The Other (36 page)

Rand sat on a bench when his left ankle started throbbing, as he knew it would, within a half-mile’s walk—this from long bouts of tennis in his twenties—and enjoyed a last round of tippling. This was good. Summer leaves in their fullness, and the smell of loam and lily pads. A furtive, woody haven, an arboreal respite. Here his B&L, at long last, dulled him. Summer nights in Seattle are not often warm, but this one was, with the breath of lindens. Rand melted into it, finally done with restiveness. A leaf-edged, gentle, shrouded vista, a view of the serene urban lake of his childhood, where he’d waded, swum, hunted frogs, rowed, and felt his wet worm turn watching girls in damp bathing suits. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”

After a half-hour, Rand got up and, pitching a little as he negotiated the promenade, made his way back to the Bel Air. He put the flask in the glove compartment and lowered the top. Traffic had dissipated. The streets were lonely. Weaving toward Laurelhurst on Ravenna Boulevard, he caught “Irish Pat” McMurtry on the radio, pounding Ezzard Charles in round ten at the Lincoln Bowl, and in his state of more-than-mild inebriation, he felt roused by the manic description of blows and by the violent enthusiasm apparent in the crowd’s roar, a partisan crowd with a weakness for McMurtry and a racial disdain for Charles.

Rand drove pointedly. He felt a burgher’s loyalty to Laurelhurst and wished to avoid the impropriety of sideswiping a parked car. In the strictly spaced pools of streetlamp light, though, the world appeared ghastly, and an accident seemed probable. The streets were narrow, and the hedges emphasized a diminishing perspective. Rand spied a ’56 Jaguar in a driveway. Someone had parked a boat trailer at curbside. The Bel Air convertible passed through a zone of rose-garden scent that was tropically viscous, and then, subsumed by the fetid plume from Lake Washington, gone. A black Lab trotted down the sidewalk, sidewinding as if to command the street on a whim. The night felt humid, and the humidity was enervating: Rand felt a headache coming on. There came the decision in favor of McMurtry, received by the gallery with unfettered delight, and this made Rand want to honk in affirmation. Instead, he snapped off his radio, the better to concentrate. At the intersection with NE 33rd, he slowed for an oncoming car, which, as it made the corner, heading east far too fast, he recognized as Ginnie’s Buick Century four-door sedan—and there was Ginnie fervidly at the wheel, her stern, sculpted face close to the windshield.

Ginnie? But it couldn’t be. She would be reading her Ferlinghetti in bed right now, ears stopped and wearing a linty nightgown, the planes of her cheeks rubbed pink with expensive cold cream. She would be thumbing through
Collier’s
and perusing the ads with her head propped against three pillows. She would be peering down through her beatnik glasses and nursing untold grievances while maintaining a freighted and female silence against the advent of his return. Rand idled. To be paralyzed by an unusual turn of events—that was him, and he knew it, much to his chagrin, but the way he liked to think of this was
native caution
and
due deliberation.
So he denied what he’d seen and mistrusted his blurred perception, yet the fact remained that Ginnie had passed by—recklessly—at this odd, late hour. It could only mean one thing: emergency. And, if he was further deductive, infant emergency. Rand thought again of his diaper-pin hypothesis. Maybe John William had impaled himself and then, in his writhing, driven the point into his colon, or punctured a major artery. If so, then he, Rand, would be right, right in a way that meant purchase on Ginnie, leverage, and a marital upper hand, and though he wouldn’t choose an emergency involving John William as the trigger for such an advantageous posture, he also saw this potential outcome—this skirmish victory in the war of his marriage—as a silver lining to what might be a black cloud, and as a long-term, sunny side-effect.

Convenient to Laurelhurst was the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital—a complex of buildings mammothly institutional and notably out of scale with the neighborhood—and Ginnie careened toward it, down 42nd, with the breathlessly intoxicated Rand in her exhaust stream. He caught up under the emergency-bay klieg lights in time to see her in the door of her Buick. Ginnie emerged with the tempestuous John William, and though foremost in Rand’s thoughts was the well-being of his son, immediately beneath that was loathing for his own existence—for his bilious wife, for his earsplitting baby, for BOMARC and his meeting in the morning, not to mention the fat against his belt and the ceaselessly returning weeds in his flower beds. John William! thought Rand, running at a speed he hadn’t ventured since giving up tennis, and aware of how clumsy his gait had become, how undependable his legs, how pincered his lungs were by lack of exercise. He was thirty-six.

