Still Life with Plums (13 page)

She pushes out of her chair and makes her way forward still clutching her margarita, ready to allay the students’ fears and pull order out of chaos. It all comes so naturally to Beth, Natalie thinks. This mothering, this taking care of minor conference nuisances: misplaced manuscripts, forgotten medications, lost cell phones, dietary restrictions.

A clump of conferees enter, Peggy-of-the-plums among them. All women, mostly middle-aged and older, some arm-in-arm. They take the last empty booth directly across from Natalie, on the other side of the dance floor. She watches them scoot across the vinyl bench, their shorts and skirts sliding up their dimpled thighs, hints of white underwear flashing. They don’t appear to mind as they snuggle together shoulder to shoulder so that everyone can fit.

Very bonobo
, Natalie thinks, recalling the last bit she read about the chimps who often exhibit selfless tendencies. They are a matriarchal society. All that lesbian sex bonds them together as a unified front. The males are less aggressive with each other or outsiders under this gynocentric hierarchy, preferring the good sex they can find at home to senseless war. They are also more tolerant of the children, just like James, who was not only tolerant but absolutely smitten with their son. Totally gaga. Natalie doesn’t know which one of them was more demolished when they discovered there would be no more children.

The microphone sputters and whines as Beth grips it by the neck and practically swallows the head. “To all who are about to die, we salute you!”

“Hear, hear,” one of the bonobo women answers.

Beth starts to make her way back to the table but she’s yanked off course by one of the wait people. Another fire to douse.

A buxom girl takes the microphone and says her name is Babette.
She starts reading too loudly, hands gesticulating wildly, a 1950s floor show with red lipstick, big side-swept hair, oversized jewelry and erupting cleavage.
A man’s woman
, Natalie thinks, the appraisal confirmed when she scours the room and watches the older men at the faculty booth unpeel Babs with their eyes. They don’t hear a word of her story and neither does Natalie.

Brad is next and his reading is surprisingly timid after all that chest-puffing. Natalie can barely hear him, nor can anyone else, especially now that the faculty are engaged in their own conversation which increases steadily in volume. Beth laughs from a distant corner, having been sidetracked by a cute bartender. Natalie watches Beth’s mouth, the lusty way she guzzles her drink. She keeps looking over at Natalie and holding up a finger as if to say:
I’ll be there in a minute! Just a minute!

Take your time
, Natalie mouths back, relieved, because she genuinely wants to hear the students though with each brave soul the audience becomes less attentive. Except for the bonobo women who try to shush the unruly rabble so they can better hear the youngsters taking the stage, one after another, like so many grandchildren reciting memory verses:
I think that I shall never see…
But the rest of the mob has their own urgent ramblings to spill, whole dictionaries worth. Natalie’s eyes bounce from booth to table, all those yammering jaws pouring out words that nobody hears. Like her mother back home, who desperately needs for someone to just pull up a chair and acknowledge her stories that have been gestating for such a very long time.

Eventually Hannah Pasqual makes her way toward the mic and Natalie wants to take in every syllable, every pregnant pause. The din is too loud so she tries to read Hannah’s lips, such a little girl mouth. And then the words don’t matter because her hand grips the microphone and it is surprisingly small, such tiny fingers. Hannah tries to raise her voice to compete, but she can’t, so she stops talking and
looks over at the oblivious faculty. The bonobo follow her gaze and bare their teeth. “Will you all be quiet?” Peggy shouts to no avail. And then Natalie realizes that the faculty are glaring at her, talking behind their hands, eyes on fire as they no doubt wonder if, after all this time, she has anything important left to say.

Natalie looks at Hannah casting her pearls. Genuine, beautiful, significant pearls scattering on the floor like pebbles that nobody wants. Hannah reads on but her arms begin fluttering like bird wings preparing for flight. She steals peeks of the faculty sharpening their knives, and Bev at the bar too busy flirting with the bartender.

A tap on the widow and Natalie knows who it is, a cluster of shadowy figures calling to her:
It’s time
.

“Listen,” Natalie says.

A few heads pivot her way, but the noise doesn’t subside.

“Listen!” she says more boldly.

Hannah looks at her with that little girl mouth, her trembling almond-nailed fingers, knees beginning to buckle, one hand curled as if she’s clutching a plum too tightly, bruising its tender flesh.

