Flat Water Tuesday (25 page)

“Where does your grandmother live?”

“New York, where else? But she’ll be out in Osterville soon. If I need a break from this place, I can go hang out there. You’re welcome to join us, Carrey.” He looked at me with a suddenly sincere face.

“Might need to take a rain check on that.”

“I’m thinking I’ll fly to London instead. Surprise my parents.”

“Just like that? You’d hop on a plane and leave all this?”

“I checked out airline fares. They seem surprisingly affordable.”

“Are your parents coming back for the Warwick Race?”

“They will fly back for that. Of course. They wouldn’t miss it for the world. That’s their plan.”

A light rain that felt like it wanted to become snow started to fall. The river was running high. I tried to listen to its flow but the harder I listened the more I heard my own heart.

Connor looked up at the white sky. “I have a question to ask you.”

“Ask it.”

“Did you fuck Ruth? It’s totally cool if you did. She’s worth it, I have to say. I think you banged her. That’s what I think.”

I didn’t even bother looking at him. “Nice, Connor. What kind of question is that? I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

“When she was a freshman, she did the old captain of the team, Bruce. It’s why she was made coxswain, in my humble opinion. She’s been around the block, our Ruth. I’ve always been shocked by her behavior.” He was trying hard for a reaction he wasn’t going to get.

“I’m going home. You are so full of shit, Connor, and you’re an asshole. If you were my kid, I’d ship you off to boarding school and move to another country, too.”

He laughed. “You’re going ‘home’? To where? Niccalsetti?” He turned to the river. “Niccalsetti, New York. Home of Rob Carrey.”

“Keep talking to yourself. It’s a good sign. Knock yourself out.”

“Look how defensive you are about her, Carrey! You’re a romantic at heart. Like me. We’re the last of the poets.”

“Right. Some poets.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I am. Okay? I’ll grant you the fact that I’m an asshole. But you need to at least admit you’re a cheese dog. You really are. And you have, like, no sense of humor. Nada.”

“Be funny, and I’ll laugh.”

“I’ll tell you one thing I am serious about. I can make the jump off the covered bridge. You could, too. You’re crazy enough to try it. I know you are. You pretend you’re not, but it’s still a temptation.”

“The covered bridge? Are you kidding? You can’t make the jump. It’s not something you’re meant to make. It’s not like you can just decide to miss those rocks on your way down, Connor.”

“We could do the jump right now. The water’s not frozen yet. Think about it. Even if we win the race, some other crew will have a faster time. But
nobody
wants to make the jump. It’s the stuff of legends.”

“It’s freezing out here. Even if you didn’t die jumping off the bridge, the water would kill you.”

“Us! You’d be with me! We would
not
freeze, goof. We can swim for two minutes to the shore. Come on, Rob. You have the balls to do it. I promise, if you say the word we’ll do it.”

“You really want to run down to the covered bridge and jump? Now? In the dark?”

“It’s not dark! I can see perfectly.”

“In half an hour you won’t even be able to see the water off the bridge.”

“So what? I’m not kidding, Rob. We could do this. We could make the jump.
Ruth
would do it. She’d think it was cool
you
did it. She wouldn’t say so, but she’d think it.”

“She’s not that dumb. And she would never even try it.”

“That’s where you’re dead wrong,
mon ami
. She’s the one who’s most likely to do it. Before you came along, I was fairly sure she’d go over with me.”

“She changed her mind?”

“Something like that.” He grimaced. “Listen. This is your last chance. We can start down there now and be back for dinner. The river will be frozen soon and then we have to wait until spring. It’s now or never.”

“Nobody would believe we did it, even if we did. Which we won’t.”

“Carrey, they know I wouldn’t lie about jumping off the covered bridge. And I’d have you to back me up. You’re as honest as they come.”

“If you were going to jump off that bridge, you would have done it long before I came here. And I don’t want you to kill yourself, Connor. If you do, Leonsis gets moved up into your seat. And if that happens, we lose against Warwick.”

He smirked, a Cheshire cat in the gathering shadows.

“I saw the video just like you did. We need you around for a few more months. Just until we beat Warwick. Then you can feel free to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, for all I care.”

