Insomnia (43 page)

Ralph looked around. He saw Rosalie, safe and sound at the bottom of the hill – she was lying between the two Portosans that stood down there, her muzzle resting on one paw – but otherwise this part of the park was empty. ‘I think we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves, at least for now,’ he said.

‘Thank God for small favors.’ Lois took the handkerchief back and went to work on her makeup again, this time in a rather more businesslike manner. ‘Speaking of Bill, I stopped into the Red Apple on my way down here – that was before I got feeling sorry for myself and started to bawl my silly head off – and Sue said you two had a big argument just a little while ago. Yelling and everything, right out in your front yard.’

‘Nah, not that big,’ Ralph said, smiling uneasily.

‘Can I be nosy and ask what it was about?’

‘Chess,’ Ralph said. It was the first thing to pop into his mind. ‘The Runway 3 Tournament Faye Chapin has every year. Only it really wasn’t about anything. You know how it is – sometimes people get out of bed on the wrong side and just grab the first excuse.’

‘I wish that was all it was with me,’ Lois said. She opened her purse, managing the clasp effortlessly this time, and took out her compact. Then she sighed and stuffed it back into the bag again without opening it. ‘I can’t. I know I’m being a baby, but I just
can’t
.’

Ralph darted his hand into her purse before she could close it, removed the compact, opened it, and held the mirror up in front of her. ‘See? That’s not so bad, is it?’

She averted her face like a vampire turning away from a crucifix. ‘Ugh,’ she said. ‘Put it away.’

‘If you promise to tell me what happened.’

‘Anything, just put it away.’

He did. For a little while Lois said nothing but only sat and watched her hands fiddle restlessly with the clasp of her purse. He was about to prod her when she looked up at him with a pitiful expression of defiance.

‘It just so happens you’re not the
only
one who can’t get a decent night’s sleep, Ralph.’

‘What are you talking ab—’

‘
Insomnia!
’ she snapped. ‘I go to sleep at about the same time I always did, but I don’t sleep through anymore. And it’s worse than that. I wake up earlier every morning, it seems.’

Ralph tried to remember if he had told Lois about that aspect of his own problem. He didn’t think he had.

‘Why are you looking so surprised?’ Lois asked. ‘You didn’t really think you were the only person in the world to ever have a sleepless night, did you?’

‘Of course not!’ Ralph responded with some indignation . . . but hadn’t it often felt as if he were the only person in the world to have that particular
kind
of sleepless night? Standing helplessly by as his good sleep-time was eroded minute by minute and quarter hour by quarter hour? It was like a weird variant of the Chinese water-torture.

‘When did yours start?’ he asked.

‘A month or two before Carol died.’

‘How much sleep are you getting?’

‘Barely an hour a night since the start of October.’ Her voice was calm, but Ralph heard a tremor which might have been panic just below the surface. ‘The way things are going, I’ll have entirely quit sleeping by Christmas, and if that really happens, I don’t know how I’ll survive it. I’m barely surviving now.’

Ralph struggled for speech and asked the first question to come into his mind: ‘How come I’ve never seen your light?’

‘For the same reason I hardly ever see yours, I imagine,’ she said. ‘I’ve been living in the same place for almost thirty-five years, and I don’t need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Also, I like to keep my troubles to myself. You keep turning on the lights at two in the morning and sooner or later someone sees them. It gets around, and then the nosybirds start asking questions. I don’t like nosy-bird questions, and I’m not one of those people who feel like they have to take an ad out in the paper every time they have a little constipation.’

Ralph burst out laughing. Lois looked at him in round-eyed perplexity for a moment, then joined in. His arm was still around her (or had it crept back on its own after he had taken it away? Ralph didn’t know and didn’t really care), and he hugged her tightly. This time she pressed against him easily; those stiff little wires had gone out of her body. Ralph was glad.

‘You’re not laughing at me, are you, Ralph?’

‘Nope. Absolutely not.’

She nodded, still smiling. ‘
That’s
all right, then. You never even saw me moving around in my living room, did you?’

‘No.’

