“How did they find her?” I asked the doctor.
T found her,” Flossie said.
‘We have Miss Koerner to thank for that,” the doctor said.
T was calling there for days,” said Flossie, “and getting no answer. And then last night she missed Group. I got suspicious, even though she sometimes doesn’t come, when she gets all wrapped up in her flute or something-but I just got very suspicious, because I knew she was in this depression since coming back from Puerto Rico. And this afternoon I couldn’t stand worrying any more, and I told Sister Mary Rose that I had to leave and in the middle of an arithmetic class I just got in a taxi and came over to Maureen’s and knocked on the door. I just kept knocking and then I heard Delilah and I was sure something was up.”
“Heard who?”
“The cat. She was meowing away, but there was still no answer. So I got down on my hands and knees in the corridor there, and there’s a little space under the door, because it doesn’t fit right, which I always told Maureen was dangerous, and I called to the pussy and then I saw Maureen’s hand hanging down over the side of the bed. I could see her fingertips almost touching the carpet. And so I ran to a neighbor and phoned the police and they broke in the door, and there she was, just in her underwear, her bra too I mean, and all this…mess, like the doctor said.”
I wanted to find out from Flossie if a suicide note had been found, but the doctor was still with us, and so all I said was, “May I go in to see her now?”
“I think so,” he said. “Just for a few minutes.”
In the darkened room, in one of the half dozen criblike beds, Maureen lay with her eyes closed, under a sheet, hooked up by tubes and wires to various jugs and bottles and machines. Her nose was swollen badly, as though she’d been in a street brawl. Which she had been.
I looked silently down at her, perhaps for as long as a minute, before I realized that I had neglected to call Spielvogel. I wanted all at once to talk over with him whether I really ought to be here or not. I would like to ask him his opinion. I would like to know my own. What was I doing here? Rampant narcissismo-or, as Susan diagnosed it, just me being a boy again? Coming when called by my master Maureen! Oh, if so, tell me how I stop! How do I ever get to be what is described in the literature as a man? I had so wanted to be one, too-why then is it always beyond me? Or-could it be?-is this boy’s life a man’s life after all? Is this it? Oh, could be, I thought, could very well be that I have been expecting much too much from “maturity.” This quicksand is it-adult life!
Maureen opened her eyes. She had to work to bring me into focus. I gave her time. Then I leaned over the bed’s side bars, and with my face looming over hers, said, “This is Hell, Maureen. You are in Hell. You have been consigned to Hell for all eternity.”
I meant for her to believe every word.
But she began to smile. A sardonic smile for her husband, even in extremis. Faindy, she said, “Oh, delicious, if you’re here too.”
“This is Hell, and I am going to look down at you for all of Time and tell you what a lying bitch you are.”
“Just like back in Life Itself.”
I said, shaking a fist, “What if you had died!”
For a long time she didn’t answer. Then she wet her lips and said, “Oh, you would have been in such hot water.”
“But you would have been dead.”
That roused her anger, that brought her all the way around. Yep, she was alive now. “Please, don’t bullshit me. Don’t give me ‘Life is Sacred.’ It is not sacred when you are constantly in pain.” She was weeping. “My life is just pain.”
You’re lying, you hitch. You’re lying to me, like you lie to Flossie Koerner, like you lie to your Group, like you lie to everyone. Cry, hut I won’t cry with you!
So swore he who aspired to manhood; but the little boy who will not the began to go to pieces.
“The pain, Maureen,”-the tears from my face plopped onto the sheet that covered her-“the pain comes from all this lying that you do. Lying is the form your pain takes. If only you would make an effort, if only you would give it up-“
“Oh, how can you? Oh get out of here, you, with your crocodile tears. Doctor,” she cried feebly, “help.”
Her head began to thrash around on the pillow-“Okay,” I said, “calm down, calm yourself. Stop.” I was holding her hand.
She squeezed my fingers, clutched them and wouldn’t let go. It had been a while now since we’d held hands.
“How,” she whimpered, “how…”
“Okay, just take it easy.”
“-How can you be so heartless when you see me like this?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m only alive two minutes…and you’re over me calling me a liar. Oh, boy,” she said, just like somebody’s little sister.
“I’m only trying to suggest to you how to alleviate the pain. I’m trying to tell you…” ah, go on with it, go on, “the lying is the source of your self-loathing.”
“Bullshit,” she sobbed, pulling her fingers from mine. “You’re trying to get out of paying the alimony. I see right through you, Peter. Oh thank God I didn’t die,” she moaned. “I forgot all about the alimony. That’s how mortified and miserable you left me!”
“Oh, Maureen, this is fucking hell.”
“Who said no?” said she, and exhausted now, closed her eyes, though not for oblivion, not quite yet. Only to sleep, and rise in a rage one last time.
When I came back into the waiting room there was a man with Flossie Koerner, a large blond fellow in gleaming square-toed boots and wearing a beautifully cut suit in the latest mode. He was so powerfully good-looking-charismatic is the word these days-that I did not immediately separate out the tan from the general overall glow. I thought momentarily that he might be a detective, but the only detectives who look like him are in the movies.
I got it: he too must just be back from vacationing in Puerto Rico!
He extended a hand, big and bronzed, for me to shake. Soft wide French cuffs; gold cuff links cast in the form of little microphones; strange animalish tufts of golden hair on the knuckles…Why, just from the wrists to the fingernails he was something to conjure with-now how in hell did she get him? Surely to catch this one would require the piss of a pregnant contessa. “I’m Bill Walker,” he said. “I flew here as soon as I got the news. How is she? Is she able to talk?”
It was my predecessor, it was Walker, who had “promised” to give up boys after the marriage, and then had gone back on his word. My, what a dazzler he was! In my lean and hungry Ashkenazic way I am not a bad-looking fellow, but this was beauty.
“She’s out of danger,” I told Walker. “Oh yes, she’s talking; don’t worry, she’s her old self.”
He flashed a smile warmer and larger than the sarcasm warranted; he didn’t even see it as sarcasm, I realized. He was just plain overjoyed to hear she was alive.
Flossie, also in seventh heaven, pointed appreciatively to the two of us. “You can’t say she doesn’t know how to pick ‘em.”
It was a moment before I understood that I was only being placed alongside Walker in the category of Good-Looking Six-Footers. My face flushed-not just at the thought that she who had picked Walker had picked me, but that both Walker and I had picked her.
“Look, maybe we ought to have a drink afterwards, and a little chat,” Walker suggested.
“I have to run,” I replied, a line that Dr. Spielvogel would have found amusing.
Here Walker removed a billfold from the side-vented jacket that nipped his waist and swelled over his torso, and handed me a business card. “If you get up to Boston,” he said, “or if for any reason you want to get in touch about Maur.”