The Secret of the Nightingale Palace (20 page)

He looked at Anna again. “Is that so?” he asked. The cardamom-laced curry, the spicy, coriander-scented cauliflower, the aromatic basmati rice. It all lay between them.

Anna thought she'd fall apart. “We eat a lot of Applebee's. Mostly Applebee's,” she said.

“And McDonald's,” Goldie added.

Doris said, “Dr. Choudary is famous for his Indian samosas. He brings us samosas at Christmastime. Lamb samosas.”

“Lamb! You see?” Goldie glared at her granddaughter. “Anna, you send him my meatball recipe. He's more likely to use it than you are.”

The doctor slid the sheet back over Goldie's legs. “You look like you're healing well, Mrs. Rosenthal,” he said.

“Then you're going to check me out of here.”

He sighed. “I'm going to check you out. You're free to go, so long as you don't push yourself too hard. And next time you feel dizzy, please sit down.”

 

Anna followed Naveen down the corridor. “Doctor? Could I have a word with you?”

He turned around. “Certainly,” he said. Nothing in his eyes or expression revealed that he knew her as anything other than the relative of one of his patients. Again, the moment had all the elements of fantasy, but in fact they were moving in the opposite direction from the broom closet. Naveen wasn't pretending formality; he really was formal. He looked down at her, waiting to hear what she had to say.

“Thanks for taking such good care of her,” Anna told him. “She didn't expect it, coming from New York, but you gave her excellent care.”

Naveen smiled at her, and fleetingly she remembered the firmness of his hand between her legs. Anna had fallen in love with Ford quite soon after college, so it had been a long time since she'd experienced the kind of jittery excitement she felt now. Sometimes, during the uneventful years with Ford, she had missed the thrills of attraction—waiting for phone calls, unexpected meetings that seemed like gifts of fate, the giddy feeling of an “accidental” touch, and later, the hesitant pleasure brought by a first hopeful kiss—but many years had passed since she'd actually negotiated the awkward terrain of an undefined relationship. Now she felt out of practice and almost completely unwilling to consider its inherent complications. Looking back on last night, she did feel relieved that maybe, finally, she was moving back into the world. The great emotional fact of her life was, as always, Ford's death, even if the act of sex had reacquainted her with her own body. For that, she felt quite grateful to the man standing in front of her. “I guess we'll be off,” she said. The nurse's station was ten feet away, so she tried to give her voice a granddaughter's expression of hardy relief, but also enough of the weight of happy satisfaction that a one-time lover would hear it as a tender good-bye.

At first Naveen didn't respond. Instead, he began searching through the charts on his clipboard, as if to telegraph to the nurses that he was answering a question. “Let me just see,” he said.

For long seconds, she watched him dig around in the forms. Though he maintained his composure, she could see that he was unsure of himself and tense. Finally he said, “Your grandmother has a very strong will. Given her age, I might have expected her to be here for three or four days.” His words sounded perfectly doctorlike, but—and this pleased her as it would anyone, even after the most businesslike encounter—his tone carried the slightest hint of regret that she was leaving.

Anna had nothing else to say. She felt lighter this morning and, given the circumstances, reasonably happy. Still, she hesitated to actually say good-bye. The doctor, for his part, didn't walk away immediately, either. For one moment longer than any of the nurses might have found routine, they stared at each other. Physically, there was really no difference between their expressions now and those on their faces the night before, as they lay naked in the lamplight, his hand in her hair. But Anna decided that the look between them now conveyed more amicable and practical emotions. Perhaps for that reason, the doctor said good-bye with a medical analysis. “You have very good genes,” he told her.

 

Anna and Goldie drove along the southern tip of Lake Michigan, though they never saw the water. By now the stolid and unchanging highway had become so much a part of their lives that they barely paid attention. They each noticed particular things, though. Goldie's attention was purely within the car. She kept her eyes on Anna's clothes, for example, and noted whether or not her granddaughter had combed her hair. Anna passed the time by making mental tallies of license plates from coastal states, and she announced with some fanfare each time they entered a new county.

Mostly, Bridget moved steadily west, conveying them mile by mile closer to California. For the first few hours after they got back on the road, Anna expected her grandmother to fall asleep, but Goldie busied herself by going through her purse, counting her money, checking her glasses, and making sure that her American Express Platinum Card was in its proper slot in her wallet.

