Louisa Meets Bear (10 page)

“It's not your fault,” you say, but still, after we do the dishes, you tell me that you're going to leave.

I am close to tears. I'm sure you can sense this. I count backward from a hundred subtracting threes. I am on the verge of grabbing your coat, telling you that it's unfair, that you're punishing me, that you agreed to go to Vermont, that it's not a sin to make a mistake. Instead, I keep counting. If I make a scene, I say to myself, I will make myself the problem.

I watch you through the window, unlocking the Mercedes, throwing your bag on the back seat. I hear the engine turning over, see you fiddling with the radio. Then the car door opens and you step out onto the street. My heart pounds and for a moment I think you're going to come back upstairs, you'll put your arms around me, and this will all dissolve into a funny story.

You take off your coat and get back into your car.

*   *   *

In the morning, you call me. From the sounds of many things clicking, I call tell that you're back at work. “You went back,” I say.

“Yeah, the market's hot. No point missing out.” You pause. “Listen, I'm sorry. I was a real bastard.” I hear another phone ringing. “Hold on, I've got to take this.” Three minutes pass before you get back on the line. “There's a big play about to happen. Can I call you tonight?”

So we continue. Over the summer, I move in with you. By the fall, we've settled into a routine. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I take the train to New Haven. Tuesdays, I stay over with a friend. Thursdays, I take a late train back to the city. Mondays and Fridays, I work in the apartment.

I learn your trader's habits as I had once learned your Princeton and then your beachcomber rhythms. I watch as you rise every morning at exactly ten of six, never playing games with the alarm, never pressing the snooze button three, four times as I do. You listen to the news while you shave, hum while you select your tie, lean over to kiss me goodbye before leaving and double-locking the door. I learn that you buy three papers at the newsstand on the corner, thumb through all three on the subway ride downtown, buy a large black sweet coffee, a carton of orange juice, and a bagel with cream cheese from a blind vendor, and are at your desk before seven. On the days that I'm home, you call me midday, inquiring about the progress on whatever course paper I'm writing or the work on my dissertation proposal, giving me the lowdown on what is happening on the floor. “The Turk is leading a raid,” you might say, or “I've got this guy by the balls but he refuses to holler uncle and close the goddamned deal.” I learn that after work you walk to your gym, that on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays you lift weights and climb the stair machine, and that on Mondays and Wednesdays you play basketball with a group of Catholic kids from Brooklyn who have found their way onto various trading floors. You call them the Toddlers. You telephone at nine, asking what I want for dinner, and when you arrive, you're minty-smelling, your hair still damp from the shower, a bag of take-out Chinese, calzones, or roasted chicken under your arm.

“The only problem,” I say to Corrine, “is sex. We hardly have sex. Is that normal?”

“What do you mean, ‘hardly'?”

“I mean hardly,” I say, not wanting to let even Corrine know how little
hardly
is. “Part of it is we barely see each other. If I add up how much time we spend together in a day, not even counting the night I'm in New Haven, it's not much more than an hour.”

“Them's the breaks, sweetheart, with one of those fast-track guys. You don't think I choose the grungy, wannabe artists for no reason, do you?” Corrine has a point. Although none of her boyfriends lasts more than a year and even the ones in their late thirties seem still like kids, they are there. They listen to her dreams and her thoughts about how the woman with the floppy hat is her anima and how the robber with the stocking cap is her animus. They are interested in what foods she would choose if she could only take three to a deserted island and her ideas about what happens to your body after it's buried under the ground. With you, in our snatches of time, these things never come to my mind. The agenda is full: catch up with the events of the day, plan for tomorrow.

After the winter break, I find myself thinking about one of my professors, a young guy with a reddish beard and a certain flair for clothing—an enfant terrible, I've been told, always au courant on the latest theoretical discourses and renowned for his sexual escapades. I know that really his passion is for the sound of his own voice, his greatest fascination with the meanderings of his own mind. Still, I can't help noticing during his Tuesday seminar on French literary theory how he seems to appreciate everything I say or how at the departmental cocktail hours he hovers near. Or how my hand flutters from my glass to push back a strand of my hair, my chin tilting slightly up.

