The Tolling of Mercedes Bell: A Novel (37 page)

She held his long, well-formed fingers and the large square fingernails so dear to her—fingers which had stroked every inch of her body, fingers she had nibbled playfully, fingers which had pulled her long braid out from beneath her tattered raincoat on that fateful day. She bent over and kissed those fingers, which had soothed Germaine, made her breakfast, applied Band-Aids to her scrapes, helped her with math, and thrown the Frisbee when they played on the beach. These were the fingers that drummed on the desk when he was thinking intently.

She felt his wedding ring and remembered putting it on him. She saw him looking down into her eyes at the altar, as though she were the most delectable being in the world, mumbling “Bella” softly as she moved the gold band down his long finger. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down her face. How could everything deteriorate in such a catastrophic fashion after such a perfect beginning?

When she left his room, she crossed the path of three patients,
who were walking the length of the hall, pushing their IV towers. They were deathly apparitions with sallow, mottled skin stretched over their shrinking bones. Their hollow cheeks accentuated their protruding eyes. One of the men had dark purple splotches all over his face and neck. He smiled at her, revealing the absence of several teeth. She nodded respectfully toward him, and realized with a shock that he was probably in his twenties. This was how Jack would eventually look, if he was lucky enough to survive the pneumocystis. This was the future, both his and hers.

She walked out to the parking lot, slid into the driver’s seat of Jack’s car and sat for a moment. Suddenly his scent enveloped her, and she exploded in tears. She clung to the steering wheel, her shoulders shaking with the first torrent of sobbing, the tears contained all day behind a dam of incredulity. The magnitude of what lay before her was nearly incomprehensible. Was she up to the challenge? Could she handle it? No, it was impossible, out of the question. God was asking too much. She
couldn’t
lose Jack. She
couldn’t
get AIDS. How could she care for him if she got sick? How could she stand knowing that Germaine was going to be an orphan? How could she stand seeing her child watch the suffering, knowing her mother would be next?

She had to protect Germaine somehow. She had to keep her from finding out about Jack as long as possible, which meant she couldn’t tell anyone who might tell Germaine. She had to be tested as soon as possible and keep it together at the office. She couldn’t tell her parents either. Eleanor would become hysterical, and the news would kill Philip. She would protect them from knowing as long as she could, since their knowing would serve no purpose, as yet.

These sobering thoughts slowed her tears. For Germaine she had to be stoical and dignified, so they could make the most of the time they had left. For Jack she would be clearheaded and strong. She had to, she told herself.

When the crying stopped, she turned the key in the ignition and drove straight home. She wondered why she’d never driven Jack’s sensational panther of a car before.

A
THENA STOOD WAITING IN THEIR
brick courtyard. Shadows from the house fell on her white marble form, darkening her face. She gazed down at Mercedes in the quiet of the late Sunday afternoon. Flowers bloomed in the stone urns inside the courtyard. Mercedes stopped and looked all around at the brilliant colors of the flowers against the white stucco, inhaling the fragrance of eucalyptus in the breeze. How many times had she walked through here on her way to the door without feeling the fresh air on her skin, without seeing the pattern of shadows on brick, without noticing the goddess?

She unlocked the front door and walked into the entryway, with its high-beamed ceiling. Everything in the house appeared transformed, suddenly ephemeral. She felt the sharp and immediate contraction of time that comes with a death sentence. There would be no old age, no mellowing with time, no gray hair, no lines forming around their eyes. She would never know these furnishings to show wear. There would be no seeing Germaine off to college.

She walked to the middle of the living room, where she and Jack had spent their last evening bickering—their last few hours under the old regime. Now there was a new one. The newspapers and magazines of yesterday, piled on the coffee table, might as well have been from the last century.

She went into their bedroom, to the unmade bed out of which she had coaxed her desperately ill husband that morning. It was a movie set from another life in which a healthy couple had made love, and then lain awake talking of the future.

She walked into the closet, where the shoes on the floor were
still jumbled from the movements of Jack’s legs during the seizure. With a shock she realized that only yesterday afternoon they had been getting along amiably. Jack had seemed relatively normal. He had patted her bottom and kissed her, and told her how good the house smelled from the cooking she’d been doing all afternoon. Tears welled up in her eyes again. Would there ever be any more exchanges like those—those simple niceties of marriage, ordinary expressions of gratitude and affection, which are worth far more than the sapphire ring on her finger?

If only I had known when he left that night that I would never see him again, I would have stopped him,
she remembered thinking after Eddy’s sudden death. But this time . . . How many women are widowed twice before they reach forty?

She slowly took off her clothes and looked down at her body. Not yet thirty-six and very fit. Her stomach was taut and flat, her long legs lithe and muscular, her arms strong and well-defined. She’d always taken her health and strength for granted. She had
assumed
they were hers by right and had thought very little about what a gift her body was—her body that never lied and always told her just what it needed. It worked as hard as she pushed it, even amidst its messages of fatigue. This body of hers had always resisted illness fiercely. She had taken it all for granted—recklessly, foolishly.

Would she make it to forty-five? To forty? She took a long shower, as if death and decay could be rinsed away. She pulled on pajamas and wrapped herself in her bathrobe. She buffed her sapphire ring and gave her hair a thorough brushing for the first time that day. She became aware of how long it had been since she’d eaten or drunk anything. Even today, of all days, she had neglected her body. That was a luxury she could no longer afford.