Anna knew from the map that they were now probably thirty miles south of Chicago. They had at first talked of stopping in the city for a couple of nights, but Goldie wanted to push forward now. She felt that the hospital stay had put them behind schedule, even though they had plenty of time to get to San Francisco before her flight. “I'm the type who can't relax until I take care of my business,” Goldie said. Anna suspected that such a comment was meant to criticize her own, more laid-back style, but she appreciated the indication of Goldie's commitment to returning the prints to the Nakamuras.

They were traveling now through the grinding, metallic industrial belt, the world of Teamsters and smokestacks. Jimmy Hoffa. The road here never became completely rural in the way that parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio had. She longed for a tomato, pulled right off the vine. She wanted to smell a gardenia. She wished that they could make it to Iowa that night. She pictured cornfields. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she told Goldie.

They pulled over at a Chevron station. Anna had become used to the half-curious, half-suspicious looks that Bridget attracted. While she waited for the tank to fill, a white-haired man with a John Deere cap called to her from the next pump. “What kind of mileage you get on that pretty baby?”

“Forty-seven miles a gallon,” Anna said, picking a number that sounded impressive, if wildly implausible.

“You rebuild that engine?”

“Put in a brand-new transformer, just last year.” Anna had no idea what a transformer was, or if a Rolls-Royce needed one, but the man looked convinced.

While Anna filled the tank, her grandmother went into the bathroom. Goldie always took a few pieces of Kleenex just in case. As she walked back out toward the car, a pair of truckers held the door open, then observed her as she passed. Anna understood their gaze completely. They weren't noticing Goldie because she was a very, very old lady hunched over from a bad back, two days in a hospital, and a hot June wind. And they weren't looking at her because of the fierce way she gripped her pocketbook, either. Every old lady did that at an interstate gas station in the middle of nowhere. They were looking at her because she was gorgeous, still a woman in the most definite way—elegant, beautifully coiffed, her handmade Italian shoes perfectly buffed and tied. Anna would not have been surprised to hear them whistle.

Goldie arrived at the car and gave her facilities report. “There's no soap. It's not clean, but it's not the worst we've encountered, either. What can we do about it anyway?”

Anna helped her grandmother get back into her seat. Goldie gasped slightly as she lifted her bruised legs and adjusted herself on the cushion. Though Anna would have liked to ask how she was feeling, she wasn't willing to risk the wrath that would come in response to such a question. “I'll be right back,” she said, grabbing her backpack and heading inside.

Anna loved the lightness of her body when she emerged from Bridget after hours of driving. Her movements felt springy, like Tigger bounding through the Hundred Acre Wood. Even though it was only a short distance to the building, she ran, letting the backpack in her hand flop against her leg. If only for a moment, she wanted to feel the heat and inhale fresh air. Inside, she wandered around a bit, considering what snacks she might buy when she came out of the bathroom a few minutes later—the fried chicken glowing in its bright little glass-enclosed tray? A microwave burrito? On one aisle, the truckers she'd seen outside debated over a couple of boxes of herbal tea.

She found the ladies' room, a large space with a single toilet, beside the beer coolers. Just as Goldie had said, it wasn't clean, but it wasn't repulsive, either. The smell of bowel movements, urine, and toilet bowl cleaner had been masked somewhat by an After the Rain scented freshener propped in the center of a drain on the floor. Unfortunately, it wasn't until she was squatting, midpee, that she discovered the toilet paper roll was empty. She'd forgotten to bring in any Kleenex. “Shit,” she said.

She stood up and, with her pants still down, waddled to her backpack hanging on a hook on the door, then dug her hand inside. Nothing. She began to go through the smaller pockets, looking for anything, even one of the pieces of toilet paper she sometimes used to wrap around a vitamin. Nothing. She unzipped the last compartment, reached in, and found some old tissue. Then she felt something else in there as well. With one hand she widened the opening of the bag and looked in, while she wiped herself with the other. There was a small package, wrapped in newspaper. She made her way back to the toilet, dropped in the tissue, flushed, pulled up her pants, and washed her hands before returning to the backpack.

The package was small and flexible, clearly a book. Anna pulled off the paper. It was an old cloth-covered collection of haiku. Inside the front cover, in pencil, it had been inscribed, “To Anna, from Naveen.” Underneath was a haiku in scrawling doctor's script, and a phone number. She read the poem twice.

