Borrowed Horses (23 page)

Everything was the essence of good taste: old-fashioned glamour toned down with burnished bronze mood lighting. Coltrane slid from speakers I couldn’t find. The walls themselves seemed to be speaking in jazz. Had Dr. John Rivers chosen the ebony elephant on the mantle, pearls for eyes and tusks that might have been real ivory for all I knew? Was it an antique store find, or had he haggled for it in some dusty foreign market, or was it simply mail-ordered from the latest issue of some catalogue for the fashionable wealthy? My favorite orange easy chair would have been rejected here, too old or not old enough. It wouldn’t withstand the rigorous attention of spot-lighting without revealing itself to be what it was: shabby. Yet at that moment, I would have taken it over all the too stuffed, too perfect chairs in this trophy-case of a room.

I drank my glass of Shiraz too quickly. The weight of the empty goblet hung on my hand. Obvious and pathetic, I stood alone without a soul to talk to. Even the couple from Nepal was doing better than I was. They chatted amiably with a small woman whose frizzy hair was poorly contained in her French twist. For lack of anything better to do, I moved toward the oil paintings, pretending to examine them with something approximating interest. The paint had been laid on thick—too thick, I thought, for the lightness of the moving swirls of color. I wondered what Dave would have thought of it.

“Enjoying yourself?”

I hadn’t heard Dr. Rivers approach, yet he stood at my shoulder, watching me examine his painting. His amused smile struck me as self-satisfied.

“You’re out of wine,” he said, taking the glass from my hand. “Let me get you a top up.” He left me again, alone and awkward, only more so now—abandoned. There was no one here I knew. No one from my station.

Dr. Rivers was back with a full glass and a plastic plate with fresh mozzarella, basil, and tomato stacked on melba toast, an appetizer so ubiquitous at New Jersey doctors’ parties that even here it struck me as cliché. I took the glass and plate and thanked him. The fresh mozzarella was as bland and pretentious as everything that surrounded me.

“I’m glad you could make it, Joannie.”

“Why?”

He laughed, and this time his laugh was genuine. It was a laugh that dismissed my question. I’d become merely original: clever, rather than sincere. He patted me on the shoulder, and let his hand linger there a moment. I looked at him, trying to work out what this all meant. Dr. Rivers did not like me; that had been a cornerstone to our relationship since I first started at the hospital. I’d been hired fresh out of school, and he’d immediately disapproved, constantly finding fault with my work, which even early on had been better than average.

“Well,” I said, “I know you’ve got a lot of important people to mingle with. I won’t take up your time.”

He looked stung, but he didn’t say anything as I turned from him.

As a child, I had played the game of opposites. The opposite of up is down, in is out, black is white. If there was an opposite to a barn, it was this party. I missed the silence and sincerity of horses.

I stood at the edge of a circle of surgeons telling familiar jokes. Lawyer jokes were a staple of hospital life. They were all too predictable to laugh at, but plied with good wine, the surgeons were practically doubling themselves over. Without a scalpel in hand and a body to save, they moved with more ease, joyous in this freedom.

I finished my second glass of wine as quickly as the first. The alcohol was starting to work on me—I hadn’t realized just how large the glasses were, how very much they had held. I went into the kitchen to put my glass in the sink and slip out. This room was built for beauty as much as function. Long granite countertops gleamed along the walls under rich cherry cabinetry and brushed steel lighting. The man himself leaned against a Viking stove, casually chatting with members of the board. Dr. Rivers was so relaxed in the midst of it all, smiling warmly, his wine glass in hand held as casual as an afterthought.

The clouds of alcohol were rolling in, and I wanted to get home. I caught Dr. Rivers’ eye, waved, and mouthed “thank you,” trying not to disturb what I imagined to be an important conversation.

“You’re not leaving?” he said, interrupting the board member’s wife in the middle of her story. If she was offended, she hid it behind a red lipstick smile.

I shrugged and mumbled something about being tired.

