Varian Krylov (21 page)

having to face this, I'll understand. I'll even feel guilty for making you go through this, seeing me, explaining all this to me.”

Looking at him hurt too much. She looked down at the floor. Big squares of beige and black vinyl, glossy with wax. His feet came into frame, his shoes huge looking next to her bare feet. He touched her shoulder.

“We haven't known each other very long. So maybe this will sound dumb. But since we met, I've been happier--actually waking up excited about the day, about tomorrow, about the coming week—for the first time in a lot of years. That's why I'm here.”

She made herself straight. Strong. She faced him, and forced herself to go on facing him, even when her voice pitched and reeled, even when the tears she was trying to keep back rolled down her cheeks.

“I thought it would be just sex. And I thought that would be good, you know? For the first time. But obviously it was more than that. I think even the first night it was more than that, for me, but I pretended to myself it wasn't. And I knew this was coming. I thought I'd milk every day for all the pleasure, all the new things I'd never get another chance to experience. And now, maybe I'm sorry, because it hurts so much to walk away from you. And I'm sorry, Galen, that I let you think we. . . . But, please. Please understand. It's bad enough, what's going to happen to me. I can't have you around, reminding me how much I'm really giving up.”

She let him pull her to him; it was easier than letting him watch her face twist up with sobs. And now that she was huddled against him, she let him stroke her hair, let him put his arm around her and hold her.

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“You're not being fair, Vanka. You don't know what you're giving up, where I'm concerned. You assume I won't want you.”

“Don't, Galen. God, please don't.”

“I know you're scared. I know it's hard. But please, Vanka. Please let me be here for you.”

"Don't you want to talk me out of it?

“Do you want me to talk you out of it?”

“No.”

"You've made your decision. I'm sure you didn't make it easily. I didn't come here to tell you you're right or you're wrong. I just came to be your friend."

"You don't think I'm crazy?"

"It's a lot to give up. Your whole, perfect body. This part of you that gives you pleasure. If you have a baby, you'll never nurse it. Men who might have been your lovers won't want you. But none of that matters as much as you do. Your life is worth more. Maybe even some feeling of hope, of security is worth more. And the feeling that you have some control. Over your body. Your fate."

"I think so," she said, smiling and crying hard. "I think so."

* * * *

He found her in a dim room, her head turned away from the door to the hallway and the old woman in the first bed and the curtain dividing them, toward the small window that seemed to mock the room's depressing fluorescent light with enough sunshine to remind the inhabitants that there was light and air outside, but letting none of it come to them. She looked sad and gray-yellow, like everything in the room.

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He didn't say “hi.” He only smiled at her, took her hand—the one without the IV—

caressed her cheek, and finally, bent and kissed her forehead. It felt cool and surreally smooth against his lips. She turned her eyes up to him. That was her only acknowledgment of his presence.

He took the chair from beneath the mocking window and set it beside her. Now he could hold her hand and stroke her hair. It almost seemed like she flinched when he first touched her, brushing his fingertip over her brow, into her soft hair. Then she seemed to stiffen, and stayed cold and hard, like enduring his touch was a real trial. But finally, finally, after long minutes of tender touches, she softened and warmed to his hand.

All morning he stayed there, in that chair next to her bed, and the only people who came and talked to her and touched her were the staff and, once, when it was almost noon, her surgeon. Because she hadn't told them. Her friends. Her family. No one knew she was there.

It's okay to hurt, he reminded himself over and over as he walked, dazed, over the waxed linoleum, out of her room, down the hall, watching the luminous rectangles reflected in the tiles sliding along with him, but not keeping pace.

"Hi."

The woman behind the counter said, "Yes?" without looking up.

"Hi," he said again, thinking how little it sounded like him. Shy. Uncertain. "I'm a friend of Vanka Klimov's."

"Yes?" she said again, still not looking up.

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"Would it be possible to move her? Into one of those large single rooms with the big windows?"

"No. I'm sorry."

