Losing It (17 page)

And Sienna Chu was here then left, probably for good.

Bob’s eyes hurt, even closed. His back was stiff and his knee throbbed from the debacle in the airplane yesterday. His head felt leaden. He pulled himself closer to the clock so he could read the numbers: 10:18. The morning sessions had started at nine. He’d meant to call Sienna. He remembered having had the thought and also having not moved a muscle. He sat up, reached, and opened the heavy hotel drapes a fraction then
turned away from the glaring sunshine. “Awful,” he said as he got up, limped to the bathroom. His back felt like concrete. The rubber vagina was twisted on the bathroom floor like a dead rodent. He gingerly stepped over it and into the tub. He stared for a moment at the unfamiliar faucet control. It was a single round pull-knob with no apparent markings for hot and cold.

He stepped out of the tub then pulled the knob and let the water run. There should have been a lever or something to switch the water to the shower but Bob couldn’t find it. He also couldn’t find the plug for the bathtub. The one lever that was there didn’t seem to do anything. Finally, Bob stuffed a washcloth down the drain and let the tub fill up with water, then eased himself in.

I need to call Sienna, he thought. I need to tell her … what? To explain to her that he’d been sick, a bit of food poisoning. Everything was all right. Marvellous, in fact. She had come to him. It was a miracle.

Slowly, the tub filled. The hot water soothed his aching parts.

The phone rang.

He was out of the bath in an instant, grabbed a towel, ran into the other room. He let two more rings go by as he stood at the phone, dripping, trying to compose himself. “Hello?” he said finally.

It was Julia. “Oh, Bob! You are there,” she said. “I thought I’d be too late. I slept in badly. I miss you so much!”

“Oh, honey,” he said. “I miss you so much too. You wouldn’t believe -”

“I had the most amazing dream,” she blurted. “It was so powerful. It was about my mother. We were at the lake. Have you got a few minutes?” And she told him all about it, a
garbled tale of her mother in a papyrus boat being unable to bring it to dock because of the slightest of winds. So Lenore had dived in to pull the boat along, and Julia – who was only a little girl in the dream – watched while her mother’s friends played bridge in stuffy clothes, and wouldn’t look up when Julia ran to them to tell them her mother wasn’t surfacing. Then in the morning, Julia’s father had come down for his swim, had started yelling, so Julia dove in, and there was her mother, just a few feet from the surface, reaching up, with a little chain dangling from one ankle.

“It shouldn’t have been enough to hold her down,” Julia said. “It was horrible.”

And while she was talking, Bob was reminded of the thousand chains holding him in place – and how wonderful they were, how lost he would be without this woman holding him to a semblance of normal life.

“What’s happened with your mother?” he asked.

“She’s all right,” Julia said, and she explained it all: her mother wandering in Hog’s Back, the ricer in the water, how she was sedated in the horrible hospital room. “There were scratch marks on the walls,” she said, “and it smelled like old urine, my God, you’d think they never cleaned the place. It would drive anybody crazy to be there. And Fallowfields is so incompetent …”

There was a sound at the door, someone fiddling with the handle then a quick knock. “Housekeeping!”

“Oh no. Excuse me, Julia,” Bob said, and draped the skimpy towel over his middle. “Please come back later!” he shouted in the direction of the door.

It opened anyway and a sturdy-looking Latin American woman poked her head in.

“Please come back later!” Bob repeated.

“Oh! Yes, sorry!” she said, and took a good look nonetheless.

Sienna was right behind her in the hallway, evaporated the thousand chains in a single glance.

“Julia, listen!” Bob said quickly into the phone, panicked and almost dropped the towel as the door closed. “My colleagues are here and I have to get going. I’ll call you, all right?”

“Oh,”
she said, an ocean of disappointment charged into one syllable.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Bob said, and had the phone halfway down before he pulled it up to his mouth again and said, “I’m so sorry about your mother. I’ll call you later!” But the line was already dead.

