Whatever Lola Wants (17 page)

So it seemed had Bobbie and Marcie.

“She wants me to quit working for Adair.”

“She mentioned that.”

“And you don't want to.”

“Bobbie.” He looked at her directly for perhaps the first time that evening. Her hair had begun to gray at the temples. Five years ago she'd given up on the tight short cut she'd sported since Carney had known her, let it grow down to her shoulders. Maybe for Ricardo. It made her more attractive, Carney had decided. Mid-forties lines taking hold at the corners of her eyes. Large dangling earrings these days, but her clothes still ran to black. She looked good. He admired her. He said, “I don't think I'm ready to give that up.”

“Not even for Marcie?”

“I don't know why I have to.” He took a bite of chicken.

Ricardo said, “You don't have to. You only have to want to.”

Carney shook his head. “That's a big one, Ricardo.”

“Sometimes the big one is necessary for bigger rewards.”

Sure didn't sound as if Ricardo was on Carney's side. “Okay. I do want to be a father. With Marcie. Some day. Maybe even around now. But quitting work that gives meaning to my life—”

“One sometimes has to.”

“You had to, Ricardo.” Carney scraped up the last of his rice. “But not by your decision.”

“At the beginning, yes, my decision. I had no choice. I still have no choice.”

“You miss your sons a lot.”

“I gained a great deal from having children in my life.” Suddenly the Chilean Latino in his accent took a sharp edge. “But I knew them well before I left.”

“And unless I have one or two, and live with them, I won't know my kids.”

“Something like that.”

Bobbie said, “She cares for you a great deal. And she's a grand and lovely woman.”

“Did you and she hatch this scheme, having me to dinner?”

Bobbie grinned. “Entirely my own idea.”

“But you know everything.”

“Very little.”

“Then you have no context for this, Bobbie.”

“Maybe enough. I know the two of you.”

“Look, if you had to suddenly give up your poetry, your whole life in that realm, what would that do to you?”

She glared at him sternly. “I once did give up that life. And my poetry, as it was then.”

“You mean San Francisco.”

“They took me seriously. I was a member of something new and very important, the beat movement. I was part of that community. But I left it behind.”

Carney blew a sigh out of the side of his mouth. “To take care of me.”

Bobbie stared at Carney in silence.

Ricardo said, “She left it behind. And she found—no, she built—a new community. A larger world than what she had been part of.”

Carney pushed his plate away. “I don't know if I can do it.”

Bobbie figured further conversation was useless. For now. “But you will think seriously about this. I order you to.”

Carney nodded, half a dozen times. “Any more wine?”

•

I stopped.

“Why'd you stop? Is something new happening down there?”

“Lola, it's not even three weeks since I started this story.”

“Oh,” Lola said. “Then you stopped because—?”

“It's all I can see. Right now.” A small lie. I did see more of that evening but it went nowhere. And I didn't want to bore Lola, let alone bring back her depressed mood from before. All I asked was to keep her here with me, and happy.

“Oh,” she said. “Well then, I guess I'd better get going. I've been away for quite a while.”

Damn! Should I chance boring her? I glanced around. “No, don't go yet.” I located a sheet in my notebook. “Look, here's more of what Bobbie's writing these days. Want to read it?”

Her forehead crinkled. Then she nodded. “Sure.” She reached for it.

SCAR

Veins in living rock, yellow, cold.

Gelid lava, still for millennia.

Far from the sun frozen blood flows, green blue orange gold.

Metamorphic rock, radiating bare.

Schist. Layer upon strained layer.

In decades past, small twinges, black, rare.

Now sheets of shale quiver.

New stings and shocks, coarse in stiff rain

As the rock's own burden measures out its fear.

In the hollows poison water drifts, and here's the pain.

A new torment, a wound in granite,

Quarried anguish, drilling into vein.

From above, rupture. Deep below, fire.

They scream in vain.

Roberta Feyerlicht

(February 3–5/03)

Lola sat silent, even more pensive than she's been in the last couple of days. She handed the poem back. “Why'd you want me to read that?” Almost angry.

