Stolen Pleasures (22 page)

Over the hospital's paging system the three pranksters sent their solemnly urgent voices along the corridors and into the wards, imbuing each name with a reverential depth.

They were actors and playwrights, these three, Angela and Dan and Lew, social workers only temporary, offering their wit as a lightening agent to the dread air in this formidable row of fadedbrick buildings, grime the mortar. Out of place, this row—it belonged in another part of the country, more north, more east, under slanting rain in Seattle or slashed by cold winds in Chicago or on that penal island off New York, someplace where the weathers punish the inmates even more.

Yet here it was, in San Francisco's warmest neighborhood and only a short walk from the broad grassy slopes and flourishing trees of Dolores Park where, on Sundays in summer, their troupe, their quick-change dozen actors, set up their shaky stage and satirized
the times with their outrageous comedies, their own Commedia dell'Arte, come alive again now in the Sixties. Their high-flung voices, along with the noises they made that thumped and banged on the neighborhood doors, might even have reached the hospital's murky windows, sounding within like the mutterings inside the head of the patient in the next bed.

Dan held a master's in political science and Lew a bachelor of arts in drama, but Angela, a small-time, odd-job actress, bold on stage but not as herself, had no degree whatsoever.

“Say you do,” Dan insisted. “Give yourself an MS in sociology and a BA in psychology. Imagine you're speaking the truth. You do it all the time on stage.”

“I don't know how long I'll last,” she said.

“Nobody knows that,” said Lew. “They're all wondering the same thing in there.”

“I mean I may not last more than a couple of days.”

Angela Anson, her name in a plastic badge on her blouse, confidante without credentials, passed up and down the women's ward, telling those on her list where they'd be going, what haven with its ominously pretty name or the bed that was waiting at home, whether longed for or not.

Unlike the men's ward where, she was told, men cursed and struck the air and straggled out into the halls on their thwarted way home, this women's ward was a quiet one. Three long rows of beds, one row along each long wall and one row along the back and, on overcrowded days, another row down the center. Narrow beds with rails that went up and down, white sheets sliding on rods for each woman's very own curtains when the doctors came by.
Earthquake-prone, each morning the women's ward appeared to have undergone a quake in the night. The row of beds down the center gone, or the back row gone, and the shocked atmosphere like that after a quake.
What's happening here?
The question on each face upon a pillow. A quake of the mind, a quake of the heart.

Dr. Curie
. . . Dan's good morning to Angela.

“Bad dreams at night,” she'd told him. “My mother berating me for what? It must be because I never knew enough about her. She may have wanted to unfold herself for me and never could. Their lives must be unfolding before their eyes, in there, and they're unfolding mine. They're unfolding me. Do you know what I mean?”

Dan said he sort of knew. So she was...
Dr. Curie . . .
discoverer of so much that was undetectable and that might not even exist.

Her step, always a light step, was even lighter here, a step for museums and churches, sanctified places that always made her feel unworthy.
The county hospital is not a holy place, Dan said, and you were not hired for the role of St. Teresa of Avila. She kissed the lepers' lesions and that's not in your line of duty.
Her step was light for another reason. She wished to disappear from this unfolding scene as the women did, overnight, two, three, or an entire row at a time, gone to places called home or gone for reasons unknown to her, and as the interns also disappeared and were replaced by lookalikes.

The illustrious doctors, long dead or never alive, whom Dan and Lew were calling for, seemed more solidly in person than these young interns who stepped from bed to narrow bed, graceless, at a loss, not yet adept in the presence of women in their beds, maybe any woman in any bed, anywhere. Dan called these interns by their
first names, drank coffee with them, gave them his dissident view of Vietnam, and, more often than not, he was the one calling for the imaginary doctors, convinced they'd be around long after the real ones, the sleep-deprived, baffled fledglings, were gone a thousand times over.

An Audience of One who never blinked. They had to imagine that God was watching, or that's what Angela had to imagine for them, these women in this pale ward, so they'd not be overlooked. So many persons in rows—it was a common enough sight across the world in Vietnam, on the television screens that seemed invented for just that repetition of wars and disasters that laid people out in rows. Over the other scenes there was always a terrible struggle in the air, but in this women's ward there was a yielding to whoever was watching over them and to the medication that must seem like a persuasive stranger entering their most intimate being for their own good. What an unbearably rude intrusion, then—Angela appearing at bedside to tell them where they'd be going next.

“Where?”

This one, this woman, fifty, pink-champagne hair, must have run away from home at nine and kept on running away. The nights of her life on a barstool till 2:00 am and the last hours of the morning with a newfound friend, down in the dubious comfort of his bed. A chic hat and a string of pearls and a job, all that to begin, and then the nylons bagging at the knees and ankles and the high heels bending inward.

“Where?”

“Laguna Honda.” And Angela saw this woman's face draw up from her frightened heart a small girl's look of daring to flee.

Laguna Honda. Like a monastery, like a huge echoing nunnery on a hill, it belonged in Spain in the Middle Ages. With a tower, and within the tower a dimlit archway, the only light above the thick black trees whenever Angela drove past at night. She drove fast around the curve to escape her imagining of pale faces floating on deep black waters.

“You can't do that. My daughter won't let you.”