Without forethought Natalie stands and marches forward, nudging tables and chairs as she makes her way onto the dance floor. Hannah’s eyes widen as Natalie approaches, knocks the microphone completely over, and grips her in a bear hug so tight it’s as if Natalie is hugging herself, and maybe she is. Hannah squirms at first, then her rigid body relaxes, a sigh slips from her mouth as if it’s been bottled up since birth. Natalie wants to whisper something into the girl’s ear, some important gift, but even now, especially now, there are no words, so she does the only thing that feels right, she presses her lips against Hannah’s and holds them there, just holds them there firmly, a kiss Hannah accepts without resistance for two seconds, three, as all sound dies away and they stand there bathed in such delicious quiet after so much noise.

All eyes are on them, Beth’s too, though her mouth is agape. But Natalie doesn’t care because she can hear the breeze slipping through the window, seeking her out, twining its airy tendrils around her arms and legs, lifting her up to whisk through the open window and out into the sky. Down below the Saguaro are frolicking, banging and bumping, not a soldier among them, spilling their milky seed across the desert floor and who knows what will take root, a twenty-acre peach orchard, perhaps, where Natalie’s son can rest in the shade. She floats above it all, but something begins to weigh her down, her satchel strapped across her shoulder, dangling toward earth. She reaches in to lighten her burden so she can really take flight and pulls out her own seeds to scatter: lemons and plums; To-Do lists and diamonds; a tangle of knotted-up letters: f-l-u-k-e; her mother’s voice—finally free; and pages from a novel Natalie will never finish which scatter like paper birds in the wind.

There are 732 floor tiles in this corridor—at least from the elevator to the VISITORS NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT sign. 12 light switches. 28 doorknobs. 3 NO SMOKING signs. 7 moonrise-over-the-ocean framed prints. And 13 visitors’ chairs (mauve and blue plaid) including mine. It is 26 steps from the elevator to Chrissy’s door. Of course, I wear a 13 work boot and have a long stride. I don’t know how many steps from inside the door to Chrissy. It’s 527 days since I’ve been in there and I wasn’t counting when I was.

And I wasn’t always counting.

The first month I just watched. 18 hours a day. From this chair.

Douglas the Thursday Floor Waxer is minimally retarded. He asked me to teach him how to flirt with the respiratory therapist who wears rose scrubs and a turquoise crucifix in her left ear. I told him to do something nice for her. Now he polishes an extra shiny path from the R.T. doorway to the cafeteria, one of her favorite routes.

The Vending Machine Refiller says, “Ed, the reason the mini-donuts are always the first to go is because they’re the biggest package for the money.” I say it is because people like the third knob from the left. It’s a comfortable knob. Well-worn. People need small comforts here. He says, “People need vending nourishment to sustain them through these ordeals.” I say they need motion. Body movements. Insert. Pull. Unwrap. Eat. Makes them feel like they’re adding something to the cause. Sending out healthy sparks that just might make it down the hall, under the door, and into the tube of their Somebody Special.

I think it’s a built-in function of humans to count. Money. Scores. Faults. Heartbeats. Heartbeats are all Chrissy’s got now. I’m counting everything else. I’m hoping someday I’ll hit the right number and a jackpot of forgiveness will spill out all over me.

Christine Salir was an attorney with Wade, Brock, and Rowe. She drove a cherry red Impulse and carried an ostrich-skin briefcase. Her town house was on Seawall Boulevard. I walk by there on Sundays on my way to the pier. Nice. Red brick and wrought iron. Two men live there now. In the mornings they wear kimonos and drink coffee out of tiny china cups. They also read
The Galveston News
if I don’t get there first.

I like to go down to the water early and listen to lapping. Lapping is the only thing I don’t count. Sometimes I bring Douglas the Thursday Floor Waxer with me. He is learning to fish. He wants to catch a big one for his R.T.

It is 1.2 miles from my trailer to St. Stephen’s. 2.3 from the pier. Dr. Castinoli insisted I come 1 less day. He said, “I don’t think it’s healthy, all this counting.” So now I’m down to 6 days with Chrissy.
But I’m not the only one down. Mr. Salir is down to Saturdays. I don’t know about Mrs. Salir. I think she’s down to nothing.

Mr. Salir takes 32 steps to get to Chrissy’s room. It used to be 18. 23. 27. Now it’s 32. If he remembers, he won’t look at me when he passes. But sometimes he forgets and nods a glazed stare. I remember 1 time when his eyes were grateful and he pumped my hands and cried. Then Dr. Castinoli called him into a corner to talk in whispers and he cried some more but was no longer grateful.

