Amy Falls Down (4 page)

“I have a bionic leg,” she explains, due to a terrible accident involving her basset hound and a chainsaw. “We don’t like to talk about it,” she adds. Fortunately, Alphonse, the basset hound, survived unscathed, and romps gaily around Gallup as she tours a living room packed floor to ceiling with books. As she points out her S. J. Perelman collection, Alphonse trips her up and a small bookcase tips over, upending three shelves full of priceless old hardbacks, but Gallup just giggles infectiously. “As you can see,” she says, “he’s still trying to kill me.”

Gallup, author of three acclaimed novels, has not written for more than thirty years. Could a new book of fiction be in the offing? When asked again about her immediate plans, she says, cryptically, “To visit the Palomar Hospital Emergency Room.” Research, perhaps, on a medical mystery? “I don’t write mysteries,” she says, sitting us both down in the living room.

I am, at this point, at a complete loss.

In the touchy silence which follows, I wonder how to begin. Or rather how to begin again. How to talk to, and learn from, this profoundly eccentric and fascinating woman. In our telephone arrangements for this interview—the first in a ten-part series on San Diego authors—we had not discussed specific topics, so I have no idea what, if anything, is off-limits. If Gallup, something of a wunderkind in her early twenties, has written a word in thirty years, she has kept it to herself. On the other hand, recent history beckons. Okay, here goes.

“What drove that class member to kill?” I finally blurt, shocking myself. I have not planned to do this, but the atmosphere of the room compels me. The dark little parlor, jumbled with dusty books, its walls papered with Hopper prints and old Thurber cartoons, and Gallup, flamboyant yet oddly quiet at its center, reminds me of an old fairy tale—Merlin’s library, or the Gingerbread House. “Why did the rest of the class keep meeting even after two of them had died?” I ask.

As though I weren’t there at all, she picks a book off the floor, opens it up, and begins, silently, to read. Time crawls, punctuated by the whir of a crooked old Kit-Kat clock on the wall and the heavy panting of Alphonse. Clearly I have overstepped. Big time.

Still reading, she reaches up and slips off her scarlet turban, releasing a breathtaking wealth of silver-blond hair that falls to her waist.

After a full five minutes, and just at the point where I’m about to apologize and slink away, she looks up at me and closes the book. “Have you ever read this one?” she asks, pointing to the spine:
U.S.A.
, by John Dos Passos. Wordless, I shake my head. “Me neither,” she says. “When I was a kid, I managed to dodge it.” She bends down and scoops up the fallen hardbacks, piling them on the coffee table. “I never read any of these.” I peruse the titles.
Absalom, Absalom. The Idiot. The Virginian. My Gun is Quick. Buccaneer Governess.
“
Buccaneer
’s by Henrietta Mant. It was a bestseller in 1942.” She opens it up, seemingly at random, and begins to read again—this time for only half a minute. She glances up at me, clears her throat, and reads aloud. “Captain McDougal’s coarse chestnut beard scraped her cheeks raw as they grappled beneath the Southern Cross, and black waves slapped the poop of the
Flaming Simoom
.”

Reprieved, I scan the shelves that run along all four walls. “Where do you keep your own books?” She gestures toward a haphazard pile on the floor, in front of the fireplace. The pile looks, oddly, like kindling.

“He was on some defense committee for Leon Trotsky.”

“Who?”

“I have no idea,” she says. She sits in contemplative silence on a blue leather hassock, her eyes closed, her devoted basset attendant at her feet, gazing at her quizzically. She could be fast asleep. She could be, I realize, the mysterious subject of an old portrait.

At last she raises her head, and the expression on her own face mirrors that of Ambrose. Alert. Engaged. “Hello,” she says, as though suggesting that the interview begin again.

And so it does.

Disastrously.

“How did it feel to be assaulted in your own living room by a trusted student?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” The words are confrontational, but her expression is kindly, composed, as though she actually expected me to tell her. This is one of the oddest social moments of my life. Again, that feeling of enchantment, of timelessness, as I wait for some sign, the quiet broken only by the gentle lapping sound of Alphonse’s long tongue, licking her toes. Ten perfectly good toes. Was the “bionic leg” story some private joke? Was there no end to the mystery of this woman? Abruptly she stands. “They don’t love us,” she says. “To them we are salt licks and food gods.”

