The Tides (2 page)

As they made their way out of the room into a hall, where bluish-white fluorescent lights rippled and dazzled
off white floors and white walls, Marshall had the sensation of gauze trailing across his face, touching just the thinnest layer of his skin and flesh, and it was light enough to tickle and tease, rough enough to hurt. He flinched away. He smelled a flowery odor that was naggingly familiar and evocative. But he didn't say anything. The human heart requires secrets; Faye had taught him that.

Rebecca spat, 'Look at that,' and stopped short.

Marshall looked, saw innumerable things that could have accounted for her distress - holes in the linoleum that turned out to be only darker squares that turned out to be holes after all; doorways that listed; a man with his zipper open.

Rebecca had let go of him to take a pen and notebook out of her pocket. She scribbled something on what he could see was a list covering most of the page. He couldn't make out what she wrote, and he was curious, a bit wary; was she writing something about him? When she reached for the handrail and flipped it halfway off the wall he saw that all its screws on one end were missing, and the bracket clattered onto the floor. He bent to pick it up, hefted it in his hands. 'I'll fix it for you,' he offered.

He saw her start to refuse. Then she looked at him. 'That'd be great, Dad. Do you think you could?'

'I expect I could manage a job of this magnitude,' he advised her with studied irony, and to his gratification she smiled. She had a pretty smile, if she could just let herself go. But maybe it was a good thing she didn't.

She put her notebook and pen away and took his arm again, hugging it to her. They made their way along a corridor whose length, breadth, direction, and function he found inscrutable. They were in a hospital, he thought,
and then fleetingly reme
m
bered: This was a nursing home. The phrase appalled him, then slid away.

Behind and above them, where neither of them noticed - and producing such a slight distortion in light, sound, and air quality that Rebecca wouldn't have thought much of it anyway, though Marshall would
—
Faye followed them. She'd just got here, and she still found the sheer novelty of it energizing, but she hadn't come all this way, gone to all this trouble, just for the buzz. She liked this place. There were opportunities everywhere. There'd be plenty to keep her amused while she waited for her chance at the real prize. But patience had never been Faye's strong suit. She wouldn't just sit on her hands.

Marshall was shocked that there were so many people out here, and uneasily he wondered if he was supposed to know any of them. Actually, not a few of them did look familiar, but one of the reasons he'd always had trouble with names was that the world's population (what he'd seen of it, which wasn't much; keenly he regretted not having traveled more, knew he never would now, thought maybe he would, maybe he would go to Greece, he'd always wanted to go to Greece, he would talk to Billie about it when she got back, there was no reason they couldn't go to Greece, they had plenty of money and plenty of time) was made up of types. Physical types. Psychological types. Marshall had made something of a study of the world's types. Consequently, he had difficulty distinguishing one individual from another, and often didn't see much point in doing so.

There, sitting in a chair against the wall with her purse upright in her, lap was one of the small, frail old-lady type; his mother had been like that, and his daughter Becky would be, too, when she was old. He missed Becky. He
hadn't seen her for a long time. He wondered where she was. He gave a courtly little bow to the small old lady.

Coming down the hall was a drunk. Marshall detested all drunks.
This was the happy-drunk type. Jovial, beaming like an imbecile, the guy would have been red-faced if he hadn't been a Negro. He smelled like a brewery, gladhanding you and slurring his words. Marshall knew the type and kept his face stony when the drunk approached, but the young woman on his arm - his daughter; his daughter Rebecca - stopped and was friendly. She oughtn't to do that. That wasn't the way to handle drunks. Marshall made his arm stiff and leaned away from his daughter and the drunk, hoping she'd sense and correctly interpret his disapproval. When they were out of earshot he would sit her down and give her some fatherly advice about drunks (happy drunks, fawning drunks, were the most insidious, whatever their race).

Among the nurses and aides in white uniforms were several types. The homosexual. The nervous young girl. The brazen young girl. The middle-aged female smoker with gravelly voice, nicotine-stained fingertips exaggerated by long painted nails, and smoky breath.

Marshall was certain he had never known the names of any of these people. Throughout his life he hadn't taken much interest in more than a few people - his wife Billie, his daughter Rebecca, co-workers as long as they were working with him. (Faye.) Childhood friends; suddenly he was wondering what Winslow Curtis was doing these days. Good old Windy. He stopped and asked of the woman beside him (he couldn't quite place her, but she was somebody close to him so it made sense to ask), 'Did you know Windy Curtis? What's become of him?'

'No, Dad,' she said
patiently. Her patience alarmed
him. 'You knew Windy before I was born. He died twenty-five years ago or more, of a heart attack.'

Shock riffled through him, along with a dismaying feeling of déjà vu, as though he'd experienced that same shock and vertigo at the news of his friend's death more than a few times before. He must have swayed a little because she put her other hand on his shoulder. 'Oh,' Marshall said, struck as if freshly by the inevitability of both death and mourning. 'Oh. That's too bad. I'll miss him.'

'You had good times, together, didn't you?'

How did she know that? Did she know Windy? Warily, Marshall nodded. 'We traveled across country together.' (With Faye. Both of us with Faye, although Faye and Windy had never openly admitted it.) Maybe he shouldn't have said that. Maybe he'd given away secret and potentially damaging information about himself (and about Faye, although he couldn't quite see how).

'During the Depression, when you were just out of high school and couldn't find work.'

Suspicion now rang in his ears. 'That's right,' he said curtly, and would say no more about Winslow Curtis, whom he would visit as soon as he could get out of this place. (Or about Faye.)

'Look, Dad,' Rebecca urged. She was trying to distract him. Marshall recognized the ploy. She was trying to force him to turn left. He'd have had no objection to turning left, but he was not about to be forced and certainly not by his own daughter, so he resisted. The pressure on his arm and shoulder subsided. 'They're painting a mural.'

