Broken for You (33 page)

Troy's arrival produced an unusual effect: Anyone who didn't know better would have thought they hadn't seen him in years, and they showered him with a prodigal's welcome of hugs and back-claps. "Please don't let me interrupt dinner," he protested, but they were already flying into action: Susan scurried to the laundry for towels, Bruce vanished to the kitchen, and Margaret set tasks for Gus—would he please fetch epoxy from the pantry and retrieve the boxed-up remains of her wedding china?

"I just stopped by after work," Troy said. "Really, ma'am, I wasn't intending to stay."

"Don't be silly." Margaret pulled an ironstone Mason pitcher off a shelf and began filling it with water. "I'm sure she wants to see you." Her mother had returned; she was lurking in the corner of the dining room and assessing Troy's physique in an entirely inappropriate manner. It was downright beady. Margaret shot her a twitchy, sour look. "Let's get those lovely flowers into this pitcher," she said pointedly. "I'm sure Wanda will love them."

The others came back to the dining room and recommenced their fussing over Troy. Before they could abduct him to the table, however, Margaret broke in. "Would you please take these things in to Wanda?" she asked, gesturing toward the box and epoxy.

"Sure." When Troy took up the box, it rattled with the unmistakable sound of broken contents, and his face reflected mild alarm.

"Don't worry, dear," Margaret said. "Wanda will know what to do with that."

"See if you can get her to come out," said Bruce. "I made enough food for the Army Corps of Engineers."

"But please," Margaret whispered, "don't hurry." She took Troy by the shoulders, turned him around, and gave him a small push in the direction of the Aviary Suite.

Cream was drizzled into cups with chipped handles. Sugar cubes were plunked and stirred. Fork tines chimed mildly against mismatched plates. Dessert spoons dawdled over melting spheres of sorbet. They nibbled. They sipped. They steered clear of certain subjects. They watched the clock.

Finally, Gus spoke. "They're probably playing Monopoly."

Margaret gave a violent, imploded snigger, sending a mouthful of ginger tea up her nose and setting off laughter all around. Even Gus let loose with a series of staid yuks.

After they all helped clean up, they started for their respective rooms— Susan and Bruce outpacing Margaret and Gus on the stairs.

"Good night!" they called out to one another. "Good night!" "Good night!"

Margaret loved the way their conjoined voices reverberated against the angled planes of wood, marble, plaster, and porcelain.
I should have had concerts here,
she thought, suddenly regretful.
Boys' and girls' choirs. Madrigal singers. I could have done that much, at least.

Gus drew Margaret's hand through his arm. He placed one of his warm, puff-pastry hands over hers as they strolled toward their room.

"Your barbershop quartet," she said. "I'm sorry, dear heart, I've forgotten the name."

"The Crooning Clansmen."

"Yes! I want them to sing at the wake. Here in the house. Would they, do you think? Would you ask?"

Gus stopped. "When are you planning on telling her, Margaret?" "I can't see how it would do any good, not now anyway. She's still so fragile."

"But everyone else knows, my dear. It hardly seems fair." Margaret stroked his cheek. "Don't worry, Gus. I'll let her know when the time is right."

Wanda woke suddenly. Had she heard someone talking? She was in bed, still dressed, but her shoes were off and she was covered by a blanket. How did she get here? She looked around the room, so huge and unfamiliar. It was almost completely dark, and it took time to realize that she was no longer in the hospital. The only light came from a street lamp outside the bay window. No moon. No stars. It was still raining, harder now, and there was a wind blowing.

She'd been on the floor, she remembered, doing—what? Margaret had been here, and smashed something—a bird, yes. And left the pieces behind, Wanda remembered; she'd been turning the pieces over in her hands. She was out of the hospital, in this new room, this room full of birds, on the main floor, so that she wouldn't have to manage the stairs. They'd been so thoughtful, so kind. She could hardly bear their kindness.

Someone besides Margaret had been here, she realized—and not only because she'd been moved to the bed, but because of the smell: dewy sage, laundered flannel. It was Troy.

Wanda's eyes refocused in the dark and she saw him, slouched in the window seat—awake or asleep, she couldn't tell. She had seen him like this often in the last months, keeping watch near her bed, like a soldier. She had heard him crying. He was the only one, of all of them, who had not pressed her to speak, had not tried to cheer her with petty conversation. Silent, the way horses are silent. The way cowboys are silent.

With effort, she sat up and moved her legs over the side of the bed. Troy stirred.

"Wanda?" He got up and walked across the room. She'd forgotten how tall he was. In silhouette, it was clear to her in a way it hadn't been before: He wasn't a boy at all. His hair was longer and his face leaner, as if he'd lost weight. Even in the dim light, she could see that he'd aged. She started to pull him toward her on the bed. She felt his hesitation, his wariness, and beneath that, their old unfinished business, and an offer she knew he would never make on his own.

"Don't worry," she whispered, pulling harder, until they were face-to-face and she could taste the warm cinnamon breeze of his breath. "I won't break."

It should have been a sweet pleasure to come at last to the feast of his body—plum wine, the oil of grapes, honeyed butter, peasant bread— to reward his long months of fasting and withholding, his bedside vigil, and what might even have been a guilty love. She tried the old enticements and teasings, tried to draw lines with him, for him: sinewy curves, thick swirls of color. She tried to braid her body with his, conjoin flesh and fluid—but all she could offer was gracelessness and pain. The only lines she could draw were sharp and splintered, gouged from dead wood. He tried too. He didn't want her pain. He slowed her, gentled her, quelling for a time her desperation with touch. He tried sweet applications of wet here and there, as if to soften and then glue her back together. He made promises she knew he couldn't keep, assurances he didn't mean. How could he? Because he was breaking too against the rock that she'd become. He had to be thinking—as she was—of what their bodies could have been together before the accident. She mourned the loss of what she might have given—not love, maybe, but something of worth: oblivion, nourishment, an improvised tango, a good fuck. Now and forever she could only be an obscene assemblage of cast-off parts that did not cohere and could not adhere to this or any other man's beauty.
Cripple,
she thought, seeing the angularity of the word in space, tasting its imploded bitterness.

