The Last Time I Saw You (12 page)

THIRTEEN

C
ANDY
S
ULLIVAN LETS
E
STHER OUT OF HER LITTLE CARRYON
, and the dog runs excitedly around the room, sniffing deeply at this place and that. Candy and Cooper once watched a documentary on hotel cleanliness—or lack thereof—and Coop said, “You see why I don’t like to travel?” But it wasn’t true that he didn’t like to travel—he relished his getaways with his male friends. It was traveling with her that gave him pause. She had figured that out, finally, and only last year went to Paris alone, which at first scared the hell out of her, but then she actually enjoyed it quite a bit. To linger before a painting in the Musée d’Orsay or over a platter of cheese at an outdoor café, to watch the waters of the Fontaine d’Agam or sit in the stained-glass-colored light of a cathedral, without worrying about someone else’s level of tolerance for such things! To take in a sunset while sitting beside the Seine and allow it to be the religious experience that it was, to come to tears over the astonishing beauty in a totally uninhibited way! She ate three croissants with raspberry jam for breakfast one day, and had no breakfast at all the next. She deliberated over a little painting for sale at a gallery on Rue des Beaux-Arts, worrying and worrying about the cost of just under two thousand dollars, but then got it anyway, and after she brought it back to her hotel room and propped it up so that she could see it from the bed, she decided it was worth three times what she’d paid for it. It was of a rolling field of lavender in late afternoon, the sun a deep gold wash, and she wanted to be buried with it, she told Coop on the phone the next day, when she called to check in. That was when the idea of being buried was still an abstraction.

He’d said at that time that he missed her, that he was eager for her to come home, but then when she came home, he didn’t seem so glad after all. The first thing he said to her after she cleared customs was, “Christ, what
took
you so long?” When they got home and she showed him the painting, he said, “Huh.
How
much was that?” Later, he just seemed sad—sighing over his dinner, seeming to avoid her by planting himself in front of the television and then his computer, and when finally she called him on it, he said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, here we go again. Don’t blame your moodiness on me!”

She considered not responding, but then she said, “I’m only asking you to tell me what’s going on. You seem upset. Or sad, or something. If I’m wrong, you can tell me. You don’t have to get mad.”

“
You’re
the one who’s
mad
!” he said.

She stared at him, her stomach aching, then said, “And yet you’re the one who’s yelling.”

He shook his head wearily, his eyelids at half-mast. Then he lowered his voice to a chilling level and said, “I’m not
yelling
, Candy.” He stood back from her, put his hands on his hips, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “
THIS IS YELLING! See the difference?
”

She walked away, and—how to say it?—feared for her back as she did so. She walked away and straightened some things in her desk drawer. She sat at the edge of the bed and contemplated her knees. She took a bath. She went to bed.

There is a knock at the door. For one second, she thinks it might be Coop, and she looks around the hotel room with his eyes, thinking about how he’ll disapprove of the tacky artwork, the floral bedspread. She straightens her suit jacket and skirt and goes to the peephole to look out. It’s someone from the hotel, an awkward-looking young man in a uniform that’s way too big for him, and he’s holding a massive bouquet of flowers. Candy sighs, presses her forehead against the door, and then opens it. “My goodness!” she says. “Aren’t they lovely!”

The man—boy, really—holding the flowers seems barely aware of them. After Candy exclaims over them, he gives them a quick look, then smiles at her. “Yeah, these are for you,” he says. “You’re Candy Armstrong, right?”

“Right.” She takes the flowers from him and breathes in the scent of one of the lilies. “Wait right there,” she says, and puts the flowers on the dresser, then goes to her purse for a ten-dollar bill.

“
Thanks!
” he says. “You need anything else? Ice? I could go and get you some ice for your ice bucket.”

“No thanks.”

“You know how to work everything in the room?”

