The Early Stories (67 page)

Abruptly the young intern left off his desultory conversation and moved to Joan's side. There was a chirp of clips. When he moved away, she was revealed holding her naked arm upright, pressing a piece of cotton against it with the other hand. Without pausing, the intern came to Richard's side, and the birdsong of clips repeated, nearer. “Look at that,” he said to his elderly friend. “I started him two minutes later than her and he's finished at the same time.”

“Was it a race?” Richard asked.

Clumsily firm, the boy fitted Richard's fingers to a pad and lifted his arm for him. “Hold it there for five minutes,” he said.

“What'll happen if I don't?”

“You'll mess up your shirt.” To the old man he said, “I had a woman in here the other day, she was all set to leave when, all of a sudden—pow!—all over the front of this beautiful linen dress. She was going to Symphony.”

“Then they try to sue the hospital for the cleaning bill,” the old man muttered.

“Why was I slower than him?” Joan asked. Her upright arm wavered, as if vexed or weakened.

“The woman generally is,” the boy told her. “Nine times out of ten, the man is faster. Their hearts are so much stronger.”

“Is that really so?”

“Sure it's so,” Richard told her. “Don't argue with medical science.”

“Woman up in Ward C,” the old man said, “they saved her life for her out of an auto accident and now I hear she's suing because they didn't find her dental plate.”

Under such patter, the five minutes eroded. Richard's upheld arm began to ache. It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a classroom where they would never be recognized, or in a charade that would never be guessed, the correct answer being Two Silver Birches in a Meadow.

“You can sit up now if you want,” the intern told them. “But don't let go of the venipuncture.”

They sat up on their beds, legs dangling heavily. Joan asked him, “Do you feel dizzy?”

“With my powerful heart? Don't be presumptuous.”

“Do you think he'll need coffee?” the intern asked her. “I'll have to send up for it now.”

The old man shifted forward in his chair, preparing to heave to his feet.

“I do
not
want any
coffee
”—Richard said it so loud he saw himself transposed, a lesser Iris, into the firmament of the old man's aggrieved gossip.
Some dizzy bastard down in the blood room, I get up to get him some coffee and he damn near bit my head off
. To demonstrate simultaneously his essential good humor and his total presence of mind, Richard gestured toward the blood they had given—two square plastic sacks filled solidly fat—and declared, “Back where I come from in West Virginia sometimes you pick a tick off a dog that looks like that.” The men looked at him amazed. Had he not quite said what he meant to say? Or had they never seen anybody from West Virginia before?

Joan pointed at the blood, too. “Is that us? Those little doll pillows?”

“Maybe we should take one home to Bean,” Richard suggested.

The intern did not seem convinced that this was a joke. “Your blood will be credited to Mrs. Henryson's account,” he stated stiffly.

Joan asked him, “Do you know anything about her? When is she—when is her operation scheduled?”

“I think for tomorrow. The only thing on the tab this after is an open heart at two; that'll take about sixteen pints.”

“Oh …” Joan was shaken. “Sixteen … that's a full person, isn't it?”

“More,” the intern answered, with the regal handwave that bestows largesse and dismisses compliments.

“Could we visit her?” Richard asked, for Joan's benefit. (“Really ashamed,” she had said; it had cut.) He was confident of the refusal.

“Well, you can ask at the desk, but usually before a major one like this it's just the nearest of kin. I guess you're safe now.” He meant their punctures. Richard's arm bore a small raised bruise; the intern covered it with one of those ample salmon, unhesitatingly adhesive bandages that only hospitals have. That was their specialty, Richard thought—packaging.
They wrap the human mess for final delivery. Sixteen doll's pillows, uniformly dark and snug, marching into an open heart: the vision momentarily satisfied his hunger for order.

He rolled down his sleeve and slid off the bed. It startled him to realize, in the instant before his feet touched the floor, that three pairs of eyes were fixed upon him, fascinated and apprehensive and eager for scandal. He stood and towered above them. He hopped on one foot to slip into one loafer, and then on this foot to slip into the other loafer. Then he did the little shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap step that was all that remained to him of dancing lessons he had taken at the age of seven, driving twelve miles each Saturday into Clarksburg. He made a small bow toward his wife, smiled at the old man, and said to the intern, “All my life people have been expecting me to faint. I have no idea why. I haven't fainted yet.”

His coat and overcoat felt a shade queer, a bit slithery and light, but as he walked down the length of the corridor, space seemed to adjust snugly around him. At his side, Joan kept an inquisitive and chastened silence. They pushed through the great glass doors. A famished sun was nibbling through the overcast. Above and behind them, the King of Arabia lay in a drugged dream of dunes and Mrs. Henryson upon her sickbed received, like the comatose mother of twins, their identical packets of blood. Richard hugged his wife's shoulders and as they walked along leaning on each other whispered, “Hey, I love you. Love love
love
you.”

