We were face to face. It occurred to me that if Jason got angry enough, he wouldn’t spend the night with me.
“You want it one hundred percent your way,” Jason said.
“You are talking about yourself,” I said. And it was echo, echo, echo, echo chamber time again, time again, time again.
“You have no sense of order,” Jason yelled.
“Oh, leave me alone,” I yelled back. I was getting tired. I gave the shopping cart a jab. All at once I didn’t care if he fucked me tonight, or ever.
“I’ll leave you alone, cunt,” Jason screamed. He walked out of the market. I watched him leave. Go, bastard. I hate you. And he was gone. And I was staring at the market door. Everything seemed darkly gouged out and too cold and I wasn’t at all certain.
I had the sensation of sinking into black circles, liquid whirlpools, dark air hissing, the chill, and I thought, now easy, take big breaths. Calm down. It was all a dream. I was wrong. I was dark, too sharp. I was bleeding, seething, mistaken, misshapen. And I’ll go insane without him. The roof will break off and winter strike without warning and the ground dissolve with a small sucking sound. And the earth will be barren, skies clotted with fat yellow clouds of dust and hopping locusts and I’ll die.
I ran into the parking lot. I searched the sidewalk, the street, the gray shadow-driven pavement where haunted fat dark shapes floated. I got into my car, aching and resigned, part of me breaking, breaking.
Jason was lying on the back seat. He was eating a Mars bar. “I really don’t know what to do anymore,” he said.
20
I crossed the bridge over Eastern Canal and wound down an alley to the beach. It was early. The sky and sea were a lively blue. I thought of Jason curled small in my bed, his breath slowly rising and making the sheet softly sway. The morning waves sashayed onto shore, pastel blue, petticoat blue, and I wondered how it had all gone so bad. I walked along the wet sand to the place where I had strangled the cat, the place where the waves curved around his body in a black embrace. The sand was deserted, pale yellow, popsicle yellow. Waves curled slowly and lapped at the shore. And I thought, how did it happen, the ruin? Like everything else, one sad blind step at a time.
I drove to the hospital. The day was clear, finely etched, the edges distinct, the centers solid. Lawns and slices of sidewalk pushed up spring flowers. Pink and white lilies, mouths starched and wide open. Dark stalks of purple iris. Yellow and red and lava-colored cannas. Gladioli, roses, and the bougainvillaea that never slept, never went into remission, but just kept spreading across garden gates and roofs, luxuriant. And plateaus of red and pink geraniums, azaleas, blue clusters of agapanthus. The city almost looked real.
Francine was sitting in the hospital cafeteria. She was wearing white slacks and a white straw beach hat. A vision in white. She was reading The New Yorker magazine. “Borges is a great writer,” she announced. “Márquez. Neruda. All those greasers are great writers.” She closed the magazine.
We considered the great greaser writers in silence. I drank another cup of coffee. I was conscious of the round black and white clock embedded in the wall just above my head. Why, it was a kind of eye. It saw something, measured something. It breathed and blinked.
“He looks so much better,” Francine said, sparkling. “I’m taking the day off. I’m going sailing.”
“You deserve it,” I said.
Francine leaned across the small table. She brought her face very close to mine. “Phillip has fallen in love with me,” she whispered. “Totally smitten. But he’s afraid to get involved. He knows he could become serious. He’s afraid to be vulnerable. What do you think?”
“I’m tired of what men are afraid of.”
“I know what you mean. I thought about that reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday. News is merely the way men gossip.” Francine stared at me, stared into me, through the skin, directly into my brain. “It’s tedious pretending to be subservient, isn’t it? But Phillip is a whole new ball game.” Francine leaned her face so close to mine I could feel her breath against my face. “He’s a Scorpio,” she whispered. “You know what that means.”
It was becoming clear to me that Francine was missing important cards from her personal deck. An ace and two kings at the least. Maybe it had something to do with the mice that fell out of the ceiling and bounced across her ten-year-old head.
“They want him to walk. He says he’s waiting for you. By the way, I called his bluff.”
“How?”
“He asked for the TV Guide,” Francine said. She laughed. “He didn’t ask for it. He pointed to the TV up on the wall. Then he put out both his hands like a book and pantomimed turning pages. I ask you, would a man planning to die want a TV Guide?” Francine stood up. “Make sure he walks,” she said.
“Francine, have fun today,” I said softly.
My mother looked stunned. “You’ve never wished me a good time in my entire miserable life,” she said. “And you’re going to be one guilt-ridden woman someday.”
My father was sitting up. The oxygen and IV were gone. The other machines were gone. He was reading Playboy. When he saw me he shoved the magazine aside and removed his eyeglasses. His expression darkened. He had already written a note.
BUYING TIME AT THIS EXPENSE CRAZY. PUT U & F. THRU THIS. F. ACTING NUTS. MICE ON HER BRAIN AGAIN. AFRAID 2 DIE. U & F. CANT TAKE CARE OF SELVES.
I read my father’s note. He looked alert. His eyes were a dark brown. The inky liquid was gone. They had removed more of the bandages from his face. He looked incredibly sad.
“Are you in pain?”
My father nodded his head.
“Do you want a shot?”
My father nodded yes. He reached for his pad. ASKED NURSE 4
SHOT. NO DICE.
“They won’t give you a shot any more? They must think you’re getting better.”
B.S. THEY R SADISTS.
My father stared at the floor. After a while a young nurse padded into the room. “Time to go on your first walk,” she said cheerfully. She gave my father a big smile.
My father stared at the nurse. He gripped his blanket with both hands and pressed it tightly against his chest. I could see a grayish scab on his hand where the IV needle had been embedded. My father shook his head violently from side to side.
The nurse smiled sweetly and left the room. She returned with another nurse and a doctor I had never seen before. “Time to walk now,” the new doctor said. He sounded as if he meant it.
My father studied the new doctor. Then he gave him the finger.
Everyone sprang into action. One nurse pried the sheet from my father’s hands. The other nurse and the doctor gripped my father under his armpit. They were pulling him by his good arm, the one they hadn’t taken skin from. I tried to help my father put his bathrobe on. His shoulder was too thickly bandaged from the skin graft. He couldn’t push his arm through the sleeve. I draped it over his shoulders.
My father was standing on his feet. His legs were trembling violently. He seemed startled and breathless, clearly in pain.
“One foot in front of the other,” the doctor said firmly.
My father gave the doctor a brief black stare. With his eyes he said eat it motherfucker.
We edged into the corridor. My father leaned against me. He took tiny broken steps. I tried to match them. My father has always been a good walker. It was one of his hobbies. After the divorce, my father had tried to walk his rage out. He would walk from his house in West Los Angeles to City Hall downtown and back. Or he would walk west, to the ocean, and back again. Walking. Walking. Once he walked forty miles in a single day. He went back later to measure his route exactly by the car odometer. Forty-two miles, he told me proudly.