Claire's Head (14 page)

“At Christmas she mentioned this Chinese doctor.”

“Oh, the herb doctor. Some friend of hers recommended this doctor in Chinatown who got her boiling up herbs every day for like weeks. The whole apartment stank. Then she had to drink the, what, the tea, the broth?”

“Did it help?”

“Honestly? Maybe. Not really in the end, I guess.”

“Do you have the doctor's name?”

“Fin? Fung? Someone on East Broadway.” The line went shrill with sirens, a man, a woman calling his name. “Claire, I've gotta go.”

She set down the phone. A pain support group? An herbalist? She retrieved the fan from the closet and stationed it far enough from the desk so as not to ruffle the papers on the surface. Gathering the business cards, minus those she'd taken home on her last visit, she began to sort them, dealing them out like playing cards. Medical professionals, assorted media, beauty treatments, other – the curious detritus of Rachel's life. Other included IT workers, bankers, an economist, a hypnotist, a professor of astronomy. The air filled with the thwacking of pigeon wings. A breeze from the fan played across Claire's sweaty back. She stood in front of the fan, arms raised, as if showering in air. Down below, a dog barked. She went to the sink and gulped down a glass of water. Back at the desk, she came upon a card for a Dr. Win Toong on East Broadway.

It was a Saturday. She decided to try the number anyway. The woman who answered the phone said the doctor was finish for today. I'm just wondering if I could speak to the doctor? Finish, you want an appointment? Well, Claire said, I guess, if there's anything available Monday, say, Monday morning. Monday, twelve noon.

She was scheduled to fly out at 3:50. She ought to be able to make it down to East Broadway and back in time to catch her flight.

At one, wearing a hat and sunglasses, Claire went out for lunch. The curbs glowed white-hot. Pedestrians kept to the shady side of the street. In Veselka's, on the corner of 9th and Second Avenue, she ate a tuna-salad sandwich and listened to a waitress taking a man's order as a bus blew squealing in along 9th Street. “Something to drink with that?” the waitress asked.

“Mustard,” the man replied.

Instead of returning to Rachel's apartment, Claire kept walking, south along Second Avenue, past a young woman who suddenly turned to her male companion and asked, What is a falafel? Further south, a man coasted by on a scooter, chanting, Wherefore wherefore where – It was an afternoon of such auditory oddities. At Houston, a man was squatting on the sidewalk, a wool hat upended in front of him, shouting what sounded like gibberish, which then clarified into
shellfish shellfish
as she approached, and then, uttered with ever increasing speed,
please help please help
, as she drew even nearer. She tossed a handful of coins into his hat.

All of this seemed familiar. She and Rachel had walked together down Second Avenue, sometimes cutting across 4th Street or 3rd, sometimes continuing south to Houston, before heading west. Through Rachel, she had a history on these streets, a history that brought Rachel close and reached back years, ever since Rachel had moved to New York, at twenty-four, to attend the Columbia School of Journalism. (Later, she would manage to finagle herself a series of work visas through positions on various magazines, which became in practice, if not on paper, steadily more freelance over the years. She found a good lawyer and got a green card.)

Two Decembers in a row, as soon as her fall semester of college classes ended, Claire had taken the twelve-hour train journey south to visit Rachel. During the hours when Rachel was busy, she had walked the streets and avenues on her own, back and forth, up and down, counting blocks, committing them to memory, storing the streets inside her.

On her first trip, she discovered that tree-sellers had taken over stretches of lower First Avenue, below 7th Street, erecting wooden scaffolds and leaning Christmas trees, cut spruce and Scotch pine, against them. She walked through these temporary bowers, inhaling pitch and spice. The tree-sellers, she realized, by observing the licence plates on the trailers parked beside the trees, were Canadian. Presumably they camped out on First Avenue during these weeks before Christmas. (Where did they shower? What did they eat?) They sat on folding metal chairs behind the trailers, those with Quebec licence plates speaking nasal French to each other, the Nova Scotians with noticeable accents. It was an odd place in which to discover a sense of complicity and fellowship with her countryfolk, and she felt a sudden nostalgia for the land she'd so recently left.

