Out of the Blue (13 page)

“Don’t you dare criticize my mother, you ignorant, self-absorbed man,” I said. “It was nice meeting you. Thanks for dinner.”

I half fell, half lunged into the back of the taxi. I didn’t even cry. Maybe I was so hot with fury that the water evaporated into steam before it got past my tear ducts. And it wasn’t until we got nearly home that I remembered the money. All that cash he sent year after year, without any questions. Of course, he’d apparently been thinking I would drop dead soon enough, but still. So much for Harrison Ford.

Ma was pretending to watch TV when I dragged my left leg through the door. I wanted more than anything to head straight for my room and hide under the bed, but that didn’t seem too awfully mature.

“Hi,” I said, and flopped down at the other end of the couch.

“Uh-oh,” she said, and snapped the Off button on the remote.

“Didn’t you tell me you could never get him to talk about his feelings?”

“Blood from a stone.”

“Well, he’s learned to vent.” I rubbed my toes, a peculiar exercise since I had no feeling in either my fingers or my foot.

“Are you gonna be cryptic or are you going to tell me what happened? And how about some Lioresal? You’re walking like fucking Quasimodo.”

I shook my head. Lioresal makes my ears ring, and I had enough shouting going on in there at the moment.

“So is he bald?” she asked me.

“I think he’s had implants. His head looks like a vineyard.”

“I knew it. God, he had the most gorgeous head of hair, but his mother’s father was a cue ball.”

“Ma, can I ask you a personal question?”

She didn’t have to hear it. “He was
very
good-looking,” she explained.

It felt good to laugh.

“Oh, and that doesn’t count when you’re eighteen?” she said. “Not only that, he was clever and funny and my parents couldn’t stand him. What more could a girl want?”

“Well, what happened to him? Was he hit by lightning or something?”

“Now there’s a thought,” she said. “And all this time I figured he just got stuck in adolescence. It’s not so unusual, you know. And then they head for L.A. That town is full of men in a state of arrested development.”

I told her about his prostate. She was quiet a moment. Actually, I think she was a little choked up. Then she recovered and said something about how if he had to get cancer, it was only fitting it should strike a territory that had caused the most grief to the greatest number of people.

“He thinks MS is fatal,” I said. “He wanted me to counsel him on facing premature death.”

“I told him a thousand times,” Ma said. “He’s on the MS Society mailing list, for God’s sake.”

“Well, the man’s not a great listener.”

It was her turn to laugh. “I get the feeling you’re not likely to make this a regular thing.”

“Not only that, I doubt if we’ll ever see another nickel out of him.”

“That bad.”

“I got pissed.”

She raised one eyebrow.

“Maybe I can get a raise,” I said. “I’ll talk to Duncan Reese.”

“We’ll manage. But your father can’t help himself. He’ll keep sending cash until he drops.”

“Now I understand why you got migraines.”

“Not until after he left. There
were
some good years, Anna Marie. And don’t look at me like you don’t want to hear about it.”

“I hate him,” I said. I heard my voice sounding like a small child’s.

She took my hand, and I thought about my father’s similar gesture at the dinner table. But his hand was empty, not like hers. I lifted it up and laid it gently against my sore jaw. A healing hand, a making, doing, fixing, loving hand.

“I’ll take a pill now, if you don’t mind.” The cramps in my legs were pretty excruciating. When she came back with the medication, I swallowed it and said, “I heard you talking to Hannah once, and I quote: ‘Jamie could never learn to keep his dick in his Jockey shorts.’ Do you care to elaborate?” Hannah was my godmother and Ma’s best friend for thirty-five years. I was sort of named for her. Unfortunately, she’d moved to Europe right about the time I got sick.

“When was this?” she asked.

“You were talking to her on the phone. I was maybe ten.”

“Okay,” she said. “But you’re only getting one side of it.”

“Would you
please
stop trying to be fair?”

She brought us some cocoa and a chocolate carrot-and-banana cake that was a lot better than it sounded.

“It’s pretty simple. He started fooling around with the secretaries at his father’s insurance company, then more serious affairs.”

“Was this after I was born?”

“Oh, from the beginning, except I didn’t know about it then.”

“God,” I said.

“You asked for the whole scoop, you’re getting it, babe,” she said. “I wanted him out, but I was scared to death. No job, no training for anything. I couldn’t imagine how I’d cope.”

We sat in silence. It seemed like a lot to absorb.

“This is not an original tale, Anna,” she said quietly. “It happens all the time.”

