When we’d finally compromised by agreeing to meet for drinks in Center City — whence I imagined myself following her home again and this time gaining entry to her bedroom, gaining permission to put my hands on more highly charged parts of her body, maybe even gaining everything I wanted, provided she wanted it as much as I did — I ate a quick dinner and went to my room to read Hegel for an hour. I’d barely sat down when the call came from my sister Cynthia.
“Clelia’s in the hospital,” she said. “They admitted her last night around midnight.”
I was in such an Anabel state that my thought was: we had our first kiss around midnight. It was as if my mother had somehow known. Cynthia explained that my mother had been in the bathroom for four hours with a rising fever, unable to get away from the toilet. She’d finally managed to phone her gastroenterologist, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout, who was old-school enough to make house calls and fond enough of my mother to do it at eleven on a Saturday night. His diagnosis was not just an acute bowel inflammation but a complete nervous breakdown — my mother couldn’t stop deliriously defending Arne Holcombe from some unnamed accusation.
“So I just got off the phone with the campaign manager,” Cynthia said. “Apparently Arne exposed himself to a female staffer.”
“My God,” I said.
“They tried to keep it from Clelia, but somebody told her. She kind of went out of her mind. Twenty-four hours later, she can’t leave the toilet long enough to call for help.”
Cynthia was hoping I could fly to Denver. She had a big vote on unionization coming up on Friday, and Ellen was still furious with my mother for some remark she’d made about banjo players. (Ellen’s position then and ever after was: She’s a bitch to me, and she’s not actually my mother.) Cynthia had never entirely stopped being dubious of me morally, albeit in a friendly way, and she probably already feared (with good reason) that she’d end up stuck with the primary emotional care of her stepmother. I agreed to call the hospital.
First, though, I called Anabel and luckily caught her before she’d left to meet me. I explained the situation and asked if she might come and see me in my dorm instead. Her response was dead silence.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Now you see what I mean about it beginning,” Anabel said.
“But this is an actual emergency.”
“Try to imagine me in your dorm. The eyes on me. The smell of those showers. This is something you can imagine me doing?”
“My mom is in the hospital!”
“I’m sorry about that,” she said more kindly. “I’m just sick about the timing. It’s like everything is some sort of sign with us. I know it’s not your fault, but I’m disappointed.”
I consoled her for nearly an hour. I believe this was the first time I ever really spoke ill of my mother; she’d previously been nothing worse than an embarrassment I’d kept to myself. I must have wanted to show Anabel that my loyalties were hers for the taking. And Anabel, though she identified with her own suffering mother, not only said nothing in defense of mine but helped me to sharpen my complaints with her. She groaned when I told her that my mother subscribed to Town & Country, and that she considered paper napkins déclassé and put out cloth ones, with napkin rings, at every meal, and that her idea of a chic department store was Neiman Marcus. “You need to tell her,” Anabel said, “that the people she admires all fly to New York and shop at Bendel’s.” Anabel may have renounced her privilege, but she was still defending it from parvenus. When I recall her snobbery, the innocent cruelty of it, she seems very young to me, and I even younger for feeling intoxicated by it and using it against my mother.
The voice in Denver was hoarse and slurred with sedatives. “Your dumb old mother is in the hospital,” it said. “Doctor Schan … Vyllingerhout took one look at me … ‘I’m taking you to the hospital.’ He’s the most wo’r’ful man, Tom. Lef’ his bridge game for me, plays bridge on Saturday night … They don’t make physissans like that anymore. He doesn’t have to work — sisty-sis years old. A real arissocrat, I think I told you his family … very old family, Belgium. He comes on Saturday night straigh’ from his bridge game to dumb old me. Saturday night he makes a house call. Says I’m going to get better, not giving up until I’m better. Honestly, I’m so discouraged with this dumb old thing … He really is my savior.”
I was encouraged that she seemed already to be moving on from Arne Holcombe to Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. I asked if she wanted me to come and see her.
“No, sweetie. You’re sweet to offer but you have your magazine. To edit … your newspaper I mean. I’m so proud you’re editor in chief. It will really impress … the law schools.”
“Journalism schools all the more.”
“I’m just happy to think of you with your fine, interesting, ambitious friends … all your bright prospects. You don’t have to come and see dumb old me. Rather you not see me this way. Not my best … you can come when I’m better.”
I’m not proud to have seized on permission granted under sedation not to go and see her. I think she did genuinely want me to have my own life, but this doesn’t lessen the offense of my fear of being around her, my fear of implication in her sickness and recovery, and I ought to have known — did know, but pretended I didn’t — that Cynthia, who was a very good person like our dad, would take up my slack and drive to Denver in her VW minibus after her union vote.
Not that I gave it much thought. My head was a radio playing Anabel on every station. There was no magazine in the world in whose pages I wouldn’t have pointed to her picture and said: That one. No words in the language that stopped my heart like ANABEL CALLED on my office message board. (Never ANNABELLE. She was vain about her name and spelled it for whoever took the message.) We spoke every night and I began to resent the DP for interfering. I stopped eating beef and much of anything else; I was constantly half nauseated. Oswald clucked over me, but I was half nauseated with everything, including my best friend. I only wanted Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel Anabel. She was beautiful and smart and serious and funny and stylish and creative and unpredictable and liked me. Oswald delicately called my attention to signs that she might be somewhat crazy, but he also showed me an article in the business section of the Times: McCaskill, still swimming in profits from Soviet grain sales, had an estimated value of $24 billion, and its dynamic president, David M. Laird, was aggressively expanding its operations overseas. I did the math on David — five percent, four heirs — and arrived at a figure of three hundred million dollars for Anabel, and felt even sicker.
I had to see her three more times before she let me in her bedroom. She was no doubt mindful of the number four, but there was also a peculiar circumstance that I learned of some hours into our third meeting as a couple, after I’d emerged victorious from protracted struggle with fear and feminist self-scrutiny and dared to ease my hand up under the maroon velvet dress she was wearing. When my fingers finally reached her underpants and touched the source of the heat between her legs, she drew breath sharply and said, “Don’t start.”
My hand retreated immediately. I didn’t want to harm her.
“No, it’s OK,” she said, kissing me. “I want you to feel me. But only for you, not for me. You don’t want to start with me.”
I took my hand out of her dress altogether and stroked her hair, to impress on her that I wasn’t in a hurry, wasn’t selfish. “Why not?” I said.
“Because it won’t work. Not tonight.”
She sat up on her sofa and pressed her knees together with her hands flat between them. She made me promise that, no matter what happened, I would never tell anyone what she had to tell me. Ever since she was thirteen, she said, her periods had been in perfect sync with the phases of the moon. It was a very weird thing: her bleeding invariably began nine days after the moon was full. She said she could be trapped in a cave for years and still know what day of the lunar month it was. But there was something even weirder: ever since she’d had her unhappy disease in high school (this was her phrase, “my unhappy disease”), she could only achieve satisfaction in the three days when the moon was fullest, no matter how hard she tried on other days of the month. “And believe me, I’ve tried,” she said. “There’s nothing but frustration at the end of what you were starting.”