My Education (27 page)

“Actually I'm recovering from an assault,” I declared to the party, swallowing two of the aspirin with the rest of the first of my two margaritas. “I was hit on the head with a two-by-four not long ago. I'm getting a goose egg,” I added, massaging it where I'd just noticed it starting to grow at the crown of my head.

Now they all grew absorbed and excited.

“My God!”

“Were you mugged?”

“She's not kidding. I can feel the bump.”

Casper and I alternated and overlapped, telling the story. “Relating this event has taken almost one hundred twenty times the length the event itself took,” I observed through their oaths of amazement and horror.

Casper was repeating, “My masculinity is the real victim here. Did I avert the catastrophe? No. I may never recover.”

“Regina,” Nicholas was saying to me with solemn persistence, as I received my third and fourth margaritas. “Regina, darling, look at me.”

He'd broken his own rule. It was the same compulsion he'd already shown—mentioning Joachim as a pathway to Martha. Hesitating, I looked at him. A bell jar might have dropped over us. He reached for my innermost gaze and took that, and in doing so, surrendered his own. It seemed a fragile, darting thing, momentarily stilled in my care. His eyes were that color that people call “hazel,” that is actually green, gold, and brown, each thin petal distinct in its hue, as if laid on by a brush. The skin of his face had developed a slack, tender look. If I'd pressed a finger against it, I imagined a dimple would linger a moment, recalling the touch. He had aged. And yet his beauty, being male, seemed more potent on account of the wear. We wanted women to be smooth like children, and men just the opposite way. Was this true? The fraudulence of such ideals abruptly amazed me. I adored Martha's subtly rough imperfection. And feeling her body as I always did, against mine and within it, I realized I was seeing him now as she did, and a boundlessly receding horizon dropped out of the back of that intimate gaze, like an empty keyhole at the centermost part of the pupil. Pursue me this far and you lose me, it warned, though the dazzle continues—the featureless fields of gold all around. But the landmarks are gone.

“Your pupils don't seem abnormally dilated,” he concluded, leaning back, “but it depends on the size that they normally are. Are they usually large?”

“I have no idea,” I said, blinking at him.

“Do one more thing for me. Stand up, like this—” he stood awkwardly, where he was on the bench with his knees partly under the table—“and spread your arms wide like this.” I obeyed, and we faced each other over the table like matching scarecrows.

“What's this now?” Andy demanded. “May I play along?”

It conveys the atmosphere of Happy Hour, which had continued, around and behind us, to grow more and more crowded and loud, that Nicholas and I in our cruciform pose attracted no general attention at all. Only our own tablemates were attentive to what we were doing. “Now bring the tips of both index fingers very quickly to the tip of your nose, just like this.” I complied. “Again.” Like repeating a strange calisthenics we outstretched our arms, pointed our fingers, swung them fast on the fulcrum of elbows to land on our noses; a few times, going fast, I was off by an inch. “Not bad,” Nicholas said. By now Andy had joined us and the three of us shifted around to not bump our wingspans.

“Warming up?” asked our waitress.

“Just cranking the hollow leg open,” said Andy. “Another round, please. Let's try strawberry now, everyone. Are the strawberry ones really lovely? All frothy and pink?”

“All right,” Nicholas concluded at last. “If I were Coach Clive, that infallible sage of my youth, I'd pronounce you All Right to go back on the ice. No concussion, Regina. You may lace up your skates.”

“Is that really a test for concussion?”

“Coach Clive said it was, and Coach Clive was a leader of men. I always felt safe, trusting him.”

“If it's a test for sobriety I've flunked,” Franklin said. “Just watching you has made me nauseous.”

“I agree,” Casper said. “I'm exhausted.”

“Five frozen strawberry margaritas!” our waitress sang out as she banged down the frost-furry mugs.

