Where had I been all this time?
Where were you? You were waiting. Except you grew to love the waiting more than the love you waited for.
You see, Doctor, I was just pretending to be like others who find love if they look hard enough for it. But I wasn’t like them. I was just pretending. I’m like her. It’s love I want, not others.
“Take this,” he said, producing a Xanax in his palm like a magician bringing his hand to your ear to retrieve a coin. He watched me swallow it with the help of a tiny plastic cup of water, then tapped the front of my shoulder a few times and let his palm rest there in a sympathetic gesture of fellowship and male solidarity: We’re all in this together, bro. The last time someone had touched me on the shoulder was less than twelve hours ago. “You’ll be all right. Just rest awhile.” He grabbed a stool and sat next to me to take my pulse again. Just having someone sit next to me like this was comforting.
He reminded me of Officer Rahoon. Officer Rahoon, whom I’d totally forgotten, but who stood over me now as policemen do when they gather around your stretcher in the ER, filling regulation forms and papers, their walkie-talkies squawking away loudly, as they seek to comfort you while confabulating about this or that hockey player last night with the Filipino head nurse. His apparition now made me think of a me who had stopped being me; Rahoon was the last person to see me before I’d molted that old self on the night after the party. Perhaps I’d gone back to Straus Park that night and sat there the way snakes seek out a hidden, scraggly rock against which to squeeze and rub their old skin off. Perhaps this was why I liked to return there every night, and had wanted to come back there last night as well, because there was a part of me that either didn’t want to let go of its old slough or hadn’t shed it completely, and coming back felt safer than going forward. Two steps forward, three steps back. Story of my life too, Clara. This was where I would heal, not here in a hospital. Suddenly I was dying to go back and sit in the park. Just sit and find myself, just sit and learn why I kept coming back to Clara’s world.
Perhaps I was right not to sleep with her last night: had she pulled any of this after making love to me, I’d have slit my throat with one of her father’s kitchen knives, killed myself first, then her.
Or maybe I was no different than she was. She had simply beaten me to it. I remembered that moment when, alone in the bathroom at the bar last night, I’d planned to slip away after making love to her. This is about tonight, I had kept telling myself, but make no promises about tomorrow. We were each other’s mirror image. Is this why I wanted her so badly?
“Maybe talking to someone might help,” said the intern.
I had never “talked” to someone before, I said.
“I’m surprised,” he said.
Why was he surprised? Because I was a visibly self-tormented, insecure, prone-to-self-hatred, depressive type you’d never think of leaving alone before an open window on the eleventh floor?
“No, it’s just that everyone has a setback at one point or another.”
And my point was now, right? A setback. Was this the polite way of naming what had happened to me? A setback. I see eternity one day, and the next we’re talking setbacks?
All I could think of asking was how long they were planning on keeping me there.
Till my heartbeat was back to normal.
Here was a prescription for more of these. And: No caffeine. No drinking. Lay off cigarettes too.
Six days with the world’s most beautiful woman and I was a wreck headed for the loony bin.
Suddenly I heard my phone ring.
“It’s the télyfön,” I said.
“I’m going to need to ask you not to use your cell here.”
I could just imagine Clara responding to such contemptible bland-speak: Are you needing to ask me now, or are you going to need to ask me in some fabricated moment in an undefined, politely ambiguous future?
“I have to take this call,” I told the doctor. “It’s from”—and I whispered the word—“the heartbreak.”
“Well, make it very brief, and don’t get all wired up again.”
“I am all wired up,” I said, pointing to the wires of the cardiogram still suctioned to my body.
“I’m free,” she said. As always she cut to the chase, then greeted you.
I looked about me and couldn’t help snickering: But I’m not.
Oh?
I’m actually tied up. Then, realizing the joke had gone far enough—“I’ve got wires stuck in every part of my body.”
“What are you talking about?”
She was yelling, and I was hoping that junior-internist here might get a sense of the madwoman I’d been up against these past few days.
“I’m in a hospital.”
A grapeshot of questions. She was coming over.
No need to. I can take care of myself. They’re letting me go.
Where was she?
On Printz Street — added emphasis — about to hail a cab headed uptown. Was using my nickname a good sign, or was she just making nice to cover up being downtown still?
I put a finger on the mouthpiece of my cell phone. “How long before I can walk?” I asked.
The young resident made an almost disappointed smirk. Time to remove these wires, put my clothes on, fill out the paperwork.
“Can you meet me downstairs in my building?”
“I can do that.”
I can do that. What on earth did I can do that mean? Did she have to speak Amphibabble too? Didn’t everyone?
Was she coming because she was eager to, wanted to, or was hers a lukewarm acquiescence bordering on indifference?
Finally, there it was: Don’t keep me waiting long.
•
“What were you doing in the hospital?” she asked.
She was sitting on a sofa in the lobby of my building. She had removed her shawl and her coat, so she had to have been waiting for a while. When she stood up, she looked absolutely stunning. Slender, dark colors everywhere, her hazel-eyed beauty simply forbidding. Diamond stud sitting on her sternum. Last time I’d seen it was ages ago. All of it reminded me that whatever bridges we’d crossed last night had been completely blown up this morning. The corvus had tumbled off the ship.
“I’m just staying for a few minutes. I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
Did she want to come upstairs?
“Yes, but only for a few minutes.”
I felt weak and sapped. I had no stomach for emotional haggling and tussling. I was just relieved to see her in the very same place where we’d picnicked twenty-four hours before. But she was chilly, wasn’t sitting. The meter was obviously running.
“So, are you going to tell me what happened?” she asked once we were in the elevator.
From the way she framed the question, I could tell she’d already guessed the answer. There was no point hiding the truth.
“Call it recurrent shell shock from my years in the trenches.”
“In the what?”
“In the bog, in the quag, the trenches.”
She nodded. But she seemed to have forgotten. Or perhaps she hadn’t. “It was a panique attack,” I finally said, hoping she’d pick up the rhyme with garlique. She shook her head.
She took her time getting out of the elevator, and once again was brusquely shoved out by the door. “This is not the time.” She turned to the elevator, then kicked it in the equivalent of its shin. “Fucking beast. Fucking, fucking beast.”
We burst out laughing.
I opened the door. Thank God I had tidied up the place this morning. Someone next door was cooking what appeared to be a late-afternoon soup. How I wished we’d had breakfast together this morning.