“Just remember that it would never even occur to Leonsis to jump off the covered bridge. That’s what sets him apart from you and me.”

“It would never occur to me, either. This is
your
weird thing.”

“So, keeping me alive is Robert Carrey’s public service. Your selfish nobility humbles me.”

“Connor, you don’t know anything about dying.”

“I think you’d be surprised at what I know.”

“You don’t know jack crap.”

*   *   *

The trip back from Zambia was unadulterated hell. I arrived in New York after a total of thirty-two grueling hours of travel. Ten hours from Lusaka to London. A twelve-hour layover in Heathrow. Ten hours to Kennedy. My entire body ached from the pounding I had been given and I had a screeching hangover, the desperate kind that makes you chew aspirin, tear up cocktail napkins, toss back water two bottles at a time. I had eaten nothing. The meals on the flights revolted me. Halfway across the ocean I finally vomited, standing in the small closet of a bathroom, retching water and snot into the steel bowl. It was almost a relief. I tried to call Carolyn from Lusaka International, then again from London. Nothing. I called her father and mother, both of whom had moved to Boca Raton a year before, and asked if they had heard from Carolyn. They were puzzled by my call and I realized she had not told them what had happened, and that was a bad sign. I told them she had miscarried and I had not been with her. She had gone to the hospital and been discharged, and I was on my way back to be with her. I promised to call them when I got into the city, I was sure everything would be fine. Their thirty-two-year-old daughter was in good hands, she’d call them if she needed them.

I edited out a few facts. The pathetic condition I was in; the hammering headache, the dry lips, the shaking. My bruised, possibly fractured, ribs. Everything was not going to be fine.

I also omitted the things
I
didn’t know yet. That Carolyn had woken on a sheet painted with blood at 2:00
A.M.
a week before, had called the ambulance. The ambulance guys had come in through the fire escape because they couldn’t get the gurney into the freight elevator. Carolyn wouldn’t send it down to them as she was passing in and out of consciousness on the floor and was half hysterical with fear. They eventually loaded her onto a seated gurney and carried her down the stairs covered in blankets with an IV in her arm. Carolyn was howling. The neighbors, even the sweatshop workers, were out in the street to see her. Under the sheet, her legs were smeared with blood. She was in the middle of a hemorrhaging miscarriage, this woman who had started to sustain herself by dreaming about a baby that was now trickling out of her.

They had her in the hospital within half an hour and the procedure was finished while she was sedated. Carolyn did it all alone. When it was over, she wanted to continue to be alone. It was just that simple.

When I finally touched down at JFK, I practically ran to the taxi stand and sat through the interminable drive into the city, dreading what I would find. I dialed the number to the loft ten times on the way in and got the same cheery answering machine each time, finally crushing the cell phone in my hands in frustration. I had no idea who else to call. I just did not have the numbers for the rest of the people we knew in New York—those were in a book by the phone in the loft.

When I let myself in, after calling Carolyn’s name all the way through the agonizingly slow ride up the elevator, I was confronted by carnage. The smell of congealing food, four days old, struck me first. And the god-awful mess; her clothes, pajamas, bills, papers. The detritus of a life scattered across the workstation and the kitchen and the tables and the floor. I felt as if the dust from a million years of grief had settled on the scattered cushions and unevenly pulled shades and crumpled rug. Carolyn was curled in bed, wearing a sweatshirt of mine and my boxers. I went to the bed, lowered myself next to her with the same helpless horror you feel when you find a grievously and senselessly wounded animal. When she awoke she took my hand, brought it to her mouth, and began to gnaw and make sounds that were like crying.

I nursed her as best I could. She was wearing a kind of heavy pad that she continued to bleed into, that had to be changed like a battle dressing. For a week I emptied out the small, stained cotton pillows that piled up in the steel wastepaper basket in the bathroom. I dressed her, undressed her, bathed her. I didn’t leave the apartment. I cleaned up, made food. She ate, she took pills, she cried, she took different pills. I started to forget to clean up, I stopped making meals. I’d move from her bed to the couch, listening always to the way she breathed, to the undulation of her crying, alert for her hysterical rage, terrified I’d fall asleep and she’d hurt herself.