By the time Anna returned to the car, her hands were full of snacks—Cokes, a couple of Butterfingers, a foot-long beef jerky, some potato chips, too.

“You're going to make me so fat,” Goldie said, obviously delighted, but Anna was too distracted to reply. Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard her grandmother say, “Isn't this fun? It's fun, isn't it?”

Anna decided that they would make it to Iowa that night. “Yes,” she answered.

As they slid back onto the highway, she turned the words of the poem over in her mind. She knew them by heart already:

Not because of that,

Or me, I see that you, too,

Can be whole again.

11

Mrs. Yves Saint Laurent and Mrs. Issey Miyake

B
y early evening they had crossed from Illinois into Iowa. In Davenport they found a Hampton Inn, and then an Applebee's, and by 9
P.M
., Goldie lay under the covers, her fingers curled, like a child's, over the top of the sheet. As tired as she was, Anna wasn't ready to go to sleep. She wasn't willing to leave her grandmother alone, however. She went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. “I'm going to soak for a while,” she said. “Call me if you need me.” Goldie was exhausted, though, and when Anna peeked out a few minutes later, she was asleep.

While the tub filled, Anna looked through the haiku book. She read Naveen's poem again, then flipped through the pages, reading more. She could remember studying the form briefly in college, but she had to count the syllables again—5–7–5—to remember its constraints. Writing a successful haiku seemed like an almost impossible feat, like etching portraits in grains of rice. But here was Naveen's, as simple and clear as a voice in her ear.

She lay the book by the sink and undressed, then stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself. For so long, the sight of her body had only made her feel more lonely. Now she found she could regard it with less emotion. At thirty-five, her breasts had begun to droop and her stomach had become flabbier. She had never liked her hips, but she felt more kindly toward them now. Her skin looked rosy and supple. Her hair fell in tangled but thick curls across her shoulders. Her shadow-circled eyes looked curious and alert. Anna thought of the abandoned house that stood on the corner of her block on Waynoka. No one had lived there for years. Boards covered the windows, and tree branches from the last ice storm lay across the roof. Still, every spring the azaleas bloomed in the front yard in a tumble of pink blossoms. It seemed that despite her own absence and neglect, Anna remained rather pretty.

When she turned off the water, she heard “Anna!” from the other room. Without thinking, she dashed naked out of the bathroom and over to Goldie's bed.

“What? What?” she said.

“Darling, could you get me some water?” The old woman's face looked pale in the light that spilled out from the bathroom.

“Oh. Okay. I thought something was wrong.”

Goldie gave a little cough. “My throat's a little scratchy. I'm sorry I got you out of the bath.”

Anna turned and headed back toward the sink for a glass. “No. It's okay,” she began. “I just—”

But Goldie cut her off. “What in the world? What is that on your shoulder?”

Her voice, a weak whisper only a moment before, had suddenly regained its full strength.

Anna stopped, began to turn around, and then quickly retreated into the bathroom. She pulled on her silk kimono, popped off the paper lid that covered the bathroom cup, and poured her grandmother some water.

“What have you done to yourself?” Goldie demanded when Anna reappeared. She had pushed herself up in bed now. Her hair, unpinned, lay matted against her pillow.

Anna said, simply, “I've got a tattoo.” She walked over to Goldie and stood by the bed.

“Let me see it.”

Anna turned around and let the kimono slip off her shoulder.

Goldie switched on the bedside light.

“It's dragonflies,” Anna said.

For a moment the sight rendered Goldie speechless. At last she said, “Are you some kind of tramp?”

Anna didn't have the energy to argue. “It's body art,” she said. “I like it.”

“Did he make you do that?”

Anna remembered Ford's reaction when she came home with the tattoo—startled and surprisingly distressed—but he'd eventually gotten used to it. “No,” she said. “I did it myself.”

“Did he like it?”

“Not particularly.”

“It's disgusting. At least he had
some
sense.”

Only a few days earlier, Anna would have protected herself through some offhand and imprecise attempt to deflect her grandmother's criticism. Now, though, the image of Goldie in the suitcase remained too fresh. She seemed so old, so deeply in need of care. “You know what?” Anna said.

“What?” Goldie sounded suspicious.

“You need to rest. You're too weak to let yourself get upset about this.”

Anna pulled her robe back around her shoulder, sat down on the bed, and handed her grandmother the glass. “Drink up and go back to sleep,” she said gently.

