She stared right into his eyes and could not read them at all, and then Father Duncan was there too, the scar cutting deep from one side of his face to the other, sectioning him off.
“Is everything all right?” he said.
“Why, everything is wonderful, Father,” she said. “We were just discussing my recovery.” The priest put his hand on her elbow, and she could not stand to be touched. She’d been touched enough.
“Why don’t we sit down?” he said.
She looked down at him and said, “Why, Father, I thought you were.”
The priest backed away a step, and started to speak once or twice before the words finally came out. “This is a terribly difficult time, Norah,” he said sadly.
She turned to Miller Packard and said, “I believe I have committed a faux pas.” And then, keeping her back strong and straight, she walked into the bathroom. She had a good back and was always aware of her posture. As a child, she was graded on it at school. Peabody Laboratory School, Milledgeville, Georgia. Always the highest marks in posture.
The priest turned to Miller Packard when the door closed behind her and said, “She isn’t herself.” There was a lull then, and Father Duncan, who became anxious in the absence of conversation, who needed some kind of talk going on somewhere, said, “Are you a relative?”
“No, only a friend.”
“I didn’t meant to interrupt,” the priest said. “I just came over because it seemed the conversation was becoming . . .
animated,
and I thought perhaps I could help. She’s definitely not herself.”
Father Duncan looked quickly at the bathroom door. “Sometimes pain makes us say things we regret.” He smiled at Miller Packard and allowed that to sink in. “I don’t know how close you are to the situation,” he said, “but it was a particularly brutal assault. I mention this to help you understand any . . . unusual behavior.” Packard nodded, and Father Duncan moved a little closer and dropped his voice. “I’m afraid Norah was
disfigured.
”
Packard waited a few seconds and then dropped his head close and studied the priest’s face. “You didn’t do that to yourself, did you?” he said.
She was standing in front of the mirror, naked to the waist. The bandage and gauze lay in the sink. The nipple of her left breast was small and pink, the areola pale, all but invisible. The right breast was cross-stitched and crusted black.
A woman came into the bathroom and stopped. Norah smiled sweetly and then checked herself in the mirror. “Well, what do you think?” she said.
The woman moved a step closer. She said, “My God, Norah, I didn’t know it was actually
severed.
”
“They cut it off all right,” she said, and then, taking the point of the injured breast between her thumb and index finger, she squeezed until a drop of watery blood appeared and then ran in a line down her stomach. She trembled at the pain, and then found the woman in the mirror again, looking stricken.
Stricken
— she found that she loved the word
stricken.
“I didn’t catch your name,” she said.
“Marla Hodges, honey,” the woman said. “I’m Marla Hodges. We volunteered for the Stevenson campaign together.”
“Oh, Adlai,” she said fondly, “ ‘Madly for Adlai.’ ” She dabbed at the stitches with a linen towel and then held the breast and moved it closer to the mirror. “I just can’t make up my mind.”
The woman began edging back toward the door.
“If symmetry were the issue, I suppose I could lop the other one off too, but you can imagine what the Republicans would say about that.”
And then the woman was gone.
The door opened again, and it was Miller Packard. A strange name. Time had passed; she didn’t know how much. She was still undressed to the waist, and without a word, he ran some warm water into the sink, took the towel out of her hand and cleaned her breast and patted it dry, and then the skin below it.
She shivered.
He looked closely at the wound, touching it once with the back of his finger, checking for heat. She did not misunderstand what he was doing. “We don’t have to be worried about infection,” she said. “At least not according to Dr. Speers. He’s administered penicillin.”
He retrieved her blouse and bra from the bar crossing the entrance to the stall where she’d hung them, then put the bra in his coat pocket and held the blouse for her while she put it on. Then he buttoned it up. She said, “He was concerned, however— and I would say not a little disgusted— that venereal disease is apparently able to exist in the female apparatus without any symptoms at all. I believe those were his words, the
female apparatus.
” She liked that even more than
stricken.