The following year, Claire wanted only to vacate her life in Toronto, empty her heartbreak into these other streets. Four months had passed since Kevin Giddings, her first boyfriend, had left her, the loss of him papering over all the questions she'd had about their relationship, once the initial euphoria of having a boyfriend, an actual boyfriend, had worn off. They'd met at Sheridan, where Claire studied cartography and Kevin, landscape gardening. He'd abandoned her for an interior design student. It wasn't that she was coming to Rachel for comfort, she didn't
particularly want to confide in Rachel about her love life. Rather she wanted to be enveloped by the magnanimous, energetic pleasure that Rachel would take in steering her, the younger and less sophisticated one, towards gallery shows and shops and cheap restaurants that she might not otherwise have heard of. As on her last trip, they would have dinner together, and wander through tiny boutiques trying on odd-shaped dresses and expensive shoes. Only as soon as Claire arrived on Rachel's doorstep, it was clear that Rachel was in the grip of a migraine.

Before Claire had even set down her bags, Rachel beckoned her over. “Feel this,” she muttered, indicating the back of her neck, and when Claire, after removing her gloves, squeezed her fingers over the skin, the muscles beneath were hard as stone. Rachel exhaled softly. There were times when Claire's own neck felt like that. She rubbed Rachel's neck a little longer.

“Bad?” It was a stupid question.

“I thought it would be over by now,” Rachel said. Her voice had dropped a note, a side effect of heavy codeine use. “It's into its third day.”

Folding her coat over a chair, Claire filled the kettle and put it on the stove. She took the heel of bread and rind of cheese that Rachel offered her, which seemed to be all the food there was in the apartment.

“Look,” Rachel said. Pulling back the sleeve of her shirt, she flexed her bicep. The muscle was well-defined without bulging grotesquely. “I was reading an article the other day about junkies, and how toned their muscles can be, from tension, not from strength, and I thought, that's me. Do you know how depressing that is?”

“But you were always athletic,” Claire protested.

“Was,” Rachel said. “Emphasis on was.”

“Are you taking care of yourself?” Claire asked. “Maybe you're working too hard or taking too many pills.”

“Honey, I have to work.”

Rachel's futon was pulled out across the floor of the middle room. Claire had to leave her bags in the kitchen since there was no way to get from the kitchen to the front room without stepping on the mattress. Rachel wouldn't go out for dinner. “If you want to go out, you'll have to go by yourself.”

So, although Claire had envisioned setting out with Rachel for a late meal in SoHo or Chinatown, she squelched her disappointment and trudged around the corner by herself to the Café Mogador on St. Marks Place.

When she climbed back up the six flights, a bag of groceries in her arms, and knocked on Rachel's door, Rachel opened it, in the midst of pulling on her leather jacket.

“What's up?” Claire asked in surprise.

“I have to run an errand.”

“Do you want me to run it for you?” Because, as Claire had understood it, an hour and a half ago Rachel wasn't feeling well enough to go anywhere, and her pallor and the swerve at the edge of her movements did not seem to have subsided in the meantime.

“No,” Rachel said. It seemed a given that Claire would accompany her.

They descended the six flights without speaking.

Outside, they turned in the direction of First Avenue and crossed at the lights, heading east, where, on the far side of First
Avenue, a handful of dark men jittered in the shadows, crying,
sin sin sinsemilla
. Without a word to Claire, Rachel stepped into the deeper shadows with one of the men, leaving her in the middle of the sidewalk. A moment later, Rachel returned, pocketing something.

“Are we going back?” Claire asked.

“No,” Rachel said, “we're going to the park.” It was mild for December, cool enough for gloves but not cold enough to see your breath.

“Rachel, no,” Claire said, “I just got in. I'm starting to feel exhausted. Let's go back.”

“I thought you wanted to go out,” Rachel said. There was something mean in her voice. She hadn't yet given Claire a set of keys, which, on some level, she seemed aware of.

Claire thought, I can go back. Or anywhere else. Abandon Rachel, only this wasn't really Rachel, she told herself, this was Rachel's migraine speaking.

