Robbie's Wife (22 page)

The rain finally stopped, the weather turned and there were a few warm days. Whenever there was a bit of sun, Bournemouth filled with people bound for the beach and the quay became filled with cars and people and beach chairs blossomed along the wall. A month passed with no postcard for Robbie and now when I fed him he no longer seemed to struggle as much; the strange cursing that I felt at the beginning had diminished.

Sometimes, when I had finished with the other patients, I’d wheel Robbie out onto the terrace. That’s what Agnes called the little balcony that looked out toward the sea, only you couldn’t see the sea from there, only the backs of the hotels along the quay. But it faced south so the light was stronger and I took a chair and sat in front of Robbie. I held his head with both hands to stop the shaking and looked directly into his eyes. His eyeballs rolled uncontrollably, which was why they couldn’t train him to answer questions the way they did with terminal MLS patients. They trained them to roll their eyes up and down for yes and side to side for no, but Robbie couldn’t control his eyes so there was no way to establish a pattern that would enable him to communicate. It was as if all of his circuits had been scrambled and he waited there behind his rolling eyeballs, thinking complete thoughts, trapped in a body that wouldn’t cooperate. His brain sent signals to his eyes, his mouth, his tongue, his hands, so many commands it was as if he was trying to do eight different things at once, neurons slamming into each other in confusion, a crowded rush hour car on the underground where all of the passengers are trying to get out at the same time, elbowing each other, cursing, and all the while the train ran full speed through the black hole under the streets, the door wide open.

I took his head in my hands and held it steady and I looked him straight in the face and I talked to him.

“Maggie was a good fuck, wasn’t she Robbie? The absolute best.”

He couldn’t answer, so I answered for him.

“How would you know, Jack Stone?”

“Because I shagged her, you spastic jellybean. I’ve told you that a thousand times.”

“You’re lying, you never shagged her, you’re too old. She’d have no interest in an old American prick like you.”

“That’s what you think. But you didn’t value her enough, Robbie. She was a treasure and you took her for granted.”

“Fuck you, Jack Stone. I never took her for granted.”

“I’m sorry. That was unnecessary. I apologize. You never took her for granted. But I’m not sure you knew how much of a treasure you had.”

His head moved under my fingers, and I swore it was a conscious movement, not just uncontrollable muscles being exercised at random.

“You see, Robbie,” and I bent so that my face was only inches from his, looked straight into his vibrating eyes, “I never meant to fall in love with her. But she was so graceful and so bright that I never had a chance. I never meant to hurt you. You were in the way. There I was, going full speed down the track toward Maggie and you were in front of me and I couldn’t stop.”

Robbie gurgled and then shouted, a harsh grunt that broke into babble, like someone speaking in tongues, possessed by God on Saturday night in the Holy Roller Church, and I held his head steady, spittle running down onto my thumbs that held his chin. He would have bitten me if he could.

“We need to get over this, Robbie. Every time we talk about her, you get emotional. We need to talk rationally about this, because Maggie is what we have in common. Can you see her? Here she comes, down the hall, barefoot, wearing that old blue vest from Marks and Sparks, as if she’s dancing, coming to see us, the two men who love her so much they would do anything at any time, no matter how unspeakable or dangerous, she has only to ask.”

We talked this way for a while until Robbie fell unconscious. He often did this, his frantic bobbing and weaving and shouting babble dying, slowing, until he sat, almost catatonic, his body vibrating ever so slightly, held to his chair by the wide cummerbund of cloth wrapped around his chest.

I know, you’re going to say, no, you weren’t talking to Robbie, you were making up all the words, talking to yourself, but I could feel his words in my hands, feel him telling me to fuck off, that I was the cause of all the pain that he felt, but he wasn’t as angry as he was when I first saw him. Sometimes I thought I could hear words in the cascade of sound that rushed from his lips, and I repeated them, asked him, Robbie, did you say you loved Maggie? Is that what you said? Where’s Terry? Where’s Jack the dog? And the sounds came again, like water over stones in a river, and I bent my face, nearly touching his lips, felt the spit on my cheek, and I listened for words of love.

