The Whole World Over (20 page)

When she put her arms around his narrow shoulders and began to
kiss him back, he murmured his approval. The radio still played, though
more quietly than when they'd come upstairs, and Saga was vaguely
aware that the cat was still on the bed, near their feet, no longer objecting
to her presence.
Tain't nobody's business if I do,
sang a woman in a
sassy, girlish voice.

"You're a sexy lady, know that?" Stan whispered as he unzipped her
pants.

She had no answer; she kept her eyes closed and sank into the music.
His naked penis, when she felt it against her bare skin, was a shock,
mostly for the desire it beckoned from Saga's marrow.

"So touch me, Story Girl," he said.

Still she said nothing and kept her eyes closed. She felt Stan's pubic
hair, like a prickly sea creature, move in circles on her thigh. Then,
another shock, she felt his fingers. She tried to pull away, but she knew
her resistance was only halfhearted. Away to the side, on the floor, she
caught sight of her pants.

"Oh no," he said gently. "Oh no. You're liking it, you are. I can tell."

And he was right, she
was,
in a strange way that denied her surroundings,
the man's disturbing smile, the smells of this bed. It was as if only
the music and her body existed. His body—that was less real.

When he raised himself slightly away from her again, she opened her
eyes only long enough to see that he was taking a condom out of a
drawer in the table that held the books and the phone. She closed her
eyes again and let herself sink further down, or come more fully to the
surface, she wasn't sure which. Because he was so thin, his body wasn't
heavy, and when he entered her, the harshness was only brief. Right
away he moved slowly, smoothly, and she knew without looking that he
was
paying attention
to her, to what her body wanted, all on its own,
without any heed to her mind, and she felt herself yield.

And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a
chaotic joy like frothing rapids:
truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous,
rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity
. . .
all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain, an ostrich
fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release of something deep in the
core of her altered brain, words she thought she'd lost for good. It
nearly deafened her (but not quite) to the other, more alarming wave—
the groaning and happy cursing that came from Stan.

"Oh
shit,
Story Girl," he said as he pulled away and collapsed facedown
beside her, one arm across her waist. Before falling asleep (quick
as you'd fall from a ledge), he reached over and turned off the radio.

The lamp, however, still cast its oval of tawdry light, straight down
on Stan's head, on his thinning dust-colored hair. And from a corner of
the room, the cat's eyes glowed accusingly at Saga. Together, the silence
and the illuminated squalor filled Saga with shame and terror—terror at
herself and at what she had allowed (not even passively) to happen.

As she crept down the two flights of stairs, clutching the banister to
keep from falling, hoping the dogs wouldn't bark and wake Stan, Saga
couldn't help thinking of Uncle Marsden, of how much he worried
when she went off on her own, of how truthfully she'd always told him
there was nothing to worry about; after all, she was not a
child.
In that
year after the accident, during all those therapy sessions and walking
lessons and silly games with balls, she'd often thought of how people
think they might wish for a second childhood. Well, she was here to tell
them that no, that was nothing to wish for!

She'd been glad, once she found her way back to Uncle Marsden's
(this time reassuring him falsely), that Stan did not know how to reach
her. She had hoped never to see him again. But then other animals came
her way, and within two months she had to call him. "Well well well, if
it isn't Story Girl," he said, but he did not mention what had gone on
between them. Almost as soon as she entered his house, however, he'd
begun to put his hands all over her body. She made the mistake of thinking
that if she told him what had happened to her—explaining how,
because of the accident, she made mistakes in judgment sometimes—he
might sympathize a little.

He laughed. He said, "Right, so you're a sicko
and
a slut. Next sob
story? Hey, just kidding." He winked meanly. But he had never touched
her again, never even tried.

"
I AM EMILY ALMA TALAMINI
. On my birth certificate."

"I am twenty-eight."

"I live in West Hartford. I live with David Hayward. David, the guy
you just sent out to wait in the hall."

"This is . . . is this 1996?"

These were some of the answers she gave, whispered because her
throat still hurt, the day after her "real" waking up, the one she could
remember. A young male doctor nodded and took notes, but it was the
nurse who said, "This is wonderful. This is such good news, Emily. Now
don't try to move too much, okay?"

When she asked why, the nurse said softly, "Because some of you isn't
quite moving yet. But it will, with some help. We just don't want you to
panic."

Saga realized then that the right side of her face felt swollen or numb,
as if it had fallen asleep. She felt alarm when the nurse reached out to
dab at that side of her mouth; was she drooling?

Oh God, I'm a vegetable, Saga thought. David is going to leave me.

And he did—but not before staying long enough that she'd come to
believe he wouldn't. Through the first month of therapy, after many
long weeks in the hospital, he came for lunch every day and sometimes
took an afternoon off to sit on the sidelines while she walked laps or
worked her fingers around a tennis ball or practiced holding pencils and
forks. She stayed at her mother's house so she wouldn't have to struggle
up the two flights of stairs to the apartment she shared with David;
often he drove her back after therapy and stayed for dinner. Sometimes
Saga's mother went out, to give them time alone. It was hard for Saga to
go to restaurants; she hated being stared at. She had been back to their
place only once, to point out what clothes and other items David should
pack. He had carried her up the stairs, like a bride, and back down
again.

