The Man in the Window (27 page)

Iris stood up. “Stop!” she said. “It’s not Eden and it’s not all chains. You’re not sure what it is, because you haven’t been out there for sixteen years.”

Now Louis slowly turned from his window toward her. “True. And you have been out there for those sixteen years,” he said mildly. “Have they been good? Can you tell me what I’ve missed?”

Iris looked at him hard. “Shit, I don’t know. You missed a bunch of things.”

“I can tell you precisely what you missed. You missed Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea.” He gestured with his good hand. “Come here. Come take a look.”

Iris moved on her short legs across the room to him. When she stood beside him the room swayed, just a little. He pulled the curtain back, and Iris immediately squinted, as if from the sudden brightness of the sun. But it wasn’t the sun that made her squint, it was something brighter still, more intense. Across the street Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea was ablaze with color.

“It’s so red,” Iris gasped.

“Isn’t it?” said Louis softly, at her side. “Sometimes I have to look away.”

“But that’s not the way things are.”

“It’s the way they are to me,” said Louis. “It’s the way they are when you really see them.”

“My God.” Iris pointed. “And who’s that? She just jumped behind a bush. Did you see her eyeliner? Aqua. It glittered like aqua diamonds.”

“Kitty Wilson. She’s always been a little heavy with the makeup.”

“Diamonds.”

“There you are.”

Iris jerked the curtain closed. “And that’s what you’ve been looking at for sixteen years?”

“Yep.”

“No wonder you jumped.”

Louis tilted his head and looked at her from behind his scarf and hat. “You think I jumped?” He touched his chest.

“I would have.”

“Why?”

“To see if that’s really the way things are.”

“And after jumping, if you found out that’s not the way things are…?”

Iris was way out of her territory and had been since he’d begun talking. She tried to pull the talk in her direction. “I’ve come to see about your arm. That’s what I know about all this jumping—you broke your arm.” She pulled him across the room and made him sit on his bed. She felt a lot better seeing him in bed—nurses understand people better when they are in bed. “So,” she said, feeling Louis’s hand where it poked out of the cast, “you been having any problems with your fingers swelling?”

“No,” said Louis, looking at her.

“Fingers going dusky?”

“No. Not that I’ve noticed.”

“Pain or tingling?”

“In my forearm, where it broke. Throbs a lot.”

“Perfectly normal. Keep it elevated on a pillow when you sleep. And don’t stand for long periods, especially without wearing your sling. Where is your sling, anyway?”

“Downstairs,” said Louis sheepishly.

“We don’t hand them out as souvenirs of your visit to the Emergency Room, you know.”

Louis shrugged, then looked away.

“I’m sorry,” Iris said quickly. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just, well, I want you to get better.”

“I know,” said Louis softly. “It was kind of you to come.”

“It was kind of you to ask me.”

“I scared you with all of my talk. I’m scary enough as it is.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“I scare everybody.” Louis looked directly into her eyes as he spoke the words. “I’m the monster of Waverly.”

Iris didn’t even blink. In fact, she smiled. “How do you do,” she said, reaching for his good hand. “I’m the monster of Barnum Memorial Hospital. I guess I’ve come to the right place.”

They held hands for what seemed a very long time, until at last a shyness returned to them and they released each other.

“Let me take you outside,” said Iris.

“Oh, Iris.” Louis paced the room.

“We’ll go out together. We’ll step across the street and take a look at Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea.”

“It’s not that easy.” Louis felt his heart race.

“No one will bother us. Who would dare bother a couple of monsters like us?”

“Iris, you’re not a monster, don’t say that.”

“I know exactly what I am. And if I’m not a monster I’m damn close to being one. People don’t scream when they see me, but I’ve heard them laugh—to my mind there’s not much difference between the two.”

“They’d scream if they saw me.”

“So don’t let them. Fuck ’em. Whose business is it? I’m not asking you to expose yourself to all the peepers. Wrap yourself up
in your quilt there if you want to, whatever it takes. Whatever it takes to get you outside on a spring day, to step across the street and look at a bush.”

“I’d like to.”

“Then come on.” She held out her hand.

“But not yet.”

