A Dangerous Age (3 page)

“I have to get a script ready for Allison Cardy by the tenth of February.”

“Then get it done. You procrastinate, Louise. It’s your Achilles’ heel.”

“Not always. I can stop it if I like.”

“Then do it. Look, I have to go. Call me tonight, okay?” She hung up and I made a pot of coffee and went into my workroom and finished the script. By two in the afternoon I had it in the FedEx box and was on my way to D.C. to look for an apartment near Walter Reed. It was time for a change. I called Winifred and told her what I was doing and she said go ahead and don’t worry about what it cost and just find something and rent it, she’d be there by the end of the week.

That was Wednesday.

“Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens.” That’s my mantra, when I remember to use it. I learned it from
Dune
, a book I will never stop loving. A great newspaperman wrote the
Dune
books after a lifetime of watching the world and its madness. It’s the best metaphor for modern
life ever written. It’s our
Don Quixote
although no one ever admits it in literary circles.

I remembered it now as I set out to take Winifred into my heart and help make her well. She will be a great doctor someday, and I’ll be able to feel I helped make it happen. What I forgot was that it was my empty nest that was really calling the shots. Not one I emptied, but one I never built or filled.

So within a month, while I was waiting at our empty apartment for Beds Incorporated to deliver the two new beds with mattresses and springs that Uncle Spencer and Aunt Helen were giving us for a housewarming present, who should drive up and park his Jeep and come walking up the front path to our duplex door but Carl Kane, first cousin to the dead bridegroom and brother to Brian Kane, who was being patched up by a team of plastic surgeons at Walter Reed with Winifred standing by while she studied flash cards from the Kaplan course for the MCAT. Of course, every doctor she met was falling in love with her and offering to help her get into medical school. She had never gained back the weight she lost in order to wear the wedding dress, and at fighting weight she is a major contender in the upscale looks department. I mean, she is lovely, the kind of woman a man thinks would make him look good in the world.

Carl stood at the end of the path, and I was standing in the doorway waiting for the delivery truck. I won’t forget that moment ever. He had on his marine uniform, but it wasn’t in very
spiffed-up condition. The jacket was unbuttoned, the tie was sticking out of a pocket, and the khaki shirt was unbuttoned to the chest bone. Fair-haired men don’t show much chest hair, but I could imagine it farther down. He’d been sweating, and he looked more like the antiestablishment guitar player he had been than the marine he was now.

“I’m Carl Kane,” he said. “They sent me over to see if I could help. Winifred said to see what you needed.”

“I could use some coffee,” I said. “And a newspaper. I’ve gotten addicted to news. So how are you all doing? Are they stitching on him today?”

“They stitched yesterday. I think he’ll look okay. I’ve never seen such attention. Rumsfeld visited the hospital yesterday. We met him. It’s busy over there.”

“And you’re on leave?”

“For another month. Then I’m going over. I keep telling myself not to want revenge, but what the hell, you can’t help what you feel, can you?”

He stood there looking like someone I wouldn’t want mad at me. Red-gold hair about half an inch long. Really nice hands. Six feet tall, intense, smart.

“How old is Brian?” I asked. “And you?”

“Twenty-four; well, we will be twenty-four soon.”

Twenty-four from thirty-six is twelve. I must not think this way, I was thinking. Do not think that way, I thought.

The van arrived with the beds, and Carl went inside with me. We watched as they assembled the contemporary iron
bedsteads and then unwrapped the mattresses and springs and placed them on the stands. After they left I got out the vacuum and Carl helped me vacuum the floors of the two bedrooms, and then I opened a box and took out mattress covers and new pale blue sheets and we made up the beds and found the pillows in a closet and put pillowcases on them, and then we sat on one of the beds and didn’t talk much. I hate myself at times like this. Men think they get led around by their desires. Try a biological clock.

“Let’s go find me some coffee,” I said. “And some eggs and toast if it’s not too late, or else some lunch.” I stood up.

He moved near to me and took my arm. “I’m all yours,” he said. “They sent me to you.”

L
IKE WHO SENT HIM
? The clan, the family, the Fates? Who decided I needed a boyfriend more than I needed a job? Who remembered we hadn’t had a single baby in ten years in the whole Hand clan? And it wasn’t because we weren’t cut out to be fruitful.