Afterward I couldn't be sure if it was at the time, or only in retrospect, that my awareness of my transit to the women's bathroom disappeared. I found myself alone there in a stall and had the sense I had been there too long. The women's bathroom at Hot Jalapeños was on the far side from the patio entrance of the main dining room, very near the street entrance where Casper and I had come in; these geographical facts were disclosed to me as if for the first time once I'd put my clothes in order and gotten through the bathroom door, as if pulling myself, with both arms, vertically through a hatch in the ceiling. A festive roar told me which way to go to get back to my table, but I struggled as if sunk to the waist in that invisible gelatinous impediment of dreams. Like a sailboat fighting the wind I tacked with painful slowness leaning to my port side, then switched to my starboard, avoiding a table; the dining room seemed entirely empty, abandoned even by the ponytailed hostess, though in the distance I heard a door swinging, and young voices calling out things like, “Six frozen, one rocks, no salt, eighty-six the jalapeño cheese poppers!” Then all at once I'd dropped through the trap door and was out in the sun, the gelatinous impediment was gone, with new determination and power my legs pumped beneath me as my table, land ho! eked up over the distant horizon. I could see Nicholas, seeing me, the frothy crest of his dirty blond hair standing up on his scalp in alarm. “Whoa!” someone shouted, as I plunged full length over a table that had rotated into my path. Heavy glassware crashed down and a wave of wet drenched my shirt front. I neither expected nor sensed any laughter, only paralyzed awe and alarm, as if a resurrected prehistoric monster had brought down its huge foot on the crowd, smashing tables and chairs into kindling as the nimble young drunks all dove out of the way. I saw fear on their faces, and empathy, the beast, talons out, apparently just at my back; saving arms and hands seized hold of me and with pooled strength tossed me like a doll to my table. I landed in a tangle of my limbs and Andy's and Franklin's and Casper's and Nicholas's and with the force of the impact threw up, arcing fountains of pink, and at the same time was suddenly lofted in Nicholas's arms—I felt myself rushing up as my spatters of vomit were still audibly raining down.

“Check, please!” Nicholas cried as he bore me away.

Then we were in his car, speeding like a torrent downhill. “Stop,” I gasped and with a shriek of brakes he pulled over and I pushed the door open and vomited onto the curb. It seemed to happen again and again as if the drive, Zeno's-paradox-like, by fractions was being stretched out to infinity. In a parking lot somewhere Nicholas said to me roughly, “Wake up!” and dropped a shopping bag from Hobo Deli full of lumpy cold stuff on my lap. “Drink that Gatorade in there, Regina. Now. Drink. All of it. No, don't doze off Regina KEEP DRINKING.” Then we were driving again. “Stop,” I gasped and with a shriek of brakes he pulled over and I pushed the door open and vomited onto the curb. . . .

“Is this it?” he was saying. “This one?” Hands—large, tense, rough finger pads, square-cut nails, a row of calluses dangling skin-shreds marking off like sentries the frontier of the palm—took hold of my face and pried open my lids.

“Stand up now. Walk with me.” Like a marionette's my feet paddled the sidewalk as I looked down on them from a distance. “Is it this one, Regina?

“Is it this one?

“Are your keys in your pocket? Are your keys in your bag?

“Is it this door, Regina?

“Drink the Gatorade. All of it. That's the way. . . .”

Then a column of pale, bluish light had unfurled like a banner, but from the top down, and the bottom up, at the same time. Perhaps it was better described as a mouth yawning open. Jaws of faint light stretched apart from each other. The aperture they made was a doorway, submerged. Drowning light filtered in from above. A skin layer peeled itself free but then lingered there, twisting and shifting its shape. Now it ebbed and withheld its movements. The pale light died away. Exhausted, I sank away also, and as if to reward me for setting it free the luminosity disclosed itself again, but by the slightest indication possible, a faint pulse in the darkness. It grew steadily closer without growing brighter, homed in on my helplessness now, and to mark its progress drove a needle of pain through my skull.

There were two things, which perhaps I took years to unbraid and discern. The dying light in my bedroom window, where my gauze curtain rippled a bit in the breeze; and the telephone, ringing. The ringing noise wasn't the light, which was bleeding away. And the ringing noise wasn't arriving from somewhere far off, but was in the next room.

I staggered toward the sound, dragging blankets behind me, and upsetting a glass of red juice of some kind. My hand reached for the phone and a fear-cataract paralyzed me in place with my hand still outstretched, my heart beating my ribs like a club, for Nicholas, in my penumbral room, only lit by the tank's chill fluorescence, had spectrally risen, as if from the floor—where in fact he had been, on his knees, to one side of my armchair.