“Louis, if I’ve survived this long out there, you can stand it for five minutes. You made it on Wednesday, didn’t you?”

“Those were extraordinary circumstances.”

“This is extraordinary circumstances! Do you have any idea what it took for someone like me to come here, to come here and now ask you outside, like, like on some kind of date? And you’re going to turn me down?”

Louis was quiet a moment. Then he said, “You know, it’s very strange. My mother and I, we live alone here and very quietly. Yet today both of us have received separate invitations to go outside, to step into the sunshine. My mother accepted her invitation. She’s out now with her new friend, walking the streets of Waverly. It was nice to see that, to see her happy.”

“Don’t you think she’d like to see you happy, to see you go outside?”

“I’m not unhappy.”

“Louis, you’re in need of some fresh air,” Iris said to him in her blunt way. “Several years of fresh air, in my opinion. Now, we can go back and forth on this thing forever, but let’s not. Let me just say what I’m going to say, then you say what you want to say, and I’ll either walk on outside with you or without you.” Iris’s throat was tight and her mouth was very dry. “Listening to you, it sounds like you know a whole lot. You’ve thought a lot about things. Well, I’m not like that. Things don’t, I don’t know, things just don’t occur to me. I understand only after doing something over and over. I’m a nurse, and what I’ve done over and over is take care of people; I know how to take care of a person. I know what’s healthy. People should listen to me, because I only speak when I know what I’m talking about. Of course, they don’t
always listen. I say to my patients, take your heart medicine, or do your back exercises, or cut down on your salt intake. Simple stuff, which I wouldn’t mention unless I was right. Now here I am with you, looking at you, and it comes to me, like with one of my patients, it comes to me that what you need is to step outside with me, right now. Walk down the stairs and out the front door with me. Because if you don’t—and this is the thing I know, this is the thing that scares me—you’ll jump right out this window again. And it may be your neck that breaks next time. You’ll jump because the world is pulling you. You’ve been looking at it for too long. You’ve made it into something too beautiful and too precious and you got to get to it, but you’ve stayed here in your room so long, you’ve forgotten how. It’s a pressure inside you, you don’t even feel it, but it’s there. You’ll be standing here someday, looking outside, and the next thing you know you won’t be—the pressure will blow you right out this window. So what I’m saying to you is: Let off some of that pressure. Come on. Come with me. Don’t give me a thousand reasons not to. Just come.”

Iris pressed her teeth to her lower lip and moved away from him. She took several steps toward the door, then turned once more to face him. Louis looked as if he was about to move, his body leaned in her direction. But then he hesitated. “Why are you doing this, Iris?”

Because, she thought, gazing into his masked eyes, because you are my Lawrence, my beautiful Peter O’Toole, my date to the prom, my one and only, my first and last desperate chance. That’s why. I don’t care who you are or what you look like: I’ll take you. And you are the only one who will take me. I am your rarest flower, and I’m blooming now, this instant, and only you have the power to see it, you who see everything, you who transform the ordinary into glorious beauty. Look at me with your window eyes and see that I am redder than your blazing azalea, greener than the emerald leaves sparkling on your trees, brighter than the dazzling yellow of your crocuses.

Iris, who never cried, knew that she was about to. Iris, who never let circumstances escape her control, trembled as she waited for him to refuse her offer. She closed her eyes because she could not endure it.

When she opened them again Louis was beside her. He had moved away from his window and across the room without a sound, without disturbing, it seemed, a single molecule of air within the shaded bedroom. As she watched his hand approach hers, she thought that it would be without weight because she was not sure if this really was Louis or a vision of Louis that she had willed across the room to her side. But when he touched her, she felt the warmth and substance of his hand and the trembling in his fingers that matched her own.

Louis looked down at Iris. He did not, as she had hoped, imbue her with physical qualities she didn’t possess. Nothing about her sparkled or shone or made him catch his breath. He saw her as she was. Everything Iris despised about herself, he saw. He saw, then dismissed all that he saw for the simple beauty of her gesture, for her brave and lovely attempt to rescue him. For Louis, it was as if Iris had defied the licking flames of the burning back room of the hardware store, had risked everything to pull him to safety. Although she didn’t know it, by risking all, she was transformed, yet unchanged. For this woman, he would walk out his front door.