Outside, the rain fell harder. She tried to become rain, create some place within where a pool could form and he could come and drink and be blessed. But she could make nothing. She was baked earth, mouth-fuls of sand, an empty table. Even as they held each other and cried, her body could not squeeze out a single tear for him to drink.

Sometime later in the night he got up and dressed. For a long while he sat on the bed, resting his hand on the back door of her heart. She tried to smooth out her breath, make it sound like the breath of a dreamer. She hoped he was fooled. She could not bear the thought of wounding him further. Finally, he leaned down, whispered her name, and left.

Wanda wrapped herself loosely in her bathrobe and got into her wheelchair. She retrieved her backpack. She pulled out her red and black book and leafed through its pages
. I
am going to find him.
she'd written, the dates recorded on page after page, as if they were journal entries, with the last entry made the day of the accident. She'd been meticulous in her madness. She wondered without caring what had become of her black dress, her rhinestone shoes, her black wig and cat's-eye glasses. She wheeled to the fireplace, put a match to the book, and threw it in. She watched it burn. "I will never find him," she said, as the pages blackened and shriveled. "I will never find him." She added kindling, logs, and the fire grew hotter. She was good at this. She watched the effortless transfiguration of her words, their release into a form that was weightless, airborne, capable of flying everywhere, seeing anyone. She watched the firelight ricochet over her bare skin and its new covering of scars; they were like hieroglyphs carved in granite. She wondered why the heat of bodies opening to one another didn't always lead to the reduction of a broken heart, and from there to union, alignment, love. She understood suddenly that her heart had healed, but wrongly, in the way of bones: It had sclerosed.

She noticed a tube of epoxy and a cardboard box on the dresser; inside the box were a pair of safety glasses, heavy work gloves, pieces of the gold leaf china that she and Margaret had demolished months ago, and a note: "Dearest Tink, Do with this as you'd like, but for God's sake, please use the gloves. Love, M."

Putting the box on the seat of her wheelchair, Wanda made her way back across the room, where—alone in the firelight, and because for the time being she had nothing better to do—she went to work.

Tw
enty-four

A Brief History of the
Hughes Collection

When Wanda awoke the next morning, the fire was out and the rain had stopped falling. The light coming through the windows had a flat pallor, the color of steel—a December palette, she thought, not at all the way light should be in midsummer.

The room was cool. The smell of Troy was still here, mixed now with the incense of dying wood smoke and rainwater, embedded in the fibers of bedsheets, pillowcases, and the dermis of her skin. On the bedside table was a porcelain vase; it held a bunch of flowers so saturated with yellow pigment that they hurt Wanda's eyes. She recalled a line by one of those suicidal poets she'd studied in college.
The daffodils are too excitable,
she paraphrased.
It is winter here.

She'd worked until first light and then gone back to bed. She must have fallen asleep. She had no idea what time it was—her wristwatch was long gone, and for months now time had been doled out in milligrams by doctors and nurses—but she could hear vague, sporadic thumps and bumpings throughout the house, so other people must be awake.

She pushed herself up and gazed at her work, laid out on the marble floor in front of the fireplace: nothing figurative, just a piecing together of the fragments from Margaret's parrot and her gold leaf china. An abstraction. A jigsaw puzzle without narrative. It gave her no satisfaction to look at it, but at the time, the act of handling the pieces—trying to find in their jagged shapes surfaces that suggested intersection, connection—had quieted, soothed, and distracted her. And here she was. She had made it to morning. She was still alive.

Where were those handy dandy prescription narcotics? Where had she dropped them?

She lowered herself into her wheelchair. She was about to conduct a search when someone knocked on the door.

Ha!
she thought.
Deus ex machine! This really is a bad play.

"Hello?" It was Margaret. "May I come in?"

Wanda wheeled to the door and opened it.

Margaret entered with a tray containing an antique porcelain coffee service. "Good morning!" She moved briskly to the window and set the tray on the table where the porcelain parrot had spent its last intact moments. "Did you sleep well?"

Wanda nodded.

Margaret poured. "Everyone's just left. Gus went to work, and Susan and Bruce have gone to do the weekly marketing."

She was immensely irritated by Margaret's voice. Had she always sounded like this? Like an excessively chipper talk show hostess from the Christian Television Network?

"They'll be back later this morning," Margaret concluded, giving her a sparkling smile and handing her a cup and saucer.

Then Wanda realized that it wasn't Margaret's voice that had changed; Margaret was the same as always. Everyone's voice—including, Wanda supposed, her own—sounded false and trivial. And whatever shabby, stupid content their words contained had little to do anymore with what she could bring herself to regard as meaningful communication. At the same time, Wanda recognized the arrogance and self-pity implicit in this brave-new-world view, and hated herself for it. The Percocet was still on the floor, somewhere. Wasn't it?

She inhaled the steam from her cup.
Jesus.
She'd tasted nothing but soapy, weak hospital coffee for so long, this was as good as an aphrodisiac.

Margaret walked over to the fireplace hearth. She studied the arrangement of pieces on the floor. "I didn't get to say good-bye to Troy," she said nonchalantly. "I suppose he left after the rest of us went to bed."