To Anna's surprise, her compassion seemed to disarm Goldie completely. She took a few sips of water, then put the glass down on the table by the bed. “You're so good to me,” she sighed.

Once Goldie had closed her eyes again, Anna got in the bath. For a long time, she counted syllables against her fingers, trying to construct a three-line poem with five, then seven, then five syllables, but she was distracted now. It was, of course, unwise to have hoped that spending a night with another man would settle, once and for all, her feelings about Ford. If only one's emotional life could be so simple. Anna ducked underneath the water and held her breath, then slowly exhaled, listening to the deep rumble of the bubbles returning to the surface. She remembered lying in bed, feeling Ford's heart beat like a dependable clock against her back. How long ago was that? Five years, at least, because before he got sick he had always been the one to curl around her. After he got sick, she had always curled around him.

 

As they drove west the next morning, Goldie sat with her cell phone in her hand, waiting on a call from her travel agent. Despite her fall, she still planned to go to Dubai. “I'm supposed to be sore for a couple of weeks,” she had reasoned at dinner the night before. “Might as well be sore on a cruise ship.”

This morning, though, thoughts of the cruise were overshadowed by the revelation of Anna's tattoo. Goldie was nearly silent over breakfast, but a few miles beyond Davenport she could restrain herself no longer. “So, are you a sailor now?” she asked. They were moving through farm country, field after field of corn that, at this point in the season, stood about three feet tall. “Are you a criminal? A murderer? A thug?”

“Let's drop the subject,” Anna said. The farmland spread away from them on both sides of the road, making her feel that the Rolls-Royce was a ship sailing across a vast green sea. The air smelled of dirt, manure, things that sprouted. She liked the feel of the sun on her hands as she held the smooth leather of the steering wheel.

“A tattoo is not something you can ‘drop.' You're stuck with it your entire life.” The harshness of Goldie's words was predictable, but Anna noticed that her tone had changed. The spite that had peppered her conversation over the first few days of their journey seemed to have dissipated now. Goldie sounded bored. She soldiered forward, though, as if she felt obligated to offer her opinions. The dragonflies tattooed up the side of Anna's shoulder reminded her, she said, of Sadie's recent decision to build bookshelves in the living room of her Manhattan apartment, which Goldie believed should be completely reserved for fancy furniture and precious knickknacks. “You girls have no sense. Next, is your sister going to put a bathtub in her living room, too?”

“Maybe she'll put in a toilet at one end of the dining room table.” Anna was finding this conversation diverting at least.

But Anna's carefree manner must have been too much for Goldie. “You think it's funny,” Goldie replied, her tone suddenly acid. “Well, maybe that other fellow didn't care. But what kind of man is going to marry you with a tattoo? It's not decent.”

And then, despite herself, Anna began to cry. She felt as if she had lowered her defenses and that as a result she'd been stabbed. “Can you just leave it? Can you leave it for a few minutes?” She had never told anyone—not Sadie or their mother or father or, especially, Ford—that putting a tattoo on her shoulder had inexplicably helped her find balance as she watched her husband's health deteriorate. Anna certainly wasn't going to try to explain such a thing now. But the tears, in any case, silenced her grandmother.

“I know you didn't like him,” Anna finally said, “but I can't hear it right now.”

“I just thought he wasn't good enough for you.”

“He wasn't good enough for
you
. I was lucky to have him.” Oddly, despite her continuing ambivalence about Ford, Anna wasn't lying. It was as if by defending him, she saw, in a brief flash, all that she had loved about him—his affection for
Calvin and Hobbes,
his fondness for peanut butter on carrots, the way his chest hair stretched down his belly, then stopped, revealing a few tantalizing inches of bare skin. Even as she was speaking, though, she mistrusted her feelings and wondered how long they would last.

“You don't give yourself enough credit. You're a beautiful girl. You could be with any man,” Goldie said, momentarily putting aside the fact of the tattoo. “You'll find another husband. You'll start your life over. I can't count the number of times I've had to start my life over. You just do it. Maybe you'll have children. You'll be happier.”

Anna kept sobbing, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Her grandmother finally opened her purse and handed Anna a handkerchief. “I don't know how you can drive in this condition.”

“I can drive in this condition!” Anna cried. It helped, of course, that the road stretched straight ahead of them into infinity and she couldn't even see another car. She tried to breathe deeply. Goldie's opinion of Ford, Anna's tattoo, or even her prospects for the future meant nothing. Why should Anna care what Goldie thought? But Anna's mind was a mess of emotions, and everything, even slights about body art, could feel impossibly defeating. “He was a good man,” Anna said.

