The Medicine Burns (8 page)

He talks to me with his back turned, going into the kitchen. “He has a big, beautiful house. While she's gone, we're going to use it.” His words sound so simple; it is like he is explaining it to a child.

“I wonder what it's like to have someone take care of you.”

Lawrence calls out casually from the kitchen, “I didn't think you were the romantic type.”

Why, then, do I feel excluded from him? Why do I feel left out of the happy family—Lawrence, Ray, and his pregnant wife?

But he emerges from the kitchen with a bottle of sherry and two glasses. Either to calm the panic he hears rising in me, or in genuine appreciation, he toasts to our friendship. I look into his eyes. Strangely, the closer he gets to me, the more remote I find him. I wonder if that is how it works with Ray.

It's gotten so that I can't think of Lawrence without Ray somewhere in the background. It's like when someone you know has cancer, how it's always there. It's not like Lawrence talks about him, about what they do, or how they feel about each other. It's just his name with a time and place written next to it under a magnet on the refrigerator, or his voice coming from the phone machine in Lawrence's bedroom. Whenever the phone rings, I always ask “who's that?” as though I'm waiting for his call.

Lawrence explains that I can leave messages for him and he'll call me from Ray's house. “I'll just be a few blocks away,” he says, comforting me. But I can't seem to rid myself of the chill of that ravine, knowing this time I'll be locked out without a plan.

It is by chance that I've spotted him and Ray tonight coming out of The Mill. I would walk up to them and shake Ray's hand if they weren't so engaged in talk. Lawrence just keeps looking over to him, as though he is never going to see him again, as though he is trying to memorize his face.

I follow at a great distance. They walk together without touching until they start over the railroad bridge. Then Ray takes Lawrence's gloved hand and guides him across, and it seems as natural as a father and child.

I am terrified of heights, and the bridge is no easy feat for me. It is not a footpath, merely an old railroad track that runs over some reinforcing beams. There is nothing to hold onto, except the track itself. I cross it on all fours. Far below, the water is frozen, certain death if I slip.

It takes me so long to cross the bridge, I feel certain I've lost them. Then, cutting across College Green Park, I see them again entering a sky blue, wooden house on the corner. The snow is lightly falling, and the perfect little house looks like a Christmas card.

I wonder what it is like to be pursued by an admirer, to be watched, investigated, loved.

Did Lawrence have to pursue anyone? Lawrence doesn't I need to do anything, I tell myself, but I need to do everything.

Suddenly, the front door opens. Ray comes off the porch and looks up momentarily. I'm leaning against the oak, in the snow, with my ski hat on. I stand there casually turning a stick in my hands. He locates my eyes and glances away.

He pulls up the door of the garage and opens the passenger door of his truck. I see him removing a large roll of paper from the seat, then he takes a plastic bucket out of the back of the truck and carries them back into the house.

The garage is wide open. I stand there for a while looking at it. I am already walking out of the park and crossing the street. I've done crazier things, I assure myself, and I conjure up the feeling of power I felt pushing the professor out into the cold.

I glance over all the windows of the house, no movements, no one looking out. I hurriedly walk up to the garage. I feel safe once I'm inside, and begin to look over his things: his work table and saw, his toolbox, and the coils of extension cords hanging from hooks in the wall. It's a regular shop in here, I think, wondering if there is anything small I can take. I turn my attention to his truck, and there, as though he were offering them to me, are his keys dangling from the lock in the passenger door.

The moment they're in my hands I feel spooked and have to leave.

Lawrence calls. He's been at Ray's for two weeks, but he's alone tonight. He talks about the snow and how it makes him feel like a child, the one that felt trapped in his parents' house, an old Chicago house full of rugs and clocks and his father's pipe smoke. While he talks, I look out my window at the highway stretching north and the snow passing over all of it, the kind of lonely sight that makes people jump every winter, and I say, “It sounds safe and warm in your old house.”

“That's why I never left,” he answers.