“Answer it,” he whispered. “I thought I'd unplugged it but I had the wrong cord.” He could have said to me, “Step out the window.” Was I dreaming? Of course! Staring at him, hypnotized, I picked up the phone. “Hello?” I asked thickly, through parched, rubber lips. Nicholas remained in his spot just beside and behind the armchair, an awkward space no one would use but a ghost. I realized I was wearing only panties and one of the old cotton T-shirts I slept in, though not the one I'd been sleeping in lately. I passed a hand through my hair and got stuck; my hair was stiff at the ends with dried vomit. My gut heaved and I would have thrown up again had there been anything left to expel.

“When did you get home?” I heard Martha ask, her voice biting each word.

“I don't know.” I stared at Nicholas, staring at me. He must hear her voice also, the room was so hushed. “Are you still coming over?” I whispered.

“Gee, sure! I guess waiting twenty-five hours for a date doesn't count as being stood up. There's no reason I should be angry.”

“What do you mean? What time is it?”

“Ten past nine.”

“Weren't you coming at eight?”

“I was coming at eight
yesterday
, Regina. If you're trying to be funny, or cagey and sexy, please stop.”

I had never felt less funny, cagey, or sexy. I implored, “I don't know what the fuck's going on!”

“Jesus, are you play-acting?” I heard Martha wonder. “Is this some kind of game? I've got to check in with Anya and then I'm coming over. Do try to be home.” On her end she slammed down the handset and I winced at the snip into silence as if I'd been slapped.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Nicholas in a whisper. The effort to whisper was almost too much. A powerful wave of disorientation, physical as an ocean swell tipping the deck, rose through me from the floorboards straight up through my painfully pulsating head and I thought I would faint. I flailed with one hand and seized hold of the back of the armchair.

He appeared to be equally broken. With a visible effort he came around from the side of the armchair and pressed me down into it by my shoulders. Then he let himself drop on the couch. “I brought you home from the bar,” he rasped, interrupting himself with an unwholesome cough. “I kept myself up the whole night. Then some time this morning I couldn't hang on anymore. I had very much too much to drink yesterday. And I've had very poor sleep the past month. I passed out, like you. Inexcusable. I woke up just now when the phone began ringing again. I was here on the couch,” he appended.

He'd spoken at too great a length for my quivering brain. The phone fell with a startling noise to the floor; I'd still had it clutched in my hand. Very far behind him I managed, “You stayed here all night? Why?”

“To check on you. I woke you up every hour to make sure that you didn't go into a coma.”

“Is that a joke?”

“No. I should have taken you to hospital immediately.”

“I'm glad you didn't.”

“I should have. Clearly, you've had a concussion. But then, my judgment was not operating as well as it should have. I got foolishly scared out of going. I'm ashamed. Thank God you woke up and came out of your bedroom. Thank God.”

“You're frightening me,” I objected, feeling so baffled I was nearly in tears.

“I mean to. Your life is what matters. Please make me a promise you'll go to a doctor first thing in the morning.”

I grew more fully conscious of being half nude. He must have undressed me, changed my vomit-drenched clothes for these sleep things and perhaps even sponged off my skin. Whether the logic of those actions dictated an image, or whether I actually now recollected, I felt his tense arm at my shoulders, and caught a glimpse of the length of myself wet and naked and seemingly dead in the tub. I dragged the welter of blankets I'd brought from the bedroom more thoroughly over my lap. Country Joe, still alive, raised and lowered his orange and white flag. When was the last time I'd fed him? I'd fallen overboard from time and it was steaming away, its vast blind bulk indifferent to me, yet there was so much transpiring onboard I could not comprehend. My message machine was on the point of exploding, its light pulsing a frantic red blur like a hummingbird's heart. It came to me that this was what the light did when the tape had run out, and that the tape running out would explain why the phone had been endlessly ringing. I pressed the rewind button on the machine and its little toy wheels hurried backward through time to the start of the story. Nicholas stood suddenly. “I should go. Promise me that you'll go to the doctor.”