Seventh Avenue (34 page)

“S’cusie, minuto. I’ve got a sudden call to the john. Won’t be a sec.”

She sat in the room for almost ten minutes, forced herself to have another drink, this time from a bottle of bourbon, which went down more smoothly than the scotch, and she took out a pill, stared at it, then chewed it to give herself a lift. The faded daffodil wallpaper began slowly to move round in circles. Barney came back in, with a glowing, but somehow fatuous smile.

“
Christ, I’m an awful host, leaving you sit by yourself.”

She tried her legs, but she couldn’t stand. The room moved too rapidly, and the neon sign below them flashed into her eyes.

“
You
awright
?”

“
Yeah, fine,” she said. “Maybe the drink. I’m a little heady.”

“Lookit, you can stretch out on the bed for a quick forty if you like.”

She ambled over and stared at the moth-eaten bedspread and fell on top of the bed. The furry nobbles of the spread tickled her nose and made her want to laugh. He eased off her high heels and pulled up the straight-back chair, and whispered conspiratorially in her ear.

“If you’re blue, I got somethin’ll perk you up.”

She sat up abruptly, supporting herself on her elbow.

“Like what?”

He extracted from a scratched cigarette case a clumsily shaped cigarette with both ends twirled close, like the fuse on a firecracker. She held it up to the light and examined it.

“What is it?” she asked, although she knew.

“My private stock. Kept in the family cellars for generations at just the right temperature. Vintage Chicago light green, a sawbuck an Oh-zee.

“It’s a reefer, isn’t it?”

“Lady, you’ve just won a kayak and a year’s supply of mustache wax. Wanter give a try?”

She cackled like a hen in a chicken run. Tears collected in the corners of her eyes.

“It’s funny?”

“No, but the joke is when you went out, I chewed a Bennie.”

“Oh, don’t tell me? Barney, where’s your brains - a kindred spirit,” he shouted. “Well, let us charge ensemble.”

“I never have . . . only pills.”

“Oh, you’re in for a treat.” He showed her his handkerchief which contained a small filter.
“Schmeck.
I don’t bang myself yet. I’m allergic to needles. They make holes in my skin.”

He lit her up with the end of his cigarette.

“Take a long belt, swallow it, till you’ve got to exhale and then let it out through your nose.” The smoke had a harsh abrasive taste, but she liked the sweet smell, which reminded her of oregano. She passed the cigarette to him, and he took a puff, held it for a long time and passed it back to her. When they finished, he emptied some tobacco out of a cigarette and carefully fitted the remainder into it with a matchstick.

“Cocktail?” he said.

She put the cigarette in her mouth and puffed until it was alight.

“
Christmas, I feel out of this world.”

“
Good buzz, huh?”

She nodded.

In a strange Irish falsetto, he sang:

“‘
All my cares and
woes .
. .

Bye-bye blackbird . . .’

“I’m on top, Rho. You know that every comedian in the business steals my material . . . and people - whenever somebody tells a joke, it’s one of my old ones. I been robbed. You can’t copyright jokes though, like songs. Nothing to protect me.”

She put an arm around his neck and pulled his face down to hers.

“
I
will,
I’ll protect you, Barney.”

His mouth was wet, and she ran her tongue along his lips, then closed her eyes as he unbuttoned her dress . . .

The bar in the Cottage Inn was crowded, and Rhoda felt uncomfortable and exposed as men in the room smiled with their eyes at her. She lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and coke. A thin, blond-haired man with a pug nose, a tired, drawn mouth, and small sharp brown eyes maundered through the bar, stretching his neck in search of somebody. Rhoda waved, and he came over.

“
Dr. Heller, I’m glad you were able to make it. Have a drink.”

“No, I’ll buy you one.” He had a rough, leathery voice and was about forty, and she thought well-dressed for a man who must have more on his mind than clothes.

“I’ve ordered one already. It’s very nice of you to spare me the time.”

The waiter served the drink and took Heller’s order, looking surprised when she told him to put it on her tab.

“I was pretty busy this afternoon, but I’m glad you’ve come. She needs visitors from time to time, although it isn’t as rewarding for them as one might hope. Did you come with your husband?”

“
No .
. . he couldn’t make it.”

“
Pity.”

