“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I’m a coward. I run away from things. It’s my style- you saw that the first time we met, in practicum.” Her shoulders drooped: “Some things never change.”
“Forget it. Like I said, ancient history.”
“What we had was special, Alex, and I allowed it to be destroyed.”
Her voice stayed soft but got tighter. The bartender glanced over. My expression sent his eyes back to his work.
“Allowed it?” I said. “That sounds pretty passive.”
She recoiled as if I’d spit in her face. “All right,” she said. “I destroyed it. I was crazy. It was a crazy time in my life- don’t think I haven’t regretted it a thousand times.”
She tugged at her earlobe. Her hands were smooth and white. “Alex, meeting you here today was no accident. I never attend conventions, had no intention of going to this one. But when I got the brochure in the mail I happened to notice your name on the program and wanted suddenly to see you again. I attended your lecture, stood at the back of the room. The way you spoke- your humanity. I thought I might have a chance.”
“A chance for what?”
“To be friends, bury the hard feelings.”
“Consider them buried. Mission accomplished.”
She leaned forward so that our lips were almost touching, clutched my shoulder, whispered, “Please, Alex, don’t be vindictive. Let me show you.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“Show me what?” I said.
“A different side of me. Something I’ve never shown anyone.”
We walked to the front of the hotel, waited for the parking valets.
“Separate cars,” she said, smiling. “So you can escape any time you want.”
The address she gave me was on the south side of Glendale, the down side of town, filled with used-car lots, splintering, by-the-day rooming houses, thrift shops, and greasy spoons. Half a mile north on Brand, the Glendale Galleria was under construction- a polished brick tribute to gentrification- but down here, boutique was still a French word.
She arrived before me, was sitting in the little red Alfa in front of a one-story brown stucco building. The place had a jaillike quality- narrow, silvered windows bolted and barred, the front door a slab of brushed steel, no landscaping other than a single thirsty liquidambar tree which cast spindly shadows on the tar-paper roof.
She met me at the door, thanked me for coming, then pushed the buzzer in the center of the steel door. Several moments later it was opened by a stocky, coal-black man with short hair and a corkscrew chin beard. He wore a diamond stud in one ear, a light-blue uniform jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans. When he saw Sharon he flashed a gold-jacketed smile.
“Afternoon, Dr. Ransom.” His voice was high-pitched, gentle.
“Afternoon, Elmo. This is Dr. Delaware, a friend of mine.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.” To Sharon: “She’s all prettied up and ready for you.”
“That’s great, Elmo.”
He stood aside and we entered a waiting room floored with oxblood linoleum and furnished with orange plastic chairs and green tables. To one side was an office labeled RECEPTION and windowed with a square of yellowed Lucite. We walked past it and up to another steel door, marked NO ENTRY. Elmo selected a key from a heavy ring and sprung the latch.
We stepped into brightness and pandemonium: a long, high room with steel-shuttered windows and a fluorescent ceiling that radiated a cold, flat imitation daylight. The walls were covered with sheets of emerald-green vinyl; the air was hot and rancid.
And everywhere, movement. A random ballet.
Scores of bodies, twitching, rocking, stumbling, brutalized by Nature and the luck of the draw. Limbs frozen or trapped in endless, athetoid spasm. Slack, drooling mouths. Hunched backs, shattered spines, nubbed and missing limbs. Contortions and grimaces born of ravaged chromosomes and derailed neural pathways and made all the more cruel by the fact that these patients were young- teenagers and young adults who’d never know the pleasures of youth’s false immortality.
Some of them clutched walkers and measured their progress in millimeters. Others, contracted stiff as plaster statues, bucked and fought the confines of wheelchairs. The saddest among them slumped, flaccid as invertebrates, in high-sided wagons and metal carts that resembled oversized baby strollers.
We made our way past a sea of glazed eyes as inert as plastic buttons. Past witless faces gazing up from the leather sanctuary of protective headgear, an audience of blank faces unperturbed by the merest flicker of consciousness.
A gallery of deformity- a cruel display of all that could go wrong with the box that humans come in.
In a corner of the room a rabbit-eared console TV blasted a game show at top volume, the shrieks of contestants competing with the wordless jabber and inchoate howls of the patients. The only ones watching were half a dozen blue-jacketed attendants. They ignored us as we passed.
But the patients noticed. As if magnetized, they swarmed toward Sharon, began flocking around her, wheeling and hobbling. Soon we were surrounded. The attendants didn’t budge.
She reached into her purse, took out a box of gumdrops, and began distributing candy. One box emptied, another appeared. Then another.
She dispensed another kind of sweetness, too, kissing misshapen heads, hugging stunted bodies. Calling patients by name, telling them how good they looked. They competed for her favors, begged for gumdrops, cried out in ecstasy, touched her as if she were magic.
She looked happier than I’d ever seen her- complete. A storybook princess reigning over a kingdom of the misshapen.
Finally, gumdrops depleted, she said, “That’s all, people. Gotta go.”
Grumbles, whines, a few more minutes of pats and squeezes. A couple of the attendants came forward and began corralling the patients. Finally we managed to pull away. Resumption of chaos.
Elmo said, “They sure love you.” Sharon didn’t seem to hear.
The three of us walked to the end of the big room, up to a door marked INPATIENT UNIT and shielded by an iron accordion grille, which Elmo unlocked. Another key twist, the door opened and closed behind us, and all was quiet.
We walked through a corridor covered in the same lurid green vinyl, passed a couple of empty wards reeking of illness and despair, a door with a mesh glass window that afforded a view of several stout Mexican women laboring in a steamy industrial kitchen, another green hallway, and finally a steel slab marked PRIVATE.
On the other side a new ambience: plush carpeting, soft lighting, papered walls, perfumed air, and music- the Beatles, as interpreted by a somnolent string orchestra.
Four rooms marked PRIVATE. Four oak doors, fitted with brass peepholes. Elmo unlocked one and said, “Okay.”
The room was beige and hung with French Impressionist lithos. More plush carpeting and soft lighting. Oak wainscotting and oak crown molding rimmed the ceiling. Good furniture: an antique chiffonier, a pair of sturdy oak chairs. Two generous, arched windows, barred and filled with opaque glass block, but curtained with chintz pull-backs and lace. Vases of fresh-cut flowers strategically placed. The place smelled like a meadow. But I wasn’t paying attention to decorator touches.
In the center of the room was a hospital bed covered by a pearly pink quilt, which had been pulled to the neck of a dark-haired woman.
Her skin was gray-white, her eyes huge and deep-blue- the same color as Sharon’s, but filmed and immobile, aimed straight up at the ceiling. Her hair was black and thick, spread over a plump, lace-trimmed pillow. The face it framed was emaciated, dust-dry, still as a plaster cast. Her mouth gaped- a black hole studded with peg teeth.
Faint movement nudged the quilt. Shallow breathing, then nothing, then re-ignition heralded by a squeeze-toy squeak.
I studied her face. Less a face than a sketch of one- anatomic scaffolding, stripped of the adornment of flesh.