“Sienna!” Bob took two strides towards the closed door then turned to the dresser and threw on a pair of pants and a shirt before sticking his head out in the hallway. She wasn’t there any more. The cleaning woman was halfway into someone else’s door, her vacuum and cart behind her. Bob walked down the corridor in his bare feet, looked around the corner, saw the elevator waiting area was empty. He pressed the button to go down. He waited, and in the hall mirror he saw an unshaven, aged, hungover-looking man in shirtsleeves and pants with no shoes or socks. His hair was wet and uncombed, his face looked ghastly.

Before the elevator arrived he turned and walked back to his room. He felt a momentary surge of panic when he realized the door had closed and locked behind him. But his card key was in his pocket from yesterday. I’m lucky, he thought. Despite myself, someone is watching over me.

Bob made it to the conference hall just as people were getting out of the panel discussion on Poe as critic. He scanned the
faces emerging from the auditorium: mostly greying, time-worn men and women like himself, talking in clumps of twos and threes, conference binders clutched to their sides.

“So,” a voice said behind him, and he turned to see someone familiar, but whose name escaped him. “How is the conference treating you?” what’s-his-name asked. A very solid, pear-shaped man with drooping jowls and a shiny pink scalp.

Davis, that’s who it was. What’s-his-name Davis. Who taught at –

“I’m fine, fine!” Bob said, shaking the man’s hand. Penn State. Penn State? Or was it Arizona?

“Started to lose me, I’m afraid,” Davis said, shaking his head. “Once we get post-postmodern I have a hard time keeping up. I thought Lewis was right on, though, when he talked about our culture’s mortal fear of primordialism.”

“Gosh, it’s been a long time,” Bob said.

“It certainly has. I’m sorry I missed you yesterday,” Davis said. “I heard you got a little flummoxed by the slide machine. Are you still – where are you, anyway? You’re way up in -”

“Ottawa, yes,” Bob said. “And you’re -”

“Rice, still. Assistant head of the department, actually,” he said, and made a little noise in his throat, a trumpeting burp as if to make it sound at the same time insignificant and monumental. “I’ve published a new book, as it turns out,” Davis said, and while he explained Bob didn’t listen. He was scanning the crowd for Sienna. Minutes later he was aware of Davis still talking about his book. “I see it as a real bread-and-butter, middle-stream reassessment. You might think about it for your freshmen.”

“Yes. It sounds good,” Bob said.

“I could send you an order form,” Davis pressed.

She wasn’t anywhere. Bob saw Suddle-Smythe, but he was talking with some other woman, a tall brunette with black horn-rimmed bifocals that she kept on a neck-strap, somehow making them look elegant.

Bob relinquished his business card and clapped Davis on the shoulder as he took his leave.

“We’ll have to have you down to give a talk,” Davis said. “I heard you were working on the Eureka theories.”

“Just some preliminary thoughts,” Bob said.

He stepped among the bodies, strained to see. She would stand out in a crowd like this. Suddle-Smythe approached him and introduced the tall brunette, Elizabeth Jersey, a nineteenth-century specialist from UCLA. Bob shook her hand pleasantly and asked Suddle-Smythe straight out if he’d seen Sienna.

“She was here this morning,” Suddle-Smythe said, looking around. “That stunning undergrad,” he explained to Elizabeth. “She has a first-rate mind,” he said to Bob.

“She was here but then she left?” Bob asked.

“She can’t have gone far,” Suddle-Smythe said.

But she was nowhere to be seen. Bob waited in line at the cafeteria for lukewarm soup and plastic-wrapped crackers, and sat through a dreary meal with a stolid grey-suited man from somewhere in the Midwest who’d thoroughly researched Poe’s periodic bouts with plagiarism, and with a tiny woman in an olive-green dress and with a terribly receding chin whose father had read her “The Pit and the Pendulum” every night for a year as her bedtime story.

“He worked on an assembly line. He liked to do things over and over,” she said. “He could recite whole paragraphs feverishly. I think he would have done well in amateur theatricals. Are you looking for someone, Bob?”

