And Again (12 page)

“Doubtful, sir,” Jackson replies.

“Well, let’s see what we can do about mitigating the fallout from this. I don’t care what he wants, I’m not selling the whole fucking farm, all right?” I reply, wiping the slight sheen of sweat from my forehead onto my sleeve. Beth won’t be happy if I show up for dinner smelling like a construction worker. I decide to forego any more leg presses for the evening.

“Of course, sir,” Jackson replies, though his voice has no conviction in it. Everyone is placating me these days. Everyone, of course, except for Hannah, who challenges me at every turn. I can almost hear the scheming that must be going on in Jackson’s head. I’m sure he’s already planning ten ways to reign me in on this. He doesn’t have the conviction to go up against S&J, risking exposure and their sizeable contributions to my campaign in one fell swoop. If Burt Leeland asked me for nuclear launch codes, Jackson would find a way of delivering them. But he doesn’t know what I know, what I’ve always known. He doesn’t know struggle, or the feeling of true power. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be me.

“Let’s get this over with,” I say, not waiting for an answer, clicking the phone off and going to change my shirt before dinner.

Later I find Beth in the study that Jackson set up as a temporary office, leaning over the desk, reading something by the light of the small lamp beside her, the intensity of her focus almost startling. I watch her for a few moments from the doorway, unnoticed, as she closes a folder and puts it back into one of the drawers. I duck back into the hallway as she flicks off the light, pretending I haven’t caught her going through my things. She starts as she sees me, shutting the office door behind her. Then she smiles, her perfect veneer pulled back into place.

“You coming to bed?” she asks.

“In a bit. I have a few ends to tie up first.”

“Of course.” She presses a hand against my chest, her wedding ring glimmering there like an accusation. She kisses me on the cheek this time, an admonishment of my earlier mistake, and then heads for the stairs.

I go back to my study after Beth has gone to bed, opening the drawer from which she’d pulled the folder. There are four files in the drawer. One for me, one for Hannah, one for Connie, one for Linda. Our SUBlife profiles, the background information collected on us before the transfer, the ones Jackson had to call in a few favors to get. Something in me prickles with displeasure, that my wife would be snooping into this part of my life. I put the files away, trying to ignore the quiet instinct inside of me that says something awful has happened, though I’m not quite sure what it is.

I knock softly on Dr. Grath’s door, four short raps, the way I always do, so he knows it’s me.

“It’s open,” he calls from inside, and I enter. His apartment is dim. The amber glow of evening sunlight cuts through the shut blinds on his window; it’s the only other light in the little room besides the flicker of the TV. He sits in his armchair with a mug of tea next to him on the side table and a joint balanced in his thick-knuckled hand. He’s surrounded by bookshelves stuffed with books he can’t read anymore. His plants are dying, their leaves curling on yellow stems. I tried to overwater them a bit before I left, but apparently it wasn’t enough. I wonder if he remembers they’re even there. “Your vacation is over just in time.
I Confess
is on.” He motions toward the TV. I smile because Dr. Grath knows Montgomery Clift has always been a favorite of mine.

“Perfect,” I reply and then stop short when Dr. Grath stands up so quickly he drops the joint. It trails hot sparks down the front of his dark green cardigan and lands on the carpet, still glowing. I’m about to rush to stomp it out when Dr. Grath’s voice stops me.

“Who are you?” he says, his face trained on me, as if he could conjure some saved-up stores of sight, if only he concentrates hard enough. He’s a small man when he stands, probably about my height, with a thin nose and wisps of white hair on his head. He paints a sweet, feeble picture, standing there in his rumpled clothes. Like a baby chick before it opens its eyes, all damp, downy feathers and shriveled legs. Only his mind remains sharp, in a body that has failed him a hundred times over by now.

“It’s me,” I say, laughing a little, as if this is a game I don’t quite understand. “I haven’t been gone for that long, have I?”

“Your voice,” Dr. Grath says, his own voice wavering with fear. Then he recovers himself a bit, because his next words are stronger, more resolved. “I don’t believe you.”

“Dr. Grath, it’s me,” I say, taking another step toward him. He shrinks back a bit. “Jesus, what do I have to say to prove it to you?”

He seems to consider the question for a minute. “Did you happen to get new vocal chords on your vacation? Because the Connie I knew smoked a pack a day since she was a teenager, and you could hear every single one of those cigarettes when she talked.”

I’m unprepared for this. I hadn’t considered that he’d be able to tell I’ve changed. I hadn’t even decided if I should tell him anything at all. I want one place in the world to be just how I remembered it. I want there to be one place where it doesn’t matter if I had been changed or not. “And what if I did?” I say.

“Impossible, my dear,” Dr. Grath replies. I shrug, though he can’t see me, not with the apartment this dark. He can barely see me in full sunlight, as it is. Just variations of shadow, he said to me once. Just figures moving around in a dark room.

“Your wife’s name was Maureen. Like my mother’s.” I leave it at that. The one thing we have in common. Dr. Grath frowns, and I can tell I’ve won him over, because he drops back into his chair. “You sound like a different person.” His tone is gruff, as if I’ve done it intentionally to inconvenience him.

“It’s a long story.” I step forward and pat him on the arm, reaching down to pick the joint up from the carpet at his feet. It’s too late; there’s a charred little hole where the fibers of the rug have been singed away. He’ll never know, though, so I don’t mention it. I hand the unfinished joint back to him. “Be more careful, old man. You don’t want to be the one to burn the building down.”