Probably not. The alarm clocks they put in hotel rooms bypassed her level of competence years ago. The television she never bothers with. But she tells him yes, she’s all set. She’ll figure out what she needs to know, or she’ll get help later. She wants to lie down for a while now, and then she wants to take a walk with Esther. Since the time she was a little girl, sleep and nature have been fail-safe tonics. And besides, the dog will be left in the room tonight, and Candy wants to be sure Esther will be too worn-out to make trouble. This hotel is dog friendly and Candy wants to do her part to keep it that way. There is a room service menu for dogs: chicken and rice, or beef and gravy, or a hamburger. There are dog cookies in the shape of fire hydrants. You can order a tennis ball or a Kong toy, too. Candy brought Esther’s usual kibble, but maybe she’ll give her a treat tonight and get her a burger.

Her cellphone rings and she looks to see who’s calling. Cooper. She contemplates not answering. But he’ll know her plane has arrived, he always tracks her flights, and he’ll keep calling until she does answer. She opens the phone and says, “Hi.”

“You get there all right?” She can hardly hear him. He must be in the car and using his earpiece. It comes to her that she has no desire to know where he is or what he’s doing, but she nonetheless asks, “Where are you?”

“Just running some errands,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. The flight was perfect; I actually arrived early. A lot of people are here already. I saw—”

“I mean, ’cause I was thinking, you didn’t plan on being there with all this
stuff
going on.”

“I’m fine, Coop. I was just going to take a nap.”

“Did you get something from me?”

“Oh! Yes! So sorry, of course; I got the most beautiful bouquet of flowers—they just arrived. Thank you.”

“Yeah, I told ’em, you know, spare no expense. Should be a pretty over-the-top bouquet.”

“It is.”

“Like a million different types of flowers.”

“Uh-huh, yes.”

He waits, and so finally she says, “There are roses and lilies, and gerbera daisies and delphinium—”

“Yeah, blue, did they send blue delphinium? I know you like the blue ones. That’s what I told them to send.”

She sees herself in the mirror across the room, her shoulders drooping, her mouth thin and drawn. In the hotel with her are the people she went to high school with, the ones who knew her when. She straightens herself so that she is standing tall, untucks the hair that has fallen down her collar, and tosses her head. “You know what, Coop? I’m so sorry, but I am just beat.”

“Well, I was just making sure the
flowers
I sent you had arrived. I wanted to make sure they were what I ordered. I paid enough for them.”

“I’ll bring them home and you can see them.”

“I doubt you can get them through security.” There is a kind of petulance in his voice.

“I’ll get them through,” she says. “The vase is the problem. But I’ll wrap them in wet newspaper and plastic; I’ll get them home. I’m going to lie down now, Coop. I’m
tired
. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“We’ll talk later tonight,” he says.

She turns off her cellphone and puts it in her purse, takes off her suit and lies on the bed. She realizes she has never turned off her cellphone when she’s been away from home. It’s not
that
radical—he knows what hotel she’s in. He can call the general number and ask to be connected to her room if he really needs her.

She picks up the hotel phone and asks for the front desk. “I wonder if you could hold my calls until further notice,” she says, and the man says, “My pleasure, Ms. Armstrong,” and as soon as he says it, she feels a thrilling zip of energy that all but eliminates her fatigue.

She lies back down anyway, and pats the space beside her for Esther to come up. But the bed is higher than the one at home, and so Candy has to reach down and help lift the dog. As she does, she notices a swelling on either side of Esther’s abdomen and now she feels a deep stab of fear. Esther noses around, snorting and turning in tight circles, and finally lies down. Candy presses lightly on the dog’s sides. Yes. A definite swelling, on both sides. Oh, please. It can’t be. She presses harder, and Esther raises her head and licks Candy’s hand.

She moves her face close to Esther’s, looks into the dog’s eyes. “Are you okay?” Esther licks Candy’s nose and wags her stumpy tail. Candy pulls the dog closer to her and lies back down. Esther has been eating, drinking, sleeping, peeing, pooping. It’s nothing. It can’t be anything. It
isn’t
.

She thinks she can probably take a good half-hour nap, and then she and Esther will take a walk (she’ll watch the dog’s gait, any change in her level of endurance) and then she’ll get ready for the dinner and dance. She has a new dress for the occasion, one that she rather than Cooper selected.

