Three Women (9 page)

Victor had been five years older than Suzanne and dazzlingly handsome. When he began to pay special attention to her, she could not believe it. She met him in the clinic their law school was running, where she as a first-year student was involved in a work-study program. He was in danger of being deported. She could still remember the moment he had turned and suddenly stared into her eyes, when she felt the floor dissolve under her soles. His eyes were large and luminous, a radiant dark brown: Elena's eyes. Stories swirled about Victor, as they always would, for he looked as if he should be a hero. Perhaps he was. He was also a skillful liar, but then that might go with being a hero in danger. She had never understood him. She had only experienced him.

She knew she should not become involved with him, and she was unable to resist. His desire simply encompassed her and she burned. She still could not imagine why he had selected her among all the women who flirted with him, even after he and she were involved, even right in her presence. But he found in her exactly what he was looking for. She was not a virgin, but she might as well have been, for his touch consumed her. She was besotted with him. She adored him, even as part of her studied him more cautiously than he ever realized.

One thing she was not too besotted to figure out was that he was not, as the rumors said, a peasant who had taken up arms. He was the son of a family with considerable money. He had been educated in private schools abroad, as was the custom in his family. Yes, he had become a radical and yes, he had fought the government. She did not doubt he had put himself in danger. But he was never short of money. What he lacked was comfort. He had decided to move in with her almost immediately, and he expected to be taken care of. In spite of her feminism, she did not doubt for a moment that she must cater to him. He was semidivine. His skin was satin. His eyes were those of a proud predator. His stance was that of a conqueror. She capitulated; she collapsed. She brought him his coffee with sweetened warm milk in the mornings while he lay in state in bed. She picked up his clothes where he tossed them
and did his laundry. She cooked only food he liked or purchased it ready made. He was surprised at first how poor she was, and that he had to give her money for his accustomed luxuries of cigars and wine and pastries. She saw all this clearly and with a wry grimace at the same time that she was melting under him and fluttering to fulfill his every whim. So it went until she was four months pregnant.

She felt guilty, that was the one absolutely sure thing: guilty because of Beverly, guilty because of Elena, guilty because she had fallen in bed with Jake like a twenty-two-year-old. Actually she didn't feel particularly guilty about that, she just thought she ought to. She smiled at her computer screen. Secretly she was rather pleased at her adventure. The only person who knew was Marta. After all, when most people go to bed with a new lover, they have to tell SOMEONE. Her someone was Marta. Only little girls and adolescents were supposed to have best friends, but maybe unmarried women could have them too. She was sorry that Jim and Elena had been upstairs, because she wanted nothing more than to sit down with Marta and tell her about Beverly in great detail, to confess to Marta how frightened she was and how confused about what to do next. But since she could not tell Marta, once again she collapsed into telling Jake—her late at night and first thing in the morning confidant.

Beverly

Beverly was talking to a worker at a machine in the jeans factory in South Carolina. The machinery was all going, the air was heavy with dust, and the boss was threatening her. She had to get out. She would meet the workers outside. But she could not move. Her legs would not obey her. The thugs the bosses had hired were coming after her with billy clubs and wrenches, but she could not move. Her legs were too heavy. She was falling.

She was at Jones Beach lying on a blanket with Ralph Caputo. He was rubbing suntan oil into her back in sweet sensuous circles. Now he was putting something wet on her back. Maybe she was in the water. The water was warm as a tub. But the water dripped along her sides and then it was cold. “Please, Mrs. Blume, am I hurting you?” Why was Ralph calling her Mrs. Blume?

Beverly came out of the haze slowly as the pain in her head abated. She could remain conscious longer at a time. She figured out she was in the hospital and gradually she remembered the stroke. She thought Suzanne had been there and Rachel and Elena. She wasn't quite sure. Her dreams were vivid, making it hard to tell what had happened and what she had imagined as she kept sliding under. They had her on intravenous, but at least they had taken the disgusting tube out of her mouth and throat. Some of the time, she just lay in the bed and cried—cried on her good side. The left side remained loyal, but her right side had betrayed her. She finally got through to the nurse with the bushy perm that she wanted her purse. She could look at herself in her purse mirror. Her face was drooping as she had thought, but not as badly as she had feared.

She could hear and see perfectly well. The doctor who asked the same questions five times kept inquiring if there were blurry spots in her vi
sion. No, no, no, she shook her head. On the right side, her head had a tendency to flop on her neck. She had become a rag doll. If only she were ambidextrous the way her friend Nell had been. Nell had had her arm broken in a demonstration back in the Vietnam years, but she had been able to write with her left hand. Well, she would just learn to print with her left hand.

She was still intact inside. She could think, she could understand what the patronizing nurses said to her as they addressed her as if she were feebleminded or a child of four. She wanted to scream. She tried once, but nothing came out of her mouth but a weird inchoate banshee moan. The effort made her drool. She clamped her lips tight. She would not drool. She would communicate, somehow, somehow. She was still herself, but she was stuck inside a body that no longer obeyed her. She had never made a mind/body split the way Christians and Platonists did, but here she was in a body that no longer seemed to fit. Her body had gone on a sit-down strike against her mind.

That guy, Ralph Caputo, they had beat him up when he was organizing women in a sweatshop in Brooklyn. The thugs bashed his head in. He was paralyzed afterward. He couldn't talk straight. That's why she'd been thinking of him, for she was like him now, broken, useless. Her friends would gradually forget her. Everyone would say, poor Beverly, she'll be missed; but not for long. Nobody was missed long. A new person filled the space. How often had she thought of Ralph in the past twenty years? She had gone to see him a few times out of remembrance of their good times in the sack and in the field together, but then she too had forgotten him—until she became him.