She reheated leftovers and poured a glass of wine. She mustn’t think with fear about her own death. In fact, she realized, if the
advent of death delivered her fully to the present moment, it was her friend.

She lit the candelabra and sat down at the dining room table in the waning daylight. She smelled her food deeply and filled her mouth with homemade chili and hot toasted cornbread. She looked all around her at the home they had made, so full of color and warmth and beauty from around the world.

Jack must stop practicing law.
What did that mean? How exactly would that come about? She ate her salad and finished the bowl of chili, thinking about the next day. She would stop at Planned Parenthood and take an HIV test on the way. And while she was at the office she would spend some time at Jack’s desk to find out, at the very least, when the mortgage was due. Maybe if she went during Melanie’s lunch hour she could get away with more time at his desk and less explaining.

She cut herself a big chewy brownie from the pan in the kitchen and licked the powdered sugar off her fingers. She felt a trickle of strength, and then she hit a wall of overwhelming fatigue.

For the second night she climbed into Germaine’s bed. She wondered if her grandmother, in the darkest hour of her long, fortunate life, had ever felt as utterly hopeless and alone as she now did. One thing was certain: no one had ever told Elizabeth that the great General Stearn was going to lose his mind. She clutched her daughter’s pillow to her stomach and wept.

J
ack was buying her a plane ticket and had the playful twinkle in his eye he’d had at the jewelry store the day he’d bought her engagement ring. She looked down and saw that his shoes were missing, along with his socks and his flesh. Long white skeletal feet protruded from his trouser legs. The clacking of his bones on the floor of the travel agency didn’t seem to bother him. Nor did it concern the travel agent, an emaciated man with mulberry-colored blotches on his neck and left cheek. Jack bent over and kissed her mouth passionately. “I just can’t leave without you,” he said. “It wouldn’t be any fun.”

M
OURNING DOVES COOING OUTSIDE SUMMONED
her from sleep. The memory of Jack’s kiss lay sweet and deadly on her lips. She ached as the memory of the previous day possessed her mind. Her heart pumped pain and sorrow and grief through every vein.

She opened the doors to the back and felt the cool night air. Her eyes burned from crying. She got back into bed and looked out at the
treetops. She didn’t want to get up but knew she was awake for the day. She couldn’t face her coworkers in this wretched state. She must keep her secret tightly wrapped. She would call in sick, because she was—sick at heart.

She wondered if Jack was awake. Did he know where he was? Did he remember his trip to the hospital? Did he understand what was happening to him—to them?

The sky grew brighter. She closed her eyes and slid down farther into the covers. Her throat tightened. In her mind she heard the shrill edge of Jack’s cough. He’d been coughing for so long. When was the first time she’d made note of it? She cringed. He was sick in the Philippines the December before they were married. He was coughing the night he announced their engagement at the Christmas party.
Could he possibly have been sick with ... ?

She silenced the thought. They’d been tested for HIV before they married. Her head swam with unanswered questions and with visions of AIDS patients: their young, forlorn faces, their wasted bodies, their sunken eyes.

Germaine would know something was going on, even if she told her nothing. She had to come up with a plausible explanation. Jack was hospitalized with pneumonia and had oxygen deprivation, which was what had been causing him to act so strangely these past months. It was true, just not the whole truth. That’s what she could tell anyone who needed to know.

She dragged herself out of bed and took her coffee out to the deck. The bougainvillea draped around the hot-tub trellis would burst with color soon. The marigolds and lobelia spilling out of the planters were beginning to bloom. Small songbirds chirped and sang at her birdfeeders. A low morning mist was lifting from the Oakland hills. The sun rose over the ridge and filled all the droplets of dew with light, turning them into pearls and diamonds glistening in the
grass, dangling from each leaf and petal, darkening the trunks of eucalyptus, redwood, and pine. Every droplet sparkled with light. The dazzling beauty stopped her thoughts and enthralled her. The sun rose higher and the ephemeral spectacle passed. How was it that she’d lived there so many mornings and never taken notice of such moments?

She called in sick to the office, then looked up the address of the Planned Parenthood clinic. The doctor’s words rushed through her head:
I don’t want you to have any false hope.

She forced herself to walk into their bedroom, which unfortunately had not cleaned itself up. She knelt in the closet and straightened the jumbled shoes. In her mind she heard the rhythmic thumping of his body during the seizure. She put his dirty clothes into the hamper. Holding them, she smelled him and pictured him crawling toward the bed, his pants unzipped and twisted on his hips. As she stripped the bed, she visualized Jack sitting on the corner, holding his head, wracked with coughing. She made order in the bathroom and packed his shaving kit. She put together a valise of things he might need in the hospital.

She suddenly thought of her mother. What would Eleanor do in this situation? She examined herself in the bathroom mirror and heard her voice.
Pull yourself together, Mercedes, for God’s sake! Self-pity will get you nowhere!
She knew exactly what Eleanor would do. She would put on makeup, lots of it, then elegant clothes, the most expensive shoes she owned, enough gold jewelry to sink a battleship, and a double dose of heavy perfume. She would act as though nothing at all were amiss, until she found out exactly what she needed to know and had manipulated every last detail to suit her purposes. No one could match Eleanor for confidence or command of circumstances, even when the deck was stacked against her—even when her ship might be sinking.