The terrace was sheltered by a similar terrace above us, the floor where the ones who were dying were kept in hospital beds, surrounded by tubes and catheters and the smell of urine and disinfectant. The joke among the ones who, unlike Robbie, could communicate, was that you went “upstairs” to the next floor, and from there you went “upstairs” in a pine box. Even if it rained, Robbie and I often stayed out on the terrace. The rain seemed to soften him.

The doctors said that patients like Robbie had a limited life span. They had to supplement his diet since it was hard for him to get much food down and his internal organs were more likely to fail since they weren’t functioning normally. Muscles atrophied and he was more susceptible to infections. It was only a matter of time, they said.

But everyone was amazed at Robbie. He continued to hang on, seemed to be iron willed, and they said I had made the difference. “If it weren’t for you, Mr. Stone,” Maxine said, “we would have seen the last of Robbie Barlow some time ago.”

But I didn’t think it was that at all. It was Robbie’s anger that kept him alive. He refused to die to spite me, and he knew I couldn’t leave him alone because I held on to the slim hope that Maggie would show up. I was the symbiotic parasite that lived off the plant and the plant tolerated me because I helped to keep it alive by keeping the other pests at bay. I wasn’t this remarkably selfless person who tended so carefully to Mr. Barlow, the one Maxine pointed to and said, if we only had more like Mr. Stone, the world would be a better place. Maxine couldn’t see the dark of the shed and the rain coming down, as Maggie said, in stair rods, and Robbie’s startled face as Jack swung the piece of timber and the electric flash that filled the air. I went through the motions with the other patients, emptying bedpans, pulling off dirty linen and stuffing it in the bags, spooning jello into Mrs. Churchill’s sagging mouth, easing crazy Simon Salmon into the little shower where I held him against the wall, my hand on his bony chest, aiming the portable shower head at him and he squealed and I told him, “Shut up, Simple Simon, we need to get the fish stink off you.” I finished them all, then turned my attention to Robbie. I bathed him and talked to him and sometimes we took long walks on the quay along the beach. Summer finally came in late July and the streets filled, there were children running in and out of the water, the paddleboats dotted the harbor and the hotels and rooms were filled. I pushed his chair all the way to the end, more than a mile, and sometimes if there was a woman sunning herself in a chair on the beach who looked vaguely like Maggie, we stopped and watched her. Robbie was lashed to his chair with a cloth cummerbund and a kerchief around his forehead and I tucked in a blanket, no matter how warm it was. The blanket seemed to contain his vibrations. The English didn’t pay much attention to things like that. Nobody took the least notice of Robbie, shaking in his chair as we went down the promenade. Their beaches weren’t anything like those in Los Angeles. In L.A., anybody who doesn’t have the body of a teenager feels uncomfortable among the tanned and lithe, but on an English beach you saw middle-aged men with their pants legs rolled up, shiny black socks and oxford shoes, and portly women in bathing suits and pasty-faced young men and nobody seemed to care whether or not you looked as if you just stepped out of
Vogue
. Robbie and I were ignored.

Sometimes after Robbie dropped off I sat with him and watched his gently vibrating body and thought about Maggie. How she had cut Robbie out of her life, as if she had lanced a boil or excised some sort of demon. At first I wondered how she could do that. She seemed too good, too much in love with Robbie, but as I cared for him and spooned gruel into him, and held his spouting mouth while he jabbered, spitting obscenities that only I could decipher, I knew that she was still in love with Robbie, but this creature wasn’t Robbie, he was someone or something else.

I knew couples like that in Los Angeles. When they divorced, each simply dropped the other off the radar, as if the seven or ten years they had spent together and the two children and the house in Brentwood had never existed. They had become other people, so it was easy to do. Robbie was no longer the person she loved. He had become a thing that gibbered and drooled and she wanted to hold onto the shaggy-haired man with the black beard who quoted Shakespeare and made love to her in dangerous places, his lithe body melting into her receptive touch.