She regards the mammoth bouquet on the dresser, the small white card stuck in it. She hasn’t even bothered to look at the card; that’s not right. Maybe, despite everything, he’s trying. Maybe he wrote something romantic, some overture meant to try to get them onto a different path. She gets off the bed and goes over to the dresser to pull the card out of the little envelope. “Call when you get this. Coop.”

She props the card against the vase, then throws it in the trash. She moves to the window and leans her head against it, considers again the information she was given by her doctor. She will seek a second opinion, even a third. But if she is dying, well, then she’s going to live first. On her own terms. On the nightstand is her purse and in it is a chocolate bar and she gets it out. She breaks off a large square and carefully positions it in the exact middle of her tongue. Then she moves herself to the exact middle of the bed to let the candy slowly melt. While it does, she runs her hands over her abdomen, then up across her breasts and down her arms. She touches herself in a way that has nothing to do with eroticism and everything to do with simply acknowledging—thanking!—a body that has been ignored for a very long time, by Cooper and by herself, too.
Don’t go
, she thinks.

At three-thirty, the bedside clock alarm goes off. Candy starts awake, then reaches over to shut the thing off. Who would set their alarm for three-thirty in the afternoon? Someone taking a nap, she supposes. Or someone like her, who distrusts the off switch and is wary of an alarm going off at five in the morning and so sets it for three-thirty in the afternoon. It makes Candy smile, thinking of someone else doing that, sitting on the side of the bed and fiddling with the alarm clock, arming themselves against what are supposed to be conveniences. She would like to meet someone like that; they could probably be friends, having lunch and complaining about the demise of hands-on reading and the way you can never get a live person on the line when you’re trying to take care of some pressing business matter. On one particularly bad day when Candy had to call about a problem with her refrigerator, she got a recording offering endless choices for things she didn’t want; and then she was rerouted to the beginning of the recording when she pressed 0. Same deal when she pressed *. And when she pressed #. Finally, Candy yelled into the phone, “I WANT A
PERSON
, I WANT A
PERSON
, THIS IS SO DE
HUMANIZING
, GIVE ME A
PERSON
!”

Later that afternoon, when she went out to deadhead the flowers in her garden, her neighbor Arthur was in his backyard. He saw her and waved, and Candy waved back. Then he came up to the fence and asked quietly, “Everything all right?” Candy flushed—he must have heard her screaming on the phone—and said brightly, “Yup!” It seems to her now that she might have shared with him her exasperation with recordings on the telephone and he would have understood. It seems like he would have nodded grimly and said, “It gets my goat, too, I’ll tell you. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket.” And then she could have shared with him her idea for being a person whose job is to simply be a real person on the line. Not to do anything; just to be a real live voice, for the
relief
of it all. He would have laughed at that, Arthur, and his bright blue eyes would have disappeared into his face the way they did when he laughed. Such a nice man, Arthur. A kind man.

Esther is sitting before her, staring expectantly in her pop-eyed way. Candy pets her, and checks to see if the lumps are still there or if they have somehow disappeared. Still there. How has she not noticed this before? She tells the dog, “Okay. I know. I’m going to take you out. Just let me take myself out, first.”

She uses the toilet, brushes her teeth, then goes to the window to look outside. Still sunny and warm, it appears, no one wearing a sweater or a jacket. She puts on a pair of white linen pants and a black linen blouse, a gold cuff bracelet, low-heeled sandals. She pushes the room key into her back pocket. Then she snaps Esther’s leash on and goes out into the hall.

Standing at the elevator is a man whose face she thinks she recognizes. “Pete?” she says. “Pete Decker?”

“Aw, Jesus,
Candy Sullivan
? The last time I saw you, you were drunk at our graduation party.”

She laughs. “Right back at you. How are you?” Oh, it’s nice to see him. Pete Decker, all grown up. He looks fine—graying hair, a few wrinkles, a little looseness at the jawline, but he really looks fine.

“I’m great!” he says, and she can see that he is taking in her collateral damage in the same way she just quickly assessed his. He bends down to pat Esther. “How you doing there, Sparky?” He looks up at Candy. “What’s his name?”

“Esther. She’s a girl.”