Where I'm Calling From (37 page)

I get up again and go to the other room, open the door, and turn on the light. The receiver is still on its side on the table. I bring it to my ear, expecting to hear the dial tone. But I don’t hear anything, not even the tone. On an impulse, I say something. “Hello,” I say.

“Oh, Bud, it’s you,” the woman says.

I hang up the phone and bend over and unplug it from the wall before it can ring again. This is a new one on me. This deal is a mystery, this woman and her Bud person. I don’t know how to tell Iris about this new development, because it’ll just lead to more discussion and further speculation. I decide not to say anything for now. Maybe I’ll say something over breakfast.

Back in the bedroom I see she is smoking another cigarette. I see, too, that it’s nearly four in the morning. I’m starting to worry. When it’s four o’clock it’ll soon be five o’clock, and then it will be six, then six-thirty, then time to get up for work. I lie back down, close my eyes, and decide I’ll count to sixty, slowly, before I say anything else about the light.

“I’m starting to remember,” Iris says. “It’s coming back to me. You want to hear it, Jack?”

I stop counting, open my eyes, sit up. The bedroom is filled with smoke. I light one up, too. Why not?

The hell with it.

She says, “There was a party going on in my dream.”

“Where was I when this was going on?” Usually, for whatever reason, I don’t figure in her dreams. It irritates me a little, but I don’t let on. My feet are uncovered again. I pull them under the covers, raise myself up on my elbow, and use the ashtray. “Is this another dream that I’m not in? It’s okay, if that’s the case.” I pull on the cigarette, hold the smoke, let it out.

“Honey, you weren’t in the dream,” Iris says. “I’m sorry, but you weren’t. You weren’t anywhere around.

I missed you, though. I did miss you, I’m sure of it. It was like I knew you were somewhere nearby, but you weren’t there where I needed you. You know how I get into those anxiety states sometimes? If we go someplace together where there’s a group of people and we get separated and I can’t find you? It was a little like that. You were there, I think, but I couldn’t find you.”

“Go ahead and tell me about the dream,” I say.

She rearranges the covers around her waist and legs and reaches for a cigarette. I hold the lighter for her.

Then she goes on to describe this party where all that was being served was beer. “I don’t even like beer,” she says. But she drank a large quantity anyway, and just when she went to leave—to go home, she says—this little dog took hold of the hem of her dress and made her stay.

She laughs, and I laugh right along with her, even though, when I look at the clock, I see the hands are close to saying four-thirty.

There was some kind of music being played in her dream—a piano, maybe, or else it was an accordion, who knows? Dreams are that way sometimes, she says. Anyway, she vaguely remembers her former husband putting in an appearance. He might have been the one serving the beer. People were drinking beer from a keg, using plastic cups. She thought she might even have danced with him.

“Why are you telling me this?”

She says, “It was a dream, honey.”

“I don’t think I like it, knowing you’re supposed to be here beside me all night but instead you’re dreaming about strange dogs, parties, and ex-husbands. I don’t like you dancing with him. What the hell is this? What

if I told you I dreamed I danced the night away with Carol? Would you like it?”

“It’s just a dream, right?” she says. “Don’t get weird on me. I won’t say any more. I see I can’t. I can see it isn’t a good idea.” She brings her fingers to her lips slowly, the way she does sometimes when she’s thinking. Her face shows how hard she’s concentrating; little lines appear on her forehead. “I’m sorry that you weren’t in the dream. But if I told you otherwise I’d be lying to you, right?”

I nod. I touch her arm to show her it’s okay. I don’t really mind. And I don’t, I guess. “What happened then, honey? Finish telling the dream,” I say. “And maybe we can go to sleep then.” I guess I wanted to know the next thing. The last I’d heard, she’d been dancing with Jerry. If there was more, I needed to hear it.

She plumps up the pillow behind her back and says, “That’s all I can remember. I can’t remember any more about it. That was when the goddamn phone rang.”

“Bud,” I say. I can see smoke drifting in the light under the lamp, and smoke hangs in the air in the room. “Maybe we should open a window,” I say.

“That’s a good idea,” she says. “Let some of this smoke out. It can’t be any good for us.”

“Hell no, it isn’t,” I say.