She sounded more indifferent than sorry. She looked up. Finally. From her expression it seemed like she got about a hundred, or maybe a thousand requests every shift that were either annoying or impossible. She looked like she'd been programmed, through long, dull repetitious habit, to say 'no' to everything.

The words “no, I'm sorry,” were already leaving her lips, stained with lipstick worn almost away, left behind on soda cans and styrofoam coffee cups, as her eyes left the form she was hurriedly scribbling on and settled on his face.

In one second her expression changed from irritation to uncertainty to recognition to shock.

"You're Galen Ross," she told him bluntly, a smile curving her lips, possibly for the first time that day.

"Yes."

He tried to smile back.

She grinned at him in surprised silence for a long moment or two.

"I'm sorry," she laughed. "What was your question?"

"I was wondering if it would be possible to move Vanka Klimov into a different room. I noticed two empty rooms—singles with large windows. Could she be moved?"

"Oh . . ." The woman began shifting awkwardly in her rolling office chair, nervously clicking her ballpoint pen.". . . I'm afraid these beds are . . ."

"Are they reserved?"

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"No," she confessed, "but . . ."

He leaned toward her, spoke in a soft voice that could have been either confidential or intimate.

"Is it an insurance issue?"

She evaded his eyes.

"I'll pay. Just bill me for the difference."

"It doesn't work that way. I'm sorry."

"Don't people incur expenses, get drugs, treatments that aren't covered, all the time?"

"Yes, but. . . ." She sighed.

"Please."

His vision blurred, and when he blinked he felt a tear slide down his cheek, but he didn't care. Even when the woman, who must see people cry all the time, working her shifts in the oncology ward, looked started, then almost alarmed. He didn't care.

"Please. I think it's the only thing I can do for her."

* * * *

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For this."

Vanka gestured toward the big window, which looked down on the lawn and trees of the park adjacent to the hospital.

"When they moved me, they said it was because some woman was afraid to be alone, so they needed my bed. That your idea too?"

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"Yes."

"Well, thank you.”

"You're welcome."

* * * *

Vanka stared at the door. She shouldn't have let the nurse go. She shouldn't have agreed to let Galen come over. With the nurse, she could be still and silent. Now, she'd have to smile, have to talk. The bell chimed a third time.

“Tonight I'll be doing a convincing impression of a delicate flower,” she warned Galen as soon as she opened the door, excusing her instinctive impulse to back away from the hug he knew he couldn't give her.

“So, no wrestling tonight?”

“I'm afraid not. In fact, you'll be lucky if I don't enlist you to lift my glass to my lips each time I desire a sip of water.”

"I don't mind it a bit, actually," he sighed with a smile, slinking up to her, his thigh brushing hers as he ran the tip of his finger under the hem of her short sleeve. “With you so fragile, I won't have to go to the trouble of getting you into restraints when I get a wicked impulse.”

He was just being playful. Obviously. But it was so like the old him—or rather, the old them—that it hurt. She backed away. It was instinct, now, not moving her upper body unnecessarily.

"I got The 400 Blows and Breathless, he said, affably.

"Truffaut and Godard? Nous attrapons la nouvelle vague, je vois."

"Mais, oui. I didn't know you spoke French.”

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“And I had no idea you knew cinema history. Khalid's influence?"

Galen scoffed.

"Hardly. Though he did help with the French, a bit. I lived in Paris, you know, for eighteen months, shooting a film. That's where we met." He laughed. "But we became .

. . friends in spite of my involvement in film, not because it's something we share in common. I defy you to get the man to set down whatever novel he's immersed in at the time to watch something on a screen. Even if I play the main character."

"I'll scrap my plans to invite him to join my cinephiles' club, then."

They settled in for their double feature, Vanka self-conscious of how slowly and carefully she lowered herself onto the sofa, using her thighs and abs to keep her back straight, to avoid flexing any muscles near the incisions. Galen loaded the DVD and fired up the projector, then settled in beside her, descending almost as cautiously as she had so as not to jar her. But almost as soon as the movie had started, she felt his gentle touch as his fingers caressed her cheek, then combed up into her hair, tickling with their teasing of her tresses, then tingling her as his nails raked her scalp before his fingertips began circling, massaging.