Before I am even aware of it, I am outside again, looking up at her on that stoop. Graciously, given that she has just shown me the door, she lets me snap her picture there, in the orange afternoon light. I feel like apologizing, though I’m not sure why. What did I do? Where have I gone wrong? I am desperate for answers. “When you come to a fork in the road,” she says,“go off-road. Stay off-road and see what happens. You’ll find out.”

Find out what?

“How it feels. To be assaulted in your own living room.”

But, I stammer, you were the one who had the experience. You were the one who was assaulted.

“Experience is overrated. Feelings are not news. Anyone who wants to know how a total stranger feels about anything must change her life.”

Does she have any final thoughts?

“Sure,” she says. “We hang, every moment of every day of our lives, by a fraying thread, and that is not news. The easiest way to the I-15 is to head straight up Ninth.”

As I back down the driveway, we wave like old friends. I race back toward home, intent on typing my first draft, digging up and reading my old thesis, Googling Henrietta Mant. Halfway home, I get off the freeway, using an exit I’ve never used before, and begin to meander homeward on unfamiliar secondary streets. It’s not off-road, but it will do.

Holly Antoon’s novel,
The Tuning Fork,
will be published in paperback by Monarch Press in March.

CHAPTER SIX

Imagine That

The mysterious subject of an old portrait.
Maybe this Antoon person had meant “the mysterious old subject of a portrait,” but by whom, Hogarth? Gainsborough? Picasso? For Amy, there was no end to the mystery of Holly Antoon, who had apparently found Amy’s bizarre and rude behavior enchanting. After a brief moment of panic at this public display, Amy comforted herself with the assurance that no one who started reading this article would finish it, and precious few would even start. Books and their authors weren’t a big focus of the
Union-Tribune
. In minutes, Amy was able to return to panicking about her imminent encounter with a non-virtual physician.

In Borges’s “The Secret Miracle,” a condemned man tries to modify his fate by imagining the most gruesome eventualities, each in intricate detail. He attempts this “weak magic” on the principle that nothing ever happens exactly the way we imagine that it will. When she first read this story, Amy instantly both hated and revered it. Hated, because she wanted to have gotten there first and would have if she hadn’t been so stupid and lazy, and revered, not because of the seventeen-jewel brilliance of the prose, but because, like all great fiction, it assured readers that they were not alone. She wasn’t the only human silly enough to attempt weak magic tricks.

She recalled picturing all the rejection letters she would receive when she submitted her first novel, and sure enough, her rejection from Knopf was much kinder and more encouraging than any of the savage kiss-offs she had composed in her head, so that when St. Martin’s took
Monstrous Women
two weeks later, she was, for just an instant, more impressed with her own arcane powers than with the prospect of publication. In the ensuing years, she imagined away brutal reviews, car accidents, dog poisonings; she singlehandedly saved the world from annihilation after the Russians invaded Afghanistan. She had even, shamefully, imagined Max’s various diagnoses and prognoses and dying behavior in exhaustive detail, never sure whether she was trying to steel herself or heroically affect the future. She was out of the room when he died; it had never occurred to her to imagine that.

Now she sat on the edge of a hard gurney surrounded by blue privacy curtains and tried to forecast the face, or at least the revealed attitude, of the white-jacketed invader who must eventually pop through. Vacuous inattention, robotic cheer, feigned concern, actual concern, she tried them all, then set to work on voices, accents, timbre, pitch. She worked more on nationalities than regions of the United States. She had time to do all this and more, but still could not bring herself to imagine the terrible moment of physical contact. Her mind just shut down at the thought of a diagnostic touch. To be groped by a slavering pervert in a dark alley would be infinitely more pleasant than to be accosted by anybody in this hospital, or any hospital. By the time the curtains parted she had not even begun the heavy lifting of diagnosis, prognosis, and next steps in what was sure to be a Jacob’s ladder of increasingly humiliating and expensive tests.

