Doubles (17 page)

 

In the bathroom off the hospital lobby, I turned on the hot water and let it run. The fluorescent lighting shone directly on my bald spot. I don’t know how much it had thinned since I’d last seen her. I was heavier. Paler. I had grown a thin beard. Steam crept up the mirror, slowly erasing my aging reflection. I washed my hands, rose up the elevator, crossed the ICU, and looked at the humans. I’d seen them all before. They were wired to machines, inflated by tubes, fed in drips; paralyzed processors of liquid. For sixteen months Anne had been one of them, every day of it on film. The Polaroid ritual made me feel like I was in control of the situation, that nothing could happen without my knowledge. But of course, it could. It had. Something else was in charge, something that made Anne wake up that afternoon for no apparent reason other than it was just time. When I pulled aside the curtain in her doorway she turned her head to look. Still greasy and thin, her hair was tucked behind each ear now. Something so simple, clearly placed by her own narrow fingertips, made her more recognizable than she had been in months. I put a hand to my own hair, embarrassed of my aging body. I kissed her withered lips. They felt like wrinkled plastic. She kissed back nonchalantly. She didn’t know how long it had been since I had last kissed her and received a response. Then she put her hands under the sheets. I imagined her feeling the ridge of the scar from where they had cut her open. It had already healed.

I looked around. Wasn’t there a doctor here? The knowledge of the child’s death seemed beyond my jurisdiction. I couldn’t believe they’d left me alone with my own wife.

“What happened?”

I told her. About the motorcycle, about the baby. Even about Bob Seger. I told her everything but that I had fouled the brakes. It was the first time in close to a year I had recounted the accident in detail. “Here,” I finally said and lifted from the bedside table a BNP Paribas tote bag from a hospitality basket at the French Open. It was now with Polaroids. She took it from me, but the weight of the bag was too much for her withered limbs. She dropped it. Two photos fell onto her chest. She picked one up and gazed at it with wonder. She ran her finger over the corner, pressing on the sharp edge. I was afraid her paper skin might tear. The date read January 6, 2006. More than two months earlier.

“This is what I look like?” she said, raising a finger to her hair.

“Not exactly.”

“Let me see the rest.”

Anne had always been prone to long silences. I watched the side of her head as she looked at photo after photo. If she viewed each for this long it would take all week. After five more photos, she started to cry so hard that I was scared she would hurt herself. I worried her atrophied muscles wouldn’t be strong enough to maintain it. A nurse came into the room and then left quickly without doing anything. I sat on the edge of the bed, apprehensive of Anne’s fragile body, scared to hold her.

She said, “Did you take one today?”

“Not yet.”

She lifted the camera from the bedside table and, with more effort than I would have ever expected—as if lifting a small barbell—she handed it to me.

Through the viewfinder the hospital room was a new landscape, transformed by life. The turquoise sheet was pushed down to Anne’s waist. Her white gown made the frame glow. Her face was a wet, red, inflated rind. And when the flash filled the room, I was aware that, for the first time in almost a year and a half, it blinded a second pair of eyes. They were spooky and blue and open and wet and looking right at me.

ATTENDING TO HER
bedsores, watching nurses massage her withered limbs, my motivation to tell Anne what I had learned disappeared. But she knew me too well. One afternoon she lifted the camera from her crowded bedside table and held it to an eye. She said, “Tell me what you’ve been thinking about.”

“I don’t want to do this.”

She sighed. “OK. Here, I will.”

She handed me the camera, and I raised it with dread. It had been a long time since I’d looked at Anne through the viewfinder with this specific fear, this apprehension of revelation.

“The dress that you gave me for Christmas last year?” she said. “They didn’t lose it at the cleaners. I dropped it in the clothes bin up at the Texaco on 54.”

The flash was still fading in my eyes as film whirred out of the camera. It wasn’t this past year. It was the one before. She had lost the last one. But the year before, yes. That was the first time I had ever bought clothing for my wife. We had always had the agreement that it was just something we wouldn’t do. I had no idea what size she was, where I might even shop for her. But one night she had opened a JCPenney catalog on the couch and said, “Pick the outfit on this page that I might wear.” It was a game she was fond of playing with her girlfriends. They would gasp in laughter and disgust, turning to a page filled with high-waisted jeans, asking each other to guess which they
would choose if forced. To my surprise that night, I unerringly picked what Anne would want. It seemed I had crossed an aesthetic divide. A few days later I saw my neighbor wearing a dress that I complimented her on. “Dan picked this out for me,” she said, smoothing it across her thighs. I thought,
I can do that.

I didn’t know what I was looking for in TJ Maxx, but when I found a red dress with a black tie around the waist, I bought it. Anne opened it on Christmas morning and said, “You bought this for me?”

“You hate it.”

“Let me try it on.”

The dress fit perfectly. From time to time I would see it in the closet and wonder if she would ever wear it. Then it was gone. Now I knew why.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I was thinking about.”

Just then a nurse with large thighs in tight pink scrubs entered the room and whispered, “I need to look at your tube.”

“What?” Anne said, turning to the nurse and looking at her through the viewfinder.

“Your tube.”

“What?” she said. She lowered the camera.

“She’s hard of hearing,” I said.

“Your nose tube!”

The tube in Anne’s nose had mashed her nostril to one side for so long that when the nurse took it out the nostril actually stayed in its malformed position. Anne’s body was like this in so many ways, alive and alert but still failing. It had for too long been dormant. The doctors said that the path back to health was fractured, unclear, and difficult. The nurse rubbed lotion onto the flattened flesh, and Anne winced as it entered a small red crack. I held her hand as she sucked air through clenched teeth.

“Fuck. It burns,” she said.

I squeezed her hand.

“Tell me what you were going to say,” she hissed.

“I can’t remember.”