They crossed Avenue A and entered Tompkins Square Park. Claire had no idea why Rachel felt she had to go to the middle of the park in the middle of December to smoke a joint, at night. This was a place that at the best of times, as Claire understood it, was not somewhere the two of them should be hanging out after dark. She had no interest in smoking a joint. She did enough drugs as it was and dreamed of fewer altered states, not more.

The park smelled of smoke and shit and urine. There were rustlings in the bushes. Footsteps exploded in Claire's ears. Her limbs felt loose and watery, her heart a sieve. They seated themselves on a bench, directly under an old wrought-iron lamp,
Rachel's concession to Claire. Rachel pulled out her packet. Dark hair fell over her eyes. She swore: she'd forgotten to bring any cigarette papers.

So they had to make their way back out to Avenue A, to the bodega on the corner of 11th, where Rachel discovered she didn't have any more money on her and Claire had to cough up the necessary cash while Rachel hovered beside her.

“Does this work for you?” Claire asked on their way back to the park. She'd heard it said that marijuana helped some people's migraines.

“Don't know yet.” There was a note of desperation in Rachel's voice.

Back on the same bench, Rachel rolled a fat little cigarette and offered it to Claire.

“No, thanks,” Claire said. She hated being made to feel prim, fearful and prim. She was aware of the twinges of something now, right side, faint pressure and pulse. “I went to a neurologist a couple of weeks ago and he wants me to keep a record of when I get them, how bad they are on a scale of one to three.”

“Three,” Rachel said, “that's pathetic.” She leaned forward. “I met a woman in the laundromat who got migraines and said the only thing that cured them was sex. Whenever she felt a migraine coming on, she went out and had sex. Didn't matter who with, just sex.” The skin beneath Rachel's eyes was so pale it looked swollen. “Guess what I asked her?” Rachel tamped the cigarette, still unlit, against her thigh.

“I don't know.”

“You do. Did it have to be good sex?”

“And did it?”

“The better the orgasm, the better the effect.” Rachel was silent for a moment; then she said, “I would do it.”

“Do what?”

“If someone was in terrible pain and having sex could help them, I would do it. Would you?”

Claire said nothing.

“How are things with your guy?”

“I don't have a guy,” Claire said. She wished she'd never mentioned Kevin Giddings to Rachel. “When I was in Victoria in the summer, he met someone else.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Whatever. Doesn't matter. When I have a headache I don't usually feel like having sex and when I had a headache Kevin didn't seem all that interested in having sex with me.”

Rachel rested her left hand gently on top of Claire's right. “It's all right.” Then she began to rub at the skin under her right eye. “I know a guy whose migraines are cured by arm wrestling.” She could be irritating, but she was also generous, and brave, and if brave, then by extension, surely Claire must also be, for pain made twins of them. There was no other being so neurochemically, so metabolically close.

On another visit, Rachel told Claire a story about a man from London, England, who suffered frequent and debilitating migraines until he came to New York on a business trip and had no headaches at all. So he arranged all his affairs to return, with the same result. And the next time, and the next. Finally, he decided to make a real trial of it, took a leave of absence from his job and spent an entire month in New York. He still didn't
suffer a single migraine. He flew back to London and told his wife they had to move to New York. In that city, he was pain-free. He was meant to be there. She refused to accompany him. Instead she asked for a divorce. His widowed mother died of an aneurysm. Still, he did not change his mind about leaving London. He and his wife sold their flat, he abandoned his well-paying job and accepted a transfer to an inferior but potentially less stressful position with the American branch of his London firm. After weeks of searching he managed to sublet a studio apartment in the West Village for several thousand dollars a month. A week later, still pain-free, ecstatically roaming the nearby streets, he stumbled upon a cheese shop. In London, he had eaten a lot of cheese. It had been his habit, on a Friday afternoon, to stop at Neal's Yard Dairy after work, buy a half-pound of Caerphilly, and eat it on the way home to his wife. In New York, he had scarcely eaten any cheese. Instead he'd discovered the joys of takeout sushi. At Murray's Cheese Shop on Cornelia Street, he bought a half-pound of Wensleydale, a fine English cheese, the sight and smell of which made him suddenly wistful. Musing as he walked, he unwrapped the cheese, devoured it all, and two hours later was felled by a migraine.