Chez Cordelia (26 page)

I didn't know what to say. I looked at the scraggly hair peeking around the corners of his running shirt and thought how hard it was, for some reason, to sympathize with him, even when he cried. “Well, I guess you don't have to do anything with her any more, Alan,” I said.

He stood up. “You were right to call your parents. Let them have a try. I give up. I've failed—failed—failed.” With each “failed” he banged his fist against the refrigerator, and then he turned his fierce, red face to me and said, “There's only one thing for me to do. I'm splitting.”

He headed for the door, remembered he was in running clothes, and went toward the bedroom.

“What do you mean, you're splitting?” I followed him down the hall. “You can't just leave, Alan. What about Greece?” I knew Greece was off, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. “You and Juliet have plane tickets. What about Juliet?”

“You and I both know she's not capable of going to Greece. Fuck Greece. Fuck everything,” he said, and I knew he meant Juliet, too. I went and banged on the bathroom door.

“Juliet! Come on out of there.”

Juliet yelled, “What?”

“Open up, Jule. Come on out here, quick!”

She emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a robe, with her hair wet. Plastered to her head, it looked like a bathing cap. Her face was dead white, and her fingers, clutching the robe around her, were translucent and skeletal.

She squinted at us, confused. “What?”

“He's leaving,” I said. “He's going to desert you. He's walking out.”

“Alan?”

Alan was sitting on the bed, looking beaten. “Juliet, I can't take it,” he said. “I can't write, I can't do anything. I haven't been able to help you. You need more than I can give you, Juliet. I've failed. I've tried, but …” His eyes clouded up again. “I make you worse. I don't know why. I admit it, Cordelia,” he said, looking wearily at me.

Big deal, I thought. We were all silent for a moment. Juliet still seemed bewildered. She put her hand to her head and frowned. I was beginning to see just how much her morning jog took out of her.

“Mom is on her way in from California,” I told her.

She didn't look at me. “But you're leaving, Alan?” she asked. “Just like that?”

“I can't take it, you've gone beyond me,” Alan said, standing up and looking around the room as if he might pack a bag or change his clothes. “We just aren't good for each other, Juliet. I can't take it any longer.”

I screamed at him, “If you say that once more, Alan, I'll kill you with my bare hands.
You
can't take it! You did it to her, you know you did.” I had a strange impulse to stand in front of Juliet and shield her, like a mother bear with her cub.

“You don't know one damn thing about it, Cordelia,” Alan said in a hateful, controlled voice. “Would you mind getting out of this room so I can talk to Juliet alone?”

I looked at Juliet, and she nodded bleakly, still looking at Alan. “Yes, go, Cordelia. I need to understand this.” She touched her forehead again.

I slammed the door on them and sat in the living room in Juliet's rocking chair, cursing silently. I wished my mother would come early, and catch Alan in his cowardly retreat. I wished Mr. Oliver were there. I tried to think of something horrible to do to Alan, to punish him for turning Juliet into a wreck, blaming her for his troubles, and then walking out on her.

I could hear his voice behind the bedroom door, talking in short fits, but I couldn't tell what he said. There was no sound from Juliet. Then I heard drawers opening and shutting, and Alan came out in jeans, a suitcase and a tennis racket. He kicked at a pile of paperback books on the floor. “Fuck these,” he said, looking anxious but trying to sound casual, even jaunty. “I've got most of my stuff—fuck the rest. I'm traveling light.”

“I see that,” I said sarcastically.

He regarded me directly for just a moment; there was panic in his eyes. “I can't handle this, Cordelia.” He dug into his pocket for his door key and threw it at me. It landed on the floor. “Keep the apartment. I won't be back.”

“But you love her, Alan. She loves you,” I protested. “She'll go crazy for sure if you leave her.” He didn't answer. “Besides, you did this to her! She wasn't like this before!”

“I haven't done it to her, Cordelia, whatever
it
is. I don't even know. But if Juliet has troubles, they're her own troubles. I've tried to help her—”

“Help!” I cried indignantly, but he wouldn't say anything else. He headed for the door. There was no noise from the bedroom. I peeked in. Juliet was still sitting on the bed, blank-faced.

