The Unfortunates (5 page)

4

To George’s surprise, CeCe had insisted on traveling by train. At the station, Esme boards with them and makes up CeCe’s seat with a cashmere throw and pillows from home. Esme hugs them and kisses their cheeks. They all look away—George at his shoes, CeCe at George’s shoulder, Esme beyond her employers to the exit. In the thirty-nine years Esme’s worked for the Somners, seldom have the three of them stood together anywhere but inside or behind Cecilia’s house.

“Go on,” CeCe says. The housekeeper disembarks, lifting the gray sleeve of her uniform to the corner of her eye. She lingers on the platform in serious conference with the conductor, pointing into the car, to the wheelchair stowed in the luggage zone, making sure he’s aware CeCe will need help on the other end, something it hadn’t occurred to George to arrange.

“—and you would think,” CeCe says from the cocoon of the throw, after they’d eaten the meal Esme had prepared for them, CeCe’s voice agitated by the bounce of the train, “the best kind of sanatorium would be all-girls, wouldn’t you? With a boys’ home across the lake? We could have mixers—bingo, intrigue, midnight lake crossings—”

“No one uses that word anymore.”

When they were first preparing for the undetermined months she would be away, George made frequent references to the lake, featured in the glossy brochures he collected from the hospital. They agreed on the Institute for Clinical Research at Oak Park because it was luxurious and optimistic—a private campus and multiple-use facility participating in drug and equipment trials, with a forward-thinking integration of holistic and alternative therapies. Its Movement Disorder Clinic, the best on the East Coast. On the brochure map of the grounds, quaintly drawn in pencil, the residence was hidden from the medical buildings by a bank of trees. No need to be depressed by the view. A game of pride, anyway, pretending she had a choice. No other facility within five hundred miles was participating in the trial. She will not be the only one there on whom they are testing Astrasyne.

“You’ll make friends,” George says.

“I will not.”

The picture of the skinny, sun-dappled pier flattened against the lake in the brochure was what put CeCe’s mind to summer camp, though she’d never gone to one herself. George offers to bring care packages full of contraband—chewing gum and a flask filled with sherry hidden in a shoebox. Since her diagnosis, they’ve been working feverishly on a comedy act—cutting each other off, tripping over each other’s joviality. They’ve never joked before and aren’t good at it. Jokes, she’d raised her children to understand, are like spinach between the teeth—laugh and everyone sees what’s the matter, excepting you. But now CeCe’s been compelled to this banter by words such as
histopathological
and
glial scar
and
unpredictable term of development
, and by the astral, plastic promise of the word Astrasyne: three syllables, fast like the train on the tracks, slow like a mouthful of hills. Astrasyne, initially and unsuccessfully developed for ADHD, might or might not—but might—still the violent shakes, restore the covenant of muscle to will, repair and light the roads rushing through the synaptic forest of her posterior parietal cortex. Her hope, and the implicit suggestion of her doctor who got her into the study, was that Astrasyne could soon be approved for home study or even market; that she might stay some months and then leave with the drug.

George asks if the sun, shearing through the dusty Plexi of the train window, is hurting her eyes. He would like to be anywhere else. Even at work, at the Hud-Stanton-Fox Foundation, where he is a program director and where they know he’ll be out most of the week.

“Might as well squint through the first or last anything,” she says. She means this also to be a joke, but it doesn’t make sense. Oak Park runs a hospice at the farthest end of campus. Of this George and CeCe do not speak.

“Here. My sunglasses.”

She takes them and turns away from him to the view. She coughs, rusty and petulant, though no part of her illness makes her cough. Her request to take the train—a rare sentimentality she’s allowed herself. She spent her childhood on trains, her father’s concerns taking her far and wide, until she was deposited at Miss Porter’s School. She liked, she still likes, how when a train comes to a wide curl of track she can see the cars moving up ahead of her, and in an instant she is where she’s just been looking. Only from the back of a train can one witness the point where (or does she mean when?) the present and the future are joined. Continuity, demonstrated with grace.