The resident’s name was Kurt Robetussien. He looked to be in his early thirties but had the tired eyes of a much older man. Beyond that, Amy paid little attention to his physical appearance, so captivated was she by his name. Was he on track for pulmonology? In Calvary Hospital in Bangor, Maine, Amy and Max had often amused themselves with the physician registry: there was an orthopedic surgeon named Klutz; there were MDs named Bunschaft, Hartwell, and Looney, none of whom had pursued appropriate specialties. Amy and Max had giggled endlessly over the tragedy of Harlan Bunschaft, who yearned to be a proctologist but, cursed by a ridiculous name, had to settle for neonatal surgery. Max would have loved Kurt Robetussien. In more ways than one, Amy thought, noting that he was Max’s type, cherubic, fleshy, his abundant brown hair luxuriant with glossy curl. He stood before her studying a file—her file, she guessed, although how there could be anything in it was a puzzle. She remembered now filling out some stupid form twelve hours ago. For a full minute he ignored her completely, which was just perfect. She held on to the moment, lengthening it in her mind, pouring into it all the joys of her pre-diagnostic-touch life. Something bad was about to happen, but
Right Now
swelled with beauty, the just-so blue of the privacy curtains, the gravelly voice of the invisible old patient to her left, the perfect thingness of the stethoscope around Robetussien’s neck. What an impossibly wonderful world.

“What happened to you?” asked Robetussien.

And how wonderful that he asked this without false concern and with only the mildest curiosity. “Life,” said Amy. “Life happened to me.”

He passed her first test, smiling instead of calling for a “psych consult.” “As it happens to us all,” he said.

“How would you know?” said Amy. “What are you, twelve?”

“Birdbath,” said Robetussien.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s all you’ve got here under ‘description of accident.’”

“I knocked myself out on a birdbath.” Amy started to explain in detail, but he was already touching her, gently palpating the back of her skull. Amy held her breath, then slowly let it out.
Now that wasn’t so bad,
she thought. He had touched her and she hadn’t lost her mind.

“Is your heart rate usually this high?” He was touching her again, the metal disk cold against the skin of her chest. He had reached down through the neck of her gown, his hand now millimeters from her unmammogrammed breast. “Never mind, it’s slowing down.” He pulled up a stool on wheels and sat down. “Who’s your doctor?”

“I don’t have one.” Amy braced herself for a brusque retort which never came; he seemed barely to have registered the fact that a sixty-two-year-old woman in obviously lousy shape had successfully evaded medical attention. She was surprised to find herself annoyed. He was older than she had first thought. There were even a few gray hairs. Had he flunked out of med school and taken another run at it?

He took something out of his pocket and shone a piercing light in her eyes. He told her to follow his index finger as it performed a series of random loops. Amy had a sudden urge to ignore it and follow an imaginary pattern instead, as if Tinker Bell were dancing from curtain to curtain. Would he ignore that too?
I was just messing with your head,
she’d say.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Evidence of a stroke, which you don’t have. Tell me about the memory loss.”

She did, first with a truncated, two-sentence version, and then, encouraged by his attention—the first signal of genuine interest so far—she elaborated fully, taking him through the past twenty-four hours, from the fall to her arrival at Palomar. “See this picture?” She showed him the Sunday paper. “This was, literally, news to me.”

“You’re kidding.” He scanned the article, taking his time. “Hey, you’re the writer.” His shoulders relaxed; he turned the page and continued reading, and when he came to the end, he snorted. “Holly Antoon,” he said.

“Okay, but how serious is this?”

“I think it’s a riot.”

“But I lost hours—”

“You look pretty sharp now. How’s the head?”

“Achy.”

He regarded her for a long moment. “You should have some tests,” he said.

“No,” she said, astonishing herself. Amy never spoke without thinking first. “No blood work. No mammogram. No colonoscopy. I prefer to be surprised.”

“By what?”

“By whatever kills me.” Amy was being ridiculous, but at the same time she felt proud, impossibly brave. She was saying no. She had never imagined doing that.

“You’re funny,” he said, looking young again. “I meant you should at least have an MRI. Why would I order a colonoscopy?”

“Oh.” Amy regrouped. “I have crummy health insurance. I’d have to pay a big chunk out of pocket.”

“You’re asking me if it’s worth it?”