Acts of God (14 page)

You drink two glasses of champagne, wait a few minutes, drink eight ounces of water, then start swallowing the pills. Oxycodone first, then Baclofen, then Ambien. That should do it. Maybe another glass of champagne.

Then you climb the railing, move around to a space clear of the engines, then jump or fall into the cold dark ocean. Don't think, don't panic, don't look back, don't whine or plead or care. Don't give in to fear. Fear is for illiterate children. You can't stay. You can't continue to live in the world as an effective person in a good mood. There is this one thing you have left to do and you can do it. Let the brainwashed, unread fools wait for death like slaves. Not me, not my father's daughter. Not my grandfather's gene-bearer. Fourteen grandchildren and a great-grandchild. I've done what I was here for.

SHE PUT THE
pills in a leather purse and zipped it and put it into the bedroom safe. Then she dressed in a pale-peach-colored blouse with ruffled sleeves and an old pair of white linen pants and went down to the dining room and ordered dinner. She had salmon with crab sauce and french fried potatoes and flan for dessert. She ate as much as she could and then got up and walked out onto the patio to watch the stars. There will be stars to guide me, she decided. Twice this many on the ocean tomorrow night, great constellations, stardust, all we are, all we ever were or ever will be.

IN THE MORNING
a driver picked her up and took her to the cruise ship and she was whisked through the first-class line and taken to a stateroom. “Not so much luggage,” the Indonesian porter noted. “Very good not take much luggage.”

She giggled and handed him two twenty-dollar bills. When he left she lay down on the bed to answer Charles's cell phone calls. “I'm writing it all down,” she told him. “I'm pretending to be a reporter. When can you come? Have you made reservations?”

“If I fly Monday I'll be in Cairo before you get there. I don't know why you want to cross the Atlantic this time of year.”

“To watch stars, of course, silly. I'm actually having a good time. I didn't know how nice it is to be alone.”

“Peter called. They're having trouble with Peter G. The kindergarten teacher says he's acting up. Peter wants to know if they should look for a better school.”

“Tell Peter to let Peter G. stay home one or two days a week. School is boring. Little children die of boredom in their terrible, boring schools.”

“Will you call him?”

“No. I don't want to talk to them yet. Take care of it, Charles. Tell him what I said. Tell him five-year-old children shouldn't be shut up all day with their overworked teachers and equally bored siblings.”

There were five other calls but she erased the messages without listening to them.

Then she went up on the deck and ate a bowl of chocolate ice cream and wandered down to the swimming pool to watch the people.

LATE THAT AFTERNOON
she found the place. It was on the back of the boat behind a place that had been cleared for yoga classes. There was a folding laddered stool for the yoga teacher to sit on while she talked. It would do nicely to climb the railing. On the other side of the railing was a smooth, curved outcrop that she could move along to get to a space beside the motors.

THE NEXT MORNING
Philipa woke early and went up on the deck to watch the early yoga class. She could still do some of the simpler moves, and when the teacher asked her to join them she did. There were only three other students, two middle-aged women and a girl who looked like a dancer. The music was Deva Premal, something Philipa had heard in yoga classes one wonderful summer when she did yoga every morning on the coast with an inspired teacher named Maya. The summer ended when Philipa's left hip and leg gave way beneath her and had to be treated with cortisone epidurals, but it remained a memory of a special time.

Philipa took great joy and pleasure from the class. It does not matter how long you live, she decided. It only matters that you love it while you're here.

In the afternoon she wrote beautiful long letters to her sons and daughter and to all of her grandchildren and great-grandchild. She wrote notes to her three closest friends, an apology to her cousin Courtney in Cairo, and a short letter to Charles.

Darling husband, heart of my heart. Allow me this surcease from suffering. I cannot be an invalid. I cannot be an old, sick, dying person. I have given you all my selfish heart has to give because your goodness and unselfishness called it from me.

Take care of the children. Give them advice but not too much money. Charles II and William are independent. And Caroline could be if she tried. She will hate me for this. That will be useful to her in the end. But don't you hate me. I'm setting you an example in case you need it.

Stay away from hospitals unless you want to die in one. I love the doctors and nurses but they're too tired and they have to lie. Nothing is of value except to have lived well and to die without pain.

I love you, Philipa

At three the next morning she dressed in slacks and heavy, laced-up boots and went up on the deck and walked back to the yoga place. She had already swallowed an Ambien and an oxycodone. When she got to the railing she drank half of the bottle of champagne. She was feeling woozy but she managed to climb over the railing and walk along the curved surface still holding the champagne and the pills. She had not thrown up yet. She did not feel like she was going to throw up. That was good. The gods were with her. She swallowed some more of the pills and stood holding the railing until she thought they had begun to take effect. I was an athlete, she told herself. I can do this. I can still hold on and I can let go.