"Mmmmm. That feels so good, I think I'm slipping into a coma. I thought only heavy doses of painkillers could make my lids this heavy."

"Maybe it's not me. Maybe it's Truffaut."

"I'm sorry. Should we have made it a Jerry Bruckheimer marathon?"

"Now that would have been cruel. But maybe it should be Kirasawa next time.

Truffaut's work is sadly bereft of swordplay."

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They resubmerged in the realm of strict schoolmasters and self-absorbed mothers for a while, until Vanka had to change positions. Galen helped her to lie down, propped on pillows so she could see the projection while comfortably reclined. Sitting at the end of the couch, Galen took her feet on his lap and, after long minutes of sensuous caressing, began diligently rubbing them until her whole body—which had been a knot of pain and fearful rigidity for days—felt like it was melting into a tranquil puddle.

She turned from the black and white images sliding over her wall, to Galen, watching them, lit by them. Galen, who'd never known her, except sick. Galen, whom she'd distrusted and feared the night they met, and for weeks after. He'd scared her.

Hurt her. He'd known her such a short time, but understood her the best of all her friends and family. And now, it was his hands softening her body made taut by weeks of stress and fear and days of awful pain.

Seeming to feel her eyes on him, he turned toward her and smiled. Not one of his teasing or bemused grins. His smile seemed like one of simple happiness.

She was happy. She was enraged. She loved him. Now. Now that she was unlovable.

She kept it in.

"I should go to bed," she told him when the antihero of the second movie had died.

"It was naughty of you to stay up as late as you have."

He got up, moving almost as carefully as she did these days, so he wouldn't jostle her. He zigzagged efficiently through the room, turning off the projector and DVD

player, gathering up dishes and ferrying them off to the kitchen, getting Vanka a fresh 202

drink to take to bed. He helped her up to sitting, up off the couch. She was ready to see him to the door but he turned her gently into the hallway.

"What are you doing?"

"You don't think you get a top-notch date like that, and not put out, do you?"

She laughed.

"Does my limited mobility make you horny, baby?" she asked in a passable Austin Powers accent.

"Now, now. Don't try to turn this around and make it about my bizarre sexual proclivities."

"It's a wonder they didn't cast you in Cronenburg's Crash.

"As what? A thirteen-year-old with an accident fixation?" He was moving her gently down the hall. "Be a good girl, now, and let me help you get to bed."

She stopped dead.

"I'm fine, Galen. I can take care of myself."

He touched her shoulders and kissed the crown of her head.

"Yes, you're good at that. It's letting people help you that you need to work on.

And I'm here to help you mend your evil ways."

Apparently his plan of rehabilitation did not require that he be allowed to attend her in the bathroom. She brushed her teeth—slowly and carefully, the way she did everything now in an effort to avoid sudden rending pain—and peed, then found Galen in her room. Even after everything he'd done for her the last few days, how tender and sweet he'd been, the sight of him standing by her bed frightened her. Judging by the quality of smile he gave her, he could tell.

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"What attire will the lady be donning for her evening's slumber?"

"All my negligees are at the dry cleaner's, so I think I'll just sleep in the T-shirt I'm wearing."

"Very good, madam. Allow me to help you out of your sweater and trousers, then."

He looked her up and down, then looked at the bed, which the home nurse had made that afternoon, and turned the covers down. In a slow, gentle dance he turned her until the backs of her legs touched the mattress.

"Cardigan first, madam. Arms nice and relaxed by your sides, please."

She hadn't told him, but he seemed to know, to have guessed that any movement of her shoulders stirred some kind of pain, from a deep ache like sore muscles, to a searing agony that tore through the veil of pain killers. Brushing her teeth had reddened her eyes with stinging tears as she'd watched in the mirror.

She'd been dreading undressing, even unzipping the cardigan and working it off her shoulders and down her arm. But now he did it for her, pulling the garment out from her chest before unzipping, sliding it off her shoulders and down her arms so gently that she didn't feel so much as an unpleasant twinge from her tortured torso.