“It’s okay, Lew. Really.”
“Tell you what. I’m going into that bathroom down there at the end of the hall to face up to some hot water and soap. Pay no attention to screams, and if I’m not out in ten minutes, you can decide on your own whether to call paramedics or the funeral home. I sure as hell don’t know which, even now.”
“Need any help?”
“Me? Look at what I’ve already accomplished, all by myself.”
“I’ll make coffee, then. Once I’m up, that’s usually it for the night.”
I stepped carefully down the hall. Must be heavy winds and a storm coming up: the ship listed badly both to port and starboard.
Ablution accomplished, nerve ends singing like power lines in a hurricane, I came back and sat as Clare poured something yellow into the cuts, smeared on antibiotic salve and bound my hand tightly in gauze.
“That’s going to need stitches. Lucky you didn’t cut a tendon or an artery.”
“It’s not bleeding anymore. It’ll be okay.”
“Lew, don’t you think you’ve worn your balls as a hat long enough for one night? Jesus!”
“Okay, okay. You’re right.”
“You’ll go to the ER?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Promise?”
I nodded and she went out to the kitchen, brought back a lacquered wooden tray with coffee in one of those thermal pitchers, two mugs, packets of sugar and sweetener, an unopened pint of Half amp; Half.
She poured for both of us and we sat there like some ancient married couple, sipping coffee together in the middle of the night without speaking. The moon hung full and bright in the sky outside, and after a while Clare got up and turned off the room’s lights. Then, after sitting again, finishing her coffee, pouring anew for us both, she said quietly, “I don’t understand what happened between us, Lew.”
I said nothing, and finally she laughed. “Guess I’ll put that on the list with quantum mechanics, the national debt and the meaning of life, huh?”
I looked at her.
“I’d come over there and sit at your feet now if I could, Lew. Just lean back against you and forget everything else. That’s what I’d do if I could. But I can’t. Probably fall, if I tried. Coffee okay? You want a sandwich or anything?”
“The coffee’s wonderful, Clare. You’re wonderful. And I’m sorry.”
A silence. Then: “You have things you’d do, too-if you could?”
I nodded. Oh yes.
Another, longer silence. “Think maybe you’d consider spending the night in this wonderful coffee maker’s bed?”
“I’m not in very good shape.”
She laughed, suddenly, richly. “Hey, that’s my line.”
Later as we lay there with moonlight washing over us and the ceiling fan thwacking gently to and fro, I mused that pain was every bit as wayward, as slippery and inconsistent, as intentions.
“Half in love with easeful death,” Clare said, striking her right side forcibly with the opposite hand and laughing. “Little did he know. But what’s left is for you, sailor.”
Human voices didn’t wake us, and we did not drown.
Chapter Nine
It was not a human voice at all to which I woke, in fact, but a cat’s. Said cat was sitting on my chest, looking disinterested, when I opened my eyes. Its own eyes were golden, with that same color somewhere deep in a coat that otherwise would have been plain tabby. Mowr, it said again, inflection rising: closer to a pigeon’s warble than anything else.
“You didn’t tell me there was a new man in your life,” I said when Clare came in with coffee moments later.
“Yeah, and just like all the rest, too: only way I can keep him is to lock him in at night. Lew, meet Bat.”
She put a mug of cafe au lait on the table by me and held on to the other, which I knew would be only half filled, to allay spillage.
“I was in the kitchen one morning, bleary-eyed as usual, nose in my coffee. Glasses fogging over since I hadn’t put my contacts in yet. I heard a sound and looked up and there he was on the screen. Just hanging there, like a moth. I shooed him down but a minute later he jumped back up. That went on a while, till I finally just said what the hell and let him in. From the look of it, he hadn’t eaten for a long time.
“He was just a kitten then. There wasn’t much to him but these huge ears sticking straight up-that’s how he got the name. I asked around the neighborhood, but no one knew anything. So now we’re roomies. He’s shy.”
“I can tell.” I wanted the coffee bad, but the cat didn’t seem to understand that.
“No, really. I bet he spent all night behind the stove, just because he didn’t know you.”
“Help?” I made clawing motions toward the coffee mug.
“What? Oh sure.” She scooped the cat up in an arm (it hung there limper, surely, than anything alive can possibly be) and dropped it onto the floor (where it grew suddenly solid and bounded away into the next room). “Hungry?”
“Yes, but it’s my treat. What time is it, anyway?”
“Eight-thirty.”
“Aren’t you late?”
“I called in.”
“Not feeling good, huh?”
“Au contraire, believe me.”
“Okay. So we can make the Camellia when it opens. Before the crowd hits. If that’s all right.”
“That’s great.”
We splashed water on faces, brushed teeth (unbelievably, she still had a toothbrush of mine there), dressed (as well as clothes to replace encrusted ones from the night before), and took her car uptown. Since the car was specially outfitted, there was never any question who would drive. She parked by an elementary school on the far side of the neutral ground and we walked across Carrollton, dodging a streetcar that lugged its way toward St. Charles beneath towering palms, bell aclang. She was wearing sneakers, jeans and an old sweatshirt from the rehab hospital that read Do It-Again.
Lester told us how good it was to see us after so long, wiped quickly at the counter, set out tableware rolled into crisp white napkins. Without asking, he brought coffees with cream, and within minutes was also sliding our breakfasts onto the counter before us, pecan waffle for Clare, chili omelette for me.
We ate pretty much in silence, smiling a lot, then walked over to Lenny’s so she could get a New York Times.
“What now, Lew?”
“Maybe you could drop me off at Touro’s ER.”
“Would you mind too much if I stayed with you? It’ll probably be a long wait, and you never know how you might be feeling afterward.”
“You don’t have to do that, Clare.”
“I know I don’t.”
So she did.
At the triage desk I gave my name and other information to the clerk, answered that no I had no medical insurance but would be paying by check for services rendered, and earned for that a lingering, weighty glance, as though it were now moot whether I was the worst sort of social outcast and deadbeat, or someone important who perhaps should be catered to.
“Please wait over there, Mr. Griffin,” he said, pointing to row upon row of joined plastic chairs I always think of as discount-store pews. “A doctor will see you shortly.”
Shortly turned out to be just under three hours.
The place was more like a bus station than anything else. That same sense of being cut off from real time, much the same squalor and spread. Everything stank of cigarette smoke, stale ash and bodies. Stains on the chairs, floor, most walls. Steady streams of people in and out. Some of them picnicking alone or in groups from fast-food bags and home-packed grocery sacks, a few to every appearance (with their belongings piled alongside) homesteaded here.
Periodically police or paramedics pushed through the automatic doors with drunks, trauma victims, vacuum-eyed young people, sexless street folk wound in layers of rags, rapists and rapees, resuscitations-in-progress, slowly cooling bodies. Every quarter hour or so a name would boom over the intercom and that person would vanish into the leviathan interior. None of them ever seemed to emerge. Nurses and other personnel strolled past regularly on their way outdoors to smoke.