You or Someone Like You (17 page)

“How can you
see
anyone!” he pleads, panicking. He means at the intersection.

Listen to me
, I say. He freezes. I fix him with my eyes. It's a technique I've practiced on my son. I want his head in first, your end, OK? Slide him in slowly.

I've got my hands around the gardener's legs, and that's when I notice the blood. To the driver, I say: Ready? We both breathe in and lift together, but the legs are heavier than I'd expected. The driver awkwardly pulls the gardener inside, more or less on top of his own body, but it works, until the hurt man screams, then closes his eyes and concentrates on the pain. When he opens his eyes, they are looking directly at me.

I look at the driver, who almost seems in worse condition. Are you OK? I ask him.

There's a muffled sound, and he says, “I think so.” With a bit of shifting he edges out from under, and the gardener lies back on the seat, head almost touching the car door, his hands in tight fists. I gently bend his legs and, stepping back, very carefully shut the door. I gather myself for a moment and realize I am not breathing. I let out my breath.

I walk briskly around to the other side. We'll take him to Cedars Sinai, I say.

The driver is scampering around the other way. “Not Good Samaritan? It's closer. Wait. Is it closer?”

Cedars does better osteopathy. (I'm thinking of Marty Silverstein.)

“Laurel Canyon!”

I think, again, about traffic. Coldwater Canyon, I say.

“Maybe we shouldn't have moved him,” he says, almost literally wringing his hands.

I give him a brief, sharp look, and he flies for the door, jams the key into the ignition so that it almost breaks off. I push the passenger seat as far up as it will go and then find the lever and flip the back forward. I squeeze into the back, near the man's head, which I lift and then lower onto my lap, and look down at him. There is a surprising amount of blood on his hip and thigh. I start unbuckling his trousers. I'm sitting behind the driver on the passenger's side. Drive, I say, fast.

The Toyota jumps forward. I put a steadying hand on the backseat and continue with the pants. I'm going to look at the wound, I say to the man in Spanish, and he nods. I pull up his shirt, unfasten the belt, unzip the trousers. OK, I say, I need you to help me. You seem to be able to move.

“I can move,” he says, and before I can stop him, he shifts his hips, gritting his teeth. Stop, I say very quickly. Don't move. (That much I know from watching television shows.)

I say to the driver, in English, He's moving, so I don't think there's serious damage to his hip structure, amazingly.

“Oh, thank God, thank God,” he says, and he gives his version of what happened, which of course he needs to do. At a very mild, brief wave of nausea, I realize that I myself am coming out of a bit of shock. I let it flow and ebb. I am gratified to see that the gardener is not modest. He slips the trousers down, uncovering gray, worn underwear, the agony showing in his neck. There is a huge gash along his upper hip, already purple and swollen, and I hold it closed with the fingers of my left hand. The blood stops flowing. The underwear is becoming soaked with blood. I look down and see that I, too, am covered with blood to my elbow.

I glance up, indicate a rapidly approaching street. Turn there. The driver does, and we almost go off the road. The driver is trying to look at us in the rearview mirror. Eyes front, please, I say. I say it very crisply to control the tremble I feel. I close my eyes for a moment. Steady on, Anne.

“Is it bad?”

I breathe deeply, open my eyes. What should I say. He's going to be fine, it looks much worse than it is.

“Ask him if he's legal,” the driver says.

It takes me an instant to process this. I find it interesting he has the presence of mind to pose such a question. Then: hospital, questions, papers, police, Immigration. I put my right hand on the side of the man's head and ask him. He says that he is. I don't bother to ask if he has health insurance. He moans, and the driver, already unnerved by the blood, becomes so agitated I'm certain all three of us are going to be hospitalized. He's going to be fine, I say, and then gently,
Please
keep your eyes in front. I'm more frightened by his driving than by the blood; normally I would find this funny. But I can hear him hyperventilating, and I realize I must stabilize him. What do you do? I ask him.

He's staring ahead. His mind spins a moment before it grips. “I'm a screenwriter,” he says, close to tears.

That's interesting, I say. My husband works at a studio.

He blinks. Focused now. “Oh yeah?” He attempts a casual voice. “Who's that?”

Howard Rosenbaum.

He gasps without making any noise, which is a feat. He is looking at me in the mirror even as he turns right at high speed. “You're Anne Rosenbaum?” He is literally wide-eyed. Why do emergencies generate clichés? A car trying to merge into our trajectory honks at us.

Yes, I say. (He pretends not to be staring into the rearview mirror.) What are you writing?

“It's a,” he says, clears his throat, “romantic comedy. Set in Vancouver.”

“Ah. Vancouver is lovely.”

He frowns, clears this throat again, says quickly, “Well, the movie's not
about
Vancouver, and people don't get that the characters don't—”

You mean script readers don't get it.

He makes a scoffing sound. He hasn't even gotten as far as script readers. He's gotten to the person who answers the phone.

You don't have an agent.

“To get an
agent
you'd have to—”

Would you like me to give your script to Howard?

His eyes fill the rearview mirror. “Would you?”

I will if you keep your eyes on the road.

His eyes are instantly on the road. Eyeballs motionless.

