He felt her sigh, and give in, like a broken stem against his chest, and in the mounting heat, all the pain left her.
He lay on the rug, his left arm bent to cradle his head, his right hand idly holding a cigarette over the ashtray, a steaming cup of coffee at his side. It must have been nine o’clock by now. He’d called the airline. They could put him on the noon plane.
But when he thought of leaving her he was filled with anxiety. He liked her. He liked her more than most people he’d ever known in his life, and more to the point perhaps, he was enchanted by her, by her obvious intelligence and her near morbid vulnerability, which continued to bring out in him an exquisite sense of protectiveness, which he enjoyed almost to the point of shame.
They had talked for hours after the second lovemaking.
They talked quietly, without urgency or peaks of emotion, about their lives. She’d told him about growing up in Tiburon, taking out the boat almost every day of her life, what it had been like attending the good schools. She’d talked more about her life in medicine, her early love of research, and dreams of Frankenstein-like discoveries, in a more controlled and detailed way. Then had come the discovery of her talent in the Operating Room. No doubt she was an incredibly good surgeon. She felt no need to brag about it; she simply described it, the excitement of it, the immediate gratification, the near desperation since the death of her parents to be always operating, always walking the wards, always at work. On some days she had actually operated until she could not stand upright any longer. It was as if her mind and her hands and her eyes weren’t part of the rest of her.
He had told her briefly, and a little self-deprecatingly, about his own world, answering her questions, warmed by her seeming interest. “Working class,” he had said. How curious she had been. What was it like back there in the South? He’d talked about the big families, the big funerals, the narrow little shotgun house with its linoleum floors, the four o’clocks in the postage stamp of a garden. Had it seemed quaint to her? Maybe it did to him too now, though it hurt to think of it, because he wanted to go home so badly. “It isn’t just them, and the visions and all. I want to go back there, I want to walk on Annunciation Street too … ”
“Is that the name of the street where you grew up? That’s so beautiful.”
He didn’t tell her about the weeds in the gutters, the men sitting on the steps with their cans of beer, the smell of boiled cabbage that never went away, the riverfront trains rattling the windows.
Talking about his life here had been a little easier-explaining about Elizabeth and Judith, and the abortion that had destroyed his life with Judith; explaining about the last few years, and their curious emptiness, and the feeling of waiting for something, though he did not know what it was. He told about houses and how he loved them; about the kinds that existed in San Francisco, the big Queen Annes and the Italianates, the bed-and-breakfast hotel he had wanted so badly to do on Union Street, and then he had slipped into talking about the houses he really loved, the houses back there in New Orleans. He understood about ghosts in houses, because houses were more than habitats, and it was no wonder they could steal your soul.
It was an easy exchange, deepening their knowledge of each other, and amplifying the intimacy they’d already felt. He had liked what she said about going out to sea; about being alone on the bridge with the coffee in her hand, the wind howling past the wheelhouse. He didn’t like it, but he liked to hear her tell about it. He liked the look in her gray eyes; he liked the simplicity of her easy, languid gestures.
He had even gone into his crazy talk about the movies, and the recurrent images of vengeful babies and children, and the way he felt when he perceived such themes-as though everything around him was talking to him. Maybe one step from the madhouse, but he wondered if some of the people in the madhouse were there because they took the patterns they perceived too literally? What did she think? And death, well, he had a lot of thoughts about death, but first and foremost, this thought had recently struck him, even before the accident, that the death of another person is perhaps the only genuine supernatural event we ever experience.
“I’m not talking about doctors now. I’m talking about ordinary people in the modern world. What I’m saying is, when you look down at that body, and you realize all the life has gone out of it, and you can scream at it, and slap it around, and try to sit it up, and do every trick in the book to it, but it’s dead, absolutely unequivocally dead … ”
“I know what you’re saying.”
“And you have to remember, for most of us we see that maybe once or twice in twenty years. Maybe never. Why, California in this day and age is a whole civilization of people who never witness a death. They never even see a dead body! Why, they think when they hear somebody’s dead that he forgot to eat his health foods, or hadn’t been jogging the way he should have been … ”
She had laughed softly under her breath. “Every goddamned death’s a murder. Why you do you think they come after us doctors with their lawyers?”
“Exactly, but it’s deeper even than that. They don’t believe they’re going to die! And when somebody else dies, it’s behind closed doors, and the coffin’s closed, if the poor slob had the bad taste to even want a coffin and a funeral, which of course he shouldn’t have wanted. Better a memorial service in some toney place with sushi and white wine and people refusing to even say out loud why they are there! Why, I have been to California memorial services where nobody even mentioned the dead guy! But if you really see it … and you’re not a doctor, or a nurse, or an undertaker … well, it’s a first-class supernatural event, and just probably the only supernatural event you ever get to see.”
“Well, let me tell you about one other supernatural event,” she’d said, smiling. “It’s when you’ve got one of those dead bodies lying on the deck of your boat, and you’re slapping it around and talking to it, and suddenly the eyes do open, and the guy’s alive.”
She had smiled so beautifully at him then. He had started kissing her, and that was how that particular segment of the conversation had come to an end. But the point was, he hadn’t lost her with his crazy rambling. She had never once tuned out on him.
Why did this other thing have to be happening? Why did this feel like stolen time?
Now he lay on the rug, thinking how much he liked her and how much her sadness and her aloneness disturbed him, and how much he didn’t want to leave her, and that nevertheless, he had to go.
His head was remarkably clear. He had not been this long without a drink all summer. And he rather liked the feeling of thinking clearly. She had just refilled the coffee for him, and it tasted good. But he’d put back on the gloves, because he was getting all those random stupid images off everything-Graham, Ellie, and men, lots of different men, handsome men, and all Rowan’s men, that was abundantly clear. He wished it wasn’t.
The sun was burning through the eastern windows and skylights. He could hear her working in the kitchen. He figured he ought to get up and help her no matter what she’d said, but she’d been pretty convincing on the subject: “I like to cook, it’s like surgery. Stay exactly where you are.”
He was thinking that she was the first thing in all these weeks that really mattered to him, that took his mind off the accident and off himself. And it was such a relief to be thinking of someone other than himself. In fact, when he considered it with this new clarity, he realized he’d been able to concentrate well since he’d been here, concentrate on their conversation and their lovemaking and their knowing of each other; and that was something altogether new, because in all these weeks, his lack of concentration-his inability to read more than a page of a book, or follow more than a few moments of a film-had left him continuously agitated. It had been as bad as the lack of sleep.