Dry Your Smile (41 page)

Voice:

Who was the most recent—

Julian:

(Her eyes shut, as if by rote:)
Dr. Jacob Bernstein at Manhattan General. I can give you his number if you—

Voice:

No, no, that's quite all right, I can get it. I've been trying to learn who he was from Mrs. Travis, but she wouldn't … uh, your mother is a difficult patient, Miss Travis.

(Julian's mouth twists into a rueful smile. Pan back to show her free hand nervously tidying her desk from Laurence's rampage.)

Julian:

I understand that, Dr. Grimes. Now please
tell
me … what, I mean how did she come to be back in the hospital?

Voice:

She fell, I'm afraid. At this stage a Parkinson patient really should be accompanied at all times. But as you know, she insisted she could manage by herself with someone looking in only every few days.

Julian:

Yes, yes, I know. But what—

Voice:

It seems that five days ago, not long after her cleaning woman had left, your mother stumbled to the bathroom and fell. She broke her hip. By the way, how old is your mother, Miss Travis?

Julian:

(Her hand twists and untwists the phone cord unconsciously:)
I'm sorry, Dr. Grimes, I have no idea. I imagine she must be in her mid-sixties. I wish I could be more precise. But she came of an immigrant family, and the records in those days …

Voice:

That's all right. It would be helpful, but it isn't that important. Actually, I'd estimate her to be more in her early seventies.

(Dolly back and pan down to show Julian stoop and begin with her free hand to gather up the spilled plant-pot soil, absent-mindedly trying to stuff it and the broken plant back into the pot as she listens:)

Julian:

Please go on. Then what? It took you
five
days to find me?

Voice:

(After a pause:)
Two days to find
you
. Three days to find
her
. She'd cut herself off from everyone so effectively that not even a neighbor wondered at anything peculiar. It seems her cleaning lady had a personal family tragedy of her own—her brother died suddenly—and when she couldn't make it to your mother's but got no answer on the phone she started calling you. But your phone, as I mentioned …

(Julian has frozen in her squatting position, her hand still full of earth)

… It seems your mother lay on the bathroom floor, unconscious for a while, and then began to crawl toward the phone.

(Julian slowly slides forward onto her knees.)

Miss Travis? Are you there?

Julian:

(With effort:)
Yes. Yes, I'm here. Please go on.

Voice:

Obviously it was extremely difficult for her. And with the hip fracture, quite painful. She's dehydrated, and her EKG shows that she might have suffered another slight stroke in the process. Oh, I meant to ask you: I do detect signs of an earlier minor stroke episode, don't I?

Julian:

(Barely able to manage the word:)
Yes.

Voice:

She must have passed in and out of consciousness a number of times. But she continued to inch toward the phone. Finally, three days later, the cleaning lady—Mrs. Washington—reached me. We gained entrance via the building superintendent and brought your mother in right away.

Julian:

(Trying to rise, not managing it:)
I'll be right there, Dr. Grimes.

Voice:

Oh, Miss Travis. I think you should know one more thing.

Julian:

(Sharp, brittle:)
What?

Voice:

Well … your mother doesn't want to see you. She is probably not capable, of course. But then I'm not an attorney. I think you should know that when I told her we had to ring you, her reaction was, uh, extremely negative. But you
are
the sole living relative, aren't you?

Julian:

(Bitterly:)
Depending on how you define living or relative, Dr. Grimes, yes.

Voice:

I don't understand—

Julian:

I'm sorry. Never mind. Yes, I am her sole living relative. And I'm grateful to you for persisting in trying to reach me. I'll come right away, whether she wants to see me or not.

Voice:

Good girl.
(Julian's mouth tightens involuntarily.)
We also need to discuss some procedural matters about her care, the future, the various—

Julian:

Yes, various costs. I understand, Dr. Grimes. I'll be there as fast as I can. Thank you.

(We hear his end of the line click off. Julian remains on her knees, clutching the receiver as if some last message might be forthcoming. Then she reaches up to the desk and hangs up the phone. Dolly in to tight close-up of her face, as her voice-over takes us into her mind:)

Julian voice-over:

Three days. And three nights. The light coming and going across the strands of the filthy Bokhara. How close your face would be to the carpet, Hope, your view of the room the same as that of the roaches who amble over the floor. The light coming slow and then fading slow and heaving your bulk through another sear of pain to inch another space closer. And the phone never ringing, the doorbell never ringing, the key never heard in the changed lock I would have used oh yes if it had fit. Who did you think of, Momma? Me? Mrs. Washington? Mrs. Dudinsky? David? That it maybe was finally really happening, and you alone, crawling across a dirty floor, crying out in your barely intelligible speech for help?

(Julian bends to all fours, putting her face deliberately close to the soil-strewn carpet, to try to see what Hope saw. Dolly back to take in the setting, the floor around her. Cut to what she sees, a close-up of the nap of carpet. Cut back to Julian, on all fours, crouching; move in again to tight face close-up with Julian voice-over:)

More than seventy hours, with the light coming and going slow through the blinds. Had the television been on for company? Did it play out its entire repertoire of soaps and game shows and cop shows and family sitcoms and news and late shows until the national anthem and the sound of static? For the darkest hours of night, static? Until the light started to leak in and the anthem broke into the channel signal again? Or was it silent except for a traffic horn, a siren? Were you trying maybe to call
me
, Momma? Or even just get an operator? And the pain shuddering out from your splintered hip-bone through your whole body? Or did the stroke wipe everything clean from the brain, like that magic slate I had as a kid? Did you think of nothing except maybe “phone” and “help”?
Three nights and three days. (Julian opens her mouth to scream, but no sound comes.)

Hope voice-over:

I never want to see you again, Julian. You did this to me
.