My laptop seized up. I’d tried to keep the script going, and had written some decent scenes that took place at Precious Little, but when I’d tried to write out what happened at the shed that night everything took on a surreal quality, and I wrote as if in a dream. I deleted lines almost as fast as they appeared, saving only fragments. When the laptop crashed I shut it up for a week, then took it to a shop on the High Street that advertised computer repairs.

“We could get it running again, sir, but you’d be better off putting your money into a new one. Hardly cost effective to repair this one.”

“How about getting the files out?”

“Not a problem, sir. You leave it with us and we’ll download them onto a disk. Pick it up tomorrow, then?”

“How much?”

“Twenty pounds, give or take.”

The next day I had my dead laptop and a disk in a plastic envelope. I bought some school notebooks, like the ones Terry had been using as his copybooks, and tried to keep the script going, but somehow it wouldn’t work and after a few days I simply stopped writing. I kept a diary of the day’s events at Precious Little in one of the copybooks, though, filled with shorthand notes, just a log of the day’s events, sometimes a few lines from one of Joshua’s songs. I thought briefly about having the repair shop print out a hard copy of the script but didn’t. Money had become scarce. Alfie paid me four hundred and sixty pounds a month, my room took three hundred of that, food took another hundred and twenty pounds, so there wasn’t much left over. I washed my clothes at Precious Little, had a biscuit and tea for breakfast, ate my noon meal with Ali and Joshua and all three of us stoked up since we were being underpaid by Alfie and we often went home with peanut butter sandwiches or a sausage roll wrapped in a napkin. I usually had fish and chips and a beer in the evening, since there was no way to cook anything in my hotel room. I was sure that others cooked on hot plates since there was a regular smell of something cooking. I still had about seven hundred dollars in my bank account in Los Angeles and I knew I could draw on it to get home, but I didn’t want to touch it.

July became August and then the postcard arrived.

“Post for Robbie Barlow, Jacko,” said Joshua that morning, holding out a postcard.

It was a picture of a sheepdog, much like Jack, posed in front of a flock of sheep. I turned it over and read:

Dear Daddy

Jack got hit by a lorry and we had to put him down. Mum won’t tell me anything about how you are so I’m going to get on a coach come August bank holiday and come to see you. Mum has a job in a library. I hope you are better now.

love, Terry

Obviously Terry knew nothing of Robbie’s condition and Maggie wasn’t telling him anything. I looked at the postmark and tried to make out where it had been mailed. All I could make out was Yorkshire and the date. It had been mailed two days before. So, Maggie and Terry were living in Yorkshire, no doubt with her brother or perhaps near him. And she had a job in a library.

I tried to piece out how I would go about finding Maggie if I were in Los Angeles. Go to the library and find the telephone directories for cities in her county. Look up Maggie Barlow, see if she’s listed. If she’s not, I’d go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and use their database to check on her license. Perhaps it was possible to do the same thing in England. Yorkshire was a county, so there must be marriage records and there I’d find Maggie’s maiden name, the key to her brother. She works in a library. Find the addresses of libraries in Yorkshire and call each one, ask for Maggie Barlow. Eventually I’d find the one where she works. Or, I could wait for Terry to show up on the coach to visit his father. August bank holiday was only a week off.

I waited, but Terry didn’t show up. Bournemouth filled with people over the weekend, and there was a steady stream of cars towing caravans going south toward Cornwall. By the middle of the following week it was apparent that Terry hadn’t boarded a coach to find his father. I’d have to try a different tack. I went to the police station, asked how I would track down someone’s address through a driver’s license, but I learned that the English were much more careful with the privacy of citizens than at home. I was told the police could make an official inquiry if I had a legal problem with someone, but I’d have to show cause first.

I went to the public library and asked the librarian if there were a telephone directory for towns in Yorkshire.

“Only for York, sir. There’s just too many others for us to carry them all.”

I found the telephone directory for York. There were plenty of Barlows but there was no Maggie Barlow or Margaret or M. Barlow.

Back at the desk the librarian suggested I go online and look for her. She pointed to a table with several computer terminals.

“You’ll find access over there. If she’s listed in a directory, you’ll no doubt find her.”