George looks out the window as well. He’s fighting, quite suddenly, the urge to laugh. It’s bad and getting worse—a hysterical giggle, tickling his throat like a sneeze. He counts what he sees to hold steady. Horse, horse, horse. Puddle, silo. Trees, tires, trees. Their train, on the express track, slows through a local station. River, platform, man tying shoe, woman on phone, man eating banana, man reading phone, lamppost, station sign, man with book, garbage bin, woman, woman, woman. This last woman, a teenager maybe, waves at the train as it passes. George claps his hand over his mouth, recovers. His mother is observing him from behind his sunglasses, crooked on her nose.

“Do you know her? Waving to you, you think?”

She can’t help it, teasing her son. Teasing, unrelated to joking. It became her common practice after she discovered he’d met Iris—checking his
coat
—while he was still involved with someone else, someone from a family CeCe was acquainted with, a young woman with no reason to take advantage. CeCe counted the months backward on her shaking, gold-locked fingers, and, yes, George had been dating that more suitable candidate when he told her someone named Iris was moving into his apartment. That was when CeCe was still avoiding getting the shake checked. Even after her whole arm occasionally began to tremble, she wouldn’t speak of it. She visited the doctor only after her own hand began petting her own cheek of its own clumsy volition. The doctor told her this forlorn symptom of self-petting was called alien limb. “Too late,” she said, for by then it was a familiar, as intimate to her as the stretch of a hated sleeping lover’s hand in the bed, not alien in the least. Her father had died at seventy-six, almost her present age; 1953, and she was seventeen. Her grandfather too. Seventy-six. She refuses. She will refuse.

“Sure, a little something I’ve got on the side. After dinner I cruise the eastern corridor. Two-hour drive. A rush home, but totally worth it.” Abruptly, finally, he laughs.

“Vulgar,” she says. The train hurtles past a lumberyard and through the haze of blue-gray smoke emitted by one of its buildings.

“Why,” she asks, “do they put the trains through such charmless neighborhoods?” They pass row houses made from the same corrugated steel as the lumberyard’s buildings. “No one needs to take a train anymore. One does it for the scenery. One wants to hear the distance accounting for itself. I would’ve let Javier drive us, had anyone bothered to tell me. When I’m ready to go home, we’ll drive.”

She takes off the sunglasses and closes her eyes. George opens
Golf America
and flips through page after page of azure sky and emerald green but cannot settle into reading. He takes out his pen and writes across the ninth hole:

EUNUCH’S DILEMMA

The Burning Papers—Act 1: y2713. Unnamed Hero escapes harem complex at top of sky tower where has been luxuriant & drugged captive of dowager queen. See office pc drft. Act II, Scene 1: Ruins of NYC. Filth. Catacombs. UH set to exit into the WORLD. Writes/sings letter of departure to Chief Eunuch. “Guard women of harem. Take special care protecting The One.” Act II, Scene II: Tower, Eunuch reads letter. Eats it. V’s scoring?

How much he owes to Iris. For years before he met her, he’d been scribbling bits and pieces of a libretto—on napkins, in e-mails to himself, nothing more than doodling, a secret, in a form he’d been trained to appreciate as a child. One day a few months before their wedding, Iris found a scrap under the coffee table. Red-faced, he insisted it was trash.

She paused, considering the piece of paper in her hand. “Maybe.”

“What’s the point? I can’t write the music, only the words.”

“I dunno, type-A. Fun?”

She told him to go find a partner, a composer, and about the bands she’d been in, how she didn’t regret any of it even though they sucked. When he suggested that his situation was different, that he couldn’t up and play an opera in a bar, she answered, “I get it. You think because it’s you, people will give a shit. Get a load of the ego on Mr. Bigtime over here! You, my friend, are wrong.”

Eunuchs lead women of UH’s harem thru catacomb waterways. [pool/real water]

Eunuch 1 sings: we take your wives to the border, the queen has cast us out of sanctuary!

E 2: we wish you were here to raise the lantern, to tell us if what we do is right. We have no papers, will we cross?(Repeat x3) It is a death sentence.

E 3 [TRAITOR E]: how can you punish us, we who are ghosts of men, and you so far away? ‘We serve your women because we serve you. But if their wish is not your wish, is this not treachery?

