Comfort and Joy (3 page)

"Two hours. Somethinglike that."Danopened his menu. "We cansleep late."
Dan hardly heard this. The thought of what lay two hours

awaystruck himcold.
Tomorrow we will drive to my mother's house.
Tomorrow. Dan reached for distractions and found his water glass.

Ford said, "One of the guys on the ward was talking about youtoday."
"Was he?"Danasked.
"The nurses took him to hear you sing. In the Christmas concert. He liked it a lot."
Dan said, "I thought I sounded pretty bad," but was pleased nevertheless.
"The nurses said you sounded good. They went on and on about it. Made me feelterrible, for not gettingthere."
"Youcouldn't help it."
"That's where I first saw you. Way back when I was a senior medical student. You were singing, 'God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.' I had never heard anything like you. It was one of the saddest sounds I ever heard. You got under my skin." This with a look of deep brooding. Something beneath attempting to surface. "I think I knew somethingabout youthat day."
"What?"
"Something about where you came from. What you could do. So I remembered you."
Something about where you came from.
The phrase echoed as the waitress, Marlene, presented supper.

During the ride in the elevator, Ford leaned against Dan and closed his eyes. Dan led him through the empty corridor by the hand, fishing the key from Ford's pocket. Ford stumbled dramatically to the bed and sprawled across it. Ford's need for sleep had longbeena joke betweenthem. He got little rest at the hospital, even when he was called upon to remain there for thirty-six or forty-eight-hour shifts; consequently, he had no time for anything else when he was at home. Dan sat quietly beside Ford, watching, hearing the change in Ford's breathing that indicated he would soon be asleep. Dan unlaced Ford's shoes, and Ford stirred, murmuring. Dan undressed him with practiced gestures. Dan read for a while, sitting in one of the chairs. When Ford's breathfelland rose inwaves, Danlaydownbeside him.
In the smallhours ofmorning, waking out ofsound sleep, Dan heard Ford talking in low tones on the telephone. Ford was speaking to Russell again. His voice, cool and crisp, belied his fatigue. The child had lost a good deal of blood. Dan couldn't hear allthat was being said, but for some reason he had a feeling this boy had hemophilia, too, and that this was a cause of Ford's worry.
"Is everythingallright?"
"The kid's having a bad night." Ford's weight settled against Dan's back. "But Russellsays he'llmake it."
Closing his eyes, Dan returned to shadowland and let Ford's warmthand nearness lullhiminto sleep again. Throughdawnand after, they lay drowsy, basking in the unaccustomed peace, having no alarm to answer. Mornings to lie abed had been scarce. Drifting in and out of dreaming, Dan was sometimes certain he wandered in Ford's house, where the sick boy cried nearby, in a room Dan had never seen and could not find, even though he heard the child clearly; in the dream Dan himself was bleeding and needed to take his medicine, but Ford had already departed for the hospital....
At other moments he was aware of Ford's heavy leg flung across his own, beneathsheets ofharshtexture. The comfortable thigh and fleshly warmth drew Dan nearer consciousness, but he lay quiet within the soft blankets, studying the pattern of acoustical tile in the ceiling. Ford's heavy sleep weighed like a stone in the bed beside him, the young man sprawled across pillows, hair tangled over his brow, bare dark nipple peering above the sheet's edge.
SoonDanreturned to the territoryofthe dream.
This time, because Dan himself was closer to waking, the dreamimage was more vivid. In Ford's house, Dan waited in the kitchen just after dawn and the boy was crying. His clear voice sounded a note of hollow cold and loneliness, a thread of vibration, now and then broken by soft sobs. On the kitchen counter lay the apparatus of the hemophiliac, the vials of dissolving medication, syringes, alcohol prep pads, butterfly needles, a tourniquet—was the medication for the boy, or for Dan?
As the sobbing continued, Dan searched the house, trying to find the boy by the sound of his voice. For a while he suspected it was his brother Grove; then he was certain it was Ford; then he became convinced it was he himself, he was crying somewhere, a smaller, younger, lesser Danny, and Dan the Elder had to find him. But the boy was always crying from some farther room. So Danwandered.
He woke finally to the tightening of large arms around his waist, to the press ofa familiar heat at his back, Ford's breathing torso moving against him and the sleepy voice murmuring in his ear. Saying no words, only the soft, slow pressure of Ford's thighs against Dan's back, tillDanturned.
When they were dressed, they bought breakfast at the same table in the same restaurant as the night before. "Did you pack your medicine?"Ford asked. "I looked for it in the suitcase but I couldn't find it."
"I have it ina separate case, inthe closet. Why?"
"Just makingsure,"Ford said.
He had already found time to call the hospital again, a conversation he had shielded fromDan, though Dan knew it had takenplace. The sick boyhad lived throughthe night.

Traveling east of Raleigh in the rented car, through flat farm country studded with paint-peeling farmhouses and winter-gaunt pine forests, Ford had the feeling it was Savannah, Georgia, that lay at the end of this journey and not the Wickham, North Carolina, of Dan's family. There was, in the flatness of the land and the poverty of the countryside, much to remind him of the territories ofhis ownboyhood. Overhead blazed a skywhite and bare as any winter sky Ford had seen, the morning sun a searing single eye into whichthe automobile plunged headlong. Alongthe roadside, beyond the bland fast-food-tainted suburbs of the Raleigh beltway, stood evidence of the lost commerce of other generations—the small wood-frame crossroads stores advertising Pepsicola; the ubiquitous, rusted Quaker State motor oil signs nearly lost behind brown weeds; wooden tobaccocuring barns, rotten and leaning over the trim, metallic bulkcurers that had replaced them. A small farm town hugged every curve of the road, streetlights bedecked in tattered Christmas decorations, streets for the most part empty of traffic. The quiet country spoke more to Ford ofbleakness than ofpeace, so that, as he steered the car deeper into the eastern forest, he kept watchonDan.