“What are you afraid of, Alan?” I asked him. “Why won't you wait for my mother? Face the consequences?”

He went out the door and shut it gently behind him. I heard him going down the stairs, fast, with a ratlike scurrying sound.

From the window, I saw him emerge from the building and walk down the sidewalk to the car. He threw the suitcase into the back seat. I yelled out the window, “Where are you going, Alan?”

He shouted something I couldn't hear, but I'm reasonably sure it was “Mind your own business.” The car door slammed, and he drove away. It had all happened in perhaps twenty minutes—maybe fifteen. I sat in the rocking chair, trying to think what I should do. I had a vague idea that Alan should be forced to confront my mother and confess his crimes—to bear the brunt of her grief and anger at Juliet's condition.
He did it
, I was still repeating to myself when Juliet walked, zombie-like, out of the bedroom, shivering, still wrapped in her bathrobe.

“Well, he's gone,” I said grimly.

She sat quietly on the sofa, looking around the room as if checking out the dust, and then all of a sudden she began making an “aaah” noise, part scream, part wail, and looking at me with her hair all wet and her mouth stretched in anguish.

I leaped up and knelt beside her. “Mom is coming. We know you're sick, Juliet. She's going to be here any minute.” I exaggerated so that she wouldn't think to leap up and run out after Alan. But she didn't move, except to rock back and forth on the sofa and moan. I thought she'd blame me, at least, for letting him go. I thought she'd ask me how Mom found out. But she said nothing, just moaned. I wondered if she'd gone mad. I didn't know what to do. She looked like a prematurely aged child. Her tiny face came to a sharp point at her chin, her cheeks were gaunt, and her eyes were huge and dull and tragic.

“Juliet?” I said, and she stopped making her noise and collapsed on the sofa in a fetal position, crying. The bottoms of her feet were cracked and white; even they looked ill and tired. “Alan was crazy!” I yelled, suddenly angry all over again at his flight. “Look what he's done to you.” She cried harder, denying nothing. I don't know if she heard me. “I'll make some tea. A nice cup of ginseng?”

She didn't answer, but I made a cup and set it beside her, and then I cleaned the apartment, furiously, eradicating the summer's accumulated dirt. I dusted everything and ran the vacuum, and I hung up all Juliet's clothes or put them in the hamper. Then I washed the kitchen floor and wiped off all the counters and cupboards and washed the accumulation of dishes. During all this, Juliet lay quiet or sobbed or moaned, hardly moving. She didn't drink the tea.

“Jule, do you want a peanut butter cracker?” I asked her when I was done. I was hot and sweating, and I spoke irritably, but the offer was made in good faith. I thought maybe some real food would snap her out of it. I thought maybe she didn't eat because she was sick of Alan-food but didn't want to admit it. “I have Triscuits, too,” I said. But she didn't answer, just moaned.

I didn't even know if she was lucid until, I guess around eleven (I was doing my best to make bean soup out of navy beans and water and herbs), she raised her head and called, “When did you say Mom is coming?”

I rushed into the living room. “Noon,” I said, and, quickly, to take advantage of her return to life, asked, “Want some bean soup, Jule?” She just laid her head down again. “Tea? Some hot tea?”

“I want to die,” she said, but I didn't believe her. If she really wanted to die she'd be in the bathroom slashing her wrists or at the window ready to leap. I brought in more tea. When I checked a few minutes later, it was still untouched. I sat down beside her and said, “I know how you feel, you know. Partly, I mean. Danny walked out on me, remember.”

I didn't expect her to answer, and she didn't, though she moaned again—perhaps in sympathy. While we were sitting there, my mother knocked at the door. Juliet gave a little scream and ran with unexpected energy to open it. She collapsed into sobs all over my mother, as if she hadn't just been crying for three and a half hours.