“No. Yes,” Bob said, caught out, reddening slightly.

She wasn’t there in the cafeteria, and she wasn’t in the afternoon seminar on Poe’s tortured relations with his sometime-wealthy adoptive father, John Allan. Bob felt himself grow more agitated and restless as the afternoon wore on. Elizabeth Jersey approached him in the break and asked if he was all right. “You look quite pale,” she said with concern, and he did feel that way, sickly, nearly faint.

“No, no. I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just, I’m fighting something. I think it was a bit of food poisoning from the airplane yesterday.”

“Maybe you should sit down,” she said, but he insisted that he was better off on his feet for a while.

“There’s a very pretty atrium down this way,” she said, and so he went with her, along a corridor and up some stairs and then around a corner. It wasn’t a large space, but there was room for a stand of tropical trees, some marble benches, and a glimpse of now-grey sky.

“The secret police in Canada are called CSIS,” Bob said as they sat on one of the benches, which was much warmer than he expected, passively heated by the morning’s sunshine. “Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They have a beautiful new building in east Ottawa, out in the country, and they put up a very impressive central atrium around some trees that were there. But they paved around the roots, or something, and the trees died, so they glued on fake leaves. You have to get pretty close to tell. A friend of mine from political science was doing some work for CSIS and he couldn’t help himself, he jumped up and grabbed one to get a good feel.”

“These are real,” Elizabeth said, and closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in the warm air. She had very large hands, a bit bony now; they would have been elegant in her youth.
Most of her fingers and both thumbs were ringed, except for the fourth finger on her left hand. She caught him looking and said unexpectedly, “Yes, that’s right, I am newly divorced.”

“I’m sorry,” Bob said.

“Never marry an academic,” she said, smiling sharply. Her eyes were painfully bright and she held herself unusually straight.

“Your ex-husband’s a professor?” Bob asked.

“He’s a serial philanderer,” she said. “He cannot resist young skin. At one point he actually made reference to himself and Clinton. You know how Clinton claimed he was the chubby one in school, never popular with girls? And so when he got in a position of authority and attraction he couldn’t help himself.”

“I’m sorry,” Bob said uncomfortably. The air seemed much warmer suddenly, his tie too tight.

“You don’t remember me,” she said softly, and Bob was gripped with a terrible thought – did I sleep with her? It might have happened years ago, in the wild days. She must’ve been a beauty. But no, he would’ve remembered.

“Have we met?” he asked haltingly.

“It was in San Diego. You brought your wife, Julia. I got to know her better than I did you. She and I had some wonderful long chats, walking in the evening. I remember she was so nervous about her paper. What was it on? Poe’s sense of the feminine, I think.”

“Oh, yes,” Bob said, brightening, and he almost said, “She wrote that for me, I was her supervisor,” but caught himself. Instead he said, “I think I remember you.”

“She
has
something, you know,” Elizabeth said. “A real spark. Well, you know. She has so much energy and passion, she must be doing wonderful work now. Did she finish her Ph.D.? Is she teaching somewhere?”

“She’s taking a break,” Bob said, looking around to see if there might be a means of easy escape. “We have a child now, a little boy,” he explained. “And she’s completely into it, as you might expect.”

“Oh, congratulations!” Elizabeth said. A warmth flooded her eyes and seemed genuine. “You must be so proud!”

“Yes. Yes,” Bob said.

“We never had children. Burt didn’t want them, he thought they’d take up too much time, destroy our careers. Then I found out what was taking up all of his time.”

“I’m sorry,” Bob said yet again and he looked at his watch. “Probably we should -”

“I understand you’ve come to this conference with a stunning undergraduate,” Elizabeth said then, dangerously. “Can I just ask you something?”

Bob’s eyes jumped. “Uh, probably we should be heading back-”

“Just for my own edification. For my own struggle with truth,” she said. Her lips were pulled tight now and she was suddenly working hard to maintain her composure.