We've come to Pete's, a small bar with pool tables and wooden booths, where it's not hard to be anonymous. There are just Pete and the two of us.

He's wearing jeans and a down jacket that is obviously not his. I remember us laughing about down jackets and how they looked like potholders. I don't mention it.

“It's difficult spending so much time at Ray's,” he says thoughtfully, pouring beer from the pitcher. “I'm afraid I might get used to it.”

“He wouldn't want that, that's for sure,” I say. “Not with Rosemary coming back in two weeks.”

There's a brief look of hurt in his face, and I wonder what it would be like to reach over the table and touch him. I am thinking that he does not want this to go on, and I know what he is asking me to do. I know what he is afraid to ask me to do, and I reach my hand into my pocket and feel the keys there like a charm.

“I understand how you feel.”

“How could you possibly understand?” he asks, as though he's the most miserable person alive.

Tonight I saw Ray and Lawrence go to the Bijou for a screening of Fassbinder's
In the Year of Thirteen Moons
. If I could have, I would have warned them about it. I don't know how they could sit through that movie without feeling very uncomfortable; the lead character has a sex change to satisfy a rich, straight man who doesn't care about her. It's no wonder she tells her life story in a slaughterhouse.

It helps to know where they are and how long they'll be gone. I could probably turn on the lights. But I know this house by heart already, and besides, I like the feeling of being a shadow here, keeping away from the windows, touching everything with these gloves, Rosemary's gloves which I'm now sure I made the right decision in taking the first night I came here.

There are two places I always have to check for clues: the bedroom and the nursery. I don't know what it is that I'm looking for. I guess I'm just interested in whatever it is they leave behind. I've felt compelled to take only a few things out of here, but they are inexplicable treasures to me.

At first, I touch the heavy draperies on the windows, the thick spreads on the bed. Then, like a neoclassical bedroom to which the wicked son is always returning, I sit on the edge of the bed and draw the cold, white sheets up to my face, with more than a sense of ownership. It really is, for a moment, like I've entered a painting, feeling so completely where I should be, as though I were positioned there by an artist.

Ray and Lawrence would feel it too, the limiting, perfecting structure of our interaction.

It was no surprise when Lawrence, five days before Rosemary's return, called to inform me that Ray had asked him not to stay at the house any longer. Time itself was conspiring to that end, but I was surprised by Lawrence's breathless weeping which made it hard to comfort him. I asked him over.

I look around the apartment and it seems as though I have moved in at last. The boxes are unpacked, and some of my favorite postcards are taped to the wall behind my desk. I've taken down the mirror tiles and stacked them inside the closet. The room and the fixtures themselves are ugly, but there is the feeling that someone lives here now, that someone is making do.

When Lawrence arrives, he concurs. “I feel more at home here than even at my own apartment,” he says. He looks exhausted.

“Well, I guess so,” I say. “Ray pays your rent.”

He sits there drinking, silent.

“I don't know what happened,” Lawrence says. “He started accusing me of things that I don't know anything about. Little things were missing, that he couldn't turn up—some of Rosemary's jewelry, which I'd never take.” He looks so humiliated, as though he is accusing himself.

“Why would he think you did that?” I ask him.

“I don't know,” he says angrily. “But he kept asking me if I was angry about Rosemary, and how I felt about them having a baby. I told him none of that mattered, and it didn't. But I think Rosemary took those things with her, or nothing's really gone and he's just finding a way to get rid of me.”

“Maybe he doesn't find you compatible with his new family?”

“I didn't ask to stay at his house,” Lawrence says. “I would have been content to have kept things the way they were.”

“Well, that's how things are now, right? Back to the way they were?”

“No,” he says. “He hates me now. He's politely asked me out of his life. Not even politely.”

“He's afraid of you.”

“I don't know why he thinks I would ever steal from him or try to disrupt his family.”

“That comes with being the lover on the side,” I remind him.