Every day this mother promised the appearance of the daughter, but the daughter wasn't showing up yet. Wasn't it glib to say that the daughter was abandoning the mother because the mother had abandoned the child? A child belongs to the world—that was Angela's explanation. But if this woman was
her
mother she'd come and stand at this bedside just as she was doing now and just as she'd appeared by her mother's bed in another ward in another city.
Your heart sinks down with your mother's, Angela said to the daughter who wasn't there. Your heart sinks down and leaves your breast and may never come back. But when you're out in the street again it comes racing back, bursting with grief.

Angela said, “My supervisor is still hoping a bed will turn up somewhere else.” Oh, God, did she say
turn up
? There was no way of saying it to ease the fear of the next bed. “More where you'd like.”

“No bed in this goddamn world is where I'd like.”

Later that day Angela caught sight of her in a curtained-off section, her face shocked by what her limbs were doing without her consent, trying to run away with her as she'd run away before, over and over.
Withdrawal from alcohol, Lew explained. It never leaves the body without a terrible lovers' quarrel.

At her back now, the woman to whom she listened evasively sideways, head bowed, unable to come face to face.

“I beg you.”

Nod, Angela, nod, and listen with one ear.

“I beg you, please ask the doctor to let me go home.”

That voice, a trembling thread trying to get itself through the eye of a needle. Angela had heard it before, years ago.

“I'll ask again.”

That arrogant doctor, that one with the impatiently jiggling knee, the disposing gaze—he was the one Angela had asked. Why had she picked him? To humanize him, when she ought to turn her full gaze upon this pleading woman and humanize herself.

She did. She looked into the woman's eyes and came face to face with her own Aunt Ida. That's who this woman was, after twenty years, up from that bed in the Home for those who were never to leave. Way back on the stage of her childhood, there was Aunt Ida in bed, white hair boy's cut, the thinnest wrists, the scarcest voice, the largest, darkest eyes, and there was Angela's mother in the visitor's chair, smartly clad even though the cloche hat and Cuban heels were already ten years worn, and there was Angela, five years old, plaid skirt, black patent-leather pumps, born entertainer, reciting the tale of that terrible battle between Ivan Skvinsky Skzar and Abdul Abulbul Amir, the threats, the oaths, the blows. There was little Angela at bedside, unable to believe what her mother had told her, that Ida had been the most beautiful of the five sisters, and here was Angela now, unable to believe that this woman at her elbow had ever been other than who she was now, had ever been young, a girl, twelve, sixteen, eighteen, in that flowering time.

From her very first hours in the ward she had tried to picture them when they were young, wanting to come to their rescue by reviving them as girls again.
Oh, such lovely girls!
Wanting to do for them what she hadn't done for her Aunt Ida.

“I try to imagine them when they were girls, but I can't,” she told the head nurse, Nancy, and the nurse, already verging into that same anonymity of aging, turned her head for Angela to see her deliberately uncomprehending face. “Why would you ever think to do that anyway?”

Dr. Mabuse . . .
Dan's voice,

Dr. Mabuse,
that decadent doctor, dispenser of opium, was calling her to join him for a coffee break in the cafeteria.

“Were you ever in Père Lachaise cemetery?” she asked him.

“You mean have I risen?”

Dan, so healthy, his cheeks childishly rosy, his hair darkly shiny, the kindest heart, the hardest head, wrote a crackling political column for an underground weekly.

“My year in Paris, my Marceau mime time, I wandered around in there,” she said.

“Gravely there?”

“Colette's monument resembles a bed.”

“Nights, does she romp around on it?”

“Afternoons, too,” she said. “Maybe beds are where women belong. Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else's, whether it's night or day, whether they want to be or not. That's where the blame lies for some infamous messes. Take that bed of Hamlet's mother, for example, or Desdemona's, because that's where Iago saw her in his fired-up imagination, a
high-born slut, sleeping with a blackamoor. I could go on and on. You persuaded me to ask for a job in this place and now you can listen to the consequences. Now I see women as inseparable from their beds.”

“Bedded down in eternity?”

“Could you see that goes on my tombstone? On second thought, I don't want a stone over me. I never want to be confined. So just wrap me in my cloth coat, forget the ermine, and leave me out on some high mountain.”

Overnight, a girl lying in the narrow bed made narrower just by youth's full size and restlessness. Dark, tumbled curls, a broad face, paled and alarmed by the pumping out of that handful of pills from where they'd settled in for a long night. Off to the psych ward at the end of the day, she was no concern of Angela's.

“Please, Miss,” as Angela walked by. “I'm not allowed to go to the lavatory and the nurse won't come.”

Angela handed up the bedpan, defying whatever rule there might be that forbade a social worker this act of mercy. Struggling out from under the covers, the girl sat awkwardly down on the pan, atop the bed, large, long legs bared and bent.

“Lie down, lie down,” Angela urged. “You do it lying down. Under the covers.” And the girl went awkwardly under, probably awkward at all of life's necessary acts, suicide among them.

Angela put the bedpan under the bed and stayed on, wanting to ask outright:
Why did you want to die?
Knowing there was no answer that could be brought to the surface by a stranger at bedside or even by a social worker with honest credentials who'd ask the same
question in cleverly curative ways. Angela Anson had had no simple answer, either, and wasn't asked, because nobody knew about her attempt. A skinny sixteen, awkward at everything and even at how to hope, she was saved by that very awkwardness, and she wanted to say to this girl:
After that bungled act I left my awkwardness behind, and now I remember it sort of fondly, like I would a crazy childhood girlfriend.