“Now I can see why you were so upset about Duncan Reese,” I said. She didn’t respond. “Did he take off or did you kick him out?” I asked.

“A little of both, I’d say.”

“Ma.”

She sighed. “Okay, he promised he’d quit messing with other women, but at my next checkup it turned out I had syphilis. Sure, he would have stuck around. Why not? It was the best of both worlds. I had to wave a bread knife at him to get him to leave.”

Well, I’d asked for it, hadn’t I? Surprisingly, it was almost a relief. Some of the stories I’d made up in my head were even worse. “But how about you?” I asked her. “Was there anybody else in your life?”

She hesitated for just a second, then shook her head.

“Ma?”

“No. There wasn’t. Look, Anna, your father acted like a jerk, but he was never malicious, he never drank or hit either of us, and he’s been true-blue financially all these years. That’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for the rest of the divorced male population.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at him.”

She smiled and cut me another slice of cake. “Aw shit, honey, I’m sure he deserved it.”

Ma and I had a Thanksgiving celebration with neighbors, an event memorable only for the raucous dogfight that ensued under the table. AirMalone was extra busy with the holiday so there was little hope of seeing Joe over the next couple of weeks—fortuitously, since I had begun to have trouble sleeping and needed every scrap of energy for end-of-term work. Most nights, there were bouts with
nocturia
, which loosely translated means “once in a while you lie there and you
don’t
have to pee.” Then there was PLMS, or “periodic limb movements in sleep.” In addition to the twitching and urinating, I was experiencing what can only be described as waking nightmares. A presence had taken to visiting my room, something so real I once actually spoke to it. Several times I reached to turn on the light in hopes of getting a look. It wasn’t menacing. Quite the opposite, in fact. A wise, protective soul for whom I felt overwhelming love materialized about two
A.M.
to envelop me in a benevolent capsule of warmth. I would bask in the joy of it, feeling so cherished, so safe, and then, suddenly, it was wrenched away, abandoning me to isolation and fear. It was as if someone dear to me kept dying over and over again. And when morning finally arrived, so would my conviction that the emptiness would ever heal.

I dragged myself dazed and haunted through the days that followed these anguished episodes. On the last morning, Ma gave me one of her long, scrutinizing appraisals and then wordlessly handed me the Metro section of the
Times
with my coffee. The article was headlined:
CAMERON SCHOOL SCANDAL.
Headmaster Duncan Reese,
it said, quoting an “anonymous source on the faculty,”
has created a tempest in the prestigious Upper East Side school by carrying on a liaison with a female member of the administration. At a second emergency meeting of the Board of Directors, a letter of resignation was drafted and Mr. Reese will reportedly be asked to sign it. According to the same source, many members of the faculty have been dissatisfied of late with Mr. Reese’s tenure and believe this relationship to be representative of his behavior over several years.

I looked up at Ma. My mouth was hanging open, and not just because I was too tired to close it.

“Your buddy Leonard Chubb?” she asked.

“Has to be.” I skimmed it again. “Leonard must have put his cousin on to this. Vernon Chubb writes for the Science section.”

“I think they’re gonna boot him out,” Ma said.

“If he’s out, I’ll be next.” My mysterious nighttime struggles suddenly seemed inconsequential. I could be out of a job.

Ma went to the kitchen and turned off the coffee maker. “You can’t assume that,” she said, but then she missed the garbage can and dumped coffee grounds all over the kitchen floor. I was just too exhausted to help her out.

There was an undercurrent of strain at Cameron, what with the photographers loitering across the street and clusters of teachers and students arguing in the halls. Duncan Reese’s door remained closed and Jessica Lassiter didn’t show up, but truthfully, I was waging my own battle against fatigue and kept out of the fray. I was relieved to step out onto Eighty-seventh Street at four o’clock. That is, until I realized that the snow had begun to fall.

When I was small, I looked forward to those first flakes as if they were gifts especially for me. I imagined that angels were shredding the clouds against a golden grater and sending the icy fragments spinning down, down into the city streets where I could examine them on my mittens or catch them on my tongue. Then as I grew older and became an expert skier, I followed the snow from mountain to mountain, cadging rides to Stowe or Sugarloaf or out West, or wherever there was enough of a base to send me flying down the slopes with billows up around my knees as if the snow were nothing more than frozen air.