Despite himself, he turned left, stopped, and looked. Maybe half a dozen people were painting a wall. The gladhanding drunk. A tiny, dark, intense woman of a type he
had not encountered oftensome sort of foreigner. Another one of the bent old-lady type
—
this one frail although she wasn't especially small.

Marshall squinted. It made him uncomfortable to see all these people painting on the wall like misbehaving children. If there was any coherence to the painting, it escaped him. Swatches and globs of random colors, and shapes that bore no resemblance to anything in the real world.

The drunk was painting the background. 'That's Gordon,' Rebecca told her father, as if he cared what the guy's name was. 'I guess he's painted before.'

'Sure have, Princess,' the drunk guy boomed, and Marshall, mistrusting his familiar tone, tried to put himself between Rebecca and the man and found he could not; in the attempt he nearly lost his balance and someone, the blonde young woman holding onto his arm, prevented him from doing so. He did not appreciate that. He would bide his time. The drunk, face flushed under the dark jowly skin, was still talking, too loudly, too familiarly. 'Houses, fences, one time a barn with a big high peak, none of the other fellows would go up the ladder. I know what I'm doing.'

The north wall of the lounge was now a bright satisfying white, with smudges and streaks only here and there. 'Well,' said Rebecca wryly, 'I guess we can't change our minds now, can we?'

A tall woman in a uniform, a stern-nurse type, shrugged and turned her attention back to the spiral notebook in her hand. 'Maybe it won't look so bad.'

A woman with a Southern accent said comfortingly, 'At least it's a cheap way to redecorate the lounge.'

The tiny dark foreig
n woman was painting stars. She
sat crosslegged in one corner, her nose inches away from Gordon's white wall, and used the brush from a child's paint-by-number so to make dozens of dots and rays. The stars were in a formation like a fan: the yellow ones at the wide end were faint and fuzzy, the middle ones were green and blue and purple and round, and at the tip was one bright red star perhaps two inches in diameter with twelve distinct points and the sugg
estion of three-dimensionality.

The woman appeared to be talking to herself. When Rebecca raised her voice slightly to say, 'Those are terrific stars, Petra,' she scooted herself around so that the stars were hidden by her small taut body from the view of Rebecca and Marshall, and Marshall heard her muttering curses no lady ought to know.

A stocky old man in a red flannel shirt and suspenders, smelling as his type always did of sweet pipe-smoke, was making shapes. Lumps. Black hills. He chortled in curmudgeonly glee. 'I don't know what they are, little lady. Hell, I'm ninety-two years old. I don't have to know. You figure it out, you tell me.' His swelling black brush-strokes filled the bottom quadrant of the mural opposite Petra and as high as he c
ould reach from his wheelchair.

Another of the frail old ladies came down the hall, laboriously, leaning hard to the left and holding onto the handrail with both hands. Rebecca let go of her father's arm to get the old lady a chair. Marshall stood swaying in space until she came back to him, saying (he thought she was not speaking to him, but he couldn't be sure), 'Beatrice, I'm glad you decided to join us.'

The woman apparently named Beatrice smiled pleasantly and didn't say anything.

Completely at a loss as to what was going on, Marshall cast about for clues. Circles of light
—
reflections, he
thought, but maybe not
—
were broken up in the wavy waxed white floor. Sounds were hollow and crowded, sliding into one another or separating out. 'Would you like to paint, Dad?' Marshall didn't know who was speaking, what the speaker was alluding to, whom she was addressing. Her father, presumably.

Marshall. Honey
.

Faye. He knew who that was, but he couldn't be expected to know what she wanted. He never had known what she wanted. Heart pounding painfully, looking around for her, desperately hoping he'd find her again and desperately hoping he would not. 'Leave me alone,' he told her.

'Okay,' Rebecca agreed. 'We'll just watch for a while.'

A very tall wiry man walked up behind Petra, positioned his feet shoulder-width apart, and dropped his hand heavily onto her head. Still painting stars, she ignored him. He stared at the wall. 'Stupid,' he announced in a loud surly voice. 'This is fucking dumb.' Marshall winced and considered telling the guy to watch his mouth, there were ladies present, but couldn't quite put the words in the best order and then forgot.

Someone handed the tall man a wide paintbrush. 'We need something at the top, Bob. You're the only one who can reach it.'

Face stormy, Bob regarded the brush. At his feet Petra worked steadily, her undertone of furious Spanish rising and falling like an unmelodic song. 'This is fucking dumb,' he said again, but he finally took the brush.

Quietly, Beatrice moved her chair up to the wall and picked up a brush. The old woman's strokes were firm, her face set. In bright blue paint and thin lines a cluster of faces emerged, not quite realistic but utterly believable.

The grin of one was ragged and desperate; the eyes of another were haunted.

When she finished the faces Beatrice cocked her head even farther to the left and regarded them critically, made a few minuscule adjustments. Then she painstakingly cleaned her brush, found a can of green paint, and proceeded to set the faces one after another on leafless stems, each of them bending sharply one way or the other.

'You've painted before, too,' Rebecca observed.

'When I was a girl,' Beatrice admitted, 'I used to do portraits. That was a long time ago, don't you know.'

'I am Jesus Christ! They're crucifying me! I am Jesus Christ! They're crucifying me! Ohh! Ohh!'

Marshall swiveled his head slowly toward the shrieking. Though this was no more peculiar or disturbing than many other things in the world, it did claim his attention for longer than most. Briefly, he thought it might be Faye (she was somewhere close by; he was afraid of her), but then he chided himself. Faye loved making a spectacle of herself, but she would never be ugly like this, scrawny legs splayed and hair unkempt as the batting from a split pillow