American Appetites (16 page)

And one of the calls would be to the glass and mirror shop on Charter Street, the one that did emergency repairs. He would have a new plate-glass window installed, Ian thought, that very day: well in advance of Glynnis's return home.

3.

In her high bed in the intensive care ward, a translucent tube snaking up into her left nostril and others attached to the soft flesh of her inner arms, Glynnis lay immobile except for her breath, which was hoarse, labored, and arrhythmic. Her heartbeat was monitored; her shaved head and much of her face were swathed in bandages tight as a nun's wimple. Had Ian not been shown to her bedside he might have stumbled past her, unrecognizing. He drew a deep sharp breath, astounded. Glynnis? That woman? Within a space of hours she appeared to have aged years.

So, at her bedside, he waited, waited patiently, holding her hand in his, whispering her name. He had read that absolute unconsciousness does not exist; the anesthetized patient on the operating table hears, and absorbs, what is said within earshot, while being unable of course to respond. When he whispered, “Glynnis?” it seemed to him that, from time to time, her fingers twitched in response; her eyelids fluttered. He had the impression that she wanted to wake, to speak to him; she was keenly aware of his presence, yet separated from him by a sort of veil, impossible to penetrate. Consciousness was the surface of a body of water of incalculable depth; and unconsciousness was that depth; and Glynnis, a swimmer trapped beneath the surface, was struggling valiantly to rise, but was pulled back, and again struggled to rise, and was again pulled back.

Yet each time it seemed to Ian that she rose higher and fell back less, that by degrees, by a supreme effort of will, she was making her way to the surface. He spoke her name like an incantation, repeatedly, tirelessly, his eyes fixed upon her face with such concentration that he no longer knew where he was, or even why he was here, what unspeakable turn of destiny had brought them to this: this hospital bed in an intensive care ward that, against one's natural expectations, was a place of much irreverent bustle and noise. Ian tried not to look toward other beds, at other visitors holding lifeless hands, speaking urgent incantatory words to unhearing ears. He thought, My love will pull her back.

Shortly after two o'clock, Bianca arrived, breathless and frightened, and sat beside Ian, close by the bed. “My God, my God,” she said in a weak voice, staring at Glynnis, “I just can't believe this, I just can't be
lieve
this—” until Ian told her to please be still; Glynnis could hear every word.

It was late afternoon when, at last, Glynnis opened her eyes.

She looked directly at Ian and squeezed his fingers, or seemed to, in an effort to speak. Her eyes were bloodshot and not altogether in focus yet she seemed to recognize him, he would swear to it that she recognized him. He said excitedly, “Glynnis? Darling? Can you hear me?” Again she squeezed his fingers; the cords in her neck tensed; she stared at him, or toward him, the pupil of the right eye much blacker than that of the left. Bianca sat silent, as if transfixed; Ian was saying, in a low, urgent, crooning voice, “I'm here, I'll take care of you, don't be frightened, I'm here and I will never go away. I will never go away.” He stood over her, gripping both her hands in his, promising, pleading, begging. It seemed to him that Glynnis heard and understood, yet could not speak. Ah, could not!

And finally she closed her eyes. And Bianca, released, burst into tears.

GLYNNIS DID NOT
regain consciousness again that day, or the next, though Ian and Bianca waited expectantly, always hopefully. Then they began to spell each other, a five-hour vigil for Ian, a three-hour vigil for Bianca. It seemed to them that, at any instant, Glynnis would again open her eyes and rouse herself forcibly from the stupor that had settled upon her limbs: would, this time, speak their names;
see
them.

But the hours passed, and the days. And it did not, so very mysteriously, happen.

Ian spoke with Flax, for Flax was the man, clearly, with whom to speak. He asked, “Is Glynnis in a coma? Is that what this condition is—a
coma?
”

Flax, frowning, seemed to say yes, unless Flax said no; it was not altogether clear what Flax said, still less what he meant. He spoke slowly and at length, explaining the details of the operation, letting fall remarks that might be interpreted as cautiously optimistic, unless they were guarded or frankly evasive. Ian gathered that Flax was waiting for the return of his partner Pois, a neurologist, who was returning to Hazelton that very day.