The infant in the hospital parking lot was crying, but that wasn’t new; in tenor and intensity it wasn’t any different from crying Rand had heard many times before. The klieg lights revealed the same strictured face, yowling and choleric, that greeted him each time he peered, from a furtive angle, surreptitiously, into John William’s crib. Or maybe it was redder, but it was hard to tell with certainty. Rand didn’t trust his take on things. There was something kaleidoscopic about the way he was experiencing the world right now. Between the adrenaline and the B&L, he only knew it in fragments—there was no continuity. But he did note that, for once, Ginnie seemed off her game. She was palpably panicked—the moment had gotten her. Shadowy armpit perspiration showed on her tunic, and her face was blanched by anxious effort. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to castigate him for being suddenly present. It was as if she didn’t have time to register his existence, much less engage in vitriol. With the baby in her arms, she hurled herself at the hospital’s automatic door, which opened with a pneumatic exhalation, as if separating pressure fronts, and he followed. It was a quiet night in the emergency ward; the foyer had the feel of silent anticipation, of a stage set before Act One. Rand was struck by this. That there was no drama. The only drama was theirs, and they’d brought it with them as if in search of an audience. Ginnie advanced like the star of the show, and with the determination he’d seen in her when she confronted their neighbor’s dog by blending stampede with lecture. Which animal is more alpha? was the only question.

The emergency-ward desk nurse lacked a sense of urgency, and to Rand her flippant manner seemed outrageous—gum-snapping, slow with a stapler, averse to eye contact, inappropriately dreamy; she was in her mid-twenties, and her lower lip looked wet and lazy. Rand stopped to explain, but Ginnie didn’t hesitate; she disappeared with the baby behind a pair of swinging doors—the kind with small windows that reminded Rand of portholes—and left him behind with the paperwork, which seemed to him a secretarial task and further undermined his sense of command. Yet, filling in blanks, he felt himself relax a little—the business-as-usual atmosphere in the anteroom subdued his desperation. He had time to think now. He was aware of his inebriation. He was aware of how menial and subservient he must seem to this sultry receptionist, whose bouffant was dark and lax. At best, he realized, he was an afterthought to her. He didn’t register; he didn’t give off scent. Rand acknowledged his feeling of being unmanned by time and marriage, a sensation he worked hard to keep in the background. It occurred to him by way of consolation that he did rise in stature on board the
Cornucopia,
as master of the tiller, where Ginnie, disturbed by the sea, was diminished. (It was a big part of what he liked about sailing.) This reversal—Rand waxing while Ginnie waned—was rare, but also occurred around jumper cables—because Ginnie was irrationally afraid of electricity—and in moments demanding celebratory elocution: for all her education and classes in rhetoric, Ginnie was tongue-tied at wedding receptions, whereas he, dumb Rand, offered toasts to happiness with ease. He’d always believed that this shortcoming of hers arose from a lack of feeling. Why was it that after weddings she invariably detailed for Rand the reasons to expect failure? He’s a cretin, she’s a bimbo, he lacks drive, she’s ineffectual, he’s devil-may-care, she’s “repressed…” Rand had his wallet out. He was fumbling through the plastic dividers, and this awkwardness deflated him further. He wasn’t skipper of his ship, he didn’t exist.

In Room 2, he found Ginnie and a Dr. McAfee, who looked startled, Scottish, and, despite his youth, old-school—tufts in his nostrils, dark hairs on his fingers—while rotating on his stool with his hands in his lap and the earpieces of his stethoscope at the back of his neck. As Rand entered, McAfee was using the phrase “further cardiac and vascular evaluation.” He stopped to introduce himself; Rand was certain McAfee smelled liquor, and that made him self-conscious and ashamed. Ginnie’s strong throat was conspicuous in the light of this room, and there was a heavy female smell of exertion, an exudate of hormone—frankly, thought Rand, the smell of Ginnie’s sex, which was always on hand when she exercised. Rand perched on the examination table. In McAfee’s manner, he thought he read the thrust of things—naturally, he and Ginnie had overreacted, in the way of most parents. There was no real emergency here. The doctor had seen this hysteria before; the atmosphere was of a misunderstanding. Yet Ginnie looked subdued and circumspect. If he was giving her the benefit of the doubt, he would say that the night’s events had exhausted her and rule out any other explanation. But—tellingly, he thought later—she wouldn’t look at him, and there was a hint of guilt in that.

