I Loved You Wednesday (2 page)

He doesn’t say anything for a moment or so, and then,when he does speak, he is so densely intense, so heavily sincere, so downright patronizing I’m immediately sorry I called.

“Oh, my God!” he moans. “Why? Why,
God?
Tell me,
GOD,
why would she do such a thing?”

Not clear as to whether it’s from me or God that Hank expects an answer, I remain silent. No answer from God, he turns to me.
“Steve,
tell me where she is!”

I give him the address of the hospital, and moaning again in sorrow, he tells me he’ll be there as soon as he finishes this hand.

An hour later Hank shows up.

I lead him to Chris’ room, and the two of us look in to see all those tubes going every which way. Hank has trouble watching, though. He says it’s all too upsetting for him. So we leave the room, and I walk him to the elevator, all the while listening to him asking God why she did it.

“Why? Why would she do such a thing to me? Huh? Why
ME?”

“Hank, she’s the one in the hospital; you’re just visiting.”

“But why me?
WHY ME?”

I push the elevator button. He clenches his teeth and says, “If that cunt thinks she’s going to get me back with this stunt, she’s crazy.” I blink twice, assuring myself he has indeed said what I think he’s said, and then haul off and slug him, barely clipping the bottom of his chin.

Which is a
big
mistake.

You don’t go around casually almost belting an ex-college quarterback still built like the proverbial brick wall. Not if you value the appearance of your face anyway.

I’m so proud I was even able to muster that first offensive I remain practically nonchalant as he grabs my lapels and, connecting, smashes me in the face, which I have to tell you hurts an awful lot, and sends me flying backward, crashing to the floor.

The elevator doors open. He steps in and is soon gone. I’m removed to the comforts of the emergency room, where I’m treated for a swollen black eye and a deflated ego before being sent home.

Returning to my apartment, I find my two bulldogs napping in front of what used to be my door, now shredded to pieces and scattered about the hallway like so many toothpicks. I tack up a blanket in the empty doorway, hoping any would-be burglar passing through will at least have the decency to ignore such an easy mark.

Awakening the next morning, blinking the one eye that is capable of opening, I look down at the bulldog licking my chin. The fellow in the bathroom mirror staring at me is a total stranger, so I dispense with my usual morning greeting.

Arriving at the hospital an hour or so later, I bring with me one long-stemmed rose. If she’d just given birth to twins, I’d have bought a dozen. Suicides, somehow, are not the same celebration.

A nurse leads me down the corridor to the ward in which Chris has been transferred, telling me I can only stay a very few minutes as the patient is most groggy.

Groggy? She’s practically catatonic.

Sound asleep, the only movements she makes are twistings of her head, accompanied by moans and sobs coming up from somewhere deep within her.

I look around the ward, and may I tell you what a hit that is? Remember
Snake Pit
with Olivia De Havilland? Well, that’s this. Sickies, weirdos, fanatics, kids freaking out on drugs, all mingled together with your other run-of-the-mill, average suicidals like Chris.

And if you weren’t depressed
before
moving into this ward, I mean if you were in the hospital for a hemorrhoidectomy or something and just happened to be placed in here, you’d probably prefer choking yourself to death with your toothbrush rather than spend another day surrounded by these dregs of humanity.

Chris is not at all responsive to me, so I place the rose on the night table next to her bed and leave.

Returning the following day, in the afternoon, I find Chris sitting up in bed, picking at her lunch. Walking over, I smile and give her a kiss. She sort of blushes, I guess because she really doesn’t know what else to do.

“What happened to your eye?” she asks quietly, at last.

“I got mugged.”

“How awful! What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later. I’d rather hear what’s new with you.”

“Nothing,” she says demurely.

“Nothing!” I raise my voice. “Chris, you tried to kill yourself. What do you mean ‘nothing* is new?”

“Don’t shout. The entire Sioux nation is in my temples, beating their tomtoms.”

“I’m not surprised. Are you satisfied?”

“Sure. It was worth it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, honest. The cutest young intern pumped my stomach and asked me out for Saturday night. I think I’m in love.”

“What about Hank?”

“Hank who?”

“Hank, the fellow you did this to impress.”

“Please, Steve. Get this straight. I did this to impress no one. I did this to end everything because my life is constantly returning to Empty. It’s lonely. I get up in the morning and put on the television for company. So I stopped fighting. Hank was hardly the whole cause. Simply the final catalyst in a long chain of disappointments.”

“I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had no idea myself.”

“But why would you want to die?”

Chris shrugs.

“All right then. Why wouldn’t you want to live?”

“I don’t know. I just wasn’t finding either alternative particularly attractive. It’s all a treadmill, isn’t it?”

An elderly, graying woman in the back of the ward sits up in bed and suddenly bellows, “DON’T THINK ANY OF YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH THIS! OH NO! NOT THIS TIME! THIS TIME YOU’VE GONE TOO FAR!” which draws most of the attention in the room to her.

“YOU’RE ALL STARING AT ME!” she screams, which is true, giving her something of a case of justified paranoia.

“FUCK OFF, OLD BITCH!” yells one of the otherweirdos, back at her, displaying a certain lack of sensitivity to her situation.

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” screams the elderly woman, pulling at her thick eyebrows.

“I SAID FUCK-OFF-OLD-BITCH!” he repeats, this time enunciating each syllable for greater clarification.