She moved carefully along the curved edge and stopped and looked up at the stars and acknowledged their magnificence. Then she took three woozy, unstable steps and fell. She saw the white light but it was not as brilliant as it was the time the car went off the mountain road in Wyoming in the snow or the time the company plane crashed in Virginia. Then she was cold, so very, very cold, and upside down in water, and then, mercifully, for there is a merciful god for those who want him, the water threw her into the motors and her brain stopped before she could gasp for air.

“SHE WAS ALWAYS
lucky,” her daughter, Caroline, told a psychiatrist several weeks later, after the confusion and disbelief and mourning had died down and people had gone home to their own lives. “She probably died before she could drown. Someone saw it from a high deck. They found enough of the body to know what happened. There were enough drugs in her stateroom to kill all the old people in North Carolina. She was so selfish, she never cared about anyone but herself. She never loved me. She could never quit saying what she thought about anything. Even if she managed not to say it, you knew she was thinking it. She thought I was a failure and she didn't like failure. She hated ugly people and she hated failure. I don't know how Daddy stood to be married to her.”

“But you aren't a failure,” the doctor said. “And you aren't selfish. You're like your father. You care about other people.”

“I don't want to ever die.” Caroline was crying now, curled up in a ball on his sofa with a box of Kleenex clutched in both her hands. “What sort of an example is it to do something like that? How will I ever die in peace when my own mother couldn't do it?”

“You aren't going to die for a long, long time,” he said. “Let's don't keep dwelling on that now.” He sighed, wanted so much to leave the room. No one dies in peace, he wanted to say, unless they are on morphine, which is not that much better than jumping off a boat.

“Let's stop for today,” he told Caroline. “I think you've had enough. Will you start exercising again, for me? Exercise is so important now, Caroline. I hate to harp on it but it is vitally important right now.”

“All right,” she said. “I will. I'll do it to spite her, goddamn selfish bitch.” She got up and put on her coat and collected her scarf and Prada bag and smiled at him and left.

He went to stand at the window that looked out on Touro Hospital, watched the crippled people being let out of cars and sent into the doors of the old, crippled hospital that was barely surviving since the hurricane.

He was trying to imagine a seventy-eight-year-old woman with the balls to jump into the Atlantic Ocean. It cheered him up to imagine it and he decided to go out and run six miles in the park in honor of her will and dominance and strength and concentration and disregard for what the world expects from us. She was probably like that all her life, he decided. What her daughter calls selfishness was there at the end to see her through.

Maybe her daughter has it, too, but I think not. She's made of thinner cloth. No wonder her mother didn't like her. I have a hard time liking her myself. I've stayed too long at this fair. I don't like them all anymore. Maybe I don't like any of them.

I could do research. Actually, I could just quit.

He got up and closed and locked his door and picked up the phone and told the receptionist to cancel his afternoon appointments. Then he went out the back door and down the stairs and went home and changed into running clothes and went to the park and ran six, seven, eight, nine miles and felt marvelous at the end.

T
his has to be recorded. He came to me last night and lay with me in the bed where for forty years I slept with another man and it did not matter. Nothing mattered. Not after many months of standing near me at the hospital while we worked to undo the damage life and craziness and disease cause other human bodies until our own were only vassals of the work we do. Every day for all those months I liked it when he was there and he liked it when I was there and we were helpful and invigorating for one another. Why did it surprise me when it came unto this other thing? Biblical language is called for here if I am to get this down, to save this moment so I can think about it and believe in it and understand its moment and its power.

I am a mother of many children. I am not old because I move too much and work too hard and eat too carefully and am too vain. I was a beautiful girl and I am a beautiful older woman. I know that. So why was I surprised when he lay on me and our bodies began to give each other this blessing so powerful and perfected and sweet? I did not use my hands and he did not use his except to hold me against him when it was over. Our bodies found each other and made the long, sweet merging that would have made a baby in another time in our lives. I know when my babies were made. I know the difference in those nights and the other nice but not perfect matings.

This was the night that brings the egg to fruition and sends the sperm to brighten it into the future of our being. Yes, it was that good. I had not imagined wanting it again.

We still had on part of our clothes. He had on a white cotton T-shirt and the white shirt he brought back from Mexico when he went diving one last time, he said, but he has already planned another trip when winter comes.

When winter comes this town becomes so cold and gray, the leaves are gone, the wind comes down from Canada and ices the branches and prunes them. I am always preparing for it in November, like today, like I was yesterday, like now.

