Small Blessings (25 page)

So anyway, here he was, sitting at the kitchen table at nine o'clock in the morning, full of Wheaties, feeling like a person who'd been sucked through a time warp, whooshed back to his college years. They had been delightful, those years, full of passion for learning, passion for his friends, passion for his occasional girlfriends (where, oh, where were they now, with their long hair and their black leotards he had ached to rip off?), passion against apartheid, and an especially pronounced passion for—there it was again—basketball! Tom heard again the satisfying
swunk
he'd dredged up last evening after Rose's surprise invitation to shoot hoops. He'd only played at the intramural level—but he'd been a pretty good shooter, averaging eleven points a game in the Amherst College winter league over the course of four years. Not too bad for someone who'd been a scrub all through high school.

The difference, of course, was that in college he'd finally grown into his six-foot-two-inch frame. Tom smiled warmly at the memory of those games. He'd blossomed, basketball-wise, at Amherst—at least that was what he liked to think.

Probably the truth was the other players had been just as bad as he, but why dilute a glorious memory with historical accuracy. The point was it remained his one experience with feeling good at something physical. Perhaps he was a fool to think he was up to a little one-on-one after so many years, but so what? It wouldn't be the first foolish thing he'd done, and appearing foolish was a small price to pay for an hour alone with Rose Callahan.

Tom got up from the table, moving as decisively as he had in years. It was time to find his old basketball, blow it up with the bicycle pump, put on a pair of gym shorts, if he could find them, go down to the gym, and see if his old baseline jumper still cooked.

*   *   *

Getting Iris to Russell's car was not easy. She was as limp as an overcooked noodle, unable to assist in the process at all. Russell drafted Ted Pitts to help him, and they ended up each grasping a side of Iris and more or less dragging her across the Book Store floor, out the door, and down the walk.

A crowd had begun to gather before they'd gone more than a couple of feet, as Iris kept raising her head and shouting, “Get your goddamn hands off me!”

This made Ted terribly nervous. “People are going to think we're kidnapping her,” he whispered.

“No, they're not,” Russell replied wearily. Really, Ted could be such a nudnik sometimes. No one with any sense would kidnap Iris Benson. She was too tiresome to be kidnapped. Someone might murder her, certainly, but kidnapping was out of the question.

Ted was terribly out of shape; he was sucking air like a three-hundred-pound lineman who's had to run ten yards. “She seems awfully sick. I hope she's not dying or anything. What on earth do you think is wrong with her?” he whispered.

“I think she's drunk.”

“Oh my. I thought I smelled something, but it's awfully early in the day for that.”

“Isn't it?” Russell said grimly.

His car was an old Mercedes. Usually it was his delight, but today Russell cursed the heavy passenger door that would not stay open. He would shift Iris's dead weight entirely to one arm and yank open the door, but before he could wedge a hip into it, the door would close again with the trademark Mercedes
thunk
he was usually so proud of demonstrating. “Damn!” he said in a loud voice.

Ted looked at him accusingly, as though this whole thing were his fault. “Can't you get it to stay open?” he asked peevishly. “My car doors stay open if you pull them back far enough.”

Ted drove an old Toyota. Of course the doors stayed open. They weighed about two pounds. “No, I can't,” Russell said in an equally peevish voice. All his AA-inspired tolerance was in use coping with Iris. There was none left over for Ted. “These doors are built for protection, not to stay open!”

Iris began to struggle.
“Where are you rapists taking me?”
she bellowed.

Russell suddenly had had enough. “Will you shut
up
!” he hissed. “You're drunk as a fart and sick as a dog, and we're trying to get you out of here before you lose your job!”

Terrible knowledge appeared in Iris's large green eyes. Tears welled and her nose began to run slightly. But she did stop struggling.

Ted opened the door again and this time held it. Russell grasped the limp but fully conscious woman under her shoulders, clasped his hands together behind her back, and bundled her into his car, falling in on top of her. For a brief moment he lay there, the two of them layered like some bad burlesque of lovers about to couple. She looked up at him. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“You're welcome.” Russell felt strangely moved in spite of himself. How much of what he hated about this woman was her disease? For that matter, how much of what she hated about him was his disease? Oh God, why couldn't the world be a simpler place?