Had I taken a birth control pill in the past five days? Who knew? I’d been so busy saving Winifred, happy to be of use and not to have to think about myself morning, night, and noon. I hadn’t even flossed my teeth since we made the down payment on the duplex and started ordering furniture and letting our parents pay for it, much less remembered to swallow a birth control pill when there certainly didn’t seem to be much reason to swallow one.

“Is it true identical twins feel each other’s pain?” I asked Carl when we were settled in a booth in a neighborhood restaurant I’d found a few days before.

“I feel this pain,” Carl said. “It kills me to see the mess it made. The surgeons have been photographing me; that’s weird enough. We’re mirror images of each other, it turns out. Something like that. They may take some skin off my butt if they need it. He’s knocked out most of the time. They aren’t letting him be in pain. They’ve got the best doctors in the world at Walter Reed.”

“They should have. I’m glad they do.”

“So you make movies? Winifred said you’d made some films.”

“I’ve made a few documentaries. I’d like to go to Afghanistan and film some of what’s going on there. I don’t know what it takes to get to do that. I’m small potatoes in the film world, Carl. I’m just scrabbling for a living. It’s crazy. No one makes a living doing this. I don’t know why I think I can.”

“I bet you will. I bet you’re good.”

“I might be. It takes so much to prove yourself. You have to get people to put their faith in you and give you money.”

“You aren’t going to eat those biscuits?” He had finished his eggs and toast and bacon and was eyeing what was left of my eggs and biscuits.

“I am not. They are all yours.” He took a biscuit and filled it with butter and added jelly and began to eat it. I had not taken my eyes off his shoulders and hands since we sat down and I just
went on looking at them. The sexual stuff between us was so thick you could almost see it.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“Wait for the movers to bring the rest of the furniture this afternoon. Stuff from my place in Baltimore. Did Winifred say when she’d be back?”

“She said to tell you she wouldn’t be home until late tonight or maybe tomorrow. She might spend the night in the hospital so Aunt Sally can get some rest and our mother can leave.”

“Okay.”

W
E DROVE BACK
to the duplex and went into the kitchen, where he helped me unpack some boxes. Then he touched my arm, and we had a real conversation.

“Would you go have dinner with me some night?” he asked. “I mean a date, like on a date.”

“You’re too young for me.”

“No, I am not.”

“Then maybe I’ll go. I’m thirty-six years old, Carl.”

“So what. I’m a man, Louise. Don’t play games with me.”

So I didn’t play any. I put my arms around him and sighed a long, deep sigh and took the man to bed and kept him there until a delivery man started beating on the door a few hours later.

Before he left to go back to the hospital, he made plans to take me to dinner the following night. “Don’t act like nothing’s happened,” he said. “Promise you won’t start all that.”

“Who are you?” I asked. “I don’t know who you are.”

“Yes, you do. You know plenty. I’m a musician, Louise, and I’m the dominant twin. Brian is my child and my brother. He’s me and now I’m going back up there and spending the night beside his bed. And then I’m going over there where they did this to him and count coup. Can you deal with all of that?”

“Twenty-four?” I said. “I don’t believe you’re twenty-four. I think you are a hundred.”

W
HEN
I
WAS SEVENTEEN
years old and having my first bad crush on a boy, my mother told me something she probably should not have told me, but all the women in our family tell things they shouldn’t tell. “You don’t know how easy it is to become pregnant,” she said. “You cannot imagine. I got pregnant with you the day your father and I were moving into our first apartment. The bed had just been delivered and we were making it up, but we didn’t even finish making it up. We made you instead. Louise, you must not have intercourse with anyone. If you think you cannot stop from doing it, you must come to me and we’ll get you some birth control pills first. You get pregnant in one second, one
second
. I know you don’t believe that. No one does.”

I loved her telling me that. She had been drinking wine and she looked like a heroine in a movie, bending near me, her eyes big and wild and her hair curling all over the place like it does when she hasn’t combed it. Plus, I liked the guilt she felt for months afterward for having told me, and her fear that I would
tell my father that she had told me. He would not have thought it was funny. He’s a serious man and so different from her it’s a wonder they’re still married. I guess they just like to do it.

