The Man in the Window (26 page)

He stood at his window for a moment longer after she had returned his wave and given to him what his injured lips had been unable naturally to give her, which was a smile. He stood, and maybe she realized what it meant for him to stand there in the open, what he bestowed upon her by lingering there. She must have—the smile that tried to light her face was as uncertain and unpracticed as his body was, revealed before the curtainless window. What a desperate pair we must be, he thought, to exchange such rare and difficult presents: a smile and a moment at a window.

He looked down at Iris. Here at my window balcony, he wondered, dreamy with unknown possibilities, am I Juliet to your Romeo? Sleeping Beauty to your Prince Charming? Who is it who has come to my rescue, to slay the fiery dragon coiled around my feet? Louis had a vision then of Iris in her nurse’s uniform transformed into a shining white knight bent on his rescue, charging up and down the streets of Waverly in search of him.

Below, beside the tulip bed, Iris began to fidget, her smile fading. What was he doing up there?

Rescue me from what? Louis thought. He caught his reflection in the glass as he stared down at Iris’s lumpy presence. I’m no Sleeping Beauty. There are no beauties here. Look at her. He grasped the windowsill for support. Look at her. Look at me. My God. Ariel. But Ariel was gone. Then he mouthed his own name. Louis. But the Louis he called for was gone too, sixteen years a memory. Gracie, there’s someone at the door. Make her go away.

“Gracie.” He turned and waited for her reply. None came.

“Gracie, please. There’s someone… here.”

He remembered. The man who wandered in last night. The burglar called Arnie. He’d come and taken Gracie for a morning
walk. The burglar had stolen his mother. Louis tried to catch his breath. Gracie, I need you. They’ve taken you, and now me, they’ve come for me. Louis rushed over to his bed and curled up on it. His mending arm throbbed inside the heavy cast.

When Louis disappeared from the window, Iris assumed he was coming down the stairs to open the door. She tugged at her dress, and sniffed quickly at her armpits, and licked her lips anxiously. A minute passed. She stepped up onto the front doorstep, then stepped down again. Another minute passed. Maybe he’s combing his hair or something. No, he always wears that baseball hat. Well, maybe he’s changing to a fresher hat. When yet another minute went by, she said, “The hell with it,” the color deepening in her fat cheeks. “I mean really. The hell with it and goddamn it, too,” and spun around on her short legs, and stomped down the walk toward the street.

Francine watched, craning to see from behind her white porch column. Kitty, in her own yard next door, poked her head up from between the branches of an overgrown azalea for a better view. She smiled. The intruder woman had been thwarted. Bev and Bert, driving home from the grocery store, spotted Iris too, and slowed down to see what there was to see. Even Carl, whose house was right across the street, took notice. He’d been watering out back, and now he was in the side yard giving his newly transplanted laurel bush a good soak. He just about drowned the thing while he pondered Iris.

There was a lot to ponder, too. Iris, who looked unstoppable as she charged down the walk, suddenly jerked to a halt and did a pirouette, like she was on a rope and somebody gave it a quick yank, wheeling her around. She stared back at the Malone house, and all the neighbors, from their various hiding places, stared with her, wondering what it was she saw.

What she saw was her last chance, which also happened to be her first and only chance. Iris, she said to herself, you got to press this thing harder, you got to take it further, because after this, there’s nothing else, not one thing else. The man in there
issued you the only invitation you’re ever going to receive; he said come, and now you’ve come, so you got to see him, at least once. You got to look him in the eye.

Iris marched right back up the walk to the house. Francine’s head poked up from her hiding place. Iris chugged up the three steps of the Malones’ front porch. Bev and Bert’s car pulled over and stopped. Iris banged on the Malones’ door. Carl forgot he was holding a hose and watered his foot. Iris banged again, then opened the front door.

One yard over, Kitty scrambled out of the azaleas. She was shaking her fist, her face was contorted. “Hey! Hey, you can’t do that. You can’t go in there!”

Iris turned and watched Kitty’s lurching approach. This woman’s been drinking, thought Iris. When Kitty was less than ten feet from her, Iris lifted one of her meaty arms and raised her hand. “Stop!” she commanded. Kitty stopped dead, as if the hand had thumped her on the chest.

Iris glared down at Kitty from the porch steps. “Lady, I’m his nurse, and I’m going in.”