The David of her memory was mostly kind—she could remember
arguments, though nothing ferocious or mean—but the new David was
emphatically gentle and patient. Before long, this invalid treatment felt
claustrophobic and creepy. Everybody around her hovered, and sometimes
she had the strange feeling that there was something else they kept
waiting for her to remember. The person she thought of as her reading
therapist said more than once, "If new memories crop up, even suspicions
you might have, let's be sure we talk about them. Okay?" Saga
thought of it as the knee-jerk okay: the tendency of her caretakers, along
with the rest of the world, to finish nearly all their statements to her
with a little "okay?" as if she were two years old and might have a
tantrum at the slightest change of plan.

One day when they were eating lunch and David leaped to retrieve
the fork she'd dropped, Saga joked, "Stop being so nice all the time,
would you? I want a boyfriend, not a Moonie or a guide dog."

David looked hurt. "But nice is what you need, honey. You need—
you deserve a lot of nice."

"I don't mean to be ungrateful, but normal is what I need.
Truckloads
of normal. If that's possible."

He smiled nervously, silent at first, as if to imply that it wasn't
possible.

"When you're ready, we'll get a new place," he said. "I want a place
with miles of books around all the walls. Maybe we could rent a little
house out near the beach. I wouldn't mind the commute. How about that
for a dose of normal?" A tiny version of Uncle Marsden's house: that had
always been Saga's fantasy. Though the part about the books made her
sad. David was a librarian, so naturally he'd want that, but he didn't seem
to think about Saga, for whom books had become a chore—surmountable,
getting easier, but a challenge rather than a refuge, a reminder of how
the most ordinary things were no longer that, how in a way nothing was.

It was a book that gave him away. Having missed a few recent
lunches, he brought Saga a box of lavish takeout from a French bistro—
roast chicken, green beans, and tiny red potatoes. A Styrofoam cup of
chocolate mousse for dessert. He'd gone to the bathroom after setting
the food on a table. Ravenous, Saga started in on the chicken. It needed
salt. Thinking that there might be packets of salt in the paper bag David
had stuffed in his satchel, she fished it out.

Under the crumpled bag, which contained no salt, she saw two books:
a biography of Truman Capote and a slim volume called
How, Voyager?
A Practical Primer for Moving Abroad.

Abroad:
a bold orange word, like a fat painted line down the center of
a street, stretching out of sight.

"Who's moving abroad?" Saga asked when David came back.

He looked at her blankly, and then he started to giggle.

"Someone who's a fool?" she said.

Not even a smile remained on his face. "Maybe," he said quietly.
"I'm sorry I didn't mention it before. I didn't want to upset you. Though
I was thinking you could come if . . ."

"Where? Come where?"

"Zimbabwe. . . . They need someone to train librarians. I saw the
ad in a journal, and just to see if I could ever get . . . I didn't think I'd
really . . ." He added desperately, "I haven't decided."

"Yes you have," she said quickly, trying hard to keep spite from her
voice. "It's the decision you have to make, isn't it? How in the world
would I come to Zimbabwe when I can't even get up the stairs to our
apartment!"

He had looked stunned, as if she were the one with the bad news, and
she said, "I understand," because she was just too tired to say much
else. And it was true. Who
wouldn't
understand?

"You let him off the hook!" cried Saga's mother when she heard the
story. She was enraged at David and refused to speak with him at all the
two or three times he called before he left. "What a coward. What a
traitor. What a
cad,
" she would mutter. Saga thought that, objectively,
her mother was overreacting; these days, people lived together all the
time and then split up, over much less than this. But her mother was
from a generation that hadn't done it that way; and perhaps she was
secretly most upset because David's departure left her alone with her
daughter's plight. Perhaps, Saga sometimes reflected, her mother had
already sensed that she would not be around much longer to care for her
daughter. In any case, how could she have been foolish enough to think
that David would stick around with a woman who just might become
a permanent cripple and certainly wouldn't ever again be completely
"right" in the head, completely the woman he had known and lived
with? Maybe it was true that people never changed, not voluntarily—
but they could, Saga knew now, become altered. Changed from without
if not from within.

David told Saga he would write, and he did send three letters—his
brief persistence almost valiant, considering that she sent not a word in
reply. Over was over, that was one thing she'd always been blessed with
knowing.

Still, when Saga heard about (and, in rehab, witnessed) the ordeals of
all the other patients who had taken a blow to the brain yet managed to
survive, she wished that she could be one of those who'd lost a solid
chunk of time from the past rather than bits and pieces of her ongoing
life; her memory had come to resemble Swiss cheese. How much better,
and more convenient, if she had just lost a definable wedge from that
wheel of cheese, just the two and a half years in which she had come to
know and love, and then live with, David.

LUCKY THING HE'D WRITTEN DOWN
his name and address. On this
street, so many buildings looked alike—dark red brick, with steep stairs
and big shaggy trees out front, rug-size gardens tucked behind black
iron railings—and she couldn't quite remember which one it had been.
But here was the buzzer:
Glazier, 1R
. She rang a third and last time.
Well, it was silly not to have called ahead.

She sat on the top step and set her knapsack and the flowerpot beside
her. It was late afternoon, the sun still fairly high in the sky now that the
clocks had skipped ahead. She had two hours to wait till she could call
Stan. Through an open window across the street, a trumpet played a
jazz song that sounded familiar. That was her life: so much felt familiar
yet fuzzy, just out of reach. Could Saga have learned to play an instrument
now? There was a neglected grand piano in Uncle Marsden's
study; Aunt Liz had been the musical one. The children would crowd on
the bench beside her and sing along while her hands romped through
folk songs out of a green book used so often that many of its pages were
held in with layers of jaundiced tape.