I scrambled to respond. “You don't like it?”

She squinted a glare at me. “How'd you get it?”

I didn't understand. “What?”

“The poem. You steal it?”

“Lola!” I laughed, I had to. “If their memories show me their scowls and grins, and I hear their words, why can't I look over Bobbie's shoulder while she's writing?”

“I suppose.” She turned from me and stared into some middle distance.

“Aren't you interested?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

I sat beside her. “Come on. Bask in self-pleasure, like you're supposed to.”

She glanced at me sharply. “That's what the great God Edsel told me. Except with him, he got his own self-pleasure, saying those words.” She smiled suddenly. “You look worried.”

“Nope, not at all. What else did Edsel say?”

She shook her head.

“Don't remember?”

She turned away. “He said he knew why I didn't look like I was in self-pleasure.”

“And that is?”

“Because I was spending too much time with Immortals.” A cool flatness to her words.

“And not enough with Gods.” A worry took me. “Or not with him?”

She looked my way again. I imagined a dampness in her eyes. “He took pleasure in upbraiding me. His phrases were harsh and well-fashioned. He enjoyed speaking them at me.”

“Edsel's an ass.” I didn't know him well, I've seen him at the Near Nimbus holding forth, all pink and pompous. No idea how he got to be a God. But death isn't fair. “Just ignore him.”

She let herself smile, and her eyes shone dry.

I looked into the far distance. “Oh,” I said. “There's a little more.”

•

Marcie came home
as late as she expected and they did sleep in, and in each other's arms, till after ten. The next days, full of work for Marcie, slipped by. Carney studied her. In his eyes she had changed, less light and quirkiness, caprice and whimsy muted. In their lovemaking, too. So quick to change? A day later he thought, maybe not so quickly. Could she have changed while I was away? This hope for a baby, was that the culprit? They made love, a dryer more distant kind of love. He was right, she had changed, shifted. He asked her if this was so.

“What do you mean?”

“You know. You remember. That lovely eccentricity about you, your jokes and teases—”

“What are you talking about?”

But she knew, he could see she knew. “I bet it's all still there, all that wonderful unpredictability. I bet somewhere inside of you it's hiding, it wants to come out—”

“Carney, just grow up.” A hiss.

Her words cut him sharper than a slap.

And days later she said, “I think you're the one who's changed. A lot.”

He went away again, a messy fire in the Alberta oil patch. He came home. They talked again. She said, “If I can't have a child with you, I'll get pregnant with someone else.”

“Who?” He couldn't remember when he'd been so angry. “Who the hell is it?”

“No one. I wouldn't ever be unfaithful to you, Carney. But I want a baby, so very much.”

“We can have a baby. I said I wanted to.”

“And be here to share raising him? Her?”

He said nothing. At the back of his brain he heard again, again, Just grow up.

Did he grow up? Did he grow down? From deep in his brain Julie tried to call out, to advise him: You can keep this from happening, C.C. But he blocked her away. Six months later he and Marcie agreed to divorce. To leave each other behind. Marcie, he learned later from Bobbie, was devastated. To have lost Carney not to a woman but to the dark tease of burning oil. He, and it saddened him for her sake, felt they should have saved the love they'd had in the beginning. But he was only a bit ravaged by losing her. She had changed too much.

•

Lola said, “I wonder—”

“What?”

“Did men ever treat me like that?”

I waited a moment before saying, “I don't know, Lola.” And that was mostly true. Yet I thought I saw, so strange, a glimmer of Lola's own memory; then it was gone. No, couldn't have been anything there. “Shall I go on?”

“Now I really had better leave.”

I nodded.

“Tomorrow?”

I nodded again. “Tomorrow, back to John Cochan.”

•

3. (1978)

For three weeks after John's
graduation he and his father had argued, wrangled, and fought. Joe impugned his son's perspective, his industrial acumen, in a moment of dirt the young man's masculinity. John stood his ground: CochPharm's pharmacopoeia contaminated thousands, yea hundreds of thousands of people who took ongoing toxic doses of its products into their bodies.

