Stolen Pleasures (23 page)

Dr. Freud . . .
Lew telling Angela that the hour was near for a visit to the psychiatric ward. She'd asked him about it. Could she peek in for a minute to see where that girl was going?

Somewhere in another of the grim buildings she slipped into the entry of that ward. The very small entry, the only place allowed her, had space enough for the Judge, a large, high-chested fellow in a finely tailored suit, the three men in gray-drab, depleted by fear of their own minds' doings and trying not to slump, and barely enough for herself.

The Judge's voice was cleaving its way through the soiled air, asking legalese questions and informing each of his destination, which asylum, what refuge. Like a scene in any number of plays, where an assassin or a priest comes to tell the prisoner what his future looks like, this was a scene in a debtors' prison for those who couldn't pay back all that civilizing invested in them. She'd been in even closer proximity to this Judge. A wedding reception at the Stanford Court Hotel atop Nob Hill, where she'd carried trays loaded with prawns and oysters up to that buttoned-up belly.

Over in a few minutes, this orderly dispersal of the deranged. The Judge left and she followed at a discreet distance, noting his brisk sort of shuffle, a slight uncertainty of step that came from
sitting in judgment for so many years. If she were ever to play a high-court judge on the stage in the park, she'd stuff a bed pillow vertically down her front and take those small steps, the uncertainty in the head repressed all the way down to the feet.

Only an illusion, that this woman was a dwarf. Recovered now, she was going home this hour, and all Angela had to do was walk along beside her in that enforced wheelchair ride to the exit and beside the slouchy orderly doing the pushing. Angela thought
dwarf
because of her theatrical tendency to recognize types from bygone centuries, and dwarfs seemed of a time of mass deprivation. This woman in the wheelchair, her gray hair stubble-cut, was deprived. A cleaning woman, she'd fainted on the job—pneumonia—and they'd had to bring her son along since there was no one else to take care of him while his mother was away. So many hiding places in the city, you never could know what went on in them until someone was brought out and then maybe went back in again.

Hop-skipping down the corridor toward them, impeding their progress, a young doctor, an intense one, hair askew.

“Let me see your hands.”

Angela's hands began to rise, palms forward. Was there some new scan that doctors had, a scientific palmistry for detecting liars and impostors and actors?

The young hyperactive doctor was bending toward the woman in the wheelchair, whose hands lay humbly in her lap, blunt hands, curved to the shape of mop handles, vacuum cleaner handles. She uncurled them under his scrutiny.

“Can you tell me,” he asked, “why your son has six fingers?”

The woman's eyes were shifting along at floor level.

“My mother cursed us.”

“Who?” Wobbling off his track.

“They cursed us.”

Dazedly stepping aside, the young doctor allowed them to proceed down the corridor, the orderly pushing, Angela guiding.

At the side portal they waited for the son to be brought from the adjacent building and for another social worker who was to convey mother and son back to their rooms. Out from the other building and down the path, the son was being swiftly borne toward his mother, the orderly mockingly happy to be pushing the wheelchair of this mute density of a man with two fingers too many. A rough spot on the pavement and off he flies, this son, onto the lawn where he lies docile, waiting to be lifted.

Lew, responding to her call, showed up in the women's ward and escorted her out into the air, around a corner where she'd never been. Lew, whose long face knew everything before it was told him, listened to her anyway.

“Doctors don't know what they're getting into when they get to be doctors,” she told him. “How could
she
know why her son's got that extra little finger alongside his proper one? One finger too many, or two too many, it's just a clue to what goes on in the dark where your life gets twisted into the weirdest shape before you're even born. Suppose he came into the women's ward and asked them why they're in there. They'd say, like, Oh, sure, Doctor, my old man beat me up, or my lung collapsed, or I was hit by a trolley.
They'd see he was simpleminded and they'd answer him like that, because how can you say to a doctor, My karma hurts me?”

“Lower your voice.”

“I don't care who hears.”