“Why? He wasn’t very close to Myrna. In fact, they didn’t like each other.”

“That’s why I would’ve thought a chat was in order. His name is one of the few she responds to. It’s a stimulus. You see, I’m afraid that I can’t offer much hope in terms of a recovery.” He stared pensively at his fingers for a few moments. “We’ve had her four and a half years and tried any number of approaches. We’ve had some success, but it’s been limited.”

“
What’s really wrong with her? Is she insane?”

“Insane? No, of course not. Or at least not what I call insane, but it’s such a difficult word to define, even in a legal sense. She has an illness which we’re trying to cure. I don’t want to throw a lot of psychiatric terms at you, but what she has can be classified as a compulsion neurosis. Baldly, this means that she has an idea about herself which terrifies her, so that she is forced to substitute another idea in its place and this in a sense becomes a symbol of what she wants to hide, rather than the secret itself.”

Rhoda swallowed her drink and felt a wave of nausea come over her.

“
Is it something to do with the abortion she had?”

“Partly. She seems to think that your husband was the father of her child, but we know this can’t be the case because she met your husband a good two years after she had it.”

Rhoda became increasingly disconcerted and upset by the mention of Jay. She stretched her mind to piece together all of her recollections of the meetings they had had.

“Ridiculous,” she said. “The truth, and I tell you this in confidence, is that my husband wanted me to have an abortion at one time. I told Myrna about it, and she brought things to a head, so that in the end, we got married, and I had my child. She’s confused.”

“
I wonder.”

“What do you mean, ‘you wonder,’“ Rhoda said in a raised, indignant voice.

“If we’re going to be absolutely honest with each other then I may have to ask you a few things that hurt, so don’t think I’m merely prying, I have a very sick patient on my hands, and anything I can learn which might help her . . .” He broke off and motioned with his index finger to the waiter who brought them another round. “You did, after all, make the effort to come up here, so no doubt you still care about your sister.”

“I do, terribly. We were very close when we were younger. She’s had a lot of disappointments. First with a married man, and then by not having a musical career.”

“Did she, to the best of your knowledge, have an affair with your husband?”

Rhoda felt her eyes burning from the smoke in the room, and she wiped them with a handkerchief. She had a vision of Barney’s tired face, and his hairy short body and his wonderful moon-shaped smile. She had come alive with him; her body had responded, as though coming out of some long fetal sleep.

At last she said, “No, she never had an affair with Jay. She was probably jealous of the fact that I got married, and she didn’t.” She knew, or thought she knew, Myrna too well to believe this, but her denial carried no conviction, and Heller sensed this.

“You mentioned her musical career. Well, what made me ask the question is the fact that she believes he ruined it. She played the clarinet for a number of years, and she insists that your husband broke it, by dropping it out of a window, so that it shattered when it hit the ground. Does that make any sense to you?”

“None.”

“Well, she’s reconstructed that instrument. She’s become it. It’s a very fragile instrument and an extremely rare one. It must never come into contact with a hard surface because it might break. As a consequence, she has to sit in a wheelchair like an invalid. She’ll stand on a soft surface, like the mattress of a bed, but not on the floor. She admits that she can use her legs, but she’s obdurate about not coming into contact with the floor. When I ask her why, she says: ‘It’s much too valuable to risk breaking. It’s the only one of its kind in the world.’“

“I’d like to see her.”

“Tomorrow, you can. I think unless your husband’s prepared to meet me and discuss what, if any, part he’s played in her life, that there’s no point in keeping her on here. He pays the bills, so you might call his attention to what I’ve said. You can take her home, but she’ll require a nurse, or a companion of some kind to be with her constantly. One more thing, Mrs. Blackman, why does your husband pay the bills?”

Rhoda pushed the table away angrily, and Dr. Heller caught it just as it was about to fall, but he could not prevent the glasses front smashing.

“I know what you’re implying with your slimy digs,” she said, “but it just so happens that my husband is a generous, open-hearted man, and he pays because he can afford to. You’re a very unpleasant man, Dr. Heller, and I’ll suggest to my husband that we take my sister elsewhere.”

“You do that, Mrs. Blackman. Somebody else might get the truth, not the version I’ve been handed. As for my being unpleasant, let me assure you that I’m not in the least interested in popularity contests or hand-holding of interested relatives. I’m trying to help a sick woman.”