My mother's light hair was frizzed all around her face from the heat, and she looked haggard, but she stayed dry-eyed. She set down her bag, which had a
New Yorker
sticking out of its side pocket, and she and I led Juliet back to the sofa and made her lie down. My mother sat beside her, held her hand, and smoothed Juliet's forehead with her fingertips. I could tell she was shocked at Juliet's appearance—she gave me a look which said so, and she picked up Juliet's hand and looked at it as if it were something she had found on the beach, some old fish skeleton.

“Is she packed?” she said to me.

I hadn't thought of that. I went to pack up Juliet's stuff, leaving my mother murmuring, “I'm taking you home, to your own room, Juliet. We're going to get some good food into you. You're going to rest. You're going to see a doctor.” Juliet said, but weakly, “No, no,” and my mother started over: “I'm taking you home. Daddy will be here day after tomorrow. We're going to make you well. You're not a worthless person, Juliet. You're not going to die, because we love you and we won't let you. You're going to eat some good food and get well.”

Juliet protested again, but my mother's voice went on and on. It scared me that Juliet had to be spoken to that way, in that special, placating voice, as if her mind really was breakable and had to be treated gingerly. If that were so, how precarious the whole summer had been, how close we all had been to disaster.

I packed her things neatly, finickingly, the clean clothes in suitcases, the dirty ones from the hamper in a plastic bag. Some of the clothes in the hamper were Alan's; I put them, with a pair of his slippers I found in the bathroom, his toothbrush and razor, and the books he told me to fuck, into another bag and took it out to the incinerator.

“Alan walked out when I told him you were coming,” I told my mother. “He left as if the cops were after him. He says she did this to herself.”

My mother's lips tightened, and Juliet sobbed afresh. I brought out her suitcases and sat down again. “Anybody want bean soup?” I asked, but nobody did. Juliet got dressed in a T-shirt dress I'd left out. It hung on her in loose folds. My mother stared at Juliet's naked knobby knees. “You should let your hair grow, Jule,” she said. Juliet reached up her hands to her hair and pulled at it, hard, until my mother took her hands away and said, “That's enough of that.”

I called a taxi and we all piled in with the suitcases and drove out to my parents' house, the three of us together on the seat, my mother and I sweating on the ends and Juliet cold in the middle. She wasn't crying any more. She stared stone-faced at the little card with the driver's ID:
GABRIEL MARQUEZ.

“That can't be Marquez,” she whispered after a while. “Driving a cab in Connecticut.”

“It's just a coincidence, Juliet,” said my mother, and explained to me, “There's a writer by that name,” which I thought was nice of her. Juliet kept staring at the name as if she remained unconvinced.

“What about you, Cordelia?” my mother asked me when the silence had gone on long enough. She turned to me for diversion, as she might have picked up her
New Yorker
. “What do you plan to do now?”

“I have to go to work tomorrow,” I said. “So I can't stay overnight at the house. I'll keep the apartment, I guess, for a while. Until I find a place to stay that I can afford.”

My mother sighed. “But what are you going to
do?
You said you were quitting your job.”

I shrugged and said, deliberately vague, “Look for a new job, I suppose.”

My mother looked at me over Juliet, disapprovingly, narrowing her tired blue eyes. “Cordelia, I wish you'd consider college. Junior college. Community college. No, listen,” she said when I began my automatic protest. “Not because I want you to become a scholar, or do anything in the academic line. I know that's not your … thing,” she said, in a voice that put no stock in my having a
thing
she could take seriously. “But just so you could meet some people, get out and see the world. These little dead-end jobs in shops and diners, Cordelia—”

“I don't work in a diner!”

“You know what I mean. You've got to do something with your life. You're too old to just drift along.”

I said nothing. I knew I wasn't drifting, knew I never had been drifting, but I had no words to convince her of that.

“There are some nice little colleges in California, Cordelia. Not demanding places, but colleges I think you could profit from. They have all sorts of innovative programs—”

“You despise those places!” I burst out. “I've heard you and Daddy make fun of them. California colleges where you can major in surfing and TM!”

“With a degree you could at least get a better job,” my mother said implacably. “And you wouldn't have to study.”

“I never said I didn't want to study!” I shouted indignantly. Gabriel Marquez turned his head around to look, and Juliet put her hands over her ears. “I just want to study what interests me.”