I get up again and go to the window and raise it a few inches. I can feel the cool air that comes in and from a distance I hear a truck gearing down as it starts up the grade that will take it to the pass and on over into the next state.

“I guess pretty soon we’re going to be the last smokers left in America,” she says. “Seriously, we should think about quitting.” She says this as she puts her cigarette out and reaches for the pack next to the ashtray.

“It’s open season on smokers,” I say.

I get back in the bed. The covers are turned every which way, and it’s five o’clock in the morning. I don’t think we’re going to sleep any more tonight. But so what if we don’t? Is there a law on the books? Is something bad going to happen to us if we don’t?

She takes some of her hair between her fingers. Then she pushes it behind her ear, looks at me, and says,

“Lately I’ve been feeling this vein in my forehead. It pulses sometimes. It throbs. Do you know what I’m talking about? I don’t know if you’ve ever had anything like that. I hate to think about it, but probably one of these days I’ll have a stroke or something. Isn’t that how they happen? A vein in your head bursts? That’s probably what’ll happen to me, eventually. My mother, my grandmother, and one of my aunts died of stroke. There’s a history of stroke in my family. It can run in the family, you know. It’s hereditary, just like heart disease, or being too fat, or whatever. Anyway,” she says, “something’s going to happen to me someday, right? So maybe that’s what it’ll be—a stroke. Maybe that’s how I’ll go. That’s what it feels like it could be the beginning of. First it pulses a little, like it wants my attention, and then it starts to throb. Throb, throb, throb. It scares me silly,” she says. “I want us to give up these goddamn cigarettes before it’s too late.” She looks at what’s left of her cigarette, mashes it into the ashtray, and tries to fan the smoke away.

I’m on my back, studying the ceiling, thinking that this is the kind of talk that could only take place at five in the morning. I feel I ought to say something. “I get winded easy,” I say. “I found myself out of breath when I ran in there to answer the phone.”

“That could have been because of anxiety,” Iris says. “Who needs it, anyway! The idea of somebody calling at this hour! I could tear that woman limb from limb.”

I pull myself up in the bed and lean back against the headboard. I put the pillow behind my back and try to get comfortable, same as Iris. “I’ll tell you something I haven’t told you,” I say. “Once in a while my heart palpitates. It’s like it goes crazy.” She’s watching me closely, listening for whatever it is I’m going to say next. “Sometimes it feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest. I don’t know what the hell causes it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she says. She takes my hand and holds it. She squeezes my hand. “You never said anything, honey. Listen, I don’t know what I’d do if something ever happened to you. I’d fold up.

How often does it happen? That’s scary, you know.” She’s still holding my hand. But her fingers slide to my wrist, where my pulse is. She goes on holding my wrist like this.

“I never told you because I didn’t want to scare you,” I say. “But it happens sometimes. It happened as recently as a week ago. I don’t have to be doing anything in particular when it happens, either. I can be sitting in a chair with the paper. Or else driving the car, or pushing a grocery basket. It doesn’t matter if I’m exerting myself or not. It just starts—boom, boom, boom. Like that. I’m surprised people can’t hear it.

It’s that loud, I think. I can hear it, anyway, and I don’t mind telling you it scares me,” I say. “So if emphysema doesn’t get me, or lung cancer, or maybe a stroke like what you’re talking about, then it’s going to be a heart attack probably.”

I reach for the cigarettes. I give her one. We’re through with sleep for the night. Did we sleep? For a minute, I can’t remember.

“Who knows what we’ll die of?” Iris says. “It could be anything. If we live long enough, maybe it’ll be kidney failure, or something like that. A friend of mine at work, her father just died of kidney failure.

That’s what can happen to you sometimes if you’re lucky enough to get really old. When your kidneys fail, the body starts filling up with uric acid then. You finally turn a whole different color before you die.”

“Great. That sounds wonderful,” I say. “Maybe we should get off this subject. How’d we get onto this stuff, anyway?”

She doesn’t answer. She leans forward, away from her pillow, arms clasping her legs. She closes her eyes and lays her head on her knees. Then she begins to rock back and forth, slowly. It’s as if she were listening to music. But there isn’t any music. None that I can hear, anyway.