He struggled to his feet again. The crowd of onlookers was dissipating. Ted, however, was still there, looking cross and relieved at the same time. “Thanks,” Russell said, impulsively offering Ted his hand.

“What are you going to do with her?” Ted asked.

Russell had no idea. The idea of carrying Iris Benson into the Dean Dome repulsed him. “I don't know,” he said. “What do you suggest?”

Ted shrugged, his mind already back at his desk, running numbers, trying to come up with a plan to ward off the Harpy's hovering hostile takeover. “Got me,” he said.

*   *   *

Lord, what fools these mortals be …

Tom Putnam stood in front of the full-length, pebbled mirror in the cramped and deserted men's locker room and studied his legs. At least they weren't flabby—he did too much walking around campus for the muscles to have atrophied—but they were white as vanilla pudding. To make matters worse, the only gym shorts he'd been able to find were a pair he'd bought in the early eighties. They were the kind his hero Larry Bird would have favored in his heyday, but in today's world of jams, they looked ridiculously short and skimpy.

As a lark, Tom had also dug out his old basketball shoes from college. They were black, high-top Converse All Stars—a.k.a. Chuck Taylors. Putting them on—just sitting there on the bench in the locker room and lacing them up—had made him feel young again.
Looking
at them stuck on the end of his vanilla pudding legs was a different story. My, how he had aged! But even so, somewhere in that middle-aged, slumping body, he could still see the remnants of young Tom Putnam, good English student, decent basketball player, and all-around hopeful guy.

What the hell! Rose Callahan was no fashionista. She was likely to be as oddly dressed as he was.

Tom's basketball was on the floor, inflated and ready to go. He picked it up, gave it a tentative bounce or two, then tried a couple of moves that required ball and feet to move in concert. It went better than he'd expected. He did not fall over a bench, or crash into a row of lockers or lose control of the ball. “‘Put me in, Coach, I'm ready to play,'” he sang, dribbling the ball toward the locker-room door. John Fogerty, risen from the dead-songs file in the back of his brain.

The hall appeared to be deserted. Tom picked up his ball and walked briskly to the stairs. All was still clear. He took the stairs two at a time (feeling only a slight tug at his heart), double-timed it through the upstairs hallway, pushed open the door to the gym, and gave a short, victorious whoop. He'd made it onto the court unscathed. No one had seen him. No student would be describing him to her friends at lunch today.

It was then he saw Rose. She was in the process of driving toward the basket at the far end of the court. As he watched, she rose into the air and sank a lay-up. She caught the ball on the first bounce and dribbled out to the top of the key, turned, and sailed in a jumper. Tom was so entranced, he forgot to be embarrassed about his vanilla pudding legs. “That was wonderful!” he called out. “My goodness, where'd you learn to shoot like that?”

Rose started and dropped the ball, which rolled away. “You scared the living daylights out of me!” she said. There was even more Texas than usual in her speech. She made two syllables out of the “scared.”
Scay-ard.

“I'm sorry,” Tom said, coming toward her. There again was that strange bubble of light around Rose so that she looked
displayed.
Space alien, beamed down in basketball shorts. Then, remembering her problems in class yesterday, he stopped and asked anxiously, “You're not going to hyperventilate or anything, are you, if I come over and talk to you?”

Rose considered this solemnly, reminding him of Henry, then shook her head. “I don't believe I am. At least, not right away. Let's try and pick up where we left off last night, shall we?” She looked up at him with a hint of a wicked gleam in her blue, blue eyes. “Disappointed?”

“No,” he said. “Relieved.” And, he could have added, strangely unconcerned about how ridiculous he looked. Sure enough, Rose looked pretty ridiculous herself, rigged out in a hideous orange and blue Virginia Cavaliers T-shirt and ancient, baggy gray shorts, her hair pulled up on the top of her head into a pom-pom.

Rose pointed at his basketball. She had, Tom thought, a challenging look in her blue eyes.