Bianca said of Flax, “If he knew Mommy he'd
care
more.”

Ian said, “We have to believe that the man is doing the best he can.”

SO THE DAYS
passed, and they waited and kept their faithful vigil; like several others at bedsides in the intensive care ward, whose sad stories they soon learned but did not consider in terms of their own situation. For Glynnis was younger after all than these luckless (and clearly moribund) patients; her heart and her other vital organs were said to be strong. The changes in her condition that took place were nearly all internal, monitored by machines of exquisite precision and meticulously recorded, in a script and a vocabulary unreadable save to the initiate. The more public terms
critical list
and
coma
came to be uttered, but never their precise explanation, still less their cause. Having witnessed Glynnis's awakening once, Ian and Bianca were certain that they would witness it again. “My wife is a fighter,” Ian said, though this was not a thought he had ever had before in his life, still less uttered; and Bianca agreed, as passionately as if the point had been contested. “Mommy isn't the kind of woman to just give
up
.”

To their friends they said, “Things are more or less the same” or “Things are more or less stable.” It would have made a powerful impression upon Ian, had he the time and the emotional energy to consider it, that so many people in Hazelton, including a number whom he scarcely knew, came forward to offer their services. He understood that Glynnis had many women friends and acquaintances, but he could never have guessed that there were so many, or that, hearing of Glynnis's condition, they would react with such sympathy and alarm. Tell us what we can do, tell us how we can help, they said, and Ian's mind went blank, so confronted. The plainest truth was that what anyone could do for him he hardly cared enough to want done.

He sensed that there was much speculation in Hazelton about what had happened to Glynnis; it was a community in which everyone knew everyone else, or knew
of
everyone else, and was never loath to know a little more. By way of Denis Grinnell, though without Denis's seeming to know Ian had not known, he learned that the police officers who had come to the house had not accompanied the ambulance but had in fact been called by their neighbors the Dewalds, who reported having heard screams. “They must have exaggerated it,” Denis said; “—what they heard, I mean.”

“I suppose so,” Ian said slowly. He was stricken with shame and alarm. Had Glynnis screamed? Had
he
screamed? He could not remember.

IN THE INTERSTICES
of visiting hours at the hospital, Ian fell into the pattern of seeking out Flax, when Flax was there to be sought out. He saw the neurosurgeon as a counterpart of himself, a highly bred professional man, nervously attuned to his public reputation, outwardly affable, amiable, yet made of a steely substance that might be made to bend if confronted with a like substance in another man. Ian surprised himself, and, no doubt, Flax, by the audacity with which he hounded the man, surrendering, as the days so bafflingly passed and there was no change in Glynnis's condition, all vestiges of pride, tact, diplomacy, and even honor: as if Flax stood between him and his wife's recovery. He reminded himself of those men, and some women, who courted Ian McCullough with the hope of appropriating from him some degree of his power; as if, by a mere gesture of generosity on his part, he could grant them the means of altering their lives. He acquired medical books, neurological books, back issues of the
New England Journal of Medicine
from a neighbor of his who was an obstetrician, and with the manic intensity that had characterized his work in graduate school, but rarely since, he became an amateur expert, though very amateur, of brain anatomy and pathology and the latest microsurgical techniques. He came to believe that Glynnis should be operated on another time and did not like it that Flax resisted; told Ian, in fact quite bluntly, that another operation would be pointless. “I can't accept that,” Ian said. Flax said, not unkindly, “You will.”

At his most desperate, Ian McCullough was likely to be his most cerebral and abstract. If Flax would not, or could not, talk helpfully of Glynnis, he would ask of him questions of a philosophical nature: “Where, Doctor, does the soul reside? Is it generated by the brain, or filtered through the brain, or
is
it the brain?” And: “I have not read Plato in years, but isn't it in the
Phaedo
that proof is offered of the immortality of the soul? What do you think of Plato's proof, Doctor? Is it just fantasy, or is there something to it?” At such times, waylaying Flax in a corridor or in the parking lot behind the Center, Ian made an effort to hide the fact that his eyes brimmed with feeling and his hands shook.