When I think about it, though, riding the train back to the city, what his kisses might be like, they are, I realize, patterned after yours when we first met, long exploring kisses that moved from my mouth to my throat, kisses that have evaporated, it seems, in the savage light of this, our adult life.

*   *   *

I can imagine many endings to our story. In one version, I go on to have an affair with this rakish professor. There is an explosive scene. You throw a plate. Lo mein hits the wall, pieces of broccoli and broken dish cover the floor. One or the other of us packs up. Mostly, I imagine it is you emptying drawers, throwing underwear and socks in a bag, grabbing an armload of suits.

In another version, we go ahead and marry. We buy an apartment. By the time, though, that we paint the walls, sand the floors, select the Oriental, order the couch, frame the pen-and-inks, plant flowerpots for the terrace, and assemble the grill, we have lost the language of love, the cadences of tenderness permanently transformed into communications about deliverypersons and summer rentals. In this version, I pray for magic. I accumulate slim volumes of poems, piling them each night by the side of the bed, hoping that the words (arms encircling bellies, tongues probing palates) will find their way into our sheets. In this version, I keep trying to turn our story into that O. Henry tale in which she cuts her hair to buy him a watch chain and he sells the watch to buy silver combs for her lovely long hair. I keep trying to explain to you how our apartment is something like this, that in the story the lovers exit with even greater devotion to each other, only the analogy doesn't make sense and, in the end, I take the rug, you take the couch, we divide up the pen-and-inks, and the gay couple who buy from us get the freshly painted walls and beautiful floors.

The real ending, though, is nothing like either of these. The real ending begins with the phone ringing in the middle of an autumn night. You reach to answer it and I hear you saying, “Who's this? Who's there?” You turn to me and say, “I can't understand a goddamned thing. It's some woman sobbing and sobbing.” I bolt awake. I know it is Corrine.

I grab the phone from you. “Corrine, Corrine, honey, what is it?” Already I am crying too. I struggle to grasp a word between her sobs. “Is it Lily?” For a long time, I can't untangle any words. Then I think I hear, “Yes,” before it is again only wails. “Corrine, I'm coming,” I say, “I'll be there as soon as I can.”

I call my father. For once, he is home. “Daddy, please,” I say. I am almost yelling. “It's Corrine. Something's happened to Lily. I think she's in a hospital. Probably UCSF is where Corrine would take her.”

It's been a long time since I've called my father Daddy. “Do something,” I whisper.

You telephone airlines for me and book me on the next flight. I pack some things, get dressed, and wait for my father to call back.

“You were right. She's at UCSF.” My father clears his throat. “I'm there now. It's not good. A vein burst in her head. It happened in her sleep. Corrine went to check on her and found her vomiting, with blood coming out of her ears.”

I can feel my bowels contracting. I hold on to the edge of the kitchen counter. “How bad? Is she going to live?” I can't tell if I am screaming or not.

It takes my father so long to answer that for a moment I wonder if he's still there. Then I hear his voice swimming toward me. “I don't think so.” I rest my forehead on the counter. “They've still got her heart going with a machine but she's brain-dead.”

“How's Corrine?” I manage to ask.

“Hysterical. They just gave her some Valium to try to calm her down. She's got some boyfriend with her who looks like he's had a handful himself.”

You help me get a cab and kiss me on the cheek. You don't offer to fly out with me and I don't ask, not because I don't want you to, I desperately do, but because of Corrine, because she will need me in ways I can't manage if I am with you.

On the plane, I sit next to a rabbi whose job is to say the blessing to make horseradish kosher. He's young, probably younger than I am, with skin that looks like it's never seen sun. During takeoff, he prays, swaying forward and back, but after that he talks on and on about the convention of industrial rabbis he's headed to in Oakland, about a childhood trip to San Francisco and a baseball game he saw at Candlestick Park. He refuses the meal, eating instead two meatloaf sandwiches he unfolds from a tinfoil wrapping. Although nothing about him feels holy to me, still I tell him about Lily.