Dr. Grath chuckles, turning back to the TV. “Yes, because if someone is going to burn down the Chelsea Hotel, it had better be its resident Edie Sedgwick.” He pats my hand, accepting the joint
and bringing it to his lips. The light flickers off his cloudy eyes; nothing is absorbed. “Was it a good vacation?”

“Not bad,” I say, settling into my usual spot on his tiny couch, watching Montgomery Clift cross the screen dressed in black priest’s robes. “I’m glad I’m back in time for this. Monty dressed as a priest is even better than watching him in
Red River
. There’s something much more alluring in the forbidden, don’t you think?”

“You are lucky you live when you do, my dear,” he says, and I can almost feel the lapsed Catholic in him stepping up to his lectern. “It wasn’t so many decades ago that a woman like you would be branded a Jezebel.”

“Oh please,” I reply. “It wasn’t so many decades ago when women like me were burned at the stake.”

He laughs then, but his eyes hover in middle space, so I can’t tell if he’s trying to look at me or the television.

“Tell me what’s different,” he says.

“Everything,” I reply. “Everything is different.”

“Is it a man?”

I’m the one to laugh now, and it’s a clear sound. It’s the first time I notice what he means, that the husky scrape is gone from my throat. I sound younger, less world-weary. I hadn’t even noticed before. “You give your gender a lot of credit, as if all it took was a few months with a new beau to fix me right up, huh?”

“I’ve seen whole worlds turn upside down in less time than that,” Dr. Grath replies.

“Yes, but not lately.”

“Careful now. You can’t tease me anymore if it turns out you’re cured and I’m not.”

I don’t say anything for a long time. He waits, remaining silent, letting me figure out what to say next.
Old bastard,
I think.

“How did you know?” I ask, finally, blinking hard to keep the sting in my eyes at bay.

“Val’s caller ID. He said the call came from Northwestern Memorial. And here I thought you weren’t coming back at all, after
he gave me that message. I thought that was your good-bye. I had a good cry over it, actually. But then you show up smelling like fresh milk, with that voice of yours. It’s like you’ve been scrubbed clean.”

“What did I smell like before?” I ask, a little taken aback.

“Vinegar. And damp hair. Like you were dying.”

“I
was
dying.”

“And now?” he asks. I look at the TV. Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter are having a tense, passion-filled exchange. It occurs to me that he looks a bit like David.

“I guess I’m not anymore.”

“And how does that happen, exactly? I mean, I’ve heard of remissions, but never cures. Not with your strain. Believe me, I’ve asked around.”

“Trying to fix me, doctor?” I ask, flirting a little, because it’s the only way I know how to repay men who are kind to me. But he’s having none of it, as usual.

“I’m not keen on the idea of outliving anyone I know,” he says.

I let a long stream of air out through my nose, as if I’ve just taken a long drag on his joint. “Well your plants are going to die.”

“Maybe not,” he replies, “now that you’re back.”

Dr. Grath falls asleep in his armchair, and I leave him there. He spends most nights there now, with the TV flickering over his well-lined face, his vacant eyes moving beneath his eyelids. I wonder what he sees when he dreams, if he ever wakes up forgetting that he’s blind until he opens his eyes. That was how it was for me for a long time. I’d wake up and for one dizzying moment I’d forget that I was sick, as if I were suspended mid-fall. Then the world would rush up to meet me.

I wash out his teacup in the sink. Killing time, mostly, before I have to go back to my apartment. I turn down the volume on the TV, though not all the way, not to the point where he won’t realize it’s still on when he wakes up in the morning. And then I venture
back across the hall, with its thin felt carpeting and musty smell, into the apartment I didn’t bother locking while I was gone.

I don’t like it anymore. Not that I ever particularly loved it, but I feel now an active repulsion when I flick on the lights and shut the door behind me. It’s nothing like the apartments I had in L.A., even the little place I’d shared with another model when I first moved into the city. That place had been cramped and hot, with foggy windows and a communal pool that was always overrun with algae and dead leaves. We’d slept on mattresses on the floor, she and I, with a curtain hung on a wire between us to divide the room. But it had a view of the Hollywood sign and it had been unfailingly sunny, like everything in California. And after growing up in a trailer, it might as well have been Buckingham Palace.

This apartment only ever served as a place for me to convalesce. I moved out of L.A. as soon as my disease started to show, as soon as the people around me began to back away. People could tolerate a lot in that city, but a beautiful woman’s descent into the grotesque was not acceptable, at least not in the industry. And people were still a bit afraid of my particular strain, which had developed a resistance to nearly all of the standard medical treatments. So I retreated back to Chicago, abandoning the sea air and the mountains and the sunshine for a tiny studio apartment in Uptown that seemed like a good place to die. And this was the apartment I’d chosen, because it was cheap enough to be covered by my Social Security checks and nothing about it reminded me of California.

It has a smell, like dying flowers, like something sweet rotting. I never really noticed it before. Now, with all of my senses sharp and new, it assails me in the doorway and has me trying to force open my windows, a futile endeavor, as they’ve been painted shut since before I lived here. I’d never cared much what my apartment looked like. But now everything around me, from my threadbare couch to the yellowing tile in my kitchen to my leaky, moldering bathtub, seems to be suffused with disease. It never occurred to me before how dim my apartment is. My bed is unmade and my sheets smell
sour. I strip it down to the mattress and haul the bedding to the first floor laundry room, throwing it into the washer with a few capfuls of bleach, enough to make my nostrils sting from the fumes, but at least it’s better than the other smell.