Discuss with V. How make clear (visually) this is in the FUTURE?

His mother. Tugging at his sleeve. They’ve arrived. In a rush, they set to collecting their bags. How will they carry the blanket and the pillows without Esme? They leave the pillows. The conductor ushers them off, slapping a narrow gangplank across the gap between the steel and the concrete, just for them. I am a spectacle, George thinks pleasantly, helping his mother heave into the wheelchair to disembark, sensing the faces behind the windows of the train turn toward him, the platform under his feet a stage. His mother is acting too, smiling at the conductor, who straddles the train and the platform to help them with the brake on the wheelchair.

“I’m perfectly agile,” CeCe says, which is still occasionally true. “The chair is a convenience.”

In the parking lot, one car door slams after another, swallowing the passengers who exited before them, so George easily spots the man leaning against his cab, holding a piece of torn cardboard that reads
SOMNER
in limp scrawl. The wheelchair barely fits in the trunk. They drive silently up curving roads, crowded on either side by deep green. George sees just two houses, far from the road. He calls Iris to tell her they’re on their way.

At her insistence he hands the cell to CeCe, who says, “Oof, filthy!” She listens for a moment. “Well, dear, the car smells.” And: “Stiff from the journey.” And: “Iris, how enlightened you are when it comes to these things!”

CeCe holds the phone out to George. “Turn this off, I don’t know how to turn it off.”

Iris, she explains, has recommended a type of scented oil that might make her feel better. And something deep tissue, something Swedish that involves undressing in front of a stranger. “I put your little microwave to my head for such rare wisdom?” She lowers and then raises the window. “Scented
oil
,” she adds, after a pause.

George sees the clock on the screen is still ticking over the seconds. “Wait. Iris, are you there? Okay, bye.” To his mother he says, “She probably heard you.”

“She knows how fond of her I am. Though, do you see how she’s changing? That it’s you who’s changing her? She’s coming into her character, and good for her. Pretty as a picture.”

Best to wait this out in silence, he decides.

“I do like her, I’m not pretending. And the world needs more sensitive men like you. She’s strength itself. So charming, and that vivid face.”

In truth, CeCe is thinking of her friends, more than of Iris. The women of means who never tried to make use of themselves to the world. She disdains how well they wear their languor: their polished faces, and their veins, so close to the surface, like blue brocade. By contrast, she prided herself on having better things to think about than her body, until its recent rebellion. Before her diet was restricted by the specialist, she ate buttered rolls and drank sugared tea. She ate dessert after both lunch and dinner, as most days she ate out: when dining out, the correct number of courses is three. She was voracious and remained slender. She’d offer bites of cr
è
me caramel or lemon tart to whomever she happened to be dining with, anticipating her companion’s tight smile which meant,
No, no, thank you
. She considered the infinitesimal growing and shrinking width of her thighs (winter to summer and back again) and whether her eyes were too near each other on the thin hinge of her nose. But in a passing way, as she had many times passed a mirror behind a firework of flowers in a lobby. Entering a room full of her acquaintances, her hair up or down, her dress smoothed, she was content to say,
Well, there it is,
the other blade of the scissor reflected in the mirror. But the Irises of the world—the new women!—who know how much it pays to be beautiful, but not how little it matters. Their miscalculated ease to vanity! How they waste what they have gained! All time and care put to tending their bodies—what a lucky approximation of illness. She pats George’s hand, clamped around the phone.

“I’m only jealous,” she says, but does not believe it’s true.

They pass through a set of metal gates, swung open by a remote sensor, and curve up a road thickly arbored by oak. The car turns onto a roundabout—she feels a little better seeing Oak Park. With the crunch of gravel under a clean wheel she has always associated the word
countryside
. The building she will live in is yellow limestone with blue trim at the front and pipe chimneys like an old Suffolk hotel. Yes, good, the roundabout rounds about a stone fountain. Cherubs dribble water from their mouths. Beneath them is an alternating symmetry of blue hydrangea and marigolds. The unbroken circle of the roundabout and the fountain, of the lake beyond the residence and the encircling woods, the squareness of the building—nothing institutional about it. Maybe it will be all right.