He finished buttoning the blouse, and she closed her eyes and felt the room begin to move. He plugged the sink and ran water into it for her, she supposed to wash her face. “It’s the wonder drug, you know,” she said, watching the sink fill. “It fixes everything.” Her finger went to her lower lip, which had been bruised on the boat. Three distinct lumps had formed there, and she felt them whenever she spoke or swallowed. The water kept coming out of the faucet.
“Let’s go home,” he said, and turned it off.
“I can’t leave,” she said. “I’m the widow.” She bent to splash her face.
“By now,” he said, indicating the room, “they’ve all heard that you’re naked and crazy and talking about lopping off your other tit.” She waited, looking up at him from the sink. “It’s a party,” he said.
She felt an unexpected wave of affection. For the way he looked at her, even now, for his clothes and his shoes, for the way he got to the point, right from the moment she saw him on the old fisherman’s boat. For his intelligence and his haircut. She forgave him the Negroes, and forgot that he seemed to smile at odd times, that he laughed at things without making any noise. It didn’t matter. He was kind, but he didn’t make any noise when he laughed. She saw it clearly now; she saw everything clearly.
She stood up, a few inches from his face. She touched his face. “I think you are the most considerate man I ever met,” she said. And then the room spun and she stumbled, and sat down in the sink.
He brought her out of the bathroom, heading for the door. The priest was suggesting to a woman in a yellow suit that Norah should be hospitalized for a few days of observation. He stopped when he saw them coming out and stepped forward, as if to greet them, and Packard moved him out of the way effortlessly, holding on to her hand, and pulled her through a sea of faces toward the door. She smiled politely and followed along, making soggy noises, the water trickling down the backs of her legs.
He called the limo and then held the back door with one hand and helped her in with the other. The priest came out of the reception hall, looking worried. Miller Packard climbed in on the other side and shut the door. She saw other people behind the priest, the mourners, Alec’s friends, trying to catch a glimpse through the windows.
“The lady is going home,” he said to the driver, and then gave him the address, to make sure he had it right. She was surprised that he would remember her address— he’d only been there once. She wondered if he had a photographic memory. She had that one thought, and then she leaned across the seat and dropped her head into his lap and closed up for the day. A moment before she went to sleep, she felt his penis crowding up through the material of his trousers, pressing into her cheek.
She felt safe and liked him very much.
7
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE WANTED TO SEE WHERE HE LIVED. SHE wanted to look at his bed and in his closet; she wanted to open the refrigerator and see what he ate. She wanted to know what music he listened to, what books he read.
“Well,” he said, “I knew somebody once who played the English horn.”
He was sitting on the edge of her pool; she was beneath him, resting an elbow on each of his legs. A wild scar ran the length of his upper leg, from his knee to the hip. His suit was lying near the drain at the bottom of the pool. They were still flushed, just catching their breath.
It was two months now, and he would not talk to her about what had happened on the boat. When she brought it up, he would tell her to think of it as a story with other people in it. He didn’t tell her what those people did afterwards.
Maybe he only wanted her to smile; he wanted someone to smile with him at strange times.
He came to the door the day after the funerals with an Orange County sheriff’s report, which he’d typed up himself, and she initialed all six pages and signed at the end without looking at it, and then he’d stepped in and closed the door and sealed the deal, right there on the stairway, and she was looking up at a chandelier all the time, seeing herself and Miller Packard in a thousand tiny reflections, and no one from Orange County ever called or came to the house, and no one ever asked how her name might have ended up in Clarence Holmes’ address book.
She looked at him now and wondered what he’d done to head them off. She guessed the address book was gone, misplaced in some evidence room or thrown over the side of some other boat into the ocean, or ashes now, but the book had been a fact, and her name had been written inside it. And he had seen it there. Matter cannot be created or destroyed— that was right out of Mr. Sanders’ science class at Peabody Laboratory School. And she had seen an execution— another matter. They had each seen what they’d seen, and he wanted her to think of it as a story about other people.