“Well,” said Louis, trying to steady his voice, “shall we go?”

Iris squeezed his hand in reply.

Louis let her walk ahead of him through his bedroom doorway. He stepped into the hall behind her, then turned, looked at his bedroom for a long moment, then gently closed the door.

“Is it cool out?” he asked as they started downstairs. “Will I need a jacket?”

“A little cool, but I think you’ll be fine,” said Iris.

“Sounds to me like hat and scarf weather,” said Louis. “But then for me it always is.”

Iris looked up at him as he laughed softly. She smiled. “You’re going to be fine, you know that, don’t you?” She’d learned that the patients she’d cared for who laughed at their overwhelming frailty their first time out of bed were the ones who did best.

“I don’t know what I know,” he said.

“I’ll be right beside you.”

“It’s not like anything will happen. I’m just stepping outside a minute. Right?”

“Right.”

“People do that all the time. Right?”

“Right.”

“To hang up their laundry or pick up their newspaper or wash their car. That sort of thing.”

“I’ve done those very things,” said Iris, “and lived to tell the tale.”

They stood before the front door. “If my legs fail me?” said Louis, shifting.

“I’ll steady you.”

“If I faint?”

“I’ll catch you.”

“If I change my mind?”

“I won’t let you.”

“That pretty much covers it, I guess.” He put his hand on the doorknob.

“You want me to get that?” said Iris.

But he was already opening the door, opening it and then leaping through it as if he’d decided it would require an unstoppable propelled effort to cross the boundary between his known interior life and the life that waited for him outside.

Just before she shot out after him, Iris thought, This is how he jumped from his window, this is the kind of force he mustered and unleashed.

He got a few feet down the front walk, then froze. She caught up with him and took his arm in hers.

“Hey, hey. Easy now,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself—remember, you still have a broken arm.”

Louis was elsewhere. He turned and looked up at his window, then down at the tulip bed. He did it again, as if trying to establish the exact trajectory of his Wednesday flight from window to earth. At last he said, “I wonder what it would take to do the whole thing in reverse. Stand in the tulip bed and hop back up into my bedroom.”

“You made it, Louis. You’re outside.”

“Am I? I haven’t really looked yet.”

“Well, look. I got you. I’m right here.” Iris positioned herself for maximum strength and balance, like she did when she helped patients stand after they’d spent weeks in bed.

Louis turned from his house and faced the world of Waverly. He lifted his eyes slowly, staring first at his feet, then at the gray-white sidewalk just beyond the toes of his shoes, then at the fresh spring-green lawn that bordered both sides of the sidewalk. He lifted his eyes and took in the widening horizon of sidewalks and grass and trees, took in the deep black asphalt of his street, and the telephone poles that lined it, and the houses whose exteriors he knew so well from sixteen years of studying them in every slant of light, every dim night shadow, every subtle change of weather that played upon their windows and doors and black-shingled roofs. It was a world he knew, yet did not entirely recognize. Everything he saw now was within reach.

Iris could hear his breathing go tight and shallow. “You had enough, Louis? You want to go back inside? You don’t really have to go over to Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea.”

Louis didn’t answer. His eyes darted over the landscape as he tried to relearn it, to get his bearings. He was Dorothy disoriented in Munchkinland. And as they had for Dorothy, hidden Munchkins slowly poked into view, Munchkins who in this case went by the names of Kitty and Francine and Bert and Bev. Kitty, in the next yard over, stepped out from behind a bush. Francine peeped around her white porch column, then showed herself completely. Bev and Bert, who’d ducked down in the seats of their station wagon when Louis opened his front door, sat up
again and peered at him. Carl had not changed his position in his side yard since Iris had first appeared at the Malone house. He still held the garden hose and had by now created a small lake around himself. All of the rescuers were assembled and ready for whatever Louis might have in mind to do next.

They hadn’t figured on Iris. She felt their eyes upon her, although it was on Louis they were feasting. She wouldn’t allow it. She let go of Louis’s arm and stormed down the front walk. “Can I help you people?” she shouted. “You got some kind of problem?” She whipped her head back and forth, glaring at each of them.