelling salts?”

“He might have broken his neck. He looks a little off-center.”

“How did he fall?”

“He just crumpled.”

“Did he hit his head?”

“He just sort of sat down.”

Adele says in a louder voice than before, “There's no question we need an ambulance. He'll need to be seen by a doctor and get a spinal tap. Don't touch him. I'll call nine-one-one.”

Nash stirs. He blinks hard a few times, works his jaw in a circle and says, “Whaah happen?”

“You got conked with a casserole,” says Adele.

Kathleen asks, “Can you touch your chin to your chest?”

Nash blinks again, then slowly lowers his chin.

“Good,” says Kathleen.

“Can you move your legs?” asks Adele.

Nash lifts one leg at a time, an inch off the floor.

“What about your arms?”

“He's fine,” Adele snaps. “If the legs work, the rest will.”

“Do you think you could get up if we helped you?” asks Kathleen.

“Maybe,” he whispers, staring hard as if he's not sure who these Good Samaritans are.

“Where does it hurt?” asks Adele.

He touches the spot on his head where it really does hurt, and feels, to his relief, a bump the size of a new potato. “Oww. I've got a doozy.”

“You're not bleeding,” says Adele. “See if you can get up on your feet.”

Kathleen takes an elbow. Adele says, “I certainly can't help.”

“Give me a sec,” says Nash.

“If you can't get up, we have to call an ambulance,” says Adele.

“What's their name?” says Kathleen. “The doctors? The couple? I can ring their apartment.”

“I don't need a doctor,” says Nash.

“They won't be home in the middle of the afternoon anyway,” says Adele.

“I think I may be able to get up now,” he says. “As long as I can use you for balance.”

Nash rolls over to his knees and slowly rises to his feet. Uninvited, he puts one arm around each woman's shoulders. Kathleen slides her arm around his waist but Adele slips out from his clutch. “I have a broken rib, remember?”

“Let's try to walk,” says Kathleen. “One step at a time.”

“Which way?” Nash asks.

The sisters exchange looks.

“I think we have no choice,” says Kathleen. “Even if he just stays for an hour. And then if he's steady, we'll call a cab.”

“I don't think I have a concussion,” Nash offers.

“You should go to the emergency room if there's even a possibility of that,” says Adele.

“I think a bump is a sign that it's not a concussion,” says Kathleen.

Adele says, “I forgot the paper towels.”

“I'll do that,” says Kathleen. “We'll clean him off, and I'll come back down with a mop and pail. You're in no condition to be washing floors.”

“Besides,” says Adele, “I couldn't look at these chunks of meat.”

“Poor Dell,” says Kathleen. “I'm sorry, hon. You'll take a nap, too, while I clean up. Do you want Lois to come home?”

Nash fingers his bump, and produces a sharp intake of breath. He expects an echo—a “Poor Nash,” or, more likely, a “Poor Harvey.”

“We have ice,” says Adele.

“I don't know what possessed me,” says Kathleen.

There is a diagonal welt on his cheekbone, which Kathleen recognizes as an imprint of the casserole's bamboo-inspired
handle. Not that she is fussing over him. While Adele rests behind a closed door and waits for a Valium to kick in, Nash is ordered to a kitchen chair, given tea, raisin toast, and ice cubes wrapped in a facecloth. Kathleen works on his stained jacket with lighter fluid and a rag. She looks up at him, and says, after a diagnostic stare, “Does your eye hurt?”

“Why?”

“It looks … there's a little half-circle of purple—here.” She touches the corresponding skin under her own eye. “Not big. A thumbprint.”

“I have a black eye?” Nash asks, enchanted with the development.

“It seems so.”

Nash touches his face, and pronounces it tender. He says, “In the movies they put a steak on a shiner, but we know
that
doesn't work any miracles.”

Kathleen doesn't smile.

“The veal,” he explains.

Kathleen shakes out his jacket, then places it on the back of an empty chair without comment.

“Under the circumstances,” Nash tries, “most people would apologize for assaulting another human being without provocation.”

Kathleen says, “My position is that I was provoked.”

“You're lucky you didn't kill me: ‘Your honor, he paid me a compliment; said I looked thirty. What choice did I have?' ”

“I wouldn't take the stand,” says Kathleen.

Nash says, “Aren't you being a little childish? I saved your sister's life, and now I can't even get a modicum of sympathy from the person who knocked me senseless.”

Kathleen says, “Okay: I'm sorry I hit you with the casserole.”

Nash tries to look aggrieved as he sips tea from his clear glass mug.

Kathleen says, “It was my favorite pot. Dishwasher-safe and ovenproof.”

Nash inspects Kathleen's expression for signs of irony, but doesn't find any. Instead he thinks, Why haven't I noticed her eyes
until now—pale green with a ring of pure yellow at the outer edges.