Laurence voice-over:

You rotten bitch, you ruined my life
.

Julian voice-over:

There must be some kind of atheist's god all my own, to help get me through this. There must be some place not brimming with horror. Joy exists somewhere, people have written about it. Or did they make it up? Does everyone? Seventy hours. You've got to do something. You've got to be calm and get down to the hospital and first change the linen no leave him a note careful most of all don't curse the universe and die you've got to be strong you can do it pull out the will who in hell do you think you are bitch bastard destroyer killer.

Julian:

What is it I do wrong?

Julian voice-over:

Never mind for now.
Think
. Get up and start moving. One foot, then the other. Women are the strong ones seventy hours
she crawled
to the phone. That's your heritage.

Julian:

I can't. I can't be strong anymore. All the will, it's drained out like pus from a lanced boil, leaving a welt of shrunken skin.
(Louder, almost a shout:)
I want someone else to be strong. I want to lean on someone else for a change!
(She looks down and notices that one hand is still clutching the spilled plant soil. She opens her fingers and watches it sift through them. Then, laboriously, like an old woman, she starts getting to her feet.)

(Widen frame to take in Julian standing, leaning for support against her desk. Suddenly she raises her head like an animal caught in a trap, and howls:)

Laaarry!

(The wail echoes through the empty loft. Faintly, from the street outside, sounds drift up of a quarrel between a prostitute and a pimp. Julian stares at her own hands with curiosity. Then she watches as one of them reaches out and lifts the telephone receiver. All her actions are done very slowly, as if underwater:)

Julian voice-over:

I'm not here. Not really. I'm a stranger, a detached observer self at the scene of the accident wondering which of all these feelings playing through me is my own. What's the motivation? Will this be a cry for help—from a woman who
could
make it to the phone? Is it a gesture toward freedom? A self-conscious heightening of the melodrama? an admission of defeat? another doomed inevitable scene to be played out? What kind of mad creature would so inflate an ordinary call into a fateful act?
What are you really feeling
, Julian?
Can
you feel?
Who are you?

(We move into a tight close-up again, and hear through the receiver a ring on the other end of the line. After only that first ring, the filtered voice of a woman answers:)

Woman's Voice:

Julian voice-over
(rapidly:)

Quickly. Quickly, now, before the tears rising in the throat break through
—

Julian:

Yes. It's me.

(Fade-out. Bring up crawl of credits, black and white. No music. Dissolve to black.)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Spring, 1983

March 15, 1983, 8
A.M.
: Day One.

The morning of the Ides of March. What an ominous date to begin keeping a journal again.

Awake early, at Ginny's, in her bedroom. She insisted on sleeping on the couch, generously giving me the privacy of a closed door.

I'm still numb, Haven't eaten since day before yesterday. Went off tranquilizers three days ago, but took two last night, to sleep. Dropped off like a stone at 3
A.M.
Now I'm irritated to find myself awake so early, unable to go back to sleep. What a disappointment. I had hoped, given the exhaustion, that I'd sleep much longer, all day perhaps. What I wouldn't give to sleep for days, weeks, to escape feeling anything!

I feel bitter, injured, self-pitying, self-righteous. Scared. A little excited, too. Curious as to how Laurence is taking it.

Strange, but I'm not lonely yet. Although last night, after having left the loft, I felt horribly alone and cold. The long, aimless bus rides were like trips through hell, a surly Charon for a driver, my few companion-passengers the tired night-shift workers of the city—watchmen and guards, telephone operators, nurses, hospital aides. The late-night drunks and shopping-bag ladies who huddle for temporary warmth into the fluorescence of a bus, not caring where it takes them. The laborers of darkness. The homeless.

Me too. I had nowhere to go. Too many friends who would have received me with unabashed glee—what Larry has rightly termed “Job's counselors”—who would underestimate what he and I mean, together or separately. To their hospitality I could not sink. To Hope's empty apartment, for which I now have a key again—out of the question, even with her still in the hospital. That would be trying to escape from one panel of a Bosch painting and finding you've taken refuge in another. I must admit that I considered it. Amazing how swiftly the niceties of emotional anguish get put into perspective by the basics: little cash in wallet, late at night, no place to stay.

But I decided against it. So I rode the buses of New York for hours, finally winding up at Times Square, where the movies run all night. Except that most are porno and sado-masochistic flicks, with audiences of middle-aged men hunched over the secret in their laps, jerking off under folded raincoats. Then there are the young men, gay hustlers taking a break from their rounds on the cold streets, and of course more drunks, snoring off their stupor. Astounding, too, how the basics lower one's judgmentalism and spontaneously heighten one's capacity for compassion: I have a newfound sympathy for drunks—I, who enjoy only a rare Bloody Mary or glass of wine with dinner, but who have never particularly understood the much-vaunted fun aspect of it all. Poor drunks. Maybe they're just trying to sleep off life. I can relate to that.

But I knew that the Apollo theater on Forty-second Street was the one all-night so-called art movie house in the city. Sure enough, they were showing a re-run of
The Great White Hope
—the tragic love affair between two people who tried to transcend being “Other” (in their case, a white woman and a black man), who were nevertheless destroyed by their times and themselves. The film still moves me deeply, even knowing as I do that many such real-life couples were drawn together during the Sixties and Seventies not always for such idealistic reasons. I'll never forget Leonora telling me how, in her experience as a black heterosexual feminist, it was always the black woman who got screwed. Or, rather, didn't. Because her black brother was after having what the white woman “represented” (class, power, success) and her white sister was after what the black man “represented” (sexuality, rage, assuagement of white guilt). But neither can I ignore how the lovers in this particular film really do try to scale the cliffs of those stereotypes to attain some visionary summit. Before they push each off, that is. Intense identification with Laurence and me.