“I want to come by and bring you something I ordered for you,” he said to me. Was that only yesterday afternoon? After work, when we were leaving the hospital and had walked out into the parking lot together. The leaves on the sugar maples are brilliant red and the sycamores are yellow and there is a hint of purple in the color, royal purple like the sweater I was wearing yesterday.

“What on earth?” I said.

“Ridiculous. I ordered it one night and it came and I want to give it to you. It's too large to bring to the hospital.”

“Then come on. Come have supper if you like. It's lonely for me with my girls gone. I'd like to have an excuse to set the table. I live on Duncan Street . . .”

“I know where you live. I asked you once. Don't you remember?”

“Of course I do.” I pulled my raincoat close around my body and pretended to be in a hurry.

“What time?” he called after me.

“Any time,” I said. “Six o'clock is good.”

He watched until I got into my car and started the motor and drove away. He always did that if he walked out with me. As if to protect me even when it was light. The way my father would stand in the driveway when I left my parents' house and would stand there until I was out of sight. People don't do that anymore for one another. A long time ago we didn't know how long it might be before we saw one another again. Or else we don't care as much or else we are distracted.

And so I set the table with pretty blue place mats and flowers and candles and Momma's Strasbourg silver and he came around six and we ate dinner early and he made me open the large package. It was some new sort of blanket that is very light and keeps the heat in. He had ordered it in pink. A large, pink, scientifically designed blanket he had ordered from the back of
Discover Magazine.

“So you won't have to worry about electric blankets,” he said. “You always say you are cold.” He stood before me then, a man, a powerful, beautiful man who wanted to make love to me and has wanted that for more than a year and I knew it and I was too afraid to do a thing but stand there knowing I was not going to resist and also that I was not going to stop being terrified.

“I haven't done this in years,” I said. “I don't think I know how. I don't think my body will do this. I'm too embarrassed to even know where to begin.”

THEN WE WENT
into my bedroom. We could have gone into a guest room. It didn't have to be mine and David's bed but I didn't think about that then and we lay down upon the bed fully clothed and began to neck like teenage children and after a while he pulled the covers down and we lay on the sheets and I took off my skirt and nylon hose, I don't remember how, and he took off some of his clothes but not the shirts and I reached my hand down to touch him but he took my hand away and climbed on top of me and our bodies found each other and gave each other meaning and great forgotten pleasure and he went deeper and deeper into me and it played out in waves like the sea and all that time he was the same man I see every day with the same thoughtful expression on his face and every move perfected because what he does and I do cannot be done any other way or people are harmed and die and so we concentrate on our work. It is a fierce profession full of blood and guts and terror and you become selfless or you cannot do it although some people do it anyway and no one who does it right is stupid enough to trust them.

Afterward we lay together in great quietness and finally he said, “I'm still hungry. Let's go get a steak somewhere. Peter will fix us something if I call him. Let's go down there.”

I knew he was starving. The soup and bread I served him for dinner wasn't much and he had hardly eaten that since this was coming and we both knew it. I had no idea what time it was but it was probably about eight thirty. The restaurant he wanted to go to was only a few blocks away and he was right, they would have anything we wanted waiting for us. He is a powerful man who commands other men without moving or saying many words. And a good man and not a man who takes women and uses them. He is a gentleman and now we have been together in the strangest thing a man and woman can do. This love, this tenderness, this blessing.

“Go on,” I said. “I don't want to go with you right now. I think we would be embarrassed to be in public with this right now. We might not know what to say.”

“I will know. I want you to live with me, Annie. I have loved you since the day I saw you walking down the hall toward me. I know what I love. I loved my wife until she died and now I love you. I don't change my mind about something that important.”

“What will people say?”

“They will wonder why it took so long for you to marry me.”

“Marry me.”

“On your terms, on any terms. Soon. I don't have long now, Annie. I can't waste what is left of my life. I want you to be there when I come home.”

“And all day at work?”

“However you want. Whatever you want.”

HE DID NOT
get up and leave right away. He held me and whispered to me for a few more minutes and then he fell asleep. After a while I fell asleep, too, and when he woke he dressed and left and said he would call me in the morning and he did and now I have all day to think about this.

In the living room is the beautiful pale pink scientifically engineered Danish blanket he ordered for me out of
Discover Magazine.
In my heart is a sort of greatness and goodness I can't walk around or leave behind as I spend this day picking up a lamp I left to be repaired and maybe painting my toenails to match the blanket and maybe going to Whole Foods to get some food into this house and then what? At two o'clock I will drive out to the hospital and take a late shift for a friend and he will be there and yes, it will be okay because love is okay. Love is redeemable. You get your money back from love and you get to keep it, too. I think. I hope and pray.