“Never take a deep breath in there,” he cautioned. “Take it every morning before you go in. You've lasted how many days? Six already? But be warned.”

 

LOWER YOUR VOICE, take no deep breaths, step softly, and you'll be fine. When she caught the old Gypsy woman watching her, Angela flashed an impersonal smile as proof that she knew what she was doing in that ward. The Gypsy woman was sitting up in bed after three days under covers and her own matriarchal bed was awaiting her return. A Gypsy queen, ninety-six years old. Over her bony face a blending of gold leaf and copper, her sea-green eyes sunken under mole-brown lids. Around her head a kerchief, blue and red. No resemblance to the Gypsies who went up and down the train in Spain, the tiny mother and her daughter who might have been sixteen or six, begging their way. This one must have eaten very well, this one must have wrung the necks of hundreds of fat chickens and pulled out big handfuls of feathers. Fear wasn't her bedmate here, Faith was and probably had always been, keeping her heart beating for so long. Shrewdly, she was gazing at Angela as at someone who could be ensnared by flattery. After a while she beckoned.

“Give me your hand.”

On your way back into life, do you fit yourself into who you were always expected to be, for a safe return? The very thin, limp hand, covered with brown patches like islands on an old sepia
chart, turned over Angela's hand, and Angela's palm lay open to the future like a part of herself that hadn't been attended to as it ought to have been, considering its potential.

“A long life.”

That index finger, its knuckle like an ancient tarnished coin, traced a line so slowly it seemed a very long way, pausing where that high road was joined or crossed by low roads, by roads not taken, and by roads down which hitchhikers came to thumb a ride. Not until she'd stepped into this ward had she begun to trouble herself over the span of her life, and now she was being told what she didn't want to know after all.

“You are a wayward girl?”

Wayward? That word wasn't around anymore. It belonged to old-time bawdy music hall skits. If she was wayward, it must be evident enough without her palm revealing it. Unlike the nurses, so trim, so starched and white, combed and capped, Angela was artfully indifferent, her dark hair untamable, her fingernails clean but their polish chipped, her blouse clean and ironed but with one button sewn back on with an unmatching thread, black kohl all around her eyes, a cheap ring from Chinatown on one finger and an even cheaper ring from a street fair on a little finger. Anyone could spot her for a working hippie, a counterculture actress, a wayward girl.

“I'm an actress,” smiling like one.

Mockery now in the glintless eyes. Was mockery, too, a liferenewing pleasure? “Actresses like jewels? Yes? Yes, I know, yes. Tomorrow my children will bring my jewels for you.” The mockery grasping back that gift of a long life, the giving and the taking away all in one breath.

Under the covers again the next morning, the Gypsy woman was identified only by the colored kerchief. Out of the corner of her eye Angela saw this flattening down and felt some shameful relief from that gaze. Kept most of the day at her desk in the row of social workers' cubicles, she did not come up to the ward until late afternoon.

Oh, God, what a handsome lot they were, that woman's children. Or grandchildren. Seven of them, gathered at the bed. Visitors—friends, pastors, relatives, nuns—came around in the evening hours, but here was this Gypsy family in the afternoon. Unreal, their garments biblically splendid as that coat of many colors, and all with golden skin. They were her children of whatever generation, and all to live as long as the mother.

The bed was empty.

“Candles. Can you bring candles?” a daughter asked, and a son said, “Please. Candles,” a singer's sorrowing voice.

Candles? She went in search. None in the nurses' station. No candles in the desk of the social worker on vacation, now known as Angela's desk. Drawers she hadn't opened before held only a coffee mug, a quicky-glance mirror, breath sweeteners, postcards, and in the larger, bottom drawer, a pair of high-heeled pumps to wear on dinner dates. Only two of the bona fide social workers were still at their desks, and they shook their heads. No candles, and they asked no reason for candles. Maybe the lights had gone out in the lavatory.

A cubbyhole grocery store was near, a few minutes' walk away. No candles there. Sold out. Candles were a necessity in every friend's apartment. Round as oranges, long as tapers, and ordinary ones, the soft light of the flame intensifying the marijuana mood.