I don't know which one of us introduced the idea of mischief. Our desires seemed to cross then and run concurrently. By the end of the evening, we were sitting on the floor with a bottle of wine between us, laughing and crying, imagining ways to terrorize Ray.

“Let's make a baby,” I suggest. I am thinking of the boxed baby clothes and the baby bounce swing I have in my closet.

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

“I found these baby clothes at the Salvation Army drop box. I can't imagine what else to do with them but make a little baby for him. It will be the one you couldn't have.”

“Rosemary's Baby!” he shouts. We both roar.

We tear the plastic wrap from the boxes. On the collar of the little pink nightie Lawrence writes “Rosemary's Baby” in black magic marker. We stuff the clothes with an old gray pillow, leaving it bursting from the collar as a head. I draw in two weeping eyes.

I think how excited Ray must be about his family's return. He has come so far with the nursery. The wallpaper has cheery yellow balloons; the seams are perfect. The whole house smells like glue.

I wonder how he will feel about these stolen baby clothes showing up again.

Lawrence is busy drawing in the mouth.

“Cut it in,” I say, our prank becoming a mad kind of voodoo. I hand him a knife I'd lifted.

He cuts through the pillowcase and pulls the dirty stuffing up out of the lips.

“Let's make them red,” he suggests.

I don't have any paint, so we stain them with Mercuro-chrome.

Lawrence suggests we keep the knife buried in its head. We sit it up in the bounce swing like that. We hang it from a nail and stare at it. I force myself to laugh at its ugliness. Lawrence can't.

“Maybe we shouldn't,” he murmurs.

“What did you expect? The Hardy Boys?”

“But I care about him,” he says, confused.

“There'll be others.”

“I don't think you understand the way I feel. I don't think you could understand it.”

“No,” I say. “Probably not. It's too subtle for me.” And I begin to think how they tried to make me beautiful, how anything attractive in my face was put there by the doctors. They really wrestled it out of me, extracted it, but at such high cost and such great pain.

“I want to understand,” I tell Lawrence.

They laid me on the table and gave me two rubber balls to squeeze. They were chewed up with nail marks. I rotated them slowly.

A German nurse with soft blonde hair dried her hands of sterilizing liquid. She directed my father, “Will you please hold your son's legs.”

I felt his hands loosely holding my ankles. He looked at me, miserable. My mother stood small in the doorway.

The nurse lowered a bright light over my face. I looked into it. At first there was nothing but whiteness. Then I saw an eyeball floating between two lights.

“This is a magnifying lamp,” the nurse explained. I saw the eye blink on the other side.

I imagined what she was seeing: the cores of blackheads, a violent chemistry in the cyst, here and there a black whisker shockingly cutting its way through the thick skin.

I saw the doctor enter through the glow of the light, radiant, drawing a rubber glove over one hand. In the other, he held a needle. He pushed the sweaty hair off my forehead and began pressing the cysts along my cheek.

He worked silently.

Finally he said, “This will hurt. But when you're well, you will thank me.” I saw the nurse nodding, reverent.

With the first prick, blood flashed across the dull green wall. My nails sank into the red balls. I felt his fingers pressing down the boil.

“It is the problem of evil,” I thought I heard the doctor say.

I remembered the video we all had to watch in the crowded lobby. The doctor's only child born with cystic acne all over its innocent body. The German doctor mournfully narrated, “my wife and I wept when our child was born to us with cystic acne. He screamed constantly as an infant, unable to lie in one position for very long.”

Hundreds of before-and-after photos of patients were flashed on the screen while the doctor talked his theory of enzymic reactions, postules, and scarring. Everyone was standing around the TV with their arms folded over their chests; they were secretly looking at the faces of the others, measuring the severity of their problem against everyone else's condition.

I remember staring constantly at a mirror. For me, the mirror was like skin, always healing itself, always getting better. Though I wanted nothing but the truth about my face, the mirror could never reflect it accurately; I saw only the desperate effort to heal.