‘That’s because there’s no streetlamp in front of my house. But there’s one in front of
yours
. I’ve seen you in that ratty old wing-chair of yours many times, sitting and looking out and drinking tea.’

I always assumed I was the only one,
he thought, and suddenly a question – both comic and embarrassing – popped into his head. How many times had she seen him sitting there and picking his nose? Or picking at his crotch?

Either reading his mind or the color in his cheeks, Lois said,‘I really couldn’t make out much more than your shape, you know, and you were always wearing your robe, perfectly decent. So you don’t have to worry about
that
. Also, I hope you know that if you’d ever started doing anything you wouldn’t want people to
see
you doing, I wouldn’t have looked. I wasn’t exactly raised in a barn, you know.’

He smiled and patted her hand. ‘I
do
know that, Lois. It’s just . . . you know, a surprise. To find out that while I was sitting there and watching the street, somebody was watching
me
.’

She fixed him with an enigmatic smile that might have said,
Don’t worry, Ralph – you were just another part of the scenery to me
.

He considered this smile for a moment, then groped his way back to the main point. ‘So what happened, Lois? Why were you sitting here and crying? Just sleeplessness? If that’s what it was, I certainly sympathize. There’s really no just about it, is there?’

Her smile slipped away. Her gloved hands folded together again in her lap and she looked somberly down at them. ‘There are worse things than insomnia. Betrayal, for instance. Especially when the people doing the betraying are the people you love.’

She fell quiet. Ralph didn’t prompt her. He was looking down the hill at Rosalie, who appeared to be looking up at him. At both of them, maybe.

‘Did you know we share the same doctor as well as the same problem, Ralph?’

‘You go to Litchfield, too?’

‘
Used
to go to Litchfield. He was Carolyn’s recommendation. I’ll never go to him again, though. He and I are quits.’ Her upper lip drew back. ‘Double-crossing son of a
bitch
!’

‘What happened?’

‘I went along for the best part of a year, waiting for things to get better by themselves – for nature to take her course, as they say. Not that I didn’t try to help nature along every now and then. We probably tried a lot of the same things.’

‘Honeycomb?’ Ralph asked, smiling again. He couldn’t help it.
What an amazing day this has been,
he thought.
What a perfectly amazing day . . . and it’s not even one in the afternoon yet
.

‘Honeycomb? What about it? Does that help?’

‘No,’ Ralph said, grinning more widely than ever, ‘doesn’t help a bit, but it tastes
wonderful
.’

She laughed and squeezed his bare left hand in both of her gloved ones. Ralph squeezed back.

‘You never went to see Dr Litchfield about it, did you, Ralph?’

‘Nope. Made an appointment once, but cancelled it.’

‘Did you put it off because you didn’t trust him? Because you felt he missed the boat on Carolyn?’

Ralph looked at her, surprised.

‘Never mind,’ Lois said. ‘I had no right to ask that.’

‘No, it’s okay. I guess I’m just surprised to hear the idea from someone else. That he . . . you know . . . that he might have misdiagnosed her.’

‘Huh!’ Lois’s pretty eyes flashed. ‘It crossed
all
our minds! Bill used to say he couldn’t believe you didn’t have that fumble-fingered bastard in district court the day after Carolyn’s funeral. Of course back then I was on the other side of the fence, defending Litchfield like mad.
Did
you ever think of suing him?’

‘No. I’m seventy, and I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left flogging a malpractice suit. Besides – would it bring Carol back?’

She shook her head.

Ralph said,‘What happened to Carolyn
was
the reason I didn’t go see him, though. I guess it was, at least. I just couldn’t seem to trust him, or maybe . . . I don’t know . . .’

No, he didn’t really know, that was the devil of it. All he knew for sure was that he had cancelled the appointment with Dr Litchfield, as he had cancelled his appointment with James Roy Hong, known in some quarters as the pinsticker man. That latter appointment had been scratched on the advice of a ninety-two- or -three-year-old man who could probably no longer remember his own middle name. His mind slipped to the book Old Dor had given him, and to the poem Old Dor had quoted from – ‘Pursuit’, it had been called, and Ralph couldn’t seem to get it out of his head . . . especially the part where the poet talked about all the things he saw falling away behind him: the unread books, the untold jokes, the trips that would never be taken.