“Aren't they all?” Goldie was unimpressed.

Anna blew her nose into the handkerchief. “I really loved him,” she said, trying to deflect her grandmother one last time. As these words emerged from her mouth, another image of Ford came to Anna's mind—healthy Ford, sitting on the Adirondack chair on the porch, drinking a Corona and reading
The Master and Margarita
. The jolt of love she felt at that moment almost broke her heart all over again. And then, as if she were experiencing the whole awful loss of her husband anew, she said, “We were going to grow old together.”

They passed a pretty farm with a grain silo and a couple of cows in a field. A school bus, full of what looked like football players, pulled onto the highway, and the teenagers started cheering out the windows as Goldie's fancy car drove by. Finally, Goldie broke the silence. “Just because you want it doesn't make it so. I have to be honest here. You might grow old alone.”

Anna sniffed, but the tone of her grandmother's voice had the strange effect of drawing her out of herself. It sounded so cynical that she almost laughed. “I probably will grow old alone,” she said.

“You might not, though.”

Anna had never heard her grandmother try to be comforting, and so, finally, jarred by the oddness of the moment, she began to laugh. Goldie looked surprised at first—Anna's laughter undermined Goldie's attempt to sound like a wise elder—but the change in mood brought both of them relief as well. “You never know!” Goldie said, smiling grandly now.

A while later, “Mack the Knife” broke the silence. Out of the corner of her eye, Anna watched Goldie flip open her cell phone, stare at it in a single habitual moment of bafflement, then find the right button. “Hello?”

Bridget's engine was quiet enough that Anna could hear a man's voice through the line. She couldn't understand what he was saying, though. “Who? Yes. Oh, hello there!” Goldie said. “How nice of you to call.”

Anna glanced over at her, wondering.

“It's the doctor,” Goldie told her.

Goldie was extremely healthy, but at eighty-five she had enough doctors in her life to make it impossible to know which one she was talking about. After Goldie landed in the hospital, they had spoken with Dr. Mitnick in New York and Dr. Damutz in Palm Beach. And of course there was Dr. Choudary in Indiana, who might have felt the urge to check in on his patient, too. “I'm feeling fine,” Goldie said. “We stop every few hours and I stretch my legs, and then I get back in the car and keep going like nothing ever happened. It's very nice of you to call. I didn't expect to hear from you again.”

Goldie paused, listening, then turned to Anna. “Dr. Choudary wants to know where we are.”

Anna's stomach tightened. “Iowa.”

“Iowa.” Another pause. “The doctor says that I shouldn't be driving more than five hours a day if you can help it, but I think that's silly. Don't you think that's silly?”

Anna wasn't sure if her grandmother was speaking to her or the doctor, so she didn't respond. Then Goldie pushed the phone in her direction. “Here. He wants to talk to you.”

“I can't talk. I'm driving.”

Goldie pointed the phone toward the desolate highway in front of them. “You couldn't have a wreck out here if you tried.” The only other vehicle on the road was the school bus, a mile or so back, just a tiny yellow blip on the horizon.

Anna took the phone. “Hello?”

“I told her I wanted to hear from you about how she's doing, and in case that didn't work, I also told her I needed the recipe for the maharani's meatball curry.”

“It's in a box in my kitchen.” Her nervousness made her sound like a robot.

“Anna,” he said, “it's just an excuse.”

“Oh.” She had no idea what to say next. She did not want to talk to Naveen, even though all the way through Indiana, into Illinois, and across the green miles of Iowa, her mind had continuously drifted back in his direction. She had retraced every turn on the path of their story, from their first official encounter at the hospital, to the contours of their conversation at the movie, to their sweet, meandering lovemaking that night, and finally to their reluctant but cheerful good-bye the next morning. She had made mental lists of what she knew of him (preferences for haiku and Johnny Cash but not interior decorating), and she had pondered the differences between the emotional damage wrought by divorce, in his case, and widowhood, in hers. Thinking of Naveen gave her a pleasure that she had not experienced since she fell in love with Ford, and there was a tingly purity to it that she savored. But Anna also savored the simplicity of their encounter, the fact that it remained abbreviated, unburdened by ugliness and loss. In her mind, their “story” had ended.