Paris Twilight (29 page)

They pressed a button for a basement floor and when we got there I held the door ajar while they rolled her out and then I tagged along. Thank God I'd decided (at the last minute too) on humble attire today, on account of the snow. A dress would stand out in these precincts, these precincts being a surgical ward, what sort of surgery I didn't know or care. What I did know was that just inside the swinging door would be a canister of soiled, discarded scrubs, and indeed there was, along with something better. Set on a shelf above the canister were boxes of fresh green scrub hats and facemasks and shoe covers, and I grabbed what I needed and headed back to the elevator. By the time I reached floor seven I was in my
doctoresse
camouflage, a facemask tied loosely around my neck and flopping open against my chest. It wouldn't fool a doctor—scrubs and a purse?—but it wasn't a doctor I was out to fool. If a doctor had been guarding the hall, I'd have gone with a dime-store sheriff's star.

I was as prepped as I could be for my performance when happenstance volunteered a grace note. An orderly was coming down the hallway. “Excuse me,” I said and inquired if he'd left the wheelchair I'd ordered in 7134.
Non
, he replied, and I told him, Oh, darn, we need it immediately, could he bring one
tout de suite, merci bien
, and I bustled on before he could claim to be busy. Then I reached the guard.

He was young and bored and professionally suspicious, but being professional, his suspicions were targeted, and I didn't look like anyone he had prepared himself to fear. I knew better than to breeze on by. I asked him how his day was going and if the natives were restless and such—I'm not sure what I came up with—before I asked about Dr. Ulmann. He said Dr. Ulmann wasn't in, and I pursed my lips a bit to express my mild professional disapproval and asked after another couple doctors whose names I just made up, and he hadn't seen them either. I then pulled out Corie's chart—actually, it was Odile's chart on its clipboard—and with a weary sigh and an air of studied distraction, I edged on past. The policeman was monitoring three or four rooms; I saw 7134 and turned into it.

There were two patients inside: a snoring woman in the first bed and Corie, lying by the window, her back to the door. I went around and paused long enough to get a good look before touching her shoulder to wake her. Her appearance shocked me. Her cheek was bruised yellow and violet and she had an abrasion on her forehead. A cut on her temple had bled into her hair, red on red, coagulated into stringy, clotted brown. The blood had not been cleaned away, nor had anything been treated that I could tell. Her lips were chapped from dehydration, and the knuckles on the hand on the hospital blanket looked as though they'd picked a fight with a cheese grater, but I was elated that I didn't see casts or, worse, a traction sling— the invoking of orthopedics had given me a scare. She should have been receiving fluids, but here, too, I was thankful for the neglect. She had no IVs or catheters, wasn't tied down like Gulliver with ropes of polyethylene. I shook her, and before she could even register who this new person was, I demanded, “Where are you hurt?”

She pointed to her ribs, and I winced.
Aïe
. Careful movement. This could require some time.

“You've been x-rayed?” I asked and she knew who I was by now because she looked at me dumb with wonder and shook her head no. Clearly, they had her doped up a bit.

Astonishing, I thought, about the x-rays, but I said, “Good,” and told her, “We're doing that now. Do you have any possessions here, or identification? Anything personal?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“Clothes?”

“In the cabinet.”

“Leave them.” I heard a little commotion outside and I went out into the corridor to redeem the orderly with the wheelchair. The guard was getting antsy; the appearance of a conveyance with wheels was enough to start making him nervous, and he'd stood up. He looked down at me from the crumbling cusp of suspicion and opened his mouth to frame what would have become a challenge if I'd allowed him sufficient time.

“Can you give us a hand, Officer?” I asked.

The request had the happy effect of insulting two professional prides with one blow. The cop's irritation that he might actually have to do something distracted him from his suspicions even as the orderly objected, “
Non, non! Docteur
, it's not a problem. Where does she have to go?”

“X-ray,” I said. “Be careful with her ribs,” and I stayed with the guard to sign Corie out for transit—thank heavens, doctors worldwide are known for illegible signatures—while the orderly went in to collect the goods. By the time the elevator doors opened at the emergency entrance level, the helpful orderly had been dismissed, and my badges and stethoscope were safely stashed in the bowels of my bag, along with my purloined scrubs, and Corie and I hightailed it sedately out to the curb, where I'd instructed Drôlet to wait for us.