“Do you know Joannie Edson?” he asked the couple, waving me into the group. “She works in Imaging—takes the x-rays that let the surgeons know what we’re getting ourselves into.”

“I just do my job,” I said, embarrassed.

“Best x-rays I’ve seen—better than we’d get when I interned in Seattle—and I can’t tell you how much we rely on those pictures. We almost lost her to New Jersey. Did lose her, I should say, for over two years, but I think I speak for many of us when I say we’re grateful she’s back.”

I didn’t know what to say. He’d never been so forthcoming with praise, but we’d never talked about my x-rays in front of people he needed to impress.

“You ever think about going back to school, Joannie?” the woman asked. “Medical school, I mean.”

“You could go into radiology,” her husband added.

“Don’t you two give her any ideas!” Dr. Rivers said. “We just got her back, and now you’ll have her leaving us for school.” They all laughed.

I was superfluous to the conversation, a topic rather than a participant. Perhaps they hadn’t meant to patronize me, but it chafed. I put on a smile. “I’m sorry, but I really do have to go. Thanks again for inviting me.” I turned to the woman smiling at me. “It was a pleasure meeting you.”

But I hadn’t met her, not really. I hadn’t even learned her or her husband’s name. Nor had they met me. The person they met was a cardboard cut-out of Joannie Edson, a life-sized paper doll skillfully cut for their amusement by the good doctor. I’d done my job: as always, I’d provided the picture that was needed.

Phantom Actualized

S
unday morning, my mother’s hands regained feeling. I stayed for an early breakfast and left when they went to church. I hadn’t known how much I had worried until that worry was removed. Now, I thought I might go see Timothy.

My eyes never left him as I waited in line, so I hadn’t seen Dave walk up with his case of Bud and bag of Cheez Doodles. I didn’t know he was a step behind and listening as I asked Timothy if he wanted lunch. I didn’t see his face blanch, then purple.

Timothy saw it all: an unknown man setting down his groceries and turning on his heel, pacing a moment at the aisle’s end, as if looking for a manager, and storming off. I merely saw Timothy’s eyes move in that direction and then return to me while I counted the dark eyelashes that framed each eye. He’d smirked. “I can get a break in a half hour.” The phantom lover could waft into so much smoke and mirrors. The wall I’d built could crumble. I peeled the Butterfinger I’d bought as an excuse to stand in Timothy’s line. Life could be as sweet.

Dave sprang on me as I walked out into the sunlight; the candy bar flew from my loose grip and broke against the pavement. The grip of his fingers on my forearm pressed deep into Zephyr’s last bruise, spinning me on my heels into his close face, twisted in rage. “Who the fuck was that?”

I still reeled in his grip. “None of your business.”

For a moment, Dave didn’t speak. The veins, already visible, grew larger and deepened their hue. “You think it isn’t?” His voice was closer to an animal’s growl than anything human. Zephyr’s bite throbbed under his hand as he pushed the bruise in deeper. A middle-aged woman in a faded “Yellowstone” tee shirt looked at us through photo-grey spectacles, their dark glass beginning to lighten under the shade of the awning. She hurried into the store, while Dave pulled me out into the sun, into the fire lane, into the parking lot, muttering, “You can’t do this, Joan. You can’t.”

“Let go of me.”

“I fucking love you.”

“You’re married.” I hissed the words, conscious of the stares upon us like we were playing out some twisted episode of
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
: The lion claims his mate by grabbing her by the nape.

“Yeah, and you’re messing with her head, too.”

Dave’s shag of hair hung over savage, brutal eyes. I’d never been so aware of the sheer power of him—how tall, how muscled. My heart beat against my ribs as if I’d been sprinting for miles, but I knew the ways of animals. The battle does not always go to the larger or more powerful. I made my eyes harsh, generating a sneer of unforgiving disdain. I settled my weight into my feet, centering my balance. I found my teeth and claws.

His fingers dug again into the meat of my arm as if he meant to tear directly into the muscle itself, and he pulled me again, dragging me through the parking lot. In a not small but small enough town, this was exactly the type of thing that could get back to his father-in-law and to Jenny.