The gardener moans and shifts. I raise and lower my left hand as he moves to hold the skin together. I ask the driver, Do you have a cloth? He starts flinging things from the glove compartment, though it's clear this will produce nothing. He stops when he notices I'm shimmying out of my sateen slip, which is quite awkward in the backseat. I rip it into wide strips. It's inappropriate bandage material, but my cotton shirt is too thick to rip, as is my linen skirt. I mop the blood that started seeping the instant I took my hand away. Then I try to tie the strips around his thigh to close at least part of the wound. The cloth seems to hold. I cradle the gardener's head in my lap. He has become conscious of the blood now, and he is terrified. I tell him he will be OK, we are going to the hospital. I ask him his name, and he says José Pineda. He moans something about death and invokes Jesus and the names of several of the saints.

I remember a professor marvel once as he told me that in his view, strangely enough American poetry had become gentler and more reassuring to readers than it had in a century. I was dubious. He waved this away. Yes, yes, modernist technique had become the norm—difficult and complex allusion, fractionated reality. But forget the style; much of poetry today had reassumed its nineteenth-century role, Wordworth's comfort and consolation, Blake's even earlier haven from the cares of the world.

Including car accidents, I think now.

I look at this man lying in my lap, close up. I see the pores in his skin, the thick hairs of his eyebrows. I see all the busboys—come up by means I don't ask about from all the unnamed impoverished countries—who have stood beside me to serve me glasses and glasses of cool lemon water, who have reached an intimate army of hairless cocoa-colored arms gently around my body to set a palace's worth of gleaming white detergent-washed dinner plates before me. Smiled and nodded at me as I have smiled and nodded at them. But I think, now that I think, that I have never, ever, in all these years and all these plates actually touched this skin or this jet black hair that I am stroking. So I will give this man in my lap comfort and consolation. I murmur to him

I hold the cloth tightly, but not too tightly, to the leg of the man in my lap. He looks as if he is concentrating. “William Blake,” I say to him.

I glance up to verify we are going the right way.

There is a faint scream of rubber on asphalt somewhere, but it seems unrelated to us. Turn left here, I tell the driver. He turns. His eyes are in the rearview mirror, watching me recite, but somehow he seems to be able to drive like this.

I'd take Civic Center Drive, I advise, to Beverly Boulevard.

He executes it, runs a red light. Both the face of the driver and the face of the gardener are focused now, kinetic, consoled.

José is listening. I don't know if he understands any of this, since I haven't heard him say a single English word. The driver's mouth wears a strange smile.

They are both calmer now. Better.

“
Más
,” he asks from my lap. More.

I hold the gardener's head as I used to hold Sam's when I put him to bed, stroking the man's hair down behind his ear with my right hand as my left holds his skin together. His hair is the color of Howard's, black and very thick, but utterly different in texture, and boar-bristle straight. I think of one of Sam's favorite
poems, a Roethke called “The Sloth.” I remember only a random bit. Roethke, I say.

The driver is grinning. I cannot remember the Spanish word for “sloth” but I describe the animal to the gardener, its habits, and he nods. He laughs, then winces. We proceed, three strangers, down West Beverly Boulevard.

When we get to Cedars Sinai, the ER team—young women in white coats, two Jewish and one Indian—extract him from the car. They act as if this were the most normal thing in the world. As they are taking him out, he says, apparently to me, “What you say.” English words. He gulps air. His accent is thick.

“Señor,” one of the doctors orders him, “por favor acuéstese. No se mueva.”

“Lo que usted dijo,” he says to me, cooperating with her but looking at me. “¿Me daría un duplicado por escrito?”

Yes, of course, I reply, surprised. I'll write it down for you tomorrow. He lets his head fall back on the gurney. He is examining the scarlet gumminess all over his right hand. I particularly enjoyed the last stanza, he says politely in Spanish. His Spanish is, phonetically, thoroughly lower-class Mexican, yet grammatically impeccable. He looks me in the eye, adds, just to make sure I understand, “En inglés.” He wants me to write it in English.

I smile broadly. Yes, sir, I say.

I turn to one of the doctors. Is Dr. Silverstein in today, I ask.

“Do you know him?”

He's a friend, I say. There may be hairline fractures.

My diagnosis amuses her, but she is not entirely dismissive. “I'll let him know.”

I'd like him to get good care, I say. Here's my card.

Having stabilized him, she turns to me, looks at the card, accepts it. Very rapidly, she scans my skin for breaks—“You were hit?” No, I just held him—checks my fingers and cuticles. “You'll need to come in for a hepatitis A test. You've had your B series?” I nod. “And syphilis, and in a few months HIV.” She purses her lips, satisfied, releases me, indicates a sign on the wall. “Call that number.” She turns away, passes through the swinging metal doors. In them I see a distorted image of myself covered in blood, streaks on my face, in my expensive hair. My shirt has dark-red patches. Half my pearls are tinted hemoglobin. The diamond earrings alone are untouched.

The lipstick is not entirely gone.

I look toward the driver. He's watching me now, utterly exhausted. I smile at him, and he smiles back, the first time he's smiled, and for a moment we grin at each other, out of panic and relief and whatever it is you feel when you experience something of this kind with another person.

We sit together, in companionable silence, waiting for the police to arrive.

 

The breeze coming in the window and the setting sun make me realize how energized I am. An adrenaline high.

“You're English, right?” he asks. He makes a careful left, heading back up into the hills toward my car.

Not exactly, I say. I'm half. Well, yes, I mean, I suppose I'm English. I never know how to answer that question.

“Ah,” he says. “Well, everyone thinks you're English.” He adds, “Your Spanish is really good. I'm jealous.”

Thank you.

There's the slightest hesitation. “My partner is from Mexico.” Then, “Well, his parents are.”