 

Odile had told me to meet her in the lycée's nurse's office, a functional little room outfitted nicely with the rudiments—tongue depressors, cotton balls, half-bath with spritz shower. It was unequipped in one regard, to my relief—there was no school nurse on duty today, thank God. Then I realized who the school's nurse was: Odile. I soon saw why. Despite the fact that she couldn't actually see her visitor's dilapidated condition, Odile didn't hesitate for an instant. She fled to Corie like a magnet to steel and commenced her mending immediately. I'd imagined this hour ahead of time as a ritual establishment of our respective roles: mine as the doctor, Odile's as the patient. Now everything was getting all swiveled up. Odile became the room's attending physician, and among the miracles of the miraculous day was the sure insightfulness of her sightless ministrations. Her hand went straight to the bloodied temple as though drawn by the heat of the wound, and her grunt of dismay when she found that gash wasn't one of surprise but of disgust at suspicions confirmed. This nun, it turned out, wasn't so cloistered from the world's ways.

She appointed me her sous-nurse—Get me hydrogen peroxide; get me the gauze—and cleaned and bound Corie's hurts and searched her over with a blizzard of squeezes and pinches, arms lifted and knees twisted, a tactical reconnaissance for signs of further damage. She pushed her into the half-bath to rinse off, then zipped from the room and returned with a change of clothes: a one-size-fits-the-whole-Arab-world abaya and a brightly colored hijab. She combed out Corie's matted hair and patted the headscarf into place—it nicely hid the bandage she'd wrapped around Corie's skull to keep the gauze tight to her temple—and said to her, “There. Now you're one of mine.”

We were all, in truth, indubitably hers, for that afternoon and into the evening (I'd dismissed Drôlet until a late hour). Odile escorted us back to her chamber, the square, dorm-ish, windowless room whose austerity reminded me of Saxe's flat, where she sat in her chair and we lounged on pillows on her carpet and her bed, Corie propped at a comic angle on account of her ribs, which appeared to be only contused, not cracked, Corie and I yakking away quite outside ourselves, as though our outlandish morning had kicked our identities reeling and indeterminate until Odile had come along to gather us into her basket like windfall chestnuts, like foundlings. We were foundlings, chestnuts, newborn chicks; we were giddy with safety and hardly recognizable to ourselves, though I consoled myself that Corie was looking more normal again, if it was yet a somewhat bruised and burnoosed normalcy.

“Weren't you awfully afraid?” Odile asked me, turning the conversation to my daring raid. “You could have been arrested—”

“For what?” Corie interrupted. “Impersonating a doctor?” It wasn't quite a scoff, but she definitely seemed to be feeling more herself.

That brought a laugh from us all, and it also brought a chapter whimpering to a close, and not a long chapter either,
malheureusement
. For a little while there, since the big event, I'd felt an unaccustomed thrill, felt myself visible at long last, the fuddy duckling who molts into cool, not some medical Auntie Mame but a street desperado who could spring a friend from a foreign jail and then (the more astounding) whisk her into an all-girl Muslim safe house, and the whisking, it should be noted—bonus points for élan—effected via chauffeured limousine. The gambit that had begun with no preparation and proceeded move by move on the improvisational fly had turned into a bravura piece of work, if I might say so, and as I say, I hardly recognized myself until Corie exclaimed “For what?” and my newfound identity collided with who I'd always been. Which was a doctor, of course, and I remembered, of a sudden, that I'd put off doing the very thing I'd come to do, and I got out my stethoscope and my blood pressure cuff and went over and pushed up Odile's sleeve.

“So now you must tell us where you've been,” I said to Corie over my shoulder as I worked. I hated my voice for its pleadingness. In the car I'd asked what the hell had happened and she'd been too druggy or stubborn to say, but now she recounted the story of her night, the civil disobedience gone haywire, the tear gas and the water cannon and the police truncheon that finally caught up with her, her arrest for resisting arrest. (“Felony tautology!” Odile interjected, miming the fall of a gavel along with her verdict, and I had to say, “Don't move.”)