I unplugged the phone, then the computer. We lived like people hiding in a war. We slept. She limped around the apartment. We drank. She kept filling the bandages and I kept throwing them away. I wrapped them in the plastic bags they delivered the food in from Huang’s Real New York Chinese Delivery.

I was the messenger. The messages were not very encouraging.

I called Carolyn’s parents from my cell phone every morning, standing in the hall and whispering my updates while Carolyn slept. I reported their daughter’s progress while sitting on the steel steps leading down to the sweatshop. I called them from the coffee takeout, from the sidewalk standing under the shepherd’s crook streetlamp in the evening.

She’ll pull out of it, I told them.

Things were kind of hard now but she was ‘making progress,’ I assured them.

I thought she was getting stronger by the day, I lied.

She was more like her old self, I fabricated.

In fact, she was listless and she was drugged and also, of course, drinking. We had a pretty considerable stash of valium (thanks to my constant flying), and she was pretty much through it. We also had the painkillers the hospital gave her. And wine. And vodka.

I didn’t mention the saturated pads of blood to her parents. That was her business, I reasoned. Women bleed, I told myself, and Carolyn had been scraped out. The bleeding would stop as it always did. I didn’t need to share that.

Of course, now I have a recurring dream that I switched on the computer during one of those long, listless afternoons and did a search for post-DNC bleeding. Or typed in “bleeding miscarriage” or “miscarriage infection” or “miscarriage care for patient.” I dream that I did a mere half hour of surfing, just to pass the time, just to make certain all this blood was normal.

I have another dream that I pick up the damn phone and call the gynecologist and ask a few hard questions. But I did not. I trusted the woman who slept next to me to know her body. Even my drugged out, drunk, sleeping partner who might have been shedding her own skin in there, who might have been losing her vision or her teeth or her sense of touch or slowly suffocating and was in no state to draw my attention to it. We traveled through those days in a dead funk. Two ghost ships drifting aimlessly on a dead, red sea.

Carolyn and I did not say things to each other that were comforting. We did not say, for instance, we could always have another baby. We could try again. We had time. I did not say I loved her. She and I spoke only about the drugs that were running out and where we could get prescriptions for new ones, especially the painkillers. She slept fifteen hours a day. The same person who for years had worked long, crazy hours weeks at a time, the sleepless life of the Indie filmmaker. We drank the things she had not been permitted two weeks before. Coffee. Wine. Scotch. Vodka. She continued to bleed.

Finally, I put a call in for her doctor, who called back five hours later to listen to me ask for more painkillers and hint about where I could find some more of those supersize bandages. The doctor blew up, demanded I bring her in immediately. The bleeding should have stopped days ago. There could be only one reason for what was happening now: infection. Had I looked at the blood? Was it dark blood or pink blood or was it blood and pus? What did it smell like? How the fuck was I supposed to know? The doctor repeated to me again to bring her in, right now, and slammed the phone down.

So I took Carolyn back to Lennox Hill. And as the taxi negotiated uptown on a busy Monday, she slept in my arms. Then we waited in the green waiting area, Carolyn nodding off, both of us looking like junkies. The doctor took one look at her, kicked me out, examined her, called me into her office, and curtly told us that a massive infection had set in and Carolyn was lucky to be alive. I realized we both smelled of booze as the doctor chewed us out. I was sweating it. Carolyn was running on painkillers, junk food, and wine. If the round of intravenous antibiotics the doctor prescribed for her did not work, there would have to be more surgery. Carolyn was checked in for observation and possibly for a procedure to halt the infection. I could stay during visiting hours but no longer because I was not a relative (live-in partners are really—when it comes down to the brass tacks of life—nothing). The doctor suggested I go home because I looked terrible and there was nothing that I could do for Carolyn now except let her sleep. I could come back tomorrow between two and five. It was more than a suggestion.

Before I agreed to leave, a nurse who couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, hooked her up to a drip, refusing to make eye contact with me. Carolyn was asleep in seconds. I watched her drift off, her lips set as if she was stating a categorical refusal to pretty much everything.