He and Dan had enjoyed relatively few such mornings with only one another for company, without the pressure of Ford's being on call at the hospital or Dan's being late coming home. Dan's face, a curious amalgamofhomeliness and handsomeness, had a clarity in this whitewashed light that reminded Ford oftheir first morning, Dan asleep in Ford's east-facing bedroom, Ford studyinghim, tryingto fathomthis strange attractor.

It was the sound of his voice that had stopped Ford in the It was the sound of his voice that had stopped Ford in the first-floor lobby of Grady Memorial Hospital, the eerie minorkey vibrato, pure and clean, a cappella, tingling the skin at the back of his neck. Ford, then a fourth-year medical student, was only dimly aware that the hospital sponsored a Christmas concert, but here it was, spilling over fromthe lobby to surround the information desk and congest the elevator court. Curt Robbins, the resident who was in charge of Ford for that month, cursed the traffic and the delay for the elevator, but Ford moved away from him into the fringes of the crowd, feeling the silence around him as the song hovered in the room. The voice rang on the tile walls and terrazzo floor. The man who was singing stood on a raised dais, nearly blocked from sight by a structural column. He was anodd, tallman, angular, witha childlike face, a high, clear brow, dark hair, and a full, soft mouth. His face was cleanly planed, his jaw all sere lines. At first Ford thought him homely, but after listeningfor a while he could no longer be sure.

The song kept himthere. In the midst of the decorated lobby, trimmed in potted poinsettias, the familiar carol belied the joyous season and mocked, gently, the attempt at gaiety through evergreenand velvet decorations. This man's songwas about the sadness of Christmas, and the singer, as far as Ford could tell, was aware of it, was in fact filling the spacious room and all its occupants with the certainty of it. Tidings of comfort and joy. Ford was mesmerized.

The song ended, and the singer received his applause. It seemed to Ford that those who had listened to the true nature of the altered melody applauded, as he did, with vigor surpassing the usualpolite appreciation. He watched the man, the slimfigure and odd face, descend and vanish quietly into a knot of friends. For a few more moments he watched, before shaking his head clear ofthe echo ofthe voice and song. Thenhe and Curt

Robbins, who had listened as rapt as Ford, returned to their duties. But as the elevator opened, Ford spied a stray concert program on the floor. He lifted the bright green-and-red Xerox, reading the names of the singers, the bell ringers from Coral Baptist Church, and Amanda Zed, the operatically trained business office representative who sang "O Holy Night" every business office representative who sang "O Holy Night" every year.

The name ofthe other singer was DanCrell, and he worked in administration. Ford folded the paper and tucked it into his pocket with his patient care notes. In the elevator he said to Curt, "Christmas sucks, anyway."

Later that same evening, in the apartment he shared with his dog, Hammond, and a friend named Allen Greenfield, he found the program mixed in among the scribbled SMA-18 results for one of his admits. The card on which he had scribbled the lab values belonged to a child who was in the terminal phase of leukemia, and Ford was expected to present this patient during tomorrow's morning conference. The concert program, lost in this chaos, seemed out of place. Laying the notes aside, he unfolded the paper and read the name again.

He hummed a few notes ofthe carolidly and thinly, with noise from the refrigerator as his only accompaniment. He tossed the program into the trash along with the rest of the paper to be purged from his pockets. The song would not leave his mind, was by now almost maddening, for it had stuck in his head and replayed itselfallday.

Months later, Ford moved into a house on Clifton Heights, a pretty brick bungalow with a deep yard stretching back to a patch of woods and a mostly dry creek bed. Here he lived, alone, with his dog. He had bought the house using income from a trust established for him by his grandfather. His ownership of the house, combined with his departure from roommates in general and Allen Greenfield in particular, had made Ford aware that he was at an important juncture in his life. He had reached his late twenties, and his parents reminded him regularly that he ought to be thinking about marriage. His parents were certain to continue their lectures onthe subject, assumingtheir harangues to continue their lectures onthe subject, assumingtheir harangues to be for his own good. But Ford imagined himself in marriage only withdifficulty.

Ford had lately begun to worry at the number of Allen Greenfields in his life. He had lived with Allen for only a few months. During the beginning of their rooming together, they had made love twice, in Ford's bedroom, on the Sunday afternoons of succeeding weeks, without speaking of the event before, during, or after. These sessions took on a kind of frenzy and violence, the memory of which haunted Ford far beyond the moments of climax. Ford had returned to the apartment fromhis Sunday morning workout, his body flush from exercise, and Allen followed him into his bedroom, where they talked. Allen had appeared fascinated with the details of Ford's workout. He admired Ford's brawny body, and Ford had offered particular brawn for further admiration. Silence had settled over themboth. Ford sensed the tentativeness of Allen's seduction and responded, at the crucial moment. Stripping in front of Allen. Standing close. Finally tellingAllen what to do, how to do it, by gripping the smaller man's head with his hand, easing him to his knees. Their two bodies had tossed violently on Ford's big bed, and when they were finished, Ford stepped immediately into the shower.