“You know what I’d like?” she says. She stops moving, opens her eyes, and tilts her head at me. Then she grins, so I’ll know she’s all right.

“What would you like, honey?” I’ve got my leg hooked over her leg, at the ankle.

She says, “I’d like some coffee, that’s what. I could go for a nice strong cup of black coffee. We’re awake, aren’t we? Who’s going back to sleep? Let’s have some coffee.”

“We drink too much coffee,” I say. “All that coffee isn’t good for us, either. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any, I’m just saying we drink too much of it. It’s just an observation,” I add. “Actually, I could drink some coffee myself.”

“Good,” she says.

But neither of us makes a move.

She shakes out her hair and then lights another cigarette. Smoke drifts slowly in the room. Some of it drifts toward the open window. A little rain begins to fall on the patio outside the window. The alarm comes on, and I reach over and shut it off. Then I take the pillow and put it under my head again. I lie back and stare at the ceiling some more. “What happened to that bright idea we had about a girl who could bring us our coffee in bed?” I say.

“I wish somebody would bring us coffee,” she says. “A girl or a boy, one or the other. I could really go for some coffee right now.”

She moves the ashtray to the nightstand, and I think she’s going to get up. Somebody has to get up and start the coffee and put a can of frozen juice in the blender. One of us has to make a move. But what she does instead is slide down in the bed until she’s sitting somewhere in the middle. The covers are all over the place. She picks at something on the quilt, and then rubs her palm across whatever it is before she looks up. “Did you see in the paper where that guy took a shotgun into an intensive care unit and made the nurses take his father off the life-support machine? Did you read about that?” Iris says.

“I saw something about it on the news,” I say. “But mostly they were talking about this nurse who unplugged six or eight people from their machines. At this point they don’t know exactly how many she unplugged. She started off by unplugging her mother, and then she went on from there. It was like a spree, I guess. She said she thought she was doing everybody a favor. She said she hoped somebody’d do it for her, if they cared about her.”

Iris decides to move on down to the foot of the bed. She positions herself so that she is facing me. Her legs are still under the covers. She puts her legs between my legs and says, “What about that quadriplegic woman on the news who says she wants to die, wants to starve herself to death? Now she’s suing her doctor and the hospital because they insist on force-feeding her to keep her alive. Can you believe it? It’s insane. They strap her down three times a day so they can run this tube into her throat.

They feed her breakfast, lunch, and dinner that way. And they keep her plugged into this machine, too, because her lungs don’t want to work on their own. It said in the paper that she’s begging them to unplug her, or else to just let her starve to death. She’s having to plead with them to let her die, but they won’t listen. She said she started out wanting to die with some dignity. Now she’s just mad and looking to sue everybody. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that one for the books?” she says. “I have these headaches sometimes,” she says. “Maybe it has something to do with the vein. Maybe not. Maybe they’re not related. But I don’t tell you when my head hurts, because I don’t want to worry you.”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “Look at me. Iris? I have a right to know. I’m your husband, in case you’ve forgotten. If something’s wrong with you, I should know about it.”

“But what could you do! You’d just worry.” She bumps my leg with her leg, then bumps it again. “Right? You’d tell me to take some aspirin. I know you.”

I look toward the window, where it’s beginning to get light. I can feel a damp breeze from the window.

It’s stopped raining now, but it’s one of those mornings where it could begin to pour. I look at her again.

“To tell you the truth, Iris, I get sharp pains in my side from time to time.” But the moment I say the words I’m sorry. She’ll be concerned, and want to talk about it. We ought to be thinking of showers; we should be sitting down to breakfast.

“Which side?” she says.

“Right side.”

“It could be your appendix,” she says. “Something fairly simple like that.”

I shrug. “Who knows? I don’t know. All I know is it happens. Every so often, for just a minute or two, I feel something sharp down there. Very sharp. At first I thought it might be a pulled muscle. Which side’s your gallbladder on, by the way? Is it the left or right side? Maybe it’s my gallbladder. Or else maybe a gallstone, whatever the hell that is.”

“It’s not really a stone,” she says. “A gallstone is like a little granule, or something like that. It’s about as big as the tip of a pencil. No, wait, that might be a kidney stone I’m talking about. I guess I don’t know anything about it.” She shakes her head.