“Come on. Eeeeeshhhhhhh.”

“It was just about some movie.”

My courage left with the nurse. It didn’t matter what Anne had done. I just wanted her nose to go back to normal.

The next morning, she picked up the camera and said, “Tell me that thing.”

I shook my head. “I told you.”

“Alright. Take another one of me, then.”

I lifted the camera to my eye in terror. It was like I was driving slowly towards a brick wall. I knew the collision was imminent but did nothing to stop it. The flash exploded as she said, “I didn’t put up any of those fliers for Winnie.”

“You told me you put them up,” I said pathetically.

“I hid them under the carpet in the office. In the back, near the arrow lamp.”

“Why?”

“Fliers never work. Let me see the picture.”

I handed her the developing image, and she silently watched herself emerge from the depths.

“See.” She held it up. It looked like all of the others. “This is an amazing picture.”

Winnie was our cat who, after eight years of quality, consistent love, disappeared one afternoon after walking into the woods. When I got home, I lifted the carpet in the office and there, underneath, covered in dust, was Winnie looking back at me. Later that night, Anne’s lungs began to fill with liquid. By the time I returned they had moved her back to the ICU.

She said, “What if I don’t make it?”

“You’ll make it.”

“You always look down when you lie.”

“I’m not lying.”

I looked down.

“Where’s Kaz been?”

Her breath gurgled in her chest. I put my head in my hands and listened to her gurgle. I just let her gurgle and gurgle and gurgle.

“OK,” she finally said and picked up the camera.

“I don’t want to take this picture.”

“Please.”

It was like she was rushing, afraid she wouldn’t have another chance. She put the camera to her eye.

She said, “Tell me what you know.”

“This isn’t my secret.”

She continued to look at me through the camera.

“I know about you and Kaz,” I said.

The film whirred out the front of the machine as the flash died.

Anne lifted her twig of an arm to the camera and plucked the developing fruit.

Silence filled the room dangerously, like water rising quickly. If she didn’t say anything else before nine, I was leaving.

Her parents still lived in town. I wasn’t the only one who had been visiting, been waiting for her to awaken. She had a sister in Raleigh. There were people who had known her longer than I, the woman out of whose womb she had wriggled cold and viscous and crying.

I wondered if, when she had had the baby, if it would have looked
Japanese. There was no sustainable lie in that equation. Their affair was timed for destruction.

I stood at the window and watched a storm cloud darken the horizon, so solid and heavy it looked like a mountain range had suddenly risen out of Burlington. A man in a brown suit pushed an elderly woman across the parking lot in a wheelchair, maneuvering around a boy skateboarding, the clacking of his board against the pavement like a brash announcement of youth floating up and through the window pane. A petite young nurse sat atop a low brick retaining wall grown over with kudzu and smoked a cigarette.

Someone entered the room behind me and punched several buttons on a machine before leaving, the electronic beeps punctuating the silence like an ice pick through a lampshade.

“If you don’t have anything else to say then I’m going to leave,” I said.

I turned. The bag was open on Anne’s chest, dozens of Polaroid Annes spread across her turquoise torso, sleeping and frozen and small. And then, in one rectangle near her left hand, I recognized myself. It was the photo she had just taken. I was just as pale, bloated, and bald as I had been in the bathroom mirror. But there was an electricity and thrill in my eyes. I saw Anne’s coveted moment of truth. I looked more alive than I had in months.

Nine
.

THERE WERE DAYS
I had imagined I wouldn’t speak to Anne once she awoke. There were nights when I dreamt we would make love in the hospital bed. Mostly I envisioned scenes of groveling and tears. Moments of profound understanding of the pain she had caused. But at no point had I thought she would be the one who wouldn’t apologize. Things happened for a reason, I suppose, and Anne wasn’t one to deny the cause or the effect. Watching her will her body back to the world of the living, I knew that my pain wasn’t the only pain in the room. I should have been groveling too. She was in that bed because of me. Because I couldn’t attach a simple brake pedal. But I could see how her physical pain might heal. There were machines and doctors and pills. The cure to my injury started on her tongue, and she wasn’t speaking. I was jealous of my insult, possessive of my ache.

The next morning I called her mother. I had not slept or eaten and knew that I sounded like a crazy person. I said, “Your daughter had an affair before the accident, and I tried to talk to her about it, but she won’t.”

Her mother was a registered nurse who had not worked in more than a decade. She was sweet and enjoyed her obese cats and her very clean house and her large collection of modern art, and she had always been lovely to me and appreciative of the fact that I had married her daughter.

“I know,” she said.

I sighed. It was a cliché. Everyone but I had known.

She said, “She’s not a good communicator.”

“I,” I said. “I can’t do this. I can’t keep going there every day. Not now. I’m sorry.”

I finally fell asleep on the couch, but after twenty-five minutes the phone rang, and I jerked awake on the couch. Drool wet my cheek. Before I picked up the phone, I spoke into the empty room. I said, “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.” I wanted to clear the sleep out of my throat before I finally said the word to another human. Then I picked up the phone and said it again. “Hello.”

It was Anne’s father. He was the museum director, but he seemed to come more from the business world than the art one. He was a short man with a shock of thick, bristly black hair. All of his coworkers were women, and I had wondered if that made him harder or softer. I could never decide which. I felt like he knew I had just practiced my greeting, that he could hear the deception.

He said, “I understand there’re some complications here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not enough reason to end a marriage.”

“It’s not that.”

“Looks that way to me.”

I wiped at my cheek and let a moment of silence play out on the phone line. The sun had angled through a gap in the limbs and lit the room with an intensity that appeared only a few minutes each day, a revelation of dust and shadow and color. I had to squint inside of my own living room.

“She’s going to have to move in with us. Diane will take care of her, I suppose.”