‘Ralph? Are you there?’

‘Yeah – just thinking about Litchfield. Wondering why I cancelled that appointment.’

She patted his hand. ‘Just be glad you did. I kept mine.’

‘Tell me.’

Lois shrugged. ‘When it got so bad I felt I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to him and told him everything. I thought he’d give me a prescription for sleeping pills, but he said he couldn’t even do that – I sometimes have an irregular heartbeat, and sleeping pills can make that worse.’

‘When did you see him?’

‘Early last week. Then, yesterday, my son Harold called me out of a clear blue sky and said he and Janet wanted to take me out to breakfast. Nonsense, I said. I can still get around the kitchen. If you’re coming all the way down from Bangor, I said, I’ll get up a nice little feed for you, and that’s the end of it. Then, after, if you want to take me out – I was thinking of the mall, because I always like to go out there – why, that would be fine. That’s just what I said.’

She turned to Ralph with a smile that was small and bitter and fierce.

‘It never occurred to me to wonder why
both
of them were coming to see me on a weekday, when both of them have jobs – and they must really love those jobs, because they’re about all they ever talk about. I just thought how
sweet
of them it was . . . how
thoughtful
 . . . and I put out a special effort to look nice and do everything right so Janet wouldn’t suspect I was having a problem. I think
that
rankles most of all. Silly old Lois, “Our Lois”, as Bill always says . . . don’t look so surprised, Ralph! Of course I knew about that; did you think I fell off a stump just yesterday? And he’s right. I
am
foolish, I
am
silly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hurt just like anyone else when I’m taken advantage of . . .’ She was beginning to cry again.

‘Of course it doesn’t,’ Ralph said, and patted her hand.

‘You would have laughed if you’d seen me,’ she said, ‘baking fresh squash muffins at four o’clock in the morning and slicing mushrooms for an Italian omelette at four-fifteen and starting in with the makeup at four-thirty just to be
sure,
absolutely
sure
that Jan wouldn’t get going with that “Are you sure you feel all right, Mother Lois?” stuff. I
hate
it when she starts in with that crap. And do you know what, Ralph? She knew what was wrong with me all the time. They
both
did. So I guess the laugh was on me, wasn’t it?’

Ralph thought he had been following closely, but apparently he had lost her on one of the turns. ‘Knew? How could they know?’

‘
Because Litchfield told them!
’ she shouted. Her face twisted again, but this time it was not hurt or sorrow Ralph saw there but a terrible rueful rage. ‘
That tattling son of a bitch called my son on the telephone and
TOLD HIM EVERY
THING
!
’

Ralph was dumbfounded.

‘Lois, they can’t do that,’ he said when he finally found his voice again. ‘The doctor-patient relationship is . . . well, it’s privileged. Your son would know all about it, because he’s a lawyer, and the same thing applies to them. Doctors can’t tell
anyone
what their patients tell them unless the patient—’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Lois said, rolling her eyes. ‘Crippled wheelchair Jesus. What world are you living in, Ralph? Fellows like Litchfield do whatever they think is right. I guess I knew that all along, which makes me double-stupid for going to him at all. Carl Litchfield is a vain, arrogant man who cares more about how he looks in his suspenders and designer shirts than he does about his patients.’

‘That’s awfully cynical.’

‘And awfully true, that’s the sad part. You know what? He’s thirty-five or thirty-six, and he’s somehow gotten the idea that when he hits forty, he’s just going to . . . stop. Stay forty for as long as he wants to. He’s got an idea that people are old once they get to be sixty, and that even the best of them are pretty much in their dotage by the age of sixty-eight or so, and that once you’re past eighty, it’d be a mercy if your relatives would turn you over to that Dr Kevorkian. Children don’t have any rights of confidentiality from their parents, and as far as Litchfield is concerned, old poops like us don’t have any rights of confidentiality from our kids. It wouldn’t be in our best interests, you see.