Romance is, simply, the strange, the untried. It was unusual for the Maples to be driving together at eleven in the morning. Almost always it was dark when they shared a car. The oval of her face clung in the corner of his eye. She was watching him, alert to take the wheel if he suddenly lost consciousness. He felt tender toward her in the eggshell light, and curious toward himself, wondering how far beneath his brain the black pit did lie. He felt no different; but, then, the quality of consciousness perhaps did not bear introspection. Something surely had been taken from him; he was less himself by a pint. Yet the earth, with its signals and buildings and cars and bricks, continued like a pedalled note.

Boston behind them, he asked, “Where should we eat?”

“Should we eat?”

“Please, yes. Let me take you to lunch. Just like a secretary.”

“I do feel sort of illicit. As if I've stolen something.”

“You, too? But what did we steal?”

“I don't know. The morning? Do you think Eve knows enough to feed them?” Eve was their sitter, a little bony girl from down the street who
would, in exactly a year, Richard calculated, be painfully lovely. They lasted three years on the average, sitters; you got them in the tenth grade and escorted them into their bloom and then, with graduation, like commuters who had reached their stop, they dropped out of sight, into college or marriage. And the train went on, and took on other passengers, and itself became older and longer.

“She'll manage,” he told her. “What would you like? All that talk about coffee has made me frantic for some.”

“At the Pancake House beyond 128 they give you coffee before you even ask.”

“Pancakes? Now? Aren't you jolly? Do you think we'll throw up?”

“Do you feel like throwing up?”

“No, not really. I feel sort of insubstantial and gentle, but it's probably psychosomatic. I don't really understand this business of giving something away and still somehow having it. What is it—the spleen?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Are the splenetic man and the sanguine man the same?”

“God. I've totally forgotten the humors. What are the others—phlegm and choler?”

“Bile and black bile are in there somewhere.”

“One thing about you, Joan. You're educated. New England women are educated.”

“Sexless as we are.”

“That's right; drain me dry and then put me on the rack.” But there was no wrath in his words; indeed, he had reminded her of their earlier conversation so that, in much this way, his words might be revived, diluted, and erased. It seemed to work. The restaurant where they served only pancakes was empty and quiet this early. A bashfulness possessed them both, and a silence while they ate. Touched by the stain her blueberry pancakes left on her teeth, he held a match to her cigarette and said, “Gee, I loved you back in the blood room.”

“I wonder why.”

“You were so brave.”

“So were you.”

“But I'm supposed to be. I'm paid to be. It's the price of having a penis.”

“Shh.”

“Hey. I didn't mean that about your being sexless.”

The waitress refilled their coffee cups and gave them the check.

“And I promise never never to do the Twist, the cha-cha, or the schottische with Marlene Brossman.”

“Don't be silly. I don't care.”

This amounted to permission, but perversely irritated him. That above-it-all quality; why didn't she
fight?
Trying to regain their peace, scrambling uphill, he picked up their check and with an effort of acting, the pretense being that they were out on a date and he was a raw dumb suitor, said handsomely, “I'll pay.”

But on looking into his wallet he saw only a single worn dollar there. He didn't know why this should make him so angry, except the fact somehow that it was only
one
. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Look at that.” He waved it in her face. “I work like a bastard all week for you and those insatiable brats and at the end of it what do I have? One goddamn crummy wrinkled dollar.”

Her hands dropped to the pocketbook beside her on the seat, but her gaze stayed with him, her face having retreated, or advanced, into that porcelain shell of uncanny composure. “We'll both pay,” Joan said.

Twin Beds in Rome
 

The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy. And their lovemaking, like a perversely healthy child whose growth defies every deficiency of nutrition, continued; when their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings. Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.

They arrived at night. The plane was late, the airport grand. They had left hastily, without plans; and yet, as if forewarned of their arrival, nimble Italians, speaking perfect English, took their luggage in hand, reserved a hotel room for them by telephone from the airport, and ushered them into a bus. The bus, surprisingly, plunged into a dark rural landscape. A few windows hung lanternlike in the distance; a river abruptly bared its silver breast beneath them; the silhouettes of olive trees and Italian pines flicked past like shadowy illustrations in an old Latin primer. “I could ride this bus forever,” Joan said aloud, and Richard was pained, remembering, from the days when they had been content together, how she had once confessed to feeling a sexual stir when the young man at the gas station, wiping the windshield with a vigorous, circular motion, had made the body of the car, containing her, rock slightly. Of all the things she had ever told him, this remained in his mind the most revealing, the deepest glimpse she had ever permitted into the secret woman he could never reach and had at last wearied of trying to reach.

Yet it pleased him to have her happy. This was his weakness. He wished her to be happy, and the certainty that, away from her, he could not know if she were happy or not formed the final, unexpected door barring his way when all others had been opened. So he dried the very tears he had whipped from her eyes, withdrew each protestation of hopelessness at the very point when she seemed willing to give up hope, and their agony continued. “Nothing lasts forever,” he said now.