And then it was true. I was knocked up. And I wasn’t sorry and neither was Carl. Brian was jealous and Winifred was embarrassed, and we took to standing around the hospital bed, the four of us, trying to decide when to tell the older people in the family. We decided to have the marriage ceremony first and then tell them about the baby.

“We’ll have the wedding here, in the hospital room,” Carl said. “So Brian can be best man. We’ll get a marine chaplain to do the service. There’s a nice man in the chapel downstairs. I talked to him right after Brian got here. I know he’d do it. Come on, Louise, let’s go talk to him.”

Get this. I’m knocked up by a twenty-four-year-old marine on his way to Afghanistan for God knows how long. I’m going to get married without telling my parents. A baby is growing inside me. And while we are in the chapel waiting for the marine chaplain to talk to us, my cell phone goes off and Rafael Donald from PBS calls to say there’s some interest in my doing a piece about the national cemeteries in the D.C. area.

I walked outside the chapel to take the call. “No,” I said. “No more cemeteries. Absolutely not. Ask them if they want to do a piece about babies born while their fathers are away at war. I’m pregnant, Rafael. How’s that for a turn of fate? He’s a twenty-four-year-old marine. I’m marrying him this week. Then he’s going to Afghanistan.”

“What?” he said. “Louise, have you gone crazy?”

“Probably,” I answered. “But I’m out of the funeral and cemetery business. I really won’t do that anymore. Who wants to back it?”

“The station in Boston. WGBH. They’re rolling in dough, Louise. It won’t be about the cemetery. It will be about its history. Well, it’s your idea. Your proposal.”

“My priorities have altered recently.”

“I guess they have.” Rafael is married to an actress. She plays a doctor on
Days of Our Lives
. He worships her and talks about her all the time, even
quotes
her opinions on films. He’s a terrible romantic and wonderful to work with.

“How about I send a crew to film the shotgun wedding? You’re photogenic as hell, Louise. Is this marine good looking also?”

“What do you think? He’s twenty-four. He helped me move the beds into my new apartment. His twin brother’s in Walter Reed having his face put back together after a bomb blew up his vehicle in Afghanistan. Our new metaphors and stories, all sprung from our deepest fears. I’m ecstatically happy, Rafael. I’ve never felt this way. I’m giddy.”

“Where will the wedding be?”

“In the hospital, by his brother’s bed, with the widow of a nine-eleven victim for the maid of honor.”

“I want to film it. Just one camera? Will you do it?”

“Sure. But I won’t say for sure I’ll let you use it.”

“That’s fair. I’ll send Carter Wilson. He’s so good, when you see the pictures you’ll want us to use it.”

“Ten four.” I hung up and went back into the chapel and sat down by Carl and thought about getting to know him, but then I decided just to hold his hand until the chaplain came.

“W
E’LL BE ABLE
to give our parents copies of the video,” I told him later that night when I was broaching the idea of making our wedding into a career move. “And Brian doesn’t have to be filmed at all if he doesn’t want it. Winifred said it’s all right with her. Do you think it’s tacky? It is tacky. I’ll admit that. But our parents might appreciate it.”

“Mother knows something’s going on. She keeps giving me looks.”

“Mine’s calling every day. Your mother’s talking to Aunt Helen and she’s calling my mother and they’re buzzing with it. Maybe we should go on and tell them and let them come.”

“Whatever you want to do.” Carl was watching a basketball game while we were having this conversation. I am marrying a man who watches thirty hours of sports a week and I do not care. My intellectual life is in the can for the time being and I think it’s funny. Right now I think everything is funny. I’m happy. I’m the Mad Hatter of happiness. I’m even starting to like Carl’s music, since it’s clear he isn’t ever going to want to listen to mine.

“I want to get married this coming Saturday if the cinematographer can come then.”

“The chaplain said he’d do it whenever we want to.”

“Call and ask him if Saturday morning is good. And I’ll call Rafael.”

“Look at this replay, Louise. Look at that foul. My God, they should kick that guy out of the game. He almost broke the other guy’s nose.”