Her voice softened, suddenly without the hint of a demand. ‘Dismas, please. Would you please see me?’
He sighed. He might know how people evolved into tightasses, but that didn’t mean he wanted to become one himself. ‘Where’s a good place? Where are you now?’
It was three-thirty now and she was just going to change and then work out. She would be at Hardbodies! near Broadway and Van Ness until around six. If he pushed it a little, he could tell himself it was right on his way home.
Jeff didn’t have a private room, but he had the window, and the other bed was empty, so it was just as good. He was at the Kaiser Hospital near Masonic, and his window looked north, the red spires of the Golden Gate poking through the cloud barrier beyond the green swath of the Presidio. Closer in, the fog had lifted and the sun was bathing the little boxes along the avenues.
Jeff Elliot wouldn’t have cared if there had been a monsoon blowing out there over a slag heap – at least he could see it.
His vision, coaxed by the Prednisone, had begun to slide back, furtive as a thief, sometime early in the morning, a dim, lighter shadow amid all the darkness.
He was afraid to believe it. This disease didn’t give back. It took away, and kept what it took. First his legs. Now his sight? And besides, there really wasn’t anything to see. Some shapes, but dark.
He could press his hands into his eyes and hold the pressure for a minute, and there would be little explosions of light – purple, green, white – that seemed to take place inside his brain. He didn’t know if real blind people experienced that. The stimulus, though, didn’t come from outside light. He was sure of that. Could it be his optic nerve was still working?
By morning there was no doubt. At least he wouldn’t, thank God, be stone-blind. And all during the day, between naps, it had gotten better, until now he could see. Not perfectly, still fuzzy, but enough.
Dorothy Burgess – from Maury’s office – had been in before she’d gone to work that morning just to see if he was all right, bringing flowers. Now she was coming through the door again – visitors’ hours – smiling, concerned, the most lovely sight he had ever seen.
She sat down. ‘How are you feeling?’
He pushed himself up, half sitting now. ‘Much better. I can see you.’
He hadn’t called his parents back in Wisconsin. He didn’t want to worry them. He thought he’d call them when the attack was over, when they could assess the latest damage. After he’d been admitted last night, he’d made a call to the Chronicle, but nobody from there had been in to visit.
He didn’t know what to say to Dorothy. Before the MS, he hadn’t done much dating to speak of, and since losing the use of his legs, his confidence in that area had dipped to zero. He’d concentrated on his career. But he was doing all right – he wasn’t asking for anything more.
If you were crippled, you couldn’t expect women to be crawling all over you, except the pity-groupies, and he didn’t want any part of them. He knew he was probably the last mid-twenties virgin in San Francisco, if not the known world, and it was okay. He could live with it. At least he was alive. You had to keep your priorities straight.
Dorothy moved her chair against the bed and rested her arm down by his legs. Her hair was the color of wheat just before it was harvested. The white blouse had a scoop neck, a scalloped row of blue cornflowers that perfectly matched her eyes. Freckles on a tan bosom. He found he couldn’t stop taking her in, like the air he breathed. ‘I’m staring.’
She laughed, more sunlight. ‘I’d stare too if I’d been blind yesterday.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He always felt apologetic about this damn disease. ‘I didn’t mean to get anybody involved in all this. Don’t feel like you have to come visit. I’m okay.’
‘It is a terrible inconvenience.’ Was she teasing him? ‘I was just saying to Maury today, ’I guess I’ve got to go visit that awful Jeff Elliot again. He is really making my life difficult, going blind in our office like that.‘
‘I was just saying -’
‘I know what you were saying. And it’s silly.’ She patted his leg. ‘Are they feeding you all right here?’
He tried to remember. ‘I guess so. I must have had something. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out tomorrow anyway. They just wanted to observe me for the day.’
‘Kaiser,’ she said. ‘Keep those beds empty. You never know when someone might need one.’
‘It’s okay,’ he repeated. ‘All I need is steroids. I don’t need to be in the hospital.’
‘You need food.’
‘I guess so. I never really thought about it.’
‘You never think about food? I think about food all the time.’
His eyes traveled down over her slim body. ‘Where do you put it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I put it. Now who’s picking you up when you leave here? How are you getting home?’
He hadn’t thought about that, either. He supposed he’d take a cab. He hoped his car was still parked in one of the handicapped stalls behind the Hall of Justice.
‘Okay, it’s settled then. I’m coming by tomorrow, taking you home, and cooking you a meal. After that, you’ve just got to stop bothering me.’ She stood up, leaned over and kissed him. ‘Don’t get fresh,’ she said, then was gone.
Hardy reflected, not for the first time, that he was too much in touch with himself. Wouldn’t it be nice to sometimes be able to truly fool yourself? Not know every motive you had down to about six levels.
He wanted to see Celine, and not in his office. That was the problem.
He had simply decided – last week, as soon as it had come up – that he was not going to do anything about it. It was too risky – for him, for Frannie, for the new life that was making him more content than he’d ever thought possible. It seemed to him that sometimes you met people who were immediately recognizable as having an almost chemical power to insinuate themselves into your life. Those people – men or women – could power your engines if you weren’t yet settled down. But if you had a career and a family and a rhythm to your life, a blast like that could only destroy things. If you wanted to keep your orbit you avoided that extra juice. Simple as that.
Hardy could control himself – that wasn’t it – but Celine was fire. And the best way to avoid getting burned, even if you were careful, was to avoid the fire.
‘Dumb,’ he said, pausing a moment before pushing open the semi-opaque glass doors of Hardbodies! He was greeted by twenty reflections of himself. Mirrors, mirrors, on the wall.
‘Can I help you?’
The name tag said ‘Chris,’ and Chris, Hardy thought, was the Bionic Man. Muscles on his muscles, green Hardbodies! headband, yellow Hardbodies! t-shirt, black Spandex shorts. Wristbands on both wrists. Perfect shiny black Beatle-length hair. Behind the long counter he could see three girls and four guys, all from the same mold as Chris.
‘I’m meeting somebody,’ he said.
‘Sure, no problem,’ Chris said. ‘We got a pager at the desk here.’
He heard her name called while he waited on a padded stool. There weren’t any chairs, only stools. And little mushroom tables with magazines on them: City Sports, Triathloner, Maximum Steel, The Competitive Edge. There was music playing, heavy-beat stuff. He heard what sounded like a lot of basketballs getting dribbled on a wooden floor.
The place already seemed packed, and people were filing by him as though they were giving away money in the back room.
Suddenly, though he jogged four or five days a week, he felt old and flabby. Everybody in here was under thirty, except for the ones who were fifty and looked better than Hardy figured he had at twenty.
And Celine, who wasn’t anywhere near fifty and looked better than any of the twenties, even with a good sweat up. Especially, perhaps, with a good sweat up. A blue sweatband held her hair back, a towel was draped around her neck. She wore a fluorescent blue Spandex halter top soaked dark between her breasts. The bare skin of her stomach gleamed wet and hard. The leotard bottoms rose over her hips at the sides and dipped well below her navel in the front. A Spandex bikini bottom matched her top. White Reeboks.