“Getting kinda long in the tooth for that kind of action, my friend.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You need me to come over there?”
“What for? Party’s over.”
“You don’t sound real good.”
“Nothing a few hours’ sleep won’t help. Say twelve or fourteen? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
We went back and forth a couple times more before hanging up. I snagged a Shiraz-cabernet blend from the kitchen pantry and sat by the front window, level of wine in the bottle and daylight outside falling at pretty much the same pace. I thought about Dog Boy and Mr. Blue sitting by their window watching this same night fall. Wondered if David might be looking out a window somewhere, where that might be if so, and what he might be thinking. Then, for whatever reason, I found myself struggling to recall ambition, wondering just why, year after year, I’d gone on pushing my way through all those cases, gone on fighting so hard for a handful of lost and damaged people, why I’d sunk myself and so much of my life into a handful of peripheral, forgotten books.
Light and wine both gone, I left those emptinesses behind and took my own upstairs to bed.
I was in a library and the library was on fire. I grabbed books at random off the shelves, stuffing them underarm. Had to save what I could, as many as I could. Down a corridor towards me strolled James Joyce, tip of a handsome malacca cane tapping the floor in front of him, shoes buffed to a high polish but severely down at the heels, eyes huge behind glasses. “Is there, sir, a problem?” The elevator door opened. Borges stood inside. His useless, boiled-egg eyes swept over me. He wore a well-appointed three-piece pinstripe suit, one black shoe, one brown. “Milton,” he said, “has anyone seen John Milton? He was just here. We were talking.” I scuttled towards the stairway, books spilling from my arms….
Whereupon the library’s fire alarm there in that fanciful land became my telephone here in this unregenerate one.
And whereupon, when my arm appeared to ignore the message sent it-simple enough directions, after alclass="underline" reach out, pick up the phone-I panicked. I knew this lag, this recalcitrance. I’d had another stroke, and a worse one this time, no doubt about it. What should be currents pulsing down the wires of nerves had become a spray of welder’s sparks. Everything got worse. Always. The world’s single immutable law.
But in fact the arm had only fallen asleep. Seconds later (though at the time it seemed far longer) the arm responded. I watched as, pins and needles firing along its length, it followed through. Found the phone, fetched it to me. Still felt as though my shoulder had two or three pounds of dead meat strapped to it. Then tongue and palate repeated the misfire.
“Lew?” Deborah said in response to my gaugh?
I tried again, coming up with, approximately, Yeg-guh.
“Lew, are you all right?” Alarm in her voice now.
Swallowing, clearing my throat. Trying out a few vowels and diphthongs offstage, then swinging the mouthpiece back towards me. Humming, I remembered reading somewhere, humming was supposed to relax your vocal cords.
“Lew, what are you doing? What the hell is that?”
“Humming.”
“Humming. As in bird.”
“Right: humming pigeon. Humming relaxes the vocal cords. Like doing warm-ups, stretches.”
“But you’re all right.”
“I’m fine. Sorry. It’s been a tough day. I was flat out, dreamless.” No way I’d tell her just how tough it had been, or why. “What time is it?”
Silence on the line. Finally: “We’ve been together what, four or five years now, Lew?”
“Something like that.”
“You have any idea how often, in all those years, you asked me the time?”
“No.”
“Never. Not once. Clocks, dates, time of day, none of that ever had much to do with the way you live your life.”
Which, upon reflection, was probably true, and I had to wonder, as she did, why now such things should matter. Hand meanwhile had distinguished itself from phone and begun its climb back up the phylogenetic slope. Switching the phone to the other, I shook the left heartily, worked it as though pumping the bulb of a sphygmomanometer that (I had little doubt) would reveal a dramatically elevated blood pressure. Like many things in life, alcohol for instance, relationships, or writing books, the meds had worked for a while, then stopped working.
“Still at rehearsal?”
“Not really-though there’s a chance we might go back. That’s why I’m calling.” She waited and, when I said no more, went on. “You sure you’re okay, I don’t need to come home?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
Crackles and pops in the wire.
“Things haven’t been going too well for us lately. That’s not exactly news, I guess. A lot of it’s my fault. I wanted so badly to find some way off the track. And now I’ve been so immersed in getting the play done. When I have coffee, whether or not I eat or sleep, deliveries at the store, sales there, regular hours-none of that seems to matter much anymore. I used to feel like this a lot, Lew. All the time. I wasn’t sure I ever would again.”
More crackles and pops. Light from outside fell through the window, pushing a slab of brightness into place on floor and wall, darkening the rest of the room.
“Never easy, is it?” I said.
“No reason it should be.”
We stood poised on parallel wires, balance poles like cats’ whiskers out at our sides.
“You have somewhere to stay?”
“Temporarily…. I’m sorry, Lew.”
“Me too.”
“I love you, you know.”
“Yes.”
I hung up the phone. From nowhere Bat appeared, leaping onto the nightstand. He sat there, eyes fixed upon me, purring, then collapsed, paws hooked over the edge. Telling me another life was there alongside my own, that I wasn’t alone after all.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Thank you for coming. Can Mrs. Molino get you anything? Coffee? Something to eat, perhaps. A sandwich? We’ve just received a fine Virginia ham-shipped in from North Carolina, not Virginia, as it happens. Or since we’re well along in the afternoon, perhaps a single malt. Some years ago you had, as I remember, a taste for Scotch.”
“Taste had little to do with it.”
“So I understood at the time.”
My eyes were on Catherine Molino, standing near the door through which I’d entered. What looked to be an original Ingres floated above her left shoulder, a framed Picasso drawing, four abrupt lines coming together in the most improbable manner, at her right. Black, Oriental-looking hair gathered in a clip at the base of a swanlike neck. Designer jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with sleeves rolled, tails out, handmade brocade vest over.
“I’m good, thank you.”
Mrs. Molino smiled, nodded once and withdrew. Smile, nod and withdrawal all equally engaging.
“Alouette, I take it, proved otherwise occupied and unable to accompany you?”
“I saw no reason to ask-as I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course.”
Looking far too small for it, Guidry sat in an antique highback wheelchair, as though the chair with time might be diminishing him, gaining by increments some stature drained from him. The room was warm enough to have orchids sprouting from cracks in the walls; nonetheless a blanket covered lap and legs.
“An old man’s blood goes thin,” he said as I took off my coat, “turns from wine to water,” and hung the coat across the back of my chair.
Here, we were well apart from the world I watched go on about its business outside the window. Everything in the room, carpet, curtains, walls, blanket, was blue-green, and all of it seemed slightly out of focus, fluid, shimmering. Here we moved at a much slower pace than those out there in that other world.