47 minutes is Mr. Salir’s average visit with Chrissy. I try to imagine what goes on in that sterilized cell. It is very difficult. I’m not sure what she looks like now. I know their faces change. He will smooth her hair and talk in a quiet voice. A daddy’s voice to a 38-year-old woman. She will lay fetal and suck her tongue. He will unpack and pack the blue duffel he always carries. Underclothes and nightgowns. What else could it be? And then he takes his 32 steps away from her. 3 minutes down the elevator if it stops on all floors.

Every third Wednesday comes Dwayne. He circles me like I circle Chrissy. Dwayne and I were paramedics together. We logged 792 runs. Mostly car wrecks. Chrissy’s was the last—for me, at least. He used to say, “You did what you thought was right, Ed.” Now he just says, “When you coming back?” We both know the answer, but he’s a good friend to keep up the pretense.

Sometimes I ask the nurses about Chrissy. I don’t know why, because they always answer: The same. Chrissy has been here 530 days and she is still: The same. She will never be anything other than: The same.

I can count 13 blocks to the pier from this hospital window. It’s 8 stories up. The east wing. A nice view. I can also watch flashing ambulances
nudge their way through blacktopped maze. I remember that pacing depression Dwayne and I used to get when we hadn’t had a run for awhile. Then the adrenaline-pumping, temple-throbbing, better-than-coke rush when we were on our way. Sirens spinning. Alive or dead. God is here. And then the heavy sleep of exhaustion.

Sally has sent me 17 letters—the last 3 postmarked Albuquerque. Sally is my ex-wife. 12 months ago she said she was tired of me counting everything but pay stubs. She then collected the savings account, address book, baby, and started running from relative to relative, state to state. She’s also sent 2 telegrams and 1 pick-me-up bouquet. I still have the rainbow vase, and somewhere in a letter S encyclopedia is a dried white daisy. S for Salir, not Sally.

Chrissy has 1 sister, Janine. Janine is 31 and the only Salir who will talk to me, which is when she flies in from Seattle on Christmas and the Fourth of July. “I can’t stand my parents any longer than that,” she says. We always go to the hospital atrium and sit on a wooden bench where Janine can smoke. Virginia Slims. She burns them down to the filter and lights up another right away. 4-pack-a-day habit, at least. Smoking got her fired from a waitressing job at Denny’s. Ashes in the bean soup. Then she worked in a photo hut in the parking lot of some mall. “I can smoke all day long and I get all the reprints I want.”

Last Christmas Janine brought a photo album of when Chrissy was small. She was a blue-eyed baby. Cantaloupe bald with pudgy legs. Janine can’t go into Chrissy’s hospital room either. Reprints will have to do.

Douglas the Thursday Floor Waxer lives with 7 other limited men. They all work and pay rent—things I used to do. I went home with him for supper 1 night. The house was extremely clean and they had
a Creole cook named Simone. She stirred a thick smell all through the house and some of it spilled out onto the patio where I was picking dead leaves from a Wandering Jew.

Simone was strict with those people—with me. Went around the table and made us each tell what we’d done productive that day. I said: “There were 53 red cars in the hospital parking lot today if you count all shades.”

Dr. Castinoli is becoming concerned about my numbers. “Seventeen notebooks are enough,” he says. But I say 17 notebooks, 2700 pages, 178,500 lines, 900,000 words are not enough when it’s all Chrissy’s got left. “Ed,” Dr. Castinoli says, “she’ll never see them.” This is when I start counting sprinkler heads in the ceiling. Cracks in the floor tile. Gum wads under the chair (usually pink).

When I’m not at the hospital or the pier I’m selling blood, collecting cans, bottles, metal, rubber. It’s how I pay for groceries and notebooks and pens. I have no phone, and the trailer is a freebie in exchange for the title:
24-Hour Maintenance Man
on the sign out front. The inhabitants don’t know I’m their fixit man. I act like a regular and shrug whenever there’s a problem. “Haven’t seen him,” I say.

Sally’s last letter was a plea. “The baby needs a father. Come soon,” was all it read. I filed it in the El Producto box with my father’s railroad watch and my mother’s wedding ring inscribed: “Till death.” When my parents died, they really died. 92 days apart.