They lifted her on a gurney like a bag of trash and wheeled her to a machine and stuffed her into it. She felt as if she were about to be cooked. Nobody explained anything. They just treated her as if she were not conscious, alive, involved. She lay in the machine wanting to scream again, claustrophobia bringing her close to panic. By the time they let her out, she was convinced they had stored her in one of those sliding trays in a morgue, except for the noises the machine made. Her hearing was just fine.

Three doctors came in and chatted with the nurse around her bed, discussing her. They were talking about her the way a vet might talk about a dog's injury in his presence, without any sense that she could
comprehend. She felt that any moment one of them would recommend she be put to sleep, which wouldn't be a bad idea. If life was to go on like this, death would be preferable. Of course that was a fantasy. They'd rather stick more tubes in her and do tests for the next ten years. They wouldn't suddenly say, Okay, old lady, do you want a way out? Yes, sir mister doctor, yes!

Rachel appeared suddenly, her light hair blown wild by the wind. “Bubeleh, can you understand me? It's Rachel, your granddaughter.”

Beverly nodded wildly. At last someone was talking to her and not about or at her.

“But you can't speak yet? I was here last week, remember?”

Beverly nodded. She did sort of remember. She made a talking motion, like a turkey gobbler with her left hand and motioned toward herself. Rachel understood. “Well, I'm here with Michael, my boyfriend, but they won't let him come in to see you.”

A boyfriend? If he came with her, he must be interested. No guy just casually dating a girl would go up to New York with her to hang around a hospital where her grandmother was stored. She made a gesture from charades at drawing Rachel out.

“Oh, you want to know about Michael. He's wonderful. We're going to get married, but that's a secret, I haven't told Mother. I know she'd carry on how I just met him. We have so much in common, Grandma. We haven't decided whether to get married before or after we go to Israel for our rabbinical studies next year.”

Beverly pointed to the mirror and then made the motion of drawing out.

“What does he look like? He's tall and thin and very serious. He has marvelous hazel eyes. His family are Conservative, verging on Orthodox. His grandfather was a rabbi in Germany before the family escaped in the thirties, but his father was in the garment business. His father still wants him to come into the business.”

Beverly snorted. After spending most of her life organizing in the garment business, she did not have a high regard for garmentos, men who subsisted off cheap labor here and now abroad. Always somewhere women and girls were sitting in a dim room full of dust sewing jeans and dresses, hour after hour, year after year for pennies and the profit of those men. Better he should be a rabbi.

The nurse came in and made Rachel leave just as things were getting interesting. She was dying to ask Rachel where he was from, were they sleeping together, everything. Rachel went back to Philadelphia, Suzanne appeared, and the tests went on. They prodded and poked every part of her body. They drew enough blood to make her anemic. “Your blood pressure is still dangerously high, Mrs. Blume.” What got into that young doctor? He actually addressed her. Improperly trained. He didn't understand she had become a rag doll. She beamed at him as best she could and nodded wildly.

Finally they took her off the intravenous. Some kind of therapist came to teach her to eat, as if she had not been eating all her life. However, after they had been at it together for half an hour, she was willing to recognize that she had to learn to eat all over again. She could not use a knife properly with her left hand, and she had a tendency to spill the food over herself. She was a one-year-old, not even a toddler. She could not talk, she could not walk, and she was just learning to feed herself. Food had a tendency to accumulate on the numb side, where she couldn't tell there was anything tucked into her cheek and threatening to slide down and choke her. All she was taking now were liquids and very soft foods like Jell-O and cream soup. She imagined eating roast chicken. She imagined a steak, although she had never been a big meat-and-potatoes woman.

Suzanne appeared, talked, worried, fussed. Disappeared again. The nurses gave her pills, injections, more tests. The therapist who was teaching her to eat now made her try to stand. She promptly fell over like a toy horse with a broken leg. Thump. They caught her, but she banged her good arm. She did not look forward to the times they hauled her out of the room, no longer on a gurney but now in a wheelchair she was picked up and placed in. She hated to see the other stroke sufferers all waiting for X rays, for CAT scans, for yet more tests. She knew that she looked as bad as they did, and that made her want to weep and bang her head. They were all helpless, hauled about and pestered.

She lay in the bed, too weary to lift her hand. Her left hand. She was terrified when she had the energy to think of what would become of her. How could she do her work if she couldn't speak? How could she even buy food? What would her friends want with her? How could she do any political work?

Why me? Why me? She cried and then grew angry with herself. Really, she was sounding like one of those people who demanded the world make personal sense. If something happened, it was part of the divine plan. Accidents, catastrophes all had to mean something. Yeah, they meant pain. The days flowed into one another and the long gray nights. Suzanne had gone back to Boston with Mao in a carrier.

“That was two weeks ago, Mother,” Suzanne said. “I took him to Brookline two weeks ago.”

At least he would be all right. Poor boy. He would not understand what had happened. The janitor had found him in the rubbish starving and injured, and now he would think he had been deserted again. If she was to die, as they said she almost had that first night, would that be so bad? It was living on in a broken body, dumb and crippled, that terrified her. It was surviving this catastrophe, the betrayal of her mind and her body. It was enduring in the prison of her mind, unable to speak, unable to walk, like some poor animal run over in the street and lying in the gutter mangled beyond recognition, but still feeling, still in pain, caught hideously between living and dying.