But now snow is my dreaded enemy and commands a kind of wartime mentality. It slicks the steps, the sidewalks, and the streets. It camouflages treacherous patches of ice. All winter I study the weather reports, and if there’s even the faintest possibility of snow, I take my cane. But this morning, I’d been too distracted by that article to flip on the TV. So, caneless on my way home at Lexington and Eighty-fifth, I lost my footing on the manhole cover in the crosswalk and went flat on my behind. I knew the damn thing was there. I knew the placement of every manhole cover on the route from Cameron to my apartment. They’re lethal when they’ve got snow or even rain on them, and why the city insists on sticking them in the middle of the crosswalks, I’ll never understand.

I lay there waiting for my legs to act as if they were attached to the rest of me, but every time I made an attempt to get up, they told me they were on sabbatical. Meanwhile, the traffic had begun to back up and the horns were blasting. Ordinarily, I find New Yorkers to be enormously helpful in such situations, but today the street was filled with grade-school kids who, embarrassed, gave me a wide berth.

Then the most peculiar thing happened. There I was, like a pile of rags about to be crushed under the wheels of an oncoming car, and I was struck instead by a conviction. I saw myself telling my father over dinner that I would never marry Joe. There it was: it wasn’t going to work out. The simplicity of it astonished me. I faced a lifetime of episodes in which my body betrayed me. They would be embarrassing, comic, dangerous, perhaps ultimately even fatal, but they would be private. I would not share them with Joe. I would not endure a relationship that required my significant other to be my nurse. I did not want Joe wheeling me around in my chair, helping me out of bed, buttoning my clothes, feeding me. It was simply too degrading. I suppose this entire mental exercise transpired in a matter of seconds but it felt as if I had been lying there for hours staring up at the sky as it hurled fat globs of snow into my face.

A large hand appeared in my line of vision. I took it without looking to see who was at the other end. It turned out to be Duncan Reese.

“Are you on your way home, Anna?” he asked once I was standing.

I nodded. The landscape, the planet, seemed to have altered. I forced myself to connect with my life prior to the epiphany about Joe. Pain was a help. I could tell I’d bruised my backside pretty thoroughly. I concentrated on that and on the humiliation of being rescued from an undignified skid by my beleaguered boss.

“I’ll walk with you,” he offered.

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” I said, at which point both feet went out from under me again.

Duncan, holding me firmly upright, had the grace to point to his giant rubber galoshes. “Pure luck I happened to have these stashed in my office. Treads like snow tires.”

As we walked, I ferreted around for something clever to say. “I’m sorry about the
Times,”
I managed finally. “I thought the tone was inexcusable.”

“Thank you, Anna. No one else has had the courage to mention it.”

As if it could be ignored. I remembered a summer job interview where my prospective employer wore a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. Was I supposed to pretend it wasn’t there?

Duncan deposited me at the bench just inside my lobby. I sat there for a few seconds, catching my breath and watching Big Bob sling suitcases into somebody’s trunk. When I got up, I glanced down the street, thinking that if the sidewalk had been thoroughly sanded, I’d stop in at the bakery. I felt like looking at Ma for a few minutes. I was just in time to see the back of Duncan Reese disappearing into Norma’s Crust.

Joe had planned to fly in just for the night so we could celebrate a private Christmas together. The glut of holiday travelers assured a hectic schedule for him, and he’d otherwise be away from the city until early January. But now I wished I could cancel our date. I needed time to absorb the assault of my street acrobatics, both physical and mental. I felt that a feather touch anywhere on my body would produce another bruise, and furthermore, I had no idea how to confront Joe with my certainty that our relationship was doomed.

In the shower, I aimed the shower head at the wall, scooped the water in my hands and poured it gently over my battered body. That helped a little. Then I dressed, grabbed my Santa satchel and started for the door. I knew I should take my cane. I stood looking at the umbrella stand where I kept it handy. I could smell peppermint and chocolate wafting from the kitchen, where Ma was experimenting with cookies. She poked her head out and saw me contemplating the cane.

“Better take it, babe,” she said. “You’re looking a tad feeble.”

“Mm.”

She was familiar with that noncommittal
Mm,
so she just gave me a look and retreated to the kitchen. It was on account of not wanting to look infirm in front of Joe that I left without it. Big Bob found me a cab and Mr. Singh and I slid across to the West Side on bald tires.

Joe opened the door. He was wearing a Santa hat and Mel Torme was singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.” I promptly burst into tears. Joe was sympathetic, but totally confused. He led me to the couch and made me sip some eggnog. Store bought. He, for one, had learned his strengths.

“Don’t be alarmed,” I sobbed. “I think it’s my pseudo … pseudo … pseudobulbar palsy.”

