The Medicine Burns (7 page)

“I'm in the English Department,” I mention. I decide not to tell him about my own failed attempts at painting. Even simple figure or perspective drawing is profoundly difficult for me. I don't trust my eye enough; I am always embellishing.

Maybe the secret club of beautiful men casts light on the ugly ones. I can imagine Lawrence and the professor shrunk down and in a glowing halo at the corner of my room watching me slide out of bed after I'd attempted sex with the information-booth attendant.

He looks so haggard under the standing lamp near my bed. He sits on the edge of my bed in discolored underwear and nylon socks, his brittle yellow body slumped with a shame I cannot rid him of.

I suppose that is what I am trying to do. I continue to disgrace myself in making him feel wanted. I'll often beg him to deliver his tongue to me through his wired mouth. He obliges me with a power he is unaware of. He is even more powerful when he doesn't oblige.

He is a codeine addict, and I've spent the afternoon driving around with him filling forged cough medicine prescriptions. There are three sticky bottles in the garbage can, one half-full on the night table. When I look at the red ring on the table, I can practically feel it on my skin. It feels like his presence, but though I'd like to be rid of him, I have my own addictions.

He flicks off the light, and until my eyes adjust, there is only the sound of him scratching his skin. He does this obsessively. My only relief is not seeing it.

“I wish you'd let me play my Hank Williams, Jr. record for you,” he says sleepily. “I think you'd like it.”

“How many times have I told you I hate country music and country people?” I am rigid in the dark.

I see his hand sliding from the side of the bed, searching out his guitar lying on the floor. The first two nights he spent with me, I had mistakenly told him I liked his playing. He told me he liked to sing me to sleep, and so I'd pretended with my eyes closed. But he could go on singing for an hour at least.

I grab his hand and twist it until I hear him whimpering. “No playing tonight,” I say through clenched teeth.

He finally falls asleep while I sit propped against the opposite wall. I'm so tense I can't sleep. I concentrate on matching my breathing to his so that I can forget he's there.

I vow that I won't sleep with him again, and stretch out on the floor without cover or pillow. But my vow does not dispel my closet of skeletons - ugly burdensome men I've broken every taboo to meet. They hang there, as patient without me as they were with me. I am a bad medicine, I think. I do not heal them, and they discard me even when they are terminal cases and there's nothing else.

They hang there: the old ones, the amputees, the mentally retarded. I'd like to cut their ropes so they could fall with all the suicides of this building. I imagine them in a sordid heap at the lobby doors of the Stonecourt Apartments, their bodies like a barricade against the doors.

Lawrence invites me to his apartment which is a large one-bedroom in a wooded area behind the campus. It's a quaint setting with a wooden bridge which crosses a landscaped ravine. We stop for a moment on the bridge, and look down at the thin brook trickling over black stones.

“Almost like wilderness,” he says, “but they can trip floodlights and light up the whole set.” He points out some of the lights, discreetly positioned behind trees. “A woman was raped here a few years ago. Now the place is like a laid trap.”

“I'll watch where I step,” I assure him.

I distrust the moonlight that makes his features take on the strange, alien quality of the man-made brook. It makes the thought of touching him seem odd and cold.

He opens the door to his apartment and ushers me inside. There is an awkward feeling as we stand, hesitant, in the doorway, as though he were housesitting with instructions not to bring in guests. He takes my coat and the warmth of the room envelops me.

“Have a seat,” he says, aware of my awkwardness. I sit down on an elegant, forest green couch. He tells me he'll get coffee and turns the radio on before he leaves the room. It's the classical music station playing softly Vaughan Williams's “Fantasia On A Theme.”

“Do you know this piece?” I ask him.

“No,” he calls out from the kitchen. “I don't really like classical music.”

This is the apartment of someone established, I think, not a student. The room is rosy and wood-rich, too designed, too considered even for a student with wealthy parents. When he returns with coffee, I can't help but admire the way he moves around the place so comfortably, like an impostor.

“There's a man I've been seeing since I first moved here. He pays the rent on this place. I had him over last weekend. This is the radio station he likes to listen to. I don't listen to the radio when I'm here alone,” he says nonchalantly. I notice, though, that he seems to be looking for a response, either shock or forgiveness.

For a moment, I don't know what I feel. Maybe envy.

“Do you love him?” I ask.

Lawrence looks at me as though I'm insane. Then his eyes soften a little. “I respect him,” he says.

Lawrence insists on taking me by his studio. “It's on your way home.” He gathers his coat.

He is one of the few students with his own studio in the painting building. The others stand in a large, open area at easels.

There is a padlock on the door and his initials, minus the III, painted on the wall. Inside, the space is crowded with canvases. Two of them are hanging on the wall, illuminated by a clamp light. I walk up close to them, surprised both by their accuracy and their beauty. They are self-portraits, simply and elegantly rendered. In one of the portraits he is looking into a mirror the way I never could, searching it as though it held the truth.

I turn to him. “They're beautiful,” I tell him, and it's easier than admitting he is.

I stand at the center of my apartment in disbelief. Practically nothing has been opened or arranged. I begin cutting the tape on an earlier life comprehensively packed and already musty smelling and foreign.

I am uncomfortable putting out the books and records and posters. They seem frighteningly self-conscious now, as though I had gone out of my way to compensate, by way of taste, for a lack in appearance. The whole life is made up. I'm afraid that Lawrence will see through my obsession with the grotesque in film, my collections of criticism and philosophy. He will see just an ugly person filling in the holes.

I leave the boxes packed, the clothes neatly folded. I stand before the mirror tiles, stretching out my skin until it looks almost smooth. My hands move section by section over my face; I cover it all except for my eyes, peering out between my fingers.

