Once home, she drank soup and took hot baths but still felt dirty. Worse, Clive Harris did not call, not the next day or the next, so was it any wonder she got sick? Here again were the near-dead, weird days when she lived as in a closet in her migraine helclass="underline" her bed, a box of rags; her heart, a corner, spooky. Sometime in the night — the next night, the next day? — Ned crossed the room; then the room emptied of people, and Isabel shut her eyes but they wouldn’t stop working: The pink underside of her eyelids, a million pixels, blinked; the sight made her sick, but when she opened her eyes, she turned sicker — always the way with her.
*
“Clive?” The curtains in the bedroom were drawn, and she was speaking softly from her bed.
“Isabel?”
“My God, this phone is heavy.”
“Isabel,” he began, but she had to hang up, and when the phone began to ring again, she pulled out the cord. Had she called him or he her?
*
There was weather outside and she asked Ned to describe it.
“Milky sunshine,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what I heard on the radio this morning.”
“My skull,” Isabel said, “it feels vacuumed.”
She thought Ned would say yes if she asked him to stay but she didn’t ask; she waited until she was sure he was gone. “Ned?” The answering silence was sweet then and she slept.
This time — but what time was that? — she answered the phone and heard Clive’s voice.
Oh, come over, come over and look me over the way you did! If only she knew what to say. The phone was in her hand. Was that all? Would that be all? I’m feeling better? Now, when her body was ringing, why weren’t they making plans for the future?
But she was feeling better.
*
And Ned wasn’t surprised at her recovery. Isabel was not one to miss a play, especially if she liked the actors. And the actors! But after the play so often came the theater fug. On this night, Ned and Isabel walked and talked about the famous actress and how she had used her hands to convey Mary Tyrone’s suffering. Isabel was moved by it, but her heart really went out to Jamie. “He is the sufferer; Edmund can write and has this thing with his mother.” Ned gave Isabel his handkerchief, and she used it and said, “Oh, that was sad, that was stunning, that was terrible. Families. Oh, God!”
“You okay?”
“Hardly.” The way the actress had used her hands — those palsied gestures — how pitiably empty they were, the hands and the gestures. To see a great performance is a gift from the gods and she remembered the heartwrecked peacock king with the golden round in his hand — Richard, the poet, in tears, defeated, talking of the death of kings. This was at the Globe; Isabel had stalked him, the actor, stalked in her fashion, prowling the frowsy stalls of tourist traps for pictures of him and greats aged or dead, old programs and photographs, anything to do with the small-seeming actor who played the king or any of the other odd crushes then in England on the Lime House adventure. Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter. The lascivious peeper in No Man’s Land says “what is obligatory to keep in your vision is space, space in moonlight particularly, and lots of it.” No moles, no nose hairs, no moon-pit pores. Isabel had considered this idea on more than one occasion and was relieved to feel still young enough that it did not quite apply to her. The fishtail lines at her eyes were faint; they didn’t last beyond her smile, and she didn’t smile much, not in Ned’s company, anyway, not much anymore — why?
Ned, not for the first time, sat on the edge of their bed and said, “You’re going to have to be the initiator.”
O, so bring out the three-prong speculum, the ratchet-mouth gag, the diddle kit, and forceps.
“You’re easy to please,” he said.
So she had always believed.
*
Clive Harris blew at his coffee and looked at the mess on his daughter’s plate. First time together in New York since Ben’s wedding last year, and already Sally was glum. He said, “There are people in the world who love you, Sally, and want you well and happy.”
Sally said she was fine; really, she was fine and she smiled and sipped water and turned the crust of her potpie into crumbs as she described her day thus far. A grotesquely crippled French woman from Algeria had shared at the meeting the astonishing fact that she could not drink water straight. Water by itself made her sick. She couldn’t stand the taste. The French accent made her story more convincing. Also the French woman had a beautiful face — there was Arab in it — but no legs to speak of, little stumps in corrective boots. However could she have had babies? Sally asked. “I mean, I wonder,” and she looked at Clive.
“Terrible!” she said.
Sally was changing doctors and medication again.
“It takes about six weeks to get happy,” Sally said, and she pulled her sweater tighter and shivered although the diner was warm and served jolly food — comfort food most called it: potpies, meatloafs, creamed spinach. Alas, no good desserts, and Sally? Sally cried.
Clive handed her a handkerchief.
“You know what it is?”
“What?” he asked.
“I need to sit under a sunlamp for a couple of hours every day.”
Sally, Sally, Sally, shaped like an egg, warm brown and large, he wondered at her: AA meetings and cripples. Why should it be but that she was ungainly, shy, unsure, a girl, a woman really, a woman with some talent — his daughter — and quite alone but for sharing her problems with strangers? Something about Sally — there was the will to fail or did he mean flail? Headaches — he didn’t want to know about headaches or pills and sunlamps and whatever the hell it took to get happy.
The girls Clive had known — so many girls, where were they? Where were the girls who had found their way into his room when he was a boy, sixteen, great age — everything worked.
Clive almost wished Sally drank. Now she was speedy and loud, a little overeager to share her miseries, turning to the biggest, her mother, Clive’s first wife, Margaret, called Meg. Meg had been a drinker, which explained why, a few years earlier, on a simple midday errand, the poor woman had been stalled, arrested as by air, confused — which way headed? Westport, Connecticut, August 1999. First stroke. Just before the millennium and the destruction of the towers.
Sally exhaled — to heck with the diet — and she took up her fork and so came the story of the mean and practiced child moving fast as a rat along a wall doing damage. “Yesterday Wisia told me she wanted to staple my mouth shut. Do I sound desperate? ‘Go live with your other mother,’ I tell her. ‘You can rip up things together.’”
Clive put out his hand, saying, “Sally.”
“That scares the kid. That shuts her up!” Sally said, “I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“That’s not true,” Clive said.
“It’s always true. So much happens and you’re out of touch. We kept Mom for a while, you know. I thought I didn’t want her in a nursing home, but in the house she was a banshee.” Naked — enough to sear the eyes! — Mom had wandered naked into the kitchen and slipped and fell. “Wisia was in the kitchen with me at the time and she threw herself onto her grandmother as if the woman were a sandpile, which was how she looked, like a sandpile of flesh.”
“Please,” Clive said, “don’t tell me these things.”
“Does this mean you won’t visit her?”
“Calm down,” Clive said.
“Am I right, you won’t?”
He said. “You’re right.”
“I’m right about it being a long time since we talked, too.” And when he didn’t answer, she asked, “You’re staying on, aren’t you? You’re not going back right away?”