“Let go of me.” As I struggled, his fingers only dug deeper between bicep and triceps. My skin stretched and burned. I tried to kick but lost my balance, feet skating on the blacktop skree. The new security guard ran from the store and toward us, a blur of tan polyester.

Dave flung open the door of his truck and tried to stuff me into the seat, as if I were a sack of meal to be thrown over a mule’s back. My head cracked against the door’s frame, and I felt the warm ooze of blood. The world was suddenly blurry and distant and slow-moving, but the door had bounced on its hinges as Dave had flung me in, and had hit him in the shoulder. More acting than thinking, I grabbed this moment of divided attention and kicked him in the balls with every ounce of strength my leg had to offer. Not an upward kick but almost a stomping motion, a mule kick.

I hadn’t kicked a guy there since grade school when it was little more than a game, an anatomical curiosity. How the boys would crumple at the slightest blow! They, who lorded their strength over us, were so easily defeated. It had all come back as I watched Dave fall. My head rang, aching where it hit the door frame. “Don’t you ever touch me,” I said, my voice choked and guttural.

I stepped over him, fetally curled and rolling on the asphalt in his sad little letterman’s jacket. Once he was a man to admire, a man with potential, now he was grasping at straws and missing even them. The security guard slowed, arriving late and now unsure of what to do or who to help.

“My fiancé,” I said, unsure what possessed me, “didn’t like the cake I picked.”

“Oh,” he said, staring. My eyes were elsewhere. The cloud-free sky stretched high and far beyond him, beyond the square brick solidity of Rosauer’s. The autumn winds were starting to gather and gust, rattling the drying leaves on their trees and lifting them free.

I got into my own truck and drove home. My heart would not stop its terrible beating, and yet I now felt no fear. It pounded within; a primal drum, a cadence.

My head throbbed. This would kill Jenny if she knew, and she would know. I had no doubt of that. Maybe not today, but if Dave couldn’t keep quiet any better than this, she’d know someday. I paced my blank apartment, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. I should have met Timothy hours ago.

Bars of late afternoon light stretched through the vertical blinds and across my living room. Light and shadow only, but bars nonetheless. I was caged.

I filled a bag of ice for the lump on my head and lay on the sofa, staring upwards, fighting to find my bearings, my sense of self, hating my weakness. Dust clung within the crevices of the cottage cheese ceiling. A long fuzz-coated strand of old spiderweb hung from an air vent gently waving in the seemingly still air of the apartment, marking time like an odd kind of metronome. If dust is mostly made up of dead skin particles, whose shed body clung to my ceiling? Was it my own dead body I was staring at? The metronome continued to swing.

It was after five when Timothy came, his face a shadow behind his wing-black hair. “Jeff told me about the parking lot.”

“Jeff?”

“Security.”

For a long time, neither of us spoke. We sat listening to the ambient noise of the parking lot, the distant clatter of pots in the apartment above, the lives unfolding all around us with their own private triumphs and disasters. We were small in the world; little more than specks of dust.

Timothy didn’t look at me when he spoke. “So that was your boyfriend.”

I didn’t answer. I was looking at the sweater he wore: khaki green with patches on the shoulders, an army cast-off. Dave’s clothing read as costuming. With it, he created the person he wanted to be. There was always the element of construction. Timothy’s clothes were at once more and less personal. Shirts fit him as perfectly as if they had been tailor-made, but the clothes didn’t make the man. An old army sweater might have looked gimmicky or self-conscious on anybody else—a persona adopted. On him, it was only functional and appropriate. Like his tattoo, it suited him and offered a suggestion of the man inside, but only a suggestion. More was concealed than revealed.

“I’d half hoped,” he said, then stopped. He started again, his words coming more slowly and carefully now, as if he was hand picking each from a garden of words, not wanting to bruise them with rough handling. “I half believed,” he looked at me with a penetrating gaze, “that you’d invented the boyfriend.”