The next morning Rhoda waited in a large room with green baize tables and French windows, which was the recreation-cum-visiting room. She gasped when she saw a woman dressed in black wheeled in through the push door. It was Myrna, and somehow it wasn’t Myrna.

Her skin had acquired the sallow grainy texture that the bodies of confined people develop as a protest against being removed from the sun, the wind, natural elements. Her movements - the sudden tremor of her facial muscles, a reflex neck jerk - had about them something of the arbitrary quality of a tropism. Her derangement had, for Rhoda, destroyed her humanity. What she looked at now was not the sister she had grown up with in Borough Park, the young dark-haired girl who reacted so quickly and with such terrifying awareness to every nuance of mood in the household, but an object without a function. She watched with distaste as Myrna cradled her arms and swayed in the chair.

“I’ll leave you alone,” a voice said, and a woman who smelled of starch strode briskly out of the room.

“Hello, Myrna,” Rhoda said in a cracking voice.

Eyes moved, yellowish eyes that she could not associate with Myrna. They resembled impure marbles in the unutterable void that lay behind them. She waited for a response, but the eyes looked over her shoulder through the window at the green-gray sky that cloaked the landscape like some spinster’s eiderdown.

“It’s me, Rhoda!” She touched her sister’s hand, and her flesh was cold. Her lips moved slowly, then thickened into an idiotic smile.

“Do you remember anything?
Me?”
Rhoda said softly. “The other day I had a dream about you, about your sweet-sixteen party. You were wearing a yellow organza dress with a high neck that Poppa got from a man who owed him money. And all the boys at the party thought you were the prettiest sister, and you were. I sat in a corner most of the evening, eating the ice cream cake Momma had made. It had lots of raisins and nuts in it. I can still taste it. She didn’t do any cooking after, ‘cause that’s when she got sick, about four or five months after. And when it was my turn to have a party, you bought a cake from the bakery. One with a lot of pink and blue icing and those soft butter-cream roses. It tasted awful, and I always resented the fact that Momma made your cake and not mine. Isn’t that silly? But it shows that I think about you and miss you.

“I’ve got a little boy now. I told you about him the last time I was here. He’s five and his name’s Neal, and he looks a bit like you around the mouth. He’s got a way of sucking in his cheeks that’s you to a T. I’ve told him about you, and he wants to meet you. He’s really a sweet kid, very deep, the way you were when you were younger. Myrna?”

Rhoda lit a cigarette, and Myrna’s eyes circled the smoke like a hawk after prey. She held the cigarette under the arm of the chair so that it would not distract her.

“Don’t you like talking to me? Would you want me to take you home? To my house. I can afford to . . . we’ve got a lot of money now. Not much else. Money enough to keep me in pills and other things for the rest of my life, and money enough to keep you out of institutions, and money enough for Poppa to hold up his head and for Howie to have a convertible, and for Momma to have doctors whenever she needs them without worrying about paying the bills.”

Myrna extended her left arm, and with her right hand as the bow, began to pick at her arm as though it were a violin.

“There’s something you gotta tell me. Please try to take in what I’m asking you, ‘cause I feel in my heart you understand me, even though you’re not talking. Will you? Please, it’s important . . . maybe it’ll help you . . . and me as well. I want you to tell me about Jay.”

“Aiiii!” A piercing scream reverberated through the empty room, and Rhoda jumped to her feet. Myrna had risen out of the chair, extended her arms in front of her, like a somnambulist, and taken a step towards her, and Rhoda began to run in terror to the door. Myrna remained frozen to the spot, shrieking; and the woman who had pushed her chair opened the swing door. She had a little bag in her hand, from which she took a hypodermic needle. She punctured the rubber top of a small bottle that contained colorless liquid, filled it, and then shot a bit into the air. Rhoda stared at the bottle for the hole, but it closed before her eyes. Like a woman’s body, she thought. It opens and closes. A box that nature opens and closes. Then one day the box is closed, and you’re dead, and people cry. After a while, they forget, and your face loses its shape, its contours, the sound of your voice merges with a thousand other voices and your voice is silent. One night, somebody, somewhere, dreams about you, and you know for certain that you’re dead . . . and that’s it.