“But—but,” Kitty stammered. “Nobody goes in. Nobody gets to go in and see him.”

Now Iris stepped through the doorway. She began to close the door on Kitty. “It’s happening now. Lady, I been invited.” The door clicked shut.

Kitty stared up at his window. He wasn’t there. Even when he’d landed in the tulip bed, he hadn’t been there, not for her. It never meant anything to him, her desire to see him, so that even when he fell to the ground before her, he had been invisible, would remain invisible, unseen except by those he invited to see.

Inside, Iris stood trembling in the dim hallway. “Mrs. Malone?” she called. “Louis? Louis Malone?”

Upstairs, Louis huddled on his bed.

Iris heard the springs creak.

“The door was open,” she called. “I hope you don’t mind I came in.”

No creaks this time, but of course he was there.

“I’ve come to see you. I’ve come about your arm.”

Nothing.

“Like we both agreed,” said Iris, her voice quieter now, almost to herself. “Like we both said.”

And then, his voice, weightless, drifting downstairs to her. She strained her ears toward the sound, as she had strained to listen when the Tube Man spoke. Louis’s voice had that same quality, of words escaping rather than delivered, whispered from lips that preferred to be still and silent.

“You’ll have to go away, I think,” came the voice.

Now it was Iris who didn’t answer.

“There’s no one here,” said the voice after a minute.

Iris moved toward the stairwell. “You asked me to come,” she said.

“I’m sorry. But I was mistaken.”

“You have to see me.”

“I can’t. Really, I can’t.”

“You have to see someone.” Iris put her foot on the first step. “No, I don’t think so. Thank you for coming, though. Goodbye now.”

“I’m on my way up.” Iris knew, as nurses seem to know, that it was time to approach. She knew that patients often feared the treatment they so desperately sought, that it was sometimes the nurse’s job to administer the treatment against all protests. Now, for the first time, she carried no dressings, or syringes, or medicines to her patient’s room, because she herself was the cure.

At the top of the stairs there were four doors, two on each side of the hallway. One was closed. She knocked lightly on it.

“Louis?”

She waited, and then said, “Louis, I’m coming in now.”

With a final act of boldness, the last in a series of bold acts that had begun when she made her first surprising overture to him in the Emergency Room, Iris opened the door and stepped into Louis’s room. She looked first where nurses always look, at
the bed. It was empty. Then she moved her eyes to the other side of the large room, which was the only place he would be, before his window. His back was to her, his hand parting a white curtain just a little, just enough so he could see.

He said, in a voice quiet and even, a voice he might have used often, talking to himself, “I don’t look at calendars anymore. I can tell from Mrs. Bingsley’s red azalea, which is beginning to overflow into Carl Lerner’s yard—Carl doesn’t seem to mind, though—I can tell it’s the end of the first week of May. May sixth or seventh? June fifteenth, Mrs. Bingsley’s viburnum will flower, or thereabouts. Francine Koessler prunes her privet hedge June thirtieth and again the last week of August. Winter is harder. Bert Howard changes his Chevy wagon over to snow tires on December fifteenth, usually. Last year’s Thanksgiving snow threw him into a tizzy; I’ve never seen a man change a set of tires so fast.”

Louis made a sound which Iris thought must have been a small laugh muffled by his scarf. She stood still, watching his back, which swayed ever so lightly as his voice found its rhythm.

He went on. “That’s a good way to keep time when you’ve stayed inside for sixteen years, almost seventeen years, really. This window has been my calendar, and all that I’ve observed have been my increments of time. Sixteen years ago I watched Mrs. Bingsley plant that azalea, and now look at it. So, in a way, the passing of the days has been a blossoming for me, like the abundant red of Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea, not a marking of days on the calendar of someone else’s idea of time. My… time here, I’m trying to say,” Louis said softly, “has been full of happy moments, very small but very happy moments. Little tastes. Doesn’t the first bite of chocolate cake always taste the best? The shock of sweetness, the anticipation of more chocolate on the tongue? Well, at my window it’s all first bites, I’m never full, the chocolate never sours and swells my belly.”

Iris leaned against his bed and listened. She had never heard such talk.