When she returned, empty-handed, the archangelic children were gone.

 

NIGHT IN HER own bed, the bed she was sure to remember as the one in this period of her life, lying beside her lover whose bed it was, too, she wondered if those women ever wondered about her, about where her bed was and whether she shared it and with whom. If wonder and curiosity were signs of life, she'd give them a boost back into life by telling them some things about herself while waiting for sleep.

Listen, my dear alones, over there across the city. Do you remember how each time you lay yourself down in a bed you wondered, if even for a moment, what you were doing there? And what about the beds you thought you'd chosen yourself? Do they now seem chosen for you? Destiny's hand patting them down.
Lie here, lie here.
God must surely have created beds for sharing, for most of mine were shared, and see the ways you've shared yours, given your children to hold dearly close and given your mates and your lovers. And maybe that's why a bed of solitude is so sweet, so sweet, if it's only for a while and not forever. And even if it's forever, I don't know that yet. Tonight I'm lying beside a man, a friend, who is as much in need as myself of a friend to lie down with, make love with, share the rent with, share soup with, break bread with, and lie down with again. Over against the wall, his side, is a large orange acrylic nude, because he's an art student and large nudes promise largeness of future and fortune, as always. This bed, if you want to know, is sprinkled with those tiny pellets of lint that never get to form in your beds, and it's in a very small concrete apartment,
a basement apartment that's next to the boiler room, if a boiler is that monster hot water tank that supplies steamy hot water to the tenants on the six floors above, and through the night that tank heats up all of a sudden, over and over, with a rush and a roar, scaring me out from under my camouflage of sleep and unheard by my bedmate. I remember that first bed ever where I lay beside a lover. It was a bed I didn't know was there, it was just a wall in a darkened apartment, and out it came and down, like a meaning unfolding in that time when so many meanings were unfolding and I was just fourteen. Oh, then there was the bed in that home for unwed mothers, the Crittenden it was called, a name like a chastising ruler, but really a kind place, a big brick building as ancient as Laguna Honda and the place where you are tonight. A man comes to sit by his mother's bed every afternoon. Have you noticed him? Fifty, but resembles a fawn, wears a suit, a tie, places his hat on his knees. A gentle man, a fine son, and the head nurse Nancy is in love with him. I won't be mortally wounded when the son I gave life to sits someday by the bed of a mother who's not me. Old mothers in their beds all look the same. Some night, some day, there'll be Angela Anson herself in your row, and what will I say to soften the heart of the social worker who I'll dislike at first sight? Why, I'll say I was an actress with a flair for comedy, even called delightful in the theater section of the Sunday papers, even called delectable, and I'll know as I tell her, if I tell her, that she won't believe a word of it. I'll say I'd thought an actress had a special kind of destiny, a beneficent role to play, bringing to life a lot of other women. Maybe, to amuse her, I'll tell her about the pranks we played, Dan and Lew and
myself, calling for those doctors who were so real for us and unreal for everybody else. And if she's not amused, I'll tell her, whether it's true or not, that Dan became a high-class political columnist, syndicated, and Lew a drama professor at a prestigious university, but I won't tell her that all my stages were small ones, if that's true for me. I'll say all that, hoping in my heart, my frightened heart, that I've persuaded her not to drop me off into that black lagoon. Oh, my dears, have you ever heard these lines?
I in my bed of thistles, you in your bed of roses and feathers.
I thought it meant the other woman's bed,
her
bed of roses and feathers, where the lover I'd loved so much was lying, but now I know it means so much more and I'll tell you why. Just remember the beds where you wished you weren't and the beds where you wished you were, and then name any spot on this earth that's a bed for some woman this very hour. A bed of stones and a bed of earth trampled by soldiers and a bed of ashes, and where you're lying now, where you never wanted to imagine yourselves. If I'd wished for a bed of roses and feathers, and
I did, I did,
now I don't want it so much anymore.