She sat up in the hospital bed, her arm taped to the elbow, and listened to the young intern. The married couple who had just moved into the other side of the duplex had found her on the front lawn, as they emerged to go for Sunday brunch. She had not seen them yet, so she had not been able to ask how they had saved her; she had been certain it was impossible to save someone who had cut lengthwise rather than across. But they had saved her, and she sat up in the hospital bed, and the intern tried to be supportive.
“Everybody wants to get away from the world,” he said. “Whether it’s dope or booze or religion or television or quick sex or trashy novels, everybody wants to run away. We all want to be entertained all the time. And when it doesn’t work, when none of it is enough, we try to kill ourselves to escape.”
She didn’t think he understood just how lonely she was.
“The real world is terrific,” the young intern said. “I promise you, Anne Marie, it’s wonderful. People are always complaining, ‘Oh, I need to get away, I need to relax, I don’t want to think about it.’ If they turn on the tube and it’s some program about current events they rush to change the channel to get some silly rerun of a sitcom. We spend ninety percent of our lives escaping. If you really, truly, completely deal with the real world… it’s fascinating!”
She asked him to go away. She said she wanted to sleep, to get away from it all. So he left, but she didn’t sleep. She started to turn on the television set high on the wall across from her bed, but a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye claimed her attention. Out there in the sky, turning in tight maneuvers, a Sopwith Camel was having a dogfight with a large green and gray pterodactyl.,
She knew it was really happening out there, because from the angle at which she lay she could see other windows in the wing of the hospital to her right, and there were people leaning out and pointing at the sky.
For a long time she watched the marvelous ballet of wood-and-fabric airplane and Cretaceous flying reptile.
She was waiting on the sidewalk outside the recording company for the married executive to pick her up for their date. He had called it their “illegal tryst” and she had not liked the way his face pulled up on one side when he smiled like that; but she had been empty of plans for that night, and it was something to do not to be alone. The married executive had, promised her dinner and a movie. They were going to see a very popular space war movie that everyone said was the return of entertainment. It was something to do.
As she stood there at the curb, a 1941 Packard pulled up and a woman rolled down the window. It was a green Packard, highly polished, as though someone who loved it had waxed it endlessly. “Anne Marie,” the woman called from the car.
She walked over. It was her mother.
Her father was driving. The scent of pipe tobacco came from inside the car. “We thought we might have a picnic, like the old times, just the three of us,” her mother said. “Would you like to come along?”
She began to cry, even as she nodded and her mother reached back to unlock the rear door. She got inside and sat very quietly beside the picnic basket. The Packard thrummed to life, and pulled away.
Anne Marie Stebner’s mother and father had been dead for eleven years. It was a wonderful picnic.
Sailing the catamaran through the reefs of sapphire rocks, she made for the island. The wind smelled of freshly mowed grass and carried with it the faint tinkling of wind chimes.
“If it gets too lonely out here,” she said aloud, “perhaps I’ll start a fast-food franchise. Something with Lebanese food, maybe.”
As she spoke, a group of golden-tanned men and women emerged from behind a dune on the island, and waved at her, waved her in through the precious reefs.
“Or I can always rent a television set somewhere,” she said, smiling broadly. Several of the golden people produced oddly shaped musical instruments and began playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.” It had always been her favorite tune.
She tacked against the wind, and headed in to the island. Reality was fighting back. If the real world was too horrible for the lives it served, then the real world would alter itself. Anne Marie Stebner beached the catamaran and ran up the sand toward the golden island dwellers.
“Hi,” she called to them. “I’ve always wanted to live in a place” like this, I just didn’t know where to go to find it. What’s happening around here?”
So they told her. And she could not, in her wildest dreams, have believed anything could be that terrifically interesting. But it was. There in the real world.
The Other Eye of Polyphemus
I was dragged, kicking and screaming, on a tour through the lives of two women, once upon a time.
It was one of the most awful experiences of all time.
Including the Spanish Inquisition, the murder of Garcia Lorca, the genocide of the Brazilian indians, the crucifixion of Spartacus’ army of slaves, the sinking of the Titanic, the fire-bombing of Dresden and the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. This experience, I tell you, contained elements of all of the above, plus a few personal nasties that make me shudder when I think of them.
The experience does not, in any but one isolated reference, appear in this story. But it was that long night that inspired the writing.
Further, deponent sayeth not.
Yuccchhhh.
THIS IS ABOUT Brubaker, who is a man, but who might as easily have been a woman; and it would have been the same, no difference: painful and endless.
She was in her early forties and crippled. Something with the left leg and the spine. She went sidewise, slowly, like a sailor leaving a ship after a long time at sea. Her face was unindexed as to the rejections she had known; one could search randomly and find a shadow here beneath the eyes that came from the supermarket manager named Charlie; a crease in the space beside her mouth, just at the left side, that had been carved from a two nights’ association with Clara from the florist shop; a moistness here at the right temple each time she recalled the words spoken the morning after the night with the fellow who drove the dry cleaner’s van, Barry or Benny. But there was no sure record. It was all there, everywhere in her face.
Brubaker had not wanted to sleep with her. He had not wanted to take her home or go to her home, but he had. Her apartment was small and faced out onto a narrow court that permitted sunlight only during the hour before and the hour following high noon. She had pictures from magazines taped to the walls. The bed was narrow.
When she touched him, he felt himself going away. Thinking of warm places where he had rested on afternoons many years before; afternoons when he had been alone and had thought that was not as successful a thing to be as he now understood it to be. He did not want to think of it in this way, but he thought of himself as a bricklayer doing a methodical job. Laying the bricks straight and true.
He made love to her in the narrow bed, and was not there. He was doing a job, and thought how unkind and how unworthy such thoughts seemed to be… even though she would not know he was away somewhere else. He had done this before, and kindness was something he did very well. She would feel treasured, and attended, and certainly that was the least he could do. Her limp, her sad and lined face. She would think he was in attendance, treasuring her. He had no needs of his own, so it was possible to give her all that without trembling.
They both came awake when an ambulance screamed crosstown just beneath her window, and she looked at him warmly and said, “I have to get up early in the morning, we’re doing inventory at the office, the files are really in terrible shape.” But her face held a footnote expression that might have been interpreted as You can stay if you want, but I’ve been left in beds where the other side grows cool quickly, and I don’t want to see your face in the morning with that look that tells me you’re trying to work up an excuse to leave so you can rush home to take the kind of shower that washes the memory of me off you. So I’m giving you the chance to go now, because if you stay it means you’ll call tomorrow sometime before noon and ask if I’d like to have dinner and see an early movie.