Adrenalin spewed, blood burbled and boiled. John's sinews and arteries withstood the turbulence. Joe's couldn't. On a hot Sunday afternoon in late June, the elder Cochan crumbled to the floor, his heart ruptured.

Johnnie sat in a small armchair beside Joe's hospital bed, far back enough to keep from contact with the tubes, leads, and monitors that controlled and measured his father's inner workings, close enough to declare the honesty of his intentions. “Pop, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what I've done to you, I'm sorry about the arguing.”

Joe spoke slowly, his bleached lips blurring his words. “I argued—too.” He wheezed. “You see where—argument gets you.”

“Well, I'm here to say I was wrong. I want to do whatever you want for CochPharm.”

Joe's eyes batted hard, a dozen-fifteen times.

“And I think we should go further. I think we should buy back from the stockholders all outstanding shares of CochPharm.”

A small nod from Joe. He held himself back from wondering what had changed the boy's mind. He didn't dare ask. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

The two, father and son, were reconciled. Attuned and, over the following months, far more: Joe's poor heart warmed and mended at watching the boy so involved with, yes, engrossed by, each aspect of the company's affairs, from long-term planning to personal relations. Joe rested proud, and grew easier in his convalescence.

Within a year CochPharm had gone private; no external force could now interfere. But Joe never again stood tall at the prow of his life's work, he spoke less than a full mind to heads of divisions, he shared little of his wisdom in controlling committees. His son, John, laid new bases, and Joe learned to be content.

On a cold
May morning in 1979 the three CochPharm lab chiefs, Thomson, Petrucci, and Lee, entered the young boss's office. Cochan guessed the tightness of their faces grew both from what they knew about their labs and what they didn't know about his possible reaction.

“Please, gentlemen, sit.”

They did.

“I've read your reports. I take it there's no coincidence the three arrived together on my desk on Friday afternoon. Right?”

Lee smiled carefully as he said, “We figured you'd better learn it all at the same time.”

“In unity there is strength?”

“And,” Thomson said, nodding, “in unity there's clarity.”

“I can see that,” said Cochan. “And you're fully convinced it's this bad.”

“Not everything is bad, John,” said Petrucci. “There are important exceptions. But lots of problems too.”

“Put them all on the table.” He noted Lee glance at the others, who nodded. Well rehearsed, thought Cochan.

“As the reports suggest, we've got several deep short-range doubts regarding certain of our patents,” said Lee, “and can hypothesize a number of long-range disasters rising from their effects. We've been led to believe that there are at least four citizens' groups looming out there, ready with class-action suits, still collecting evidence, waiting for their moment.”

“Go on.”

Thomson said, “Rhenathon seems to have brought on adrenal hemorrhaging in thirty-seven percent of adults of Nordic heritage.”

“Our Eubulemisumena-2,” said Petrucci, “it's caused urinary blockage in seventeen percent of patients forty and older and jaundice in some women as young as twenty.”

“The maximum dosage of—”

The specifics went on for another twenty minutes. Then Lee leaned toward him. “Look, John. Your father's genius put in place a system that cared a hell of a lot for the brevity of clinical trials, for adjustments to Food and Drug Administration requirements, but barely a rat's fart about the ongoing impact of so many of our products.”

“Anything else?” Cochan caught their eyes, bloodshot in Petrucci's face, cold gray in Thomson's, narrower than usual in Lee's.

Thomson spoke softly. “Our attorneys have elaborated a fine-tuned audacity to interpret legislation and precedent as no one before them has ever dared to try. How long can they keep that up?”

John Cochan had been aware since well before he joined with his father of the experiments behind the laboratories' secure doors, tubs of amalgam stranger than any drug he'd ever brewed, the somex-treated mice in their covered cages, the tiny white spiders, the roach plantations, the loathsome
Phoebis sennae eubule
butterflies, the little spit-beetles. The reports provided John with dangerous but valuable specifics as to precisely where the dangers lay. “Thank you, gentlemen.”