“I’M AN OLD LADY. HAVEN’T YOU GOT NO RESPECT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN FUCK
ME?
FUCK
Your

Things seem to be getting a little heated around the ward this lunch hour. Chris has finished not eating her lunch and is ready to go back to sleep for another eighteen hours, so I kiss her good-bye and leave, glad to get out of Happydale alive, before the Marat-Sade insurrection.

Returning to my apartment house, I find myself getting the chilliest looks from the three neighbors waiting at the elevator. And although I don’t necessarily think they’re ALL STARING AT
ME
, I’m definitely getting vibrations like “So that’s the brute who made that beautiful girl do that to herself!”

Now I know how Jack Lemmon felt in
The Apartment
when Shirley MacLaine tried to end it all in his place. And I only want to yell back at all their sideward glances, “It’s not my doing. It’s Fred MacMurray’s fault!”

Chris rests in the hospital another day and a half before being discharged. She goes from there directly to her new place on West Eighty-fifth Street, which is now ready for occupancy.

On Saturday night she does indeed go out with the cute intern who pumped her stomach, but it doesn’t amount to much as he’s twelve or something and interested in studying her mainly for the paper he’s writing on suicide.

Chris and I get together for dinner the following evening, and she shows me the list of four psychiatrists given her before she left the hospital. She was advised to contact one of them immediately to help her out of her depression. Apparently a big problem among suicidals is a high propensity to have another go at death in the period immediately following an unsuccessful attempt.

We talk about it and agree Chris would be best served by seeking out the counsel of one of these shrinks, at least until she pulls herself up a bit.

So Chris goes to therapy, and I go to the first day of rehearsal for the Broadway play in which I have a total of twelve lines.

With a black eye.

Which doesn’t sit well with the director, Abe Burrows, when I tell him I walked into a brick wall. He’s leery of accident-prone people and announces this to the assembled cast, pointing to my puffed eye as example. But he’s not really one to talk. Two weeks later, on the stage of the Martin Beck Theater, as we are about to begin our first run-through of the first act, he gives some advice to Nanette Fabray and Stockard Channing, two of the stars of the comedy, turns to walk back into the theater so he can watch us and, on his way, falls down into the orchestra pit, a distance of some fourteen feet, where he dislocates his shoulder, cracks a couple of ribs and bruises his heart.

He is taken to the hospital, and the play is taken to the cleaner’s.

We rehearse without a director for several weeks, no mean feat, until Burrows’ bruises heal some, and then go to Boston for three weeks where we try out. And try out. And try out. And the authors rewrite and rewrite, and the play keeps getting worse and worse. And everyone connected with the production knows it, but no one is telling anyone else how bad he thinks it all is. Least of all the authors, who’ve watched their once very amusing play slide away from brightness and promise into the claptrap of contrivance and foolishness.

The play, for the scores of rewrites, isn’t working. The producers are having trouble raising the rest of the capitalization, combing the backwoods for backers. There is no advance sale in New York. And the leading man is having trouble remembering his lines. But like kamikazes, we fly to New York, crash into the Martin Beck Theater on Forty-fifth Street, in the heart of the Broadway theatrical district, where we open on April 8th, to less-than-enthusiastic notices, and close the same night.

So much for my Broadway debut.

And so much for Chris’ attempt at suicide. Both of which have more in common than we know.

But please, don’t misunderstand.

Chris isn’t always depressed. And when she isn’t—BINGO!—she’s often manic. And Chris up-and-at-’em can be a good deal more confusing than Chris down for the count.

The first day we met is a perfect example.

It was a Wednesday, five years ago. We were, as memory would have it, happier in those days and hardly ever hit bottom. I know for sure it was a Wednesday because Broadway wasn’t yet a terminal patient and I would buy a standing room ticket for a Broadway matinee
every
Wednesday.

This particular afternoon I purchased a spot at the back of the Lunt-Fontanne Theater to see
How Now, Dow Jones
, a minor musical which went on to become a major failure.

I was halfheartedly thumbing through the playbill, impatiently waiting for the Hadassah theater party ladies to quiet down and the show to begin.

And that’s when Chris came hurrying toward me, a beautiful explosion of color and energy.

“Excuse me, are you four?” she asked, slightly out of breath.

“For what?”

“Four. Number four.”

I looked down at my standing room spot. “Oh! Number four. Yes, that’s me.”

“Good. Here!” she said, handing me a small notebook. “You left this at the box-office window. I bought standing room ticket five, and the man there said that number four had left this, and since I would be standing next to you, would I mind returning it, so of course I told him I’d be more than happy to and so here’s your notebook number four and so forth and so forth.”

“And so
on
and so forth,” I corrected her.

“That’s what I said,” she insisted. “I’m
so
excited. Can you tell?”

“You seem excited, yes.”

“Excited? I may have a nervous breakdown. Would you believe ... this is my
first
Broadway show! My very first! I’ve only waited my entire
life
for this moment. I’m an actress as you may well have already guessed and we got to New York only two days ago and I still can’t believe I’m finally here. I hope you don’t mind, but I just couldn’t control myself from peeking into your notebook. Some of your comments about the plays you’ve seen are so interesting, I didn’t understand a word of it.”

“Well, I just write down impressions about what I’ve seen and then read them back later. Often I don’t understand any of it, either.”

“How cosmopolitan!” Chris bubbled.

“Is it?”

“I don’t know.” She deflated. “What’s cosmopolitan?”

“That depends. Caviar for breakfast is probably cosmopolitan.”