Flax had nothing to say about the soul but offered to write Ian a prescription for the tranquilizer Librium, which, in the extremity of his need, Ian accepted. He'd heard that the tranquilizer should not be taken beyond two weeks, since it was quickly habit forming, but he reasoned that by that time Glynnis would have recovered or begun to recover. By that time he'd have no need of Librium, or of Flax, apart from settling the bill.

BIANCA SAID QUIETLY
, “You just want to protect him.”

Ian said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

Her eyes appeared oddly lashless, naked and exposed. Her face looked as if it had been scrubbed with steel wool.

Bianca said, “You men, you men who run the world, you stick together.”

“And what on earth does
that
mean?”

Bianca made an airy gesture with her hand, a gesture in such mimicry of Glynnis, Ian thought for a mad instant that she was mocking her mother. But, to the contrary, she was altogether serious. She said, regarding Ian levelly across the cafeteria table—they ate many of their meals here, in the pleasantly crowded basement cafeteria of the Hazelton Medical Center—“You cover up for one another's crimes.”

The words so took Ian by surprise, he could not reply, and stared at his daughter with a look of hurt, chagrin, dismay. Though Bianca was nineteen years old and physically mature, though she had always received superlative grades in school and was commended by certain of her teachers for her “leadership qualities,” she had always shown a different face, struck a different note, at home. Ian said, gently, “What do you mean, Bianca, by ‘crimes'? Are you suggesting malpractice?”

“I mean ‘crimes' in a generic sense,” Bianca said. “The crimes of the patriarchy, which are immeasurable, because they have always been identified as virtues.”

Ian laughed. “Bianca, really.”

“The other side of a blessing is a curse, after all,” she said. “Like the Greek word
ara
, which means prayer but also a curse: The Greeks realized that a curse is after all just a prayer against one's enemies.”

“But I don't quite see,” Ian said, “how this applies to us. To Dr. Flax and us.”

Bianca looked at him levelly, unblinkingly. He had a moment's panic: Does she think I purposefully injured Glynnis? Tried to kill her? Bianca said, “No, you wouldn't.”

Ian rose blindly from the table, thinking of escape. He would run out into the street, clear his head, breathe. That this sullen young woman in the gunmetal-gray sweatshirt and well-worn jeans, hair straggling in her face, was his daughter, and therefore
his
, struck him, for the instant, as a fact of melancholy irony, a fact that his life had brought him to, as it had brought him to the comatose woman in the hospital bed seven floors above. They were women entrusted to his care, whom he loved desperately, but of what good was his love to them?

He walked away but did not leave the cafeteria; his legs simply could not take him out the door. Instead he bought two more cups of coffee, Styrofoam cups of bitter hot coffee, and brought them back to the table.

Where, now, Bianca sat crying, tears glistening thinly on her cheeks. “It's just—you know, Daddy, the way it has turned out, I mean the way Mother woke up as she did, clearly conscious, and looking right at us and recognizing us . . . it's just—” She broke off, baffled, unable to complete her sentence. “It's just . . . something I can't accept.”

Ian shivered and said, “Yes.”

LIKE IAN, BIANCA
was careful always to refer to what had happened to Glynnis as an accident.

When Ian had telephoned her at college she'd been upset, emotional, asking Ian several times what had happened, and how, my God
how;
but once she arrived home she asked no further questions. Ian had shown her the window that had been broken—that is to say, the new window that had replaced the broken window—but, subdued, she'd made no comment beyond remarking with a shudder that plate-glass windows and doors are notoriously dangerous, like children's playgrounds . . . did he know that the statistics were really quite shocking, involving playground accidents?

Nor did she inquire about whether they had been drinking that night. Or even whether they had been quarreling.

She did, however, ask about Ian's hand, his sixty-five stitches. “Was it trying to save Mommy?”

Ian, staring at the hand as if it constituted a riddle, said slowly, “Yes, I suppose that was it . . . trying to save Mommy when the window broke. But I failed.”