I remember when I couldn't touch my face. It was two years after I had discontinued a violent dermatological therapy. My face was so red and disturbed I had grown afraid to touch it. The last doctor I saw, at the tearful request of my mother, was an old, Jewish hunchback who had an office in downtown Miami.

He took me into the bathroom and stood behind me and taught me how to wash my face. He held onto my hands and gently guided them over my cheeks and forehead. All along, I made him promise not to inject anything into my skin, not to use chemical peels. He stood behind me whispering, “Only pills, no pain.”

In my room, the ghosts rise from the boxes like dust. I feel my parents' hands on my throat and feet. They, too, are pleading.

“Can't you do something about your face?” my mother asks disdainfully. “Wash it again,” she insists, “you've got time.”

“But I have washed it.” I want her to notice that I'm wearing my new blazer and tie. But she only sees my face, stinging and burning from the medicine that puts holes in the pillowcase.

I close the boxes and start to pack them away in the closet. I sit down with the last box, though. It's packed with books. I draw one out and open it on my lap. It is a poem by Rupert Brooke, and I begin to recite it quietly to myself.

Lawrence is at the door. I tell him to come in quickly, fearful the attendant might be loitering in the hall.

“I think I've been drinking,” he says. I have him sit on one of the two rotating chairs that the apartment came furnished with. The chairs are covered in loud, flower-printed vinyl and look like hotel liquidation from the seventies. “Don't you have any chairs that sit still?” he asks.

I offer him coffee, and by the time I bring out a mug, he has found his way to the mirrored wall.

He opens up to me recklessly, “I'm sleeping with our professor, you know.”

“Really? Is he good?” I ask.

“Lousy,” he says. “He treats me like a work of art, touches me with a white glove, centers me on the bed, and asks me not to move.”

“He asks you not to move and doesn't have the decency to tie you up?”

“No way,” he laughs. “He won't even use a collar on his dog.”

“And he's not the one who pays your rent?” I ask.

“No,” he says, becoming more serious. “That's Ray.” He swoons a little, the alcohol showing. “I'm starting to worry about their paths crossing. Last weekend, while Ray was over, the professor kept calling, saying he knew I was there.”

“Boy,” I say, my voice sounding surprisingly mocking, “what a mess.”

“I was counting on your understanding,” he says conspiratorially.

“Shall I seduce him?” I ask.

Lawrence laughs. “He goes for the pretty boys,” he says in a way that makes me think I shouldn't feel hurt.

It dawns on me suddenly that he sees me as clearly as he does himself. He is beautiful and I am ugly. How could I have ever imagined those lines between us blurring?

“What do you want me to do?” I ask, knowing his answer. He wants me to play the ugly role.

Just then I hear knocking at my door. “Oh God,” I say under my breath.

“Please let me in,” the attendant says through the chain.

“Get lost,” I say bitterly.

“I know you have someone over. I just need to come in for a minute,” he croaks.

“What for?” I ask, reddening.

“I need to get my cough medicine,” he says.

“I'll get it.”

I pick up the gluey bottle from the night table and uncap it. I stick my hand out of the crack of the door and pour the red liquid over his hands and on the rug. He stands there startled as though it were blood. When I look back at Lawrence, he is laughing.

I'm freezing out here, crouched in the shadow of the bridge. I see the professor's car driving slowly up the path and sink lower into the brush, pulling it over me like a blanket. I do this carefully, suddenly remembering the banks of lights trained on me. I imagine tripping the system and the ravine flooding with light, but there are only two beams quickly extinguished when he pulls into the driveway. My breathing seems to me too loud, and even though I try to calm myself, it is all I hear in the woods. And then I hear his door open, his feet on the gravel and up on the wooden porch. I crawl up closer to see him under the porch light. He stands there looking down at his feet after he rings the bell. He looks so gentle and patient and in love, I think, waiting to be let inside.

He steps into the doorway and it is as if a meter begins to tick away. I recognize it then as my heart. Lawrence pulls the shade down, and as we agreed, I begin to move towards the door, opening it quietly and letting myself in. I feel them instantly with the acute senses of an animal. Lawrence spots me from the bedroom (did he see me too soon?). I begin talking over the chaos.

“Oh my God,” I say shocked. “I can't believe this.”

Lawrence looks at me stunned (it is not very convincing, but the professor isn't looking at him. It is my moment.)

Lawrence asks, “Why didn't you knock?”

“I just didn't,” I say, beginning to feel real agitation. “I didn't expect to catch you in a private tutorial.”

The professor is in his pants already, sliding on his glasses. He looks at me with wide, frightened eyes. It is our hope that he'll recognize me from class, but I don't see any recognition in his eyes. Only fear, as though I am a monster, some Bigfoot that lives in the ravine.

“I have to go,” he says nervously. He is still looking at me when he says it. He starts to leave without his tan jacket. I hand it to him at the door. I am feeling so powerful, I give him a little push from behind. He turns angrily toward me.

“You've got nothing on me,” he says, voice trembling as he looks into my eyes. Then he must have seen something there that made him turn and go.

I think my face has changed. Not healed, but settled. Reinforced. Lawrence calls my face scary. He says there is something intimidating about it, and he loves to recall the way I looked on the night with the professor. “It was almost like a jealous lover had walked in,” he says.

“It's been a week since you've heard from him,” I say, “so I guess it worked.”

“It worked beautifully,” he says. “I wasn't complaining.” But he looks at me sharply, and it seems for a moment that instead of me, he's looking at a small flaw on the couch.

“Ray's wife is leaving town for the next month,” he says, “and Ray's asked me to stay at his place to help him work on the nursery. Rosemary's pregnant and Ray's already acting like a proud father.”

“What's he grooming you for? A nanny position?” I sound like that scary person Lawrence finds amusing. “Why is he moving you in?” I ask, grasping.