And then, her tongue loosened, Corie filled Odile in on the general construct of her current life—on Alba, and on Saxe's death, and how she and I had first met twice, once in a church and once on a road by accident (“No accident,” Odile judged, miming another gavel. “Fate!”), and about the old letters we studied in the vast apartment, and I saw that any wedge that Massue's tirade had driven between Corie and her life on rue Nin had been expelled by her night's heroics: she had nothing to apologize for anymore. The adventures had liberated her from something more onerous than the clutches of the police: the indictments of her thuggish handler. Massue had tried his damnedest to evict her from her garden, but Alba had brought her back home. And I thought,
She's proud
. The lacerations her face bore were hardly hallmarks of bourgeois indifference, and I thought,
They honor the scars on Alba's breast
, and,
What Alba does, she follows without question
. Alba had freed Corie from Massue. As a result, Corie was more than ever Alba's captive and disciple. “Why do you have a mirror?” she asked suddenly.

I looked around at Odile's “window” set in its heavy oak frame. I was aghast (I wish I could say astonished) at Corie's rudeness, but Odile laughed, delighted. “Vanity,” she answered as she held up her sleeve for me. Her voice was blithe. She asked if Corie was surprised and noted that she had a lamp too. “Did you notice? No, I can't see them, but I can't see my lipstick either, yet I wear it,” she said, and said that if she was going to be vain, “I want a mirror to be vain in.” She lowered her voice to a confidential rumble. “Would you put on lipstick without a mirror?” The question was sly; Corie never wore even the simplest makeup, though how could Odile know that?

I reached for my bag to grab Odile's chart and pulled out with it the awkward weight I'd been lugging around through all the day's adventures. I dropped the photograph slowly into Corie's open hands. Even before she looked at it, she received it as something to revere. She scrambled up painfully and carried it to the table and held it in the lamplight and peered through the glass intently.

“Is it her?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm, with Carlos,” I said as I put away the cuff.

“Are we done?” Odile said, and then, as though 90 over 50 were something to celebrate (it isn't), she wheeled to her dresser and returned with three small earthenware cups and set them in front of us. She reached into the drawer again and came out with a mischievous half bottle of liqueur.

“Santé,”
she declared when she'd uncorked the contraband and poured us each a thimble's worth. “To rescue!” We had our sips and she asked, without a sequitur, “Aren't you ever afraid?” She had the Sahran tenacity with a topic, I had to give her that.

“How so?” I said.

“Oh,” Odile said, “I'm afraid of so many things. For instance,” and she mentioned fear for her brother, whose profession was very dangerous, who went off on missions from which he might not return, who was running off more and more with this war impending, who could be away for months at a time to who knows where, who'd warned her that any time they got together could be the very last, who was not as sturdy as he pretended to be and who'd recently looked (it was her word) unwell, like he was fighting something, “though he'll never admit it. He always has to be the strong one, because”—and she motioned around her as though flouncing a skirt to indicate the circumference of her infirmity. “So he can never be sick, even when he is. He's like all of us, he is who he has to be. And I'm his sister, who's made him be that way. Have you ever had someone disappear from your life?”

I could feel Corie's attention shift, though her eyes stayed glued to the photo. I pulled the cork and poured myself another. “Actually, yes,” I said to Odile. “I have.” And maybe it was the experience of being there and being as we were, so very dislodged, displaced, each the other and none of us ourselves, maybe it was something I'd wished to tell Corie already, or maybe I just wanted to be seen for myself again, having had a momentary taste of it, but whatever the reason, I talked about you, Daniel, you, whom I've never, ever talked about with anyone, gave them the bones of who you were and what you'd meant to me and what had happened, the base-camp accident with the drunk fools launching the mortar, a party goof gone haywire, how it hit the munitions cache. How the box was too close to your tent. How you'd remained in a coma all that long time after the wounding, long enough for them to airlift you to Saigon to cut out some of the shrapnel and then to fly you to Honolulu for additional treatment, and then on to Philadelphia to get you closer to home, though it wasn't in time for me to see you alive.