“Of course,” said Louis, “I’m not a crazy man, I’m not happy every minute of the day. There have been sad times. Even”—he paused—“desperate times. But never here at my window. Not with Mrs. B.’s azalea in sight.” Without turning, he asked, “Iris, did you see her azalea as you approached my house?”

Iris frowned, embarrassed. She couldn’t recall anything she’d passed on the way to this house, let alone a particular azalea. “I’m afraid I didn’t. I was… preoccupied. I had other things on my mind.”

“I don’t, you see. Have other things on my mind. Just that azalea. And very little else: Bert’s snow tires, like I said, the pruning of a privet hedge, the March appearance of the yellow and white crocuses at the base of the streetlight in front of our house—those sorts of things. The azalea—and it could be the crocuses, or the hedge, or Bert on his knees before his tires that I’m talking about—because it is the only azalea I can see from here, it’s rare, to me, and as beautiful as a flower in Eden. Imagine having Eden outside of your bedroom window. Sometimes I can’t bear it, I can’t bear to look at a single red petal of a single flower on that abundantly flowered bush, and I have to close my eyes. And if I can’t bear my one azalea, how could I stand being out there among all the azaleas in Waverly, how would I survive that?”

Iris, who was a nurse, who saw differently, spoke. “But it’s not. It’s not Eden out there.”

Louis made a movement as if to turn to her, but then he didn’t and stared out his window again. “You’re right. You’re right, of course. How else does one explain Kitty Wilson? I’ve had a hard time imagining her as Eve.”

The laugh again, muted and distant. Iris, who’d been leaning against Louis’s bed, now sat down on it. I’m sitting on a man’s bed, she thought.

“No”—Louis touched a finger to his scarf, where his hidden mouth would be—“maybe it is Eden and Kitty is the serpent. There, that fits, doesn’t it? But whatever she is, I’m glad to have
her, because like the azalea, which I admit I do prefer, she’s been a part of the landscape available to me from my window. She’s precious to me. I count on her. Just to show up, to show up and be Kitty, unswerving in her rabid curiosity. It’s funny to think that she has stared as intensely in my window as I have stared out of it. There’s been no joy in it for her, though. Even if I had stood naked before my window, unmasked, hat and scarf at my feet, it wouldn’t have been enough for her. She’d have feasted on my face, and then been hungry for more. That’s why I’ve never given her anything other than a teasing glimpse, so that she’d have something to nibble on for years, to sustain her.”

Louis plucked at the corner of the white curtain. “The less there has been for me to see, the more I’ve seen. On the way to your hospital last Wednesday, I looked out of the car window at all the azaleas in all the yards—white ones, pink, orange—and I couldn’t focus on any of them. The colors smeared and blurred, and the beauty in them was lost to me. I wondered, Is that how they look to the rest of the people in this car? Do I want an abundance of azaleas whose colors I can barely discern? Why clog my senses with more than I can appreciate? The red of Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea is before me only two weeks out of the year—but it lingers still through the seasons. Even in winter I can conjure that red. Have you ever seen an azalea blooming in the snow? I can even feel that red, sometimes, warming the panes on this window. If I were surrounded by azaleas on a daylight walk through Waverly, would I see them or feel them? By joining the world, would I lose it?”

Iris smoothed her hand back and forth over the quilt that covered Louis’s bed. Stop your talking, she thought. Stop your talking and come sit beside me.

If Louis heard her shifting on the bed, he gave no indication. “God watches, you know,” he said. “I’m not sure whether I believe in him or not, but in the moments I do believe, I know that he is a watcher, like me. He chooses not to intervene in the world. Why not? Because he figures he’s done enough and the rest is
up to us? Or he wouldn’t know where to begin? Or because he’s in awe of his own miracle? That’s how I picture him, his mouth slightly agape, his eyes wide in disbelief. I think he has his own azalea, his own view, his own window through which he peers at one thing at a time, because each one thing is an entire world—the red is a world and the petal is a world and the flower and finally the bush—all worlds, as full and abundant as the actual planet we think of as the world. Keeps him pretty busy, I guess. Keeps me pretty busy, anyway.

“I’ve often thought that my injury, my face, though the cause of my confinement, is also the source of my freedom. The less we have, the freer we are. Had I spent all these years living… normally… what chains would I have forged for myself by now? What pain have I avoided, or not caused, by keeping to myself?”