She says, “If I'd been the one who answered the doorbell last night, I'd have told you to get the hell off my property and never come back. And if I had been Richard, I would've knocked your block off.”

“You did knock my block off,” he says. “My block is throbbing, and probably bleeding internally, and now I have a black eye.”

Kathleen sighs, and asks if he'd like some Tylenol.

“I'm feeling a little dizzy. Do you think it's okay to take something if I'm light-headed?”

Kathleen takes the facecloth, rewraps it around new ice, and repositions it on his sore lump. When he smiles gratefully, she doesn't scowl.

Now? he wonders.
Now
can I comment on the color of her eyes? Sea foam? Spring grass? Lemon and lime cat's-eye marbles?

“Aspirin, no,” she says, “but Tylenol's probably okay.”

Nash takes two red-and-yellow capsules from the bottle she's set in front of him, and swallows them with a gulp of tea. “I remember once when I was a kid and I got hit in the head by a pitch, and the doctor told my mother to keep me awake.”

“So?”

“Which is why the thought of spending the night in a hotel scares me.”

“You're afraid you'll slip into a coma?”

Nash shrugs. “I suppose I could ask the desk to call upstairs every ten minutes.”

After an unhappy pause Kathleen says, “I could ask Richard.”

“Ask Richard what?”

“If you could stay at his place.”

“Isn't there a trial separation going on?” asks Nash. “Or did I get that wrong?” He puts down the ice pack and explores his bump as gingerly as if it were a newborn's fontanel. He bites his lip—the pain and the indignity of it. “If my folks were alive, I'd stay there,” he says.

Kathleen sits down opposite him. “Why come back now? Why
not the morning after you ran away? Or when you turned thirty. Or forty, or
fifty
?” Kathleen leans across the table, forcing Nash to notice that she has a young woman's breasts—not large but high and alert.

“I felt this pull,” he says. “I was asking myself, ‘Why can't I get it right with any woman? Why do I keep moving on instead of settling down?' And slowly the answer dawned on me: Adele Dobbin.” Nash is pleased with his answer, and with what he hopes is the weight of it.

“Tell me what you want from her,” says Kathleen.

Nash can't say what he wants from Adele because he has again moved on, fixing Kathleen's heart-shaped face and yellow-green eyes in his field. Luckily, the front door opens. Someone new, someone requiring Kathleen's attention, steps inside.

“Richard?” Kathleen calls.

“No,” says a woman's voice, coming toward them, heels clicking. “It's me.”

It's a new sister to Nash, the tallest and most formidable one, broad-shouldered and rangy, with a barrette in her pageboy.

Kathleen says, “Shhh. You'll wake Adele. Lois—this is Harvey Nash.”

“Harvey,” she breathes.

Nash stands up, switches his ice pack to his left hand, and offers his right. “Lois,” he says. “Long time.”

“Harvey did the Heimlich maneuver on Adele,” Kathleen explains.

“I heard,” says Lois. “Richard said it happened so fast that he didn't even know she was choking. Thank you
so
much. We're so grateful.” And with that she throws her long arms around Nash's neck.

Nash says happily, “Watch my injury!”

“Where?” she cries. “What happened?”

Nash gestures, palm upturned, toward Kathleen, who says flatly, “Nash was leaving the apartment and I was coming in. He said some things, and I flew off the handle, and I whacked him with the casserole we got in Woodstock.”

“Tell me you didn't,” says Lois.

“I did.”

“After what he did to Adele?”

“Exactly,” says Kathleen.

“I meant after he saved her life? What's wrong with you?”

Nash smiles. This one has presence, he thinks. She doesn't have Kathleen's femininity or Adele's looks, but there's empathy here and some kind of good strong … something.

“I am
appalled
,” says Lois. “What were you thinking of?”

“I wasn't thinking. It was pure adrenaline.”

“Don't be mad at Kathleen,” says Nash. “She had her reasons. I deeply regret the pain I've caused this family.”

Lois says, “You saved my sister's life! She'd be dead now if it weren't for you. What kind of family holds on to a grudge after that?”

Finally
, Nash thinks—a Dobbin sister who knows how to accept an apology.

“He says he has to lie down,” says Kathleen. “He's feeling dizzy.”

Nash notices that Lois has slashes of too obvious color on her cheekbones, and eyebrows redrawn with auburn pencil. As a student of the sisters, of the various shades of their red hair and their various endowments, he finds Lois a bit … well, hard. But then again, “hard” carries its own possibilities: a divorcée in the old-fashioned sense of the word, his mother's quaint bias—single and sullied through every fault of her own.

“Follow me,” Lois orders.

“He wants to spend the night,” says Kathleen.

“He can have my room,” says Lois.

“Lois—” says Kathleen.

“What? Are you going to remind me that he ruined Adele's life, therefore we have to make his as difficult as possible?”