“I’ve been telling Mrs. Barry,” said Dr. McAfee, “that far and away the most common cause of infant loss of consciousness is breath-holding. Isn’t that simple? It’s very scary when it happens, but actually quite common. Sometimes an infant will cry in a way that sounds progressively more hysterical until breath-holding sets in, but just as often an infant will start to cry and then, immediately, he holds his breath and—Does that make sense? As a simple explanation for why your son passed out? About twice a week we see a baby in here just like yours, and I’d say that only about one time in five hundred is it something other than simple breath-holding. Which is not to say that the parent seeing this for the first time would not be concerned. Of course you are. The child has lost consciousness. You’re bound to react with legitimate panic. But did he quickly come to again? Yes. Is he entirely animated, alert, and lively? Absolutely. And I would say, in this case, with
very
healthy lungs.” Dr. McAfee winked at Rand. “We’ve given John William a sedative,” he explained. “But really he’s a normal and healthy child. Except,” he added, “there’s something that concerns me, and that’s evidence of bruising at his neck and around his throat. I’ve looked at it closely, and, yes, bruising, or might I call it formative bruising. You should expect some subsequent discoloration over the course of the next several days.”

In the face of this, Ginnie blanched. It was a hard thing to feign, this reaction she wanted to enact of concern devoid of guilt, yet there was nothing she could do about the color draining from her face, and it gave the lie to her pose of maternal consternation and nothing more. Of course, this is what Rand saw, so it could be—and would be—argued in the days to come. And Ginnie, predictably, played the B&L card to maximum effect in countering him as he exhorted her to acknowledge a misdeed. “Bruises,” he would say. “They don’t come from nowhere.” “Plastered,” she would answer. “You’ve got no ground to stand on.” Back and forth like this: for him, the bottom line remained the bruises; for her, his alcoholic fog that night impaired his memory. The sad part was—Rand had always known this to be true—even when he was right, he was wrong.

In fact, by the next evening, Ginnie had cornered him into this admission: that he only
thought
he remembered Dr. McAfee saying “bruising at his neck and around his throat.” “Formative bruising,” Ginnie emphasized. “Meaning bruises that are not yet bruises. Marks that look as if they might become bruises. Marks that are not yet bruises. Ergo, marks that are not bruises. Dr. McAfee didn’t call them bruises. And lo and behold—did they turn into bruises? You’ve been looking as closely as I have. Are they bruises? Really? What is a bruise? I object to this whole line of questioning, Rand. I object to the accusatory tone you’re taking. It’s clear to me you’re engaged in a witch hunt. Don’t pretend it isn’t so—you’re after me, you want to blame me. I told you before, I told Dr. McAfee, I’ve explained this, and here I am explaining it again—I shook him. Okay? I shook him in a panic. I took him by the shoulders, and in a panic I shook him.” Ginnie mimed the action she was describing, exaggerating the gentleness with which she shook John William. “Shaking,” she said. “It’s a normal reaction. Dr. McAfee concurred with that. Maybe you don’t remember, because you were drunk. Who, by the way, is really at fault here? You come home from work, you drink for an hour, and then you waltz out, and the next time I see you, you’re tripping on your own feet and stinking of bourbon. How helpful were you in this terrible emergency? You—”

“I
do
remember,” Rand retorted. “I remember that you couldn’t give a clear answer when he questioned you about this shaking. Shoulders?” said Rand. “There were no bruises at his shoulders. You can shake a person all day at the shoulders and it won’t produce bruises at the neck and throat. How come, if you had him by the shoulders…”

On and on. Yet her energy in self-defense remained prodigious. She wouldn’t admit to what Rand suspected: that her frustration had flowed over; that she’d momentarily strangled John William. “On a baby,” she argued, “you can’t just grab shoulders, they’re too small; the insides of your hands, your thumbs, they end up closer to the throat; that’s the mechanics of the situation.” “But,” countered Rand, “there aren’t marks on the shoulders.” “We’ve covered this ground already,” said Ginnie. “Shoulders are bony, the throat is softer tissue, so which is going to bruise more easily? And why is it I’m still defending myself? I won’t do it a single moment longer! Go pour yourself a Dewar’s and sit on the patio! Go read your sports news!
Go!
”