“You want to hand me that one again?” Joe asked.

“Produces weird mood swings … and other stuff.” It wasn’t easy explaining through a torrent of tears. I mopped at my face with a napkin. “I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.” Looking back, of course, it was a combination of neurological freakout and the fact that I was already grieving.

“What can I do?”

“Put up with me until it passes.”

“Is there a medication?”

“Thor—Thor—Thorazine.”

He looked horrified.

“I’m kidding.” I took a long raggedy breath. It was starting to ease. Strange, as if the devil has hold of you and his talons suddenly loosen and slide away. “The medication has side effects worse than the symptoms, at least for me. Uh-oh. Here we go.” I ducked my head into Joe’s chest and wailed. I think I even said
Wah!

“Listen to the music,” Joe said. Mel had quit with the chestnuts and we were on to the
Messiah.
It was a gorgeous rendition with period instruments and boy sopranos. The devil couldn’t possibly hold out against it, and by the time we got through the first chorus, I had stopped carrying on. Joe’s shirt was drenched. He held me away from him to check me out, and when he stared at my nose, I knew it was blotched on the end with those unsightly red dots I get after I’ve been crying for a while.

“Maybe I was Rudolph’s older sister in a former life,” I said. Talking gave me a trembling feeling in my chest as if I were going to weep again, but I steeled myself against it.

“Better?” Joe said.

“The rough places are plain. Thanks.”

He kissed me, another one of those long sweet ones that are my favorites. You could count to thirty slowly and he’d still be there. I was thinking, is this the last one? Finally, he broke away.

“Not such a gala Christmas party,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Blow your nose,” he said. “We’re hitting the bedroom.” He got up. “I’m just taking a leak.”

That was another thing about Joe. I knew he’d leave the john door open, and wouldn’t care if I dropped by to comb my hair while he was peeing. He was totally open about such things. The last time I stayed overnight, he had barged right in while I was sitting on the toilet and seemed startled when I yelped.

I waited, in conflict about my ethical obligations here. If it was over, shouldn’t I just tell him so and go home? But I wanted one last time when I really paid attention, to store up sense memories that I could carry with me into the lonely future.

I wandered into the bedroom with my bag of gifts. Joe had put a Christmas tree in the corner. Other than a red gym sock tied to the top and a single string of lights, it was unadorned. The smell was wonderful and poignant. I supposed that the lump that had lodged in my throat would remain there for the rest of my life.

Joe came in and settled cross-legged on the bed. He reached under his pillow and pulled out a package wrapped in tinfoil and tied with red and green ribbon.

I sat and unloaded my three gifts. “You first,” I said. “That’s from Ma.” I could see there was just the one for me, and I liked that he didn’t go into an apology about it. He shot me a smile and started unwrapping. It was a pleasure to watch the way his fingers moved—deliberately, no fumbling, getting the job done. He could undo me with the same expertise.

Ma had baked him this year’s version of a Christmas cake. It looked traditional enough, like the typical dark spice variety, but I happened to know that she’d buried pieces of candy cane inside. I’d advised her that she was treading on litigious territory, maybe from some unsuspecting soul with brand-new dentures. But I also had to admit that it tasted surprisingly good.

“That was nice of her,” Joe said. He made like he was bowling for a spare. “Substantial.”

Next there was the chocolate airplane I’d special-ordered from Bloomingdale’s. It said
AirMalone
on it.

“I can’t eat this,” he said. “I’m keeping it on my desk.”

“It’ll melt,” I said. “Anyway, instead of being consumed by your work, you have to consume
it.”

The last was a volume of Stieglitz photos of Georgia O’Keeffe. After he opened it, he gave me a penetrating look and handed me my gift. He sat very quietly while I undid the ribbons.

It, too, was a book, but a handmade compilation of photographs. Instead of Stieglitz on O’Keeffe, it was Malone on Bolles. Joe had developed the photos from the cliff upstate and also a few indoor shots. One memorable night the month before, he had asked if he could photograph me naked. We’d been watching the video of
Tootsie
so I’m not certain what prompted the notion and it took some persuading on his part. I was secretly self-conscious about a close scrutiny of what to me seemed the ravages of too many steroids. He made me strip and then draped a bed sheet around me. Sometimes I was mostly covered, sometimes totally revealed. I think we only made it through half a roll of film before we abandoned the effort to a night of wild lovemaking. Now I stared at the woman in the pictures and thought that two things were very clear: there was too much pain in her eyes, and she was profoundly in love with the photographer.