“I don't have a lot of time,” she said. “I'm having company for lunch and I've got to be out of here by eleven thirty. So, would you like to play a little one-on-one?”

*   *   *

Russell took off Iris's repulsive shoes in the Mercedes so that she would not track anything into the Dean Dome. He then grasped her firmly under the arms, dragged her out of the car, eased her down his immaculately swept front walk, up the steps to his front stoop, around his beloved and carefully tended pots of red geraniums, in through the front door of his house, across the foyer floor, into his parlor, and dropped her none too gently into a wing chair. Iris was able to sit up on her own now, but only just. Russell couldn't tell if she was weak from throwing up or weak from shame. Probably it was a combination of the two. Iris had never been what one would call a stoic.

Russell sat across from her on an uncomfortable sofa and regarded her glumly. The last thing he wanted was a personal relationship with Iris Benson. He really had not thought this situation through at all well. It might have been better for both of them if he'd let somebody else bail her out of this mess, for now the two of them were inexorably bound by the chain of a rendered good deed. He'd rescued her, so now she'd feel crushingly obligated to him, and he'd have to take pains to act as though there were no such obligation, which she wouldn't be able to accept because, underneath, they still hated each other, and—as Kurt Vonnegut had so aptly put it—so it goes.

Iris was staring down at the bottom of her garish top, picking at the bits of bright metal attached to it. In Russell's opinion, the thing looked as though it had been dragged through the trash at a craft shop. It was, he supposed, what people in the Art Department would call “wearable art.” In his opinion it was neither of those things.

Without looking up at him, Iris asked in a low voice, “How many people saw me?”

At least she remembered what had happened. That, in some cockeyed AA way, made the whole thing seem somewhat worthwhile. What was the use of disgracing yourself while you were drunk if you blacked out and forgot the whole thing? It was much harder to realize you'd hit bottom if you couldn't remember what it had felt like to be down there.

“Maybe a dozen,” he said, not unkindly.

“Any students?”

“A couple.”

“Did they realize I was drunk?”

If there was one thing students were savvy about, it was who was drunk. “Probably.”

“Oh God.” Iris let go of her sweater and covered her face with both hands. Russell actually felt compassion for her. It must be awful to be dependent upon the fickle admiration of students, to be an academic and yet have to compete with the likes of Kelly Clarkson and Reese Witherspoon for approval. It made what you did seem so
cosmetic.

The college clock began to strike. Russell looked at his watch. Ten thirty. He had class today at eleven, which meant he needed to get going. He had no other choice but to leave Iris here, at his house, unattended for an hour. “I've got to go meet a class. Would you like to lie down while I'm gone?”

Iris fanned her fingers slightly so she could see out between them. “Yes, please.”

“The guest rooms are upstairs. Do you think you can make it?”

“Yes.” Iris lowered her hands and looked up at him, in dumb, unconscious mimicry of the kind of woman he was usually so taken with. “If you help me, that is. I'm a little weak.”

Russell sighed. What would Lewis, his sponsor, have to say about this? A cardinal rule of AA was to place principles over personalities, and here he was helping another alcoholic and hating every minute of it.

 

chapter 14

Agnes stood in the middle of Rose Callahan's not very big living room and eyed a two-foot-long crack in a wall. “You say the maintenance people did a lot of work on this place? It still looks pretty primitive, if you ask me.” Of course, Rose Callahan
hadn't
asked her, but neither did she look disturbed by the assessment.

“You should have seen it before,” Rose said happily.

Agnes sighed and turned to look at the titles on Rose's bookshelves. Fiction, essays, science, history, travel, biography ran riot; there was absolutely no order. Her own bookshelves were methodically arranged. Might this literary free-for-all be a manifestation of the inner Rose Callahan, the woman standing over there with her calm, contained air that gave nothing away? Probably not. Probably the only accurate information you got about the inner Rose Callahan was what she chose to tell you. Agnes sighed again. Getting to know someone was a boxing match. You circled and circled, letting fly with a tentative jab every now and then to test your ring mate's reaction.