“I will pray for the child.” He refolds the tinfoil around the remains of his sandwich and bows his head. I listen as he murmurs words I can't understand. It occurs to me that I have not heard Hebrew since my mother's funeral when my father nearly punched the rabbi who had been hired to appease my mother's parents and who had slunk from relative to relative the hour before the service to learn something about my reclusive mother only to then bungle the eulogy by referring to her as a devoted wife who would be missed by not only her three children but the entire community.

By the time I get to the hospital, Lily has been taken off of the machine. Corrine is wild-eyed. A button has popped off the front of her shirt and her fine blond hair is tangled as though she has been pulling at it all night. Her brother, Marc, who lives in Connecticut but has somehow arrived before me, is there, and some guy who looks like he's eighteen. Corrine won't let me hug her. I take her by the shoulders and try to hold her still. She smells like vomit. “Corrine,” I say. I am struggling not to break into sobs. “Tell me what to do.”

“Get rid of him,” she whispers, pointing to the guy. “I can't stand to have him here.”

I go up to the guy and walk him down the corridor. “Listen,” I say, “I don't know how to tell you this, but you've got to go now. Now is only for family and close friends.” The guy nods. He looks relieved to be dismissed.

“Should I say goodbye to her?” he asks.

I pat his hand. “I think it's best if you just leave from here.”

“I was there when it happened. I brought Corrine some pot, and she went up to check on Lily and then she just started screaming.”

“I understand.” I feel old. Old enough to be this boy's mother. He nods at me and turns toward the exit.

When I get back to the waiting room, Corrine is standing in the middle of the room kicking one of the chairs. Marc is talking to everyone, the doctors, the nurses, people on the pay phone. I can hear him making arrangements, funeral parlor, flights for his parents who now live in Florida. He tells someone on the other end of the line to wait a minute, and then beckons me to come over. “Take her home, okay? They just gave her some more Valium and the doctor said she'll probably crash.”

Corrine lets me hold her hand in the cab. With her other hand, she pulls at her hair. “Stop it,” I say. “Give me that hand.” I keep both of her hands between mine. When we get to her house, there are bloody dish towels in the hall. Corrine ignores them and heads up the stairs. I follow her into Lily's room with the butterflies Corrine painted on the walls. The bed is clotted with vomit and blood. I try to strip off the lavender sheets but Corrine won't let me. She climbs into the bed, shoes and all. She curls up on her side. I follow, fighting off nausea, putting my arms around her until we are spooned together. I hold her as she rocks and howls, low like a wolf, over and over, “My baby. My baby. My baby.”

When the Valium takes hold, I untangle my numb arms and go downstairs. I put the bloody towels in a garbage bag, and then call my father. “What caused it?” I ask.

“It was probably congenital. She was probably born with a weak blood vessel. It's like waiting for a time bomb to go off.” I start to cry again, thinking of Lily walking around with her Popsicles and trolls and a time bomb ticking in her head.

“You mean it was in her genes.”

“Maybe. Or it could have developed from some fetal problem.”

I'm afraid to ask the next question but I force myself. “Did she have a lot of pain?”

“I don't think so. Not more than a moment or two.” I want to say,
Do you swear that, do you swear on your life that it wasn't more than a minute or two, can I tell that to Corrine, that her baby suffered at most, absolute most, one hundred and twenty seconds?

After I hang up with my father, I think of calling you but suddenly I'm terribly tired. I go upstairs, back to Lily's room, reeling at first from the stench of her vomit and dried blood, acrid now like a discarded menstrual pad, my eyes welling as I think how Lily never even had a period. I manage to get the sheets off the bed without waking Corrine, then crawl back in, pulling Lily's quilt over the two of us. I listen to the rhythms of Corrine's breath, so different from yours, letting myself join her in sleep.

*   *   *

It's the part about Corrine's hair that undoes us. I tell you about it ten days later, the night I arrive back in New York, when we sit up until the sky turns slate, something we haven't done since our beginnings, while I try to describe to you the days before the funeral.