American Appetites (15 page)

He ducked to avoid her crazed flailing blows and shoved her from him, with all his strength; and Glynnis stumbled, and tripped, and fell with great force, backward, against one of the plate-glass windows—and through it, the wall of glass shattering instantly, amid her terrified screams. Shards and splinters flew into Ian's face like stinging insects.

The noise of the breaking glass was deafening, yet it died away at once; as Glynnis's screaming, so terrible in his ears, died away at once: almost at once.

She was lying on the flagstone terrace beneath the window, one of her legs still caught in the window. Ian stepped through to help her and almost fell on top of her, his ankle suddenly livid with pain—he'd cut it on a jagged fragment of glass still in the window frame. He called her name repeatedly, crouching over her, trying, in nightmare panic, to lift her. There was, suddenly, glass everywhere: in Glynnis's hair and in Ian's, in their clothing, on the flagstones. A net of blood began to spread over Glynnis's face; she did not seem to have lost consciousness yet was incoherent, insensible, writhing and moaning, her eyelids fluttering, her body a dead weight in his arms. Ian knew he must run to the telephone to call an ambulance, to get help for her, but for some seconds, for what seemed a very long time, he squatted there, paralyzed, simply unable to move; unable to lay Glynnis back down on the terrace, amid the shattered glass and the blood, and leave her.

1.

O
n an evening of the previous year, in another lifetime, it now seemed, Ian McCullough entered a crowded, buzzing room—was it in fact his own living room? in his own house?—and paused for a moment on the threshold and stared, overcome by a sudden sense of confronting, not the men and women who were his friends, but a gathering of souls.

How strange we are to one another, he thought.

Each soul was encased in flesh, bound by an envelope of skin, turned inward, immersed in silence. The soul was light, or flame—its heat small, ephemeral, easily extinguished. Ian stared and felt afraid: yet felt, in that instant, an uncanny happiness. He saw himself so brotherly, so deeply kindred to them all—these souls, these separate beings, whom he did not know.

And then Meika Cassity came up to him, and slipped her arm through his, and said, “What a lovely party, Ian!” as if she had never said those words before.

And Ian said, “Is it? We're so glad.”

AT THE HAZELTON
Medical Center, waiting for Glynnis to be returned to him, waiting out the long hours—there would be nearly seven—during which she was in surgery, Ian was overcome by this same strangeness: a certitude that we are all in disguise from one another and from ourselves, souls glimmering like phosphorescent fire, hidden in the opacity of flesh. He stared at the faces of strangers as if he knew them and was in dread of their knowing him. If Glynnis should die? If he should never speak with her again? The thought opened before him like a chasm, the far side of which he could not contemplate, let alone see. He was bathed in terror as in a cold slick sweat.

He himself had been treated, efficiently and sympathetically, in an open area of the emergency room: his erratic heartbeat monitored; his lacerated right hand cleaned, stitched, and bandaged; the cuts on his forearms and ankle attended to; his bloodied face washed. The police had requested that he take a Breathalyser test, and Ian had, shamefaced, acquiesced; it would have seemed very wrong of him not to. (And what were the results? A blood alcohol level of .14, when anything above .10 constituted legal intoxication.) He could have wept, to be so exposed and humiliated. He and Glynnis both, a matter now of public record.

“Did you and your wife have a struggle of some kind, Mr. McCullough?” the doctor asked, in a rather too casual voice.

And Ian said, shutting his eyes, “I don't know, I really don't know, everything happened too quickly. . . .”

He had telephoned for an ambulance at 11:40
P.M.
, and the ambulance had arrived at 11:44
P.M.
Within five swift minutes both he and Glynnis were admitted to the Medical Center, and by midnight the decision was made to operate on Glynnis as quickly as possible. With a hand that shook so badly he could barely hold a pen, Ian managed to sign papers, papers in triplicate: yes he had medical coverage yes he was on the faculty at the Institute yes he had a local doctor yes he would gladly sign this form and that form and all forms, if only they would save Glynnis. “Do anything you can,” he begged; “anything, everything.” He must have said many extravagant things before witnesses, as he doubtless had in the ambulance being brought from that scene of shame and ignominy—the smashed window, the glass crackling underfoot like laughter, in the dining room a havoc of china, cutlery, glasses, bottles, food. Could it be possible such a nightmare had happened? And had happened to the McCulloughs?

How swiftly his drunkenness faded. He'd been rendered sober, he thought, as if by a sledgehammer blow to the head.

A NEUROSURGEON OF
local reputation, Dr. Morris Flax, was called in, and by 12:35
A.M
. of April 24, Glynnis was undergoing emergency neurosurgery to repair arterial damage in the brain: to the degree to which, as Ian was told, it could be repaired. Glynnis had suffered some subarachnoid hemorrhaging as a consequence of multiple fractures to the skull, and without immediate surgery, brain damage, paralysis, even death were “imminent.”

The operation lasted until 6:45
A.M.
, during which time Ian waited in the visitors' lounge, sitting, and standing, and pacing about, and sitting again, his head in his hands. His bandaged right hand was stiff as a club and throbbed with pain, but the powerful drug with which he'd been injected, to ease the acceleration of his heartbeat, made him lethargic, heavy-headed. All that had happened was rapidly fading, like a bad dream; he could think only of Glynnis, on the operating table, her skull sawed open . . . for wasn't the skull sawed open, for brain surgery? And what were her chances, her real chances, of recovery? Of survival?

Ian would recall, vaguely, wrapping his bleeding hand in a kitchen towel; but it was in fact one of the young police officers who had wrapped it for him, seeing how he bled, how he stood helpless and staring, like a man wakened from a dream. And his nose and mouth were bloodied too. Take care, mister, the young man said, you're hurt too.

And the other police officer asked, What happened to your hand?

A Hazelton police patrol car had swung into the driveway almost immediately after the ambulance's arrival; two youngish police officers had entered the house, as boldly as if they had been summoned, and moved upon the scene, seemed indeed to move into the scene, with an authority Ian would have found outrageous under other circumstances. For what right had they to enter a private residence? What right to intrude, to interfere, to ask their blunt and unanswerable question:
What happened here, mister
?—staring at the wreckage, the unconscious woman being lifted onto a stretcher. Ian's initial thought was that they were the same police officers who had come to his door last September, under the pretext of mistaking his house for another. The very men about whom he had filed a formal complaint and written a half dozen letters.

Two ambulance attendants were strapping Glynnis to the stretcher, and then they were lifting her, glass crackling underfoot. The precision of their movements, their practiced coordination, reminded Ian of a crewing team plying oars in perfect unhesitating rhythm. They bore Glynnis out to the ambulance and Ian hurried panting beside them, pleading with them to hurry, to hurry, to hurry.

One of the police officers was saying, Just a minute, mister, how'd all this happen? How'd she go through that window?

An accident. We've had an accident.

What kind of accident, mister?

The window—

Yes, mister?

The window broke—

Yes? By itself, the window broke?

—and my wife fell, and—

Fell? How?

—fell, and hit the ground—

Fell, mister? Or was pushed?

They were escorting Ian to the ambulance though he had no need of their assistance. His legs were strangely elastic and seemed distant from him, yet under his control. His head was ringing and buzzing but all his thoughts were clear, lucid . . . logical. He was thinking that Glynnis's kitchen knives were all finely honed for she could not bear a dull knife; no serious cook can bear a dull knife; he had bought her a knife sharpener for Christmas a dozen years ago when Bianca was a child, and Bianca had begged to sharpen her mommy's knives for her . . . that whirring grinding noise, and the faint aromatic smell that arose from it . . . how captivated the child had been! And if the knife in Glynnis's hand had been razor sharp, and if Ian had closed his fingers around it to wrench it from her, and if he'd shoved her from him violently, to free himself of her, and if she'd fallen against the window, and if the window had shattered, and if she was badly hurt, if, even, she were to die . . . none of this had any bearing upon what had really happened. It had no bearing at all upon either of them.

STILL, THE BLADE
had been sharp; the cuts went deep. Ian wondered indifferently if he had severed nerves, bone; if his hand, already stiff as a claw, would ever mend.

2.

He waited, waited for news: watching the slow red second hand of the clock high on the wall, sitting for as long as he could bear it and then standing, and walking about the lounge, and out into the corridor, several times out of the hospital altogether, into the night, which smelled of something like asphalt . . . cold, damp, brackish. They had offered him a cot in the emergency room, empty at this hour of the morning, but he preferred the waiting room, preferred the anxiety of his vigil. By degrees the sedative was wearing off. His heart began to leap again, to kick against his ribs.

And how many times that night he hurried to the lavatory . . . needing suddenly, with no warning, to urinate, as if his bladder were pinched. And afterward, his discomfort at being unable to wash his hands, running hot water over his left hand alone. He was thinking of Bianca: the time she'd fallen on the playground at school and broken three fingers. Had it been the left hand or the right? Poor baby; poor love. A plump-cheeked pretty child with startled-looking eyes, slate blue for a while, then shading, like his own, to gray. As a little girl she'd been intelligent enough but sometimes maddeningly clumsy, graceless, rather loud, eager to please yet, if not pleasing, just as inclined to be sullen; with a look, as Glynnis said, teasing, of having swallowed a toad. They'd been happiest, though, in those years; Glynnis had thrived on motherhood, had loved not only her little girl but her little girl's friends, a bedlam of little girls at times, really quite amazing. Ian would return in the late afternoon to a kitchen full of them, and a smell of baking cookies—chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal, gingerbread—and Glynnis smiling flush-faced and beautiful in their midst: Look what we've made. Now Glynnis resented it that Bianca seemed to prefer her father, and that Ian was “undemanding” of Bianca; it was an old quarrel, an old charge: his attitude was a form of male condescension, she said, if not scorn. And Ian protested; you're being unfair, you're being absurd. I love Bianca as she is.

And Glynnis said, Yes. That's the problem.

Toward morning he went to stand for a while in the parking lot, staring at the sky as if waiting for a revelation. The long night was ending, dissolving, an orangish-pink light radiating from the horizon like something spilled, Ian thought, in water.

He seemed then to know that Glynnis would be all right; for was it not inconceivable, after all, that she
not
be . . . ? Years ago, in Cambridge, driving their feisty little red Volkswagen, she had banged her head on the windshield in a minor accident, and naturally they had worried but nothing came of it except, a day or two later, one of her mysterious migraine headaches, the kind that left her exhausted, sweating, eyes streaming tears. The accident had been an ambiguous one: the driver ahead of Glynnis had braked his car suddenly and Glynnis collided with it, damaging its rear and the front of her own car; blame lay with Glynnis for tailgating, though it would seem to have been as much the other driver's fault. There had been some unpleasantness, but the insurance company finally paid and the matter was settled. And Glynnis said, chastened, I've learned my lesson: I must keep my distance from the car in front of me, and I must wear my seat belt.

WHEN DR. FLAX IN
his surgeon's green gown came to speak with him, Ian woke, groggy and fearful, having fallen asleep only minutes before on a chair in the waiting room. He struggled to his feet, anxious yet outwardly composed, and began nodding as Flax spoke, in that quick, vague way of his that often annoyed Glynnis, for it seemed to suggest that he wasn't listening carefully. Flax told him that, so far as he could judge, the operation had gone well; they had every reason to be optimistic. There had been considerable trauma to the brain, exacerbated by the amount of alcohol Glynnis had ingested, but the arterial damage turned out to be less severe than the
CAT
-scan had indicated. “Your wife is unconscious now, of course, but she will probably begin waking by mid- or late morning. You should be able to see her then.”

Ian stared at Flax, wondered if there was something more he should be told. Or something he should ask.

He said, “Do you think she will make a full recovery?”

Flax hesitated only a fraction of a moment, then said, “Frankly, I don't know. We won't know for a while. Why don't we just hope for the best?”

“Yes,” Ian said numbly. “We'll hope for the best.”

He was advised then to go home, to sleep for two or three hours before returning to the hospital; but Ian did not want to go home and did not want to think about why he did not want to go home. Now that it was fully morning, past seven o'clock, he had telephone calls he must make . . . to Bianca at Wesleyan and to Glynnis's sister, Kate, who could, if she thought it necessary, telephone relatives of Glynnis's. And he would call the Grinnells, and the Kuhns, and the Olivers